Kids Day

I´m at an internet cafe paying 33 cents for an hour of internet cause the plugs dont work in the house in addition to that i dont have the right converter even if the plugs did work. boo. its loud in here and the keyboard is different so its weird to type on. but anyway...
so yesterday the drive up to huancayo was gorgeous. it was so nice to escape from the smog of lima into the beautiful andes. i´m in a fairly large town here, but it´s still really nice with the mountains in the background and kind of has the feel of the wild west in spanish.. plus mountains and altitute (which ive been lucky with so far). though there is a huge mall thats completely out of place in the middle of the town. it has kfc and pizza hut and burger king and all that. boooo. went to the supermarket there to pick up groceries, a bunch of stuff for the week for 9 bucks, yay. decided to cook for myself instead of payin 15 a week for food to be made for me cause ill get more variety and more assurance that its actually vegetarian.
anyway.. today was the first day of work. got up early, took the combi for 30 minutes to the clinic in chupaca (i love the name of the town).. and on the bus they chant chupacachupacachupaca as they drive to see if anyone wants to get on. awesome.
got to the clinic, spent my four hours there shadowing in pediatrics. its completely different than any hospital in the us, in different ways than i expected. the parents take the kids to one room to be weighed and measured and get a nutrition consultation and vitamins. then they wait and theres another room or vaccines, and another yet for physical exam, and then the laboratory for blood tests. weird. i actually didnt see any doctors today, just med students and nurses. in the nutrition consultation room, they also did a developmental measurement thing, which was pretty cool that they do here.. based on their age, they check a couple of things that they can do, not only walking, but also like piling blocks, grabbing onto things, understanding a story, finding a block that is hidden under a blanket, communication level, psych development sort of stuff. so that was really cool. if they werent at the approrpiate level, the nurse would write some prescription for a communication class or give the parents advice, etc. everything there was in spanish and i understood the gist of it, not every word, but i was able to get most of what was going on. also talked to the med students a little bit about how med school works there, very different. there was pretty much no sterility there, but that was expected. i´m not going to get to do mcuh at the hospital, mostly a lot of observing, but it should be interesting. i´ll alternate between different areas, general, dental, ob, maternity, psych, etc.
three afternoons a week, we go out to a tiny rural town that has a really strange name i can´t think of, and work with kids there. there were about a dozen kids today ages 4 to 11, and it was a lot of fun. they are poor kids from a rural area and its a kind of after school learning program that my volunteer program has set up. its pretty disorganized, though, so hopefully ill be able to help a lot with getting it more under control. the kids are the most adorable things ever and come up and kiss you immediately when they meet you and are jut so affectionate and adorable and i am already in loev with them after only two hours of working with them today. we are going to teach them bits of english and play with them, so i´m definitely excited for mwf afternoons.
well, thats about it for now. leave me messages!