13/1/2011

8:32pm

Today was definitely a new experience. After 11 hours of sleep (amazing!) I had rice and beans for breakfast for the first time. I actually quite liked it, so these two weeks should be pretty good in that respect.

In our first day of the volunteer workshop, we made up characters for ourselves and then created a mask for them. I've yet to think of name for my monkey (my choice was inspired by my next planned tattoo), but I'm pretty happy with how he has turned out. The masks will be for the parade that we put on at the end of our stay. For a small town like this it will be a pretty huge deal. There are even children coming from a neighbouring town to participate! Our volunteer work will be a sort of summer camp for the kids (they're on school holidays), and apparently everyone is getting very excited.

At the school, we also saw the marching band practicing, which surprised me, as I was under the impression such things didn't happen here. Never-the-less, I was thrilled, even more so by the fact it was a entirely percussive band. I spoke to one of the creative directors, who knew about my musical abilities, ad he was very excited to hear about my band back home. Maybe I'll even get to play with the children in the band - that would be so awesome!

We also had a more involved family night tonight. Despite a language barrier, we managed to have hours of fun with a deck of cards. The eldest son still shut himself away to play his Playstation, and it saddens me a little to learn that such electronics have even permeated such a small, isolated, and somewhat innocent town.

And I guess that makes me reflect on my life, and my dependence of such things in such a big city. My obsession with connectedness has morphed into almost a form of entertainment. I scorn the boy for playing his games (not literally, just in my thoughts), but in reality there is not much difference between him and the way I may sit on Facebook for countless hours on end. Maybe that is something I could learn from: I could either not take for granted the fact I'm anything but isolated, and doing better things with my time, or spend my time at home with the people at home, instead of wishing I was out there with everyone else.

I haven't showered since yesterday morning, and at this rate I think that may not even happen until tomorrow night. The weather is (apparently) unusually cold right now, even for a high altitude mountain climate. The hot water is supposedly not very crash hot, and I don't smell particularly revolting, so I am going to put it off as long as I can.

I'm also going to use these two weeks of isolation to forget about the rest of the world (well, most of it), and catch up on some sleep. Buenos noches!