My second week at PSF was just as eventful as the first (sorry for the extra long blog entry!)

On Monday morning I volunteered myself along with 3 others to cook dinner for everyone. As this is a pretty mammoth task (you're cooking for 70 people) you are given the day off work in order to plan your meal, go to the market, prep and cook the food in time for everyone getting back from work at 6. As none of us had cooked for this many people before we opted for a relatively simple dish of Chinese chicken noodles, stirfry and salad. We got our shopping list together, headed for the market and a few hours, 5 bags of vegetables and 7 headless chickens later we returned to the PSF house to start preparing our feast. We had a few moments of panic; had we brought enough chicken, had we got enough time to chop the humongous pile of vegetables in front of us, had we kept the veggie and non veggie dishes apart etc etc. We (somehow) managed to deliver food on time to a happy crowd...apart from one man with a several allergy to onions for who we had forgotten to prepare an onion free portion... I guess one disappointed customer out of 70 isn't bad...

Due to a Peruvian bank holiday, we had Tuesday off work. In true PSF 'work hard, play hard' fashion we headed out for a party on Pisco beach which would be beautiful if it weren't for the mounds of rubble dumped there after the earthquake. Some of the boys (who had obviously been boy scouts back in the day) lit a fire and prepared an incredible BBQ vastly improved by the copious amounts of sangria served with our chicken and salad. We hula hooped, sat around the campfire, made local kids pull random yoga positions (not as dodgy as it sounds), sang the standard oasis songs on the guitar (as well as the official PSF song - available for download now) and generally got merry. As Pisco is a bit of a sketchy area, we headed back to the volunteer house about 9ish to avoid any muggings putting a downer on an otherwise amazing day off.

So after a relaxing day at the beach, we all forced ourselves out of bed on Wednesday in time for the morning meeting where we sign up for our daily tasks. I volunteered to help out at the day care centre where children from
across Pisco can go when they're not at school to keep out of trouble. It was a relatively relaxed day as school exams were taking place meaning there were only 6 or 7 kids in each session (apparently there are normally 40 which i'm not sure i could handle...) We spent the morning reading with the kids (which turned into more of a Spanish lesson for me...the kids could speak better English than I could Spanish... tad embarrassing) followed by an afternoon playing football and making flowers out of tissue paper. Despite what has happened to them and their families, all the kids were so happy and so affectionate towards the volunteers; we got kisses and cuddles every other minute and one girl cried every time I let go of her hand (huge ego boost!) When I got home I was approached by English volunteer, Nel, who had been asked to lead a project which involved designing and painting a mural. She asked me to get on board (us Brits like to stick together) which I accepted as I was really keen to get involved in something creative and excited about the opportunity of working on a project from start to finish. The mural was for a school called Maria Parado which was badly damaged in the earthquake and now only has capacity for half of the kids to be there at once. The mural was to go on 3 walls in a newly built canteen, a building that one of the volunteers here (an architecture student) had designed and helped build, wire and plumb. We spent all day Thursday coming up with the design and settled on painting a solar system on the main wall with various 'planets' drawn as circular flags of the different countries PSF volunteers were from. On the second wall we drew and painted a food group pie chart showing the kids how much of each type of food they should be eating a day accompanied by the slogan 'eat well, live well' (which was pretty ironic as we walked in after lunch every day scoffing our faces with chocolate and ice cream!) and lots of pretty pictures of different foods painted by yours truly. We kept the third wall pretty simply by just painting two children wearing the Maria Parado uniform with big speech bubbles telling the children to wash their hands and recycle. Sanitary is a big issue for these kids (and most people in Pisco) so we wanted to use the mural as a way of conveying some simple hygiene messages. It took about 9 days to fully complete the mural and it was so much fun working alongside the Parado crew, becoming friendly with the ice cream man and seeing all the positive reactions from the kids.

