¡Salta! Jumping in with both feet.
Text and Photos by Kristopher Schmidt
We are happy to announce the safe arrival of 15 GC students to Lima! Everyone arrived on Thursday following a modest delay. We tried a different airline, so the arrival was a much more bearable 10pm. Students were met at the airport by Celia Vasquez (Peruvian local coordinator) and Kristopher Schmidt (Biology professor at GC, Co-Director of Peru SST). Students are here for a full 12 weeks, 6 weeks studying in Lima and 6 weeks serving in the Provincias.
We started our study portion with 3 full days of orientation. There are so many new things to learn here. What’s a kombi? Why is my lunch gigantic? Why is my lunch only $3US? How is it that my $3US lunch is so delicious? Why does the Schmidt’s youngest son Zachary constantly feel the need to announce “¡Salta!” (Jump in Spanish) everytime he jumps down the stairs? These aren’t even the academic aspects either. Our students are studying full-time while living in a foreign country. That’s a lot of work.
Peru is a new country to all of these SSTers, and only a handful have traveled abroad. Comparisons to their experiences back home or to other places they’ve visited abound already. As a Director of SST my job is to eavesdrop (and hand out diarrhea medication). It is so fun to hear the constant learning – “I love this architecture, it is so different from home. I wonder why it is like this?” expressed one student. “This tile looks exactly like the tile I saw in Seville, Spain” (yes, it was brought here from Seville in the 1600s). “I feel like my Spanish is improving already by just listening to people”. It is so exciting to see the learning on every point and at every moment. Kathryn and I (with Jonah, 6, Zachary, 3) led an SST unit here in Peru last term, and felt really good about the growth we saw in our GC students after 12 weeks. Now we have a new group with so many great adventures ahead.
Here are some things we have been doing:
- Walking tours around the important locations for study in Lima
- Hours of orientation talks (Keeping safe, getting around, basic hygeine, language skills)
- Touching the Pacific Ocean
- Team-building games
- Church!
- Exploring important historical sites (e.g. Plaza de Armas, Cerro San Cristobal)
- Taking various types of transportation (e.g. Buses and Kombis)
- Talking through the academic aspects of SST
What’s next?
Tomorrow afternoon students will meet their carefully selected Peruvian host families. Host families play a central role in helping our students to become global citizens. What an important day tomorrow will be.
¡Hasta Pronto!
