Startin' to feel like Christmas

Last weekend was taken up largely by a 3-day Taekwan-do event in which Carter's group joined the 4 others from Lima. It was his first chance to don all the gear and actually spar, so he was pretty pleased. The final day's event was excruciating and running late, so we left early rather than being held hostage by our kid's activity. Carter moved up a belt level too.

Also that weekend, we went to a kid's birthday party at an embassy family's house. It is becoming clear to us that the Peace Corps housing is not as deluxe as some of the other embassy housing. The party was fun, the kids had a great time playing ball in the emptied pool, and they served the adults pisco sours.

 Meanwhile, we are heading into the Christmas season which is also the start of Carter's summer break. Carter will be out of school from Christmas through February. Three weeks of that will be in summer "camp" with some of his friends from school. He now has made enough friends in school and Taekwan-do that it's not uncommon to be out somewhere (like Pardo's Chicken today) and have a kid yell out "Carter" from across the room. Several of them are bilingual and it is fun to watch Carter and his friends free flow between English and Spanish, whatever seems to work.

This weekend started a little early with a holiday event at the embassy. Jen got her whole office to volunteer...note the elf on Santa's left! The event brought several busloads of special needs children to come see Santa, play on bouncy houses, facepainting, play-doh, etc. The elves were doing crowd control, while the rest of us were each assigned a kid to chaperone. Some of the kids were physically disabled, deaf, mentally challenged, recovering from injuries, or even 100% OK on the outside but fighting cancer within.  Jen could not stand the level of disorganization, and it seemed like more thought could have gone into making it fun for the kids.

Nevertheless, everyone I saw seemed to be having a pretty good time. I spent the morning with a boy named Jefferson, recovering from burns from the chest up. Inexplicably, he wore a baseball hat with the word "Texas" scrawled on it. He was quiet, or more than quiet, he seemed withdrawn in a way that made some think he might also be mentally challenged. We stayed at the Play-doh station pretty much the whole time until the Christmas show. So in spite of getting very sunburned, I had a pretty nice time, certainly less stressful than some of the volunteers I saw who were assigned mentally challenged kids that were "runners", suddenly making a break for the bushes. The show had some Christmas characters, a clown, and a line of sexy Santa's Helpers who had one dance that they did to the tune of Rudolph. They did the song twice. Afterwards, the kids all got a sack lunch, a bag of presents from Santa, and then headed back where they came from. Jefferson hadn't said much all day, and I'm not sure he even returned my farewell...but as his van drove away, he craned around an watched me until the van went around the corner a block away.

I joined in afterwards as Jen took her office out for a Christmas lunch at the good cebiche place not too far away. After I picked up Carter from school and went to Taekwan-do, we met up at McDonald's with Maureen and Julito for a birthday party.

Saturday morning we were back with the same Santa, this time for embassy kids. We had gone with Julio, Maureen and Julito, and afterwards went over to their apartment for a pizza afternoon. The boys played video games, but even us adults played their new Xbox Kinect, having a good time with the dance game, laughing a lot and looking pretty silly. Before leaving, Julio (who is a filmmaker) showed us his 20min film "El Hijo" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0495119/), a short jungle story filmed at his family's coffee plantation. It was great, and talking to Julio about how the jungle is a character unlike any other was interesting. His second film should be out in a couple months.