The llama butted me

Well, ladies and gents, I started a new placement this week. I've been working at the zoo at the university in Cusco! There are llamas, deer, an ostrich, ocelots, tons of different monkeys, a puma, foxes, weird giant rat-looking things, bears, condors, turtles, parakeets, a peacock, owls, a toucan, among other birds and animals. My first day was instructive, a little chaotic, and quite memorable. Maritza, the zoo's head honcho, speaks Spanish muy rapidamente! It's a little intimidating trying to communicate with her because she doesn't slow down or simplify. My Spanish is muy basico! If you ask a question trying to clarify, she just responds with more complicated words very quickly, haha. A woman named Sandra works there, too, and she sometimes tries to rephrase things that she says. She also asks for us to teach her words in English, but communication is still quite hard. I worked with one other volunteer, Emily, whom I met on our Sacred Valley tour on Sunday. It was nice to have someone else there to help decipher Martiza's Spanish, but she was out sick after Monday.

On Monday, after wandering around getting oriented at the little zoo, our first task was sweeping leaves off the sidewalks. It sounds so simple, but a lot of the leaves were slightly wet and didn't want to be swept away, so for a semi-OCD person like me, the task was blister-inducing and time consuming! Definitely not terrible work, though :) I swept almost the whole place by myself on Wednesday, and those sidewalks looked awesome! Haha. The llama at the zoