giving birth to stars

This morning started off pretty dismal, since the man with cataracts in both eyes didn´t show up to go to the eye surgery screening. However, one little girl with "estrabismo" (she´s cross-eyed) arrived with both of her parents. So we only took advantage of 1 out of 5 possible people who could get free eye surgeries from my town. How pathetic.

Thankfully, when I got to Letirá to do the filming, my day perked up. First of all, I really like going to the high school. When I first started going there, I was slightly putt off because they used to just giggle at me and stare, which is the normal response of adolescents to my foreign face. I´m very used to it, but it doesn´t give me a fuzzy feeling inside or anything. Now that they´re more accustomed to seeing me, they will surround me and I can joke around with them. They´ll ask me a ton of eager questions, the same ones that everyone else asks me and that I patiently answer a few times a day (no joke - the downside of living in a large community)...however, they are the only ones who have ever asked me how to say words in Chinese. What´s really interesting to me is that they can pronounce Mandarin a lot better than Americans can. Plus, they get the "Ching-I Hwang" part of my name pretty right, since it has a Spanishy-sound. They´re good kids. Unfortunately for the camera, they are really shy and did not speak very loudly when being filmed. It was probably their first time ever being filmed, so it´s understandable. Letirá is supposed to be a place with a lot of machismo (a form of sexism) and low self-esteem. So hopefully, this will give them a little boost of confidence. I think whenever you do anything different from the normal routine, and especially anything public, you feel more capable.

Besides the kids, parents were invited to help with cleaning up the community. There were about 15 who showed up -- go parents! We interviewed one woman and one man, and they both were very eloquent albeit shy...and at some point in their interview asked the mayor for more support maintaining a clean environment. I joked to the camera guy that the mayor´s going to forbid me from doing this project again. Then the school director, who is in love with the Peruvian system of official documents, came and took us to the primary school. The camera guy filmed the little tykes, too, and I just used it as a fun photo op.

My goal for future environmental projects: less teacher influence, more student work. By that I mean the science teacher basically gave the kids a script to say. And the communications teacher kind of fed them ideas behind the camera. The point of a project like this is to promote more creativity, critical thinking and confidence in the kids. Although they mean well, the teachers need to take a step back. This is a common issue throughout this country that utlizes the "I speak, you copy it down" method of teaching. In the future, I am going to have to take the teachers by the hand and do some of the explaining to students myself, just to make sure the students benefit the most out of them!

Tomorrow they´re going to show the news report and environmental commercials. I hope it turns out ok, but no matter what happens, I´m satisfied!

Check out my flickr site for pictures from the past month or so.