Today I arrived at work for a reunion of the volunteers for el Centro Juvenil Futuro. We chatted a little about upcoming events and I mostly just listened. Then I got invited to go to Villa El Salvador with Juan Pedro and Ronald for a presentation about different types of violence to a group of adolescents. It was pretty awesome!
Juan Pedro fell asleep on the bus. :)
Our failed dynamic that turned into injury. We had to pretend we were a train of dragons and the front of the dragon had to grab a piece of paper that was a tail for the other dragon. But we went too fast and a girl on the tail got whiplashed into a cactus plant.... Poor thing! She had just a little scrape but we definitely killed that cactus, which apparently was beloved by the doctor in charge of the clinic.
The kids at the taller acted out their scenes of violence of different types (family, institutional, partner) and then how to solve them or alternatives. It turned out to be more humorous for them than serious, but they had some good solutions like calling the police or speaking with less aggression.
They also had to create "trees of problems" with homophobia and machismo, where they had to identify the causes as the roots and the effects as the leaves. A mildly homophobic girl was tasked with leading the group on homophobia, and that was interesting. She came up with a lot of the main problems, like violence, discrimination in the workplace, suicide, etc. I loved how she said one of the problems could be that someone in their group or class might be gay, bisexual, lesbian, trans etc, and be afraid to say so because of fear of rejection or taunts. That would be ME! I really wanted to tell her after the lecture that I'm bisexual, because she seemed to express that non-straight people are always strange or different or too flirty with everyone, yet she liked me. She said, "I really respect their rights but I don't want them near me." Yeah..... yet she listened to me and kissed me on the cheek just like everyone else. Ronald said during the next lecture he'll share with them that I'm not straight, because they're going to talk about sexual diversity anyway.
During the violence lecture, I shared a personal story about how I recognized a Peruvian friend's behavior as unusual and weird, and that I refused to meet up with him alone to "talk" when I knew he was mad at me for not wanting to have sex with him. I told them that yes, I almost certainly lost that friendship but he only wanted to talk to me alone, at his house or a place far from other people, and I know that my safety is worth more than a friendship that was messed up in the first place. I shared with them how his words were violent psychologically and it is important to recognize violence before it has a chance to really hurt you.
We went to the Center of Lima to buy a computer part, then walked through the Real Plaza. I saw UNC's 2009 victory on TVs for sale, freaked out big time and jumped up and down. Ronald witnessed it and took pictures too.
Dancers in the mall. We went into the Real Plaza en el Centro de Lima to use the bathroom in the Metropolitano station, then came across an event with people in pajamas dancing and animating the crowd.
Tasty food! It was only 4 soles. The bowl of chicken soup was incredible with lime in it, I ate every drop. The chicken was "poor people's chicken", said Ronald, because there was only a tiny bit of meat and a lot of fat and weird chickeny stuff. But it was awesome for 4 soles.
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