Every week the volunteers pay 100 Peruvian Soles (about £25) as 'contribution' which covers all food and lodging for the week. As Tuesday was a holiday, there was no food provided for the volunteers normally meaning that we would get a discount on the contribution we paid. However some bright spark came up with the idea that all volunteers still paid the usual 100 soles contribution and the excess was put towards Fridays evening meal to make it a bit fancy! And my god was it fancy! There was a strict dress code (I was told twice that I didn't look smart enough- still cant get over that the nicest i've looked so far in S.A. was at PSF of all places!), a table plan and a 4 course menu that included goats cheese wrapped in bacon and incredible humongous steaks which we got 2 of each (eat your heart out Argentina!) Due to the free drinks on offer, we again got a bit merry and headed out to the dancing hot spot non of us can resist, Mystica, where the bouncers have guns and the barmen let us pour our own drinks. Whenever we head there we quadruple the number of customers and rule the dance floor with our best reggaeton moves (and the occasional crab and booty bounce...you offenders know who you are.)

My second weekend at PSF was also action packed. On Saturday Buddha organised a little tour of Pisco so that some of the newbie volunteers could get a better grasp of some of the damage caused by the earthquake. We visited the site of the first modular home that was built for a woman called Delia. She started her career as a nurse and while she was away working, PSF organised for a group of 20ish volunteers to build her a modular home in time for her return. I am told that she was speechless when she arrived home and saw all these people working on a house for her and she is without a doubt the most grateful and appreciative person i have ever met. She also ended her career as a nurse and now volunteers in the Pisco community herself. Buddha also took us to the beach where what used to be a beautiful promenade now lies a broken up sidewalk and for a walk past the 'walls of shame,' the walls the government put up after the earthquake to hide the rubble and pretend to outsiders that everyone was OK and they were doing all they could to help. Definitely not the case. However despite all this doom and gloom, I had one of the most rewarding moments of my life during the tour. We went to visit a family for whom PSF had just finished building a home. When you work in the yard, all volunteers have to draw symbols on the windows and doors they make so that the project teams know which frames fit the different components whether it be the shutters or doors. When I made my first door single handedly in Bollywood, I wrote my initials as the symbol to match the frame to the door and low and behold when I walked into this family's house, they had my very own creation as their front door! I got very excited, told the mother in my best Spanish why I was so giddy before taking about 100 pictures of me and the door! Its so nice to see and know that the work you do as a volunteer, no matter how big or small, really does make a difference and I went home feeling very pleased with myself and happy to have contributed to these peoples lives.

That evening about 25 volunteers headed over to a restaurant owned by the family of one of the local volunteers, Jose. They prepared for us the infamous South America dish Ceviche which is a pretty spicy fish dish served with vegetables and lime (which helps cook the raw fish.) After dinner Jose's family turned up the Peruvian tunes, got out their bongos and maracas and started one of the best parties I have ever been to! We busted out our best salsa moves for hours on end before retiring home in preparation for what we knew was going to be an even more raucous party on Sunday...

Sunday brought with it PSF's own version of the Burning Man. For those of you that don't know (I didn't before PSF) Burning Man is a huge festival in Nevada that happens every year in the middle of the desert where goers build a huge village out of wood which, when sun sets, is set fire to and destroyed as if the festival had never taken place. Another key feature is that no one takes any money and instead everything you possess during the day i.e food and drink is done so on a swappsies basis. Anyway, burning man is pretty significant to PSF as after Hurricane Katrina hit the regular Burning Man participants realised they could be doing something more significant than building a random village in the middle of nowhere so went to New Orleans to offer aid in whatever way they could. This aid then spread to Pisco after the earthquake hit which gave way to a charity called Burners without Borders which later became Pisco Sin Fronteras (literal translation Pisco without borders.) As such Burning man festival is kind of seen as the origins of PSF so of course we had to hold a party to celebrate! We went all out. there were some extremely impressive fancy dress outfits including a kiwi (as featured as this blogs picture) superheroes, Aladin and Jasmine, (i went as a bottle of Inca Kola, Peru's national soft drink) and lots of cross dressing (why do boys love dressing in drag so much?) People also set up their own stalls of food and drink from which they made the hungry and thirsty crowds earn their reward in true Burning man fashion. This often required volunteers telling embarrassing stories or giving out random kisses. We also made our own wooden man on which we all wrote things we wanted to leave in the past and when sun set came we set fire to the man and with it left all those things behind us... A sentimental but incredible day that all volunteers were so proud to be a part of and will no doubt remember for a very long time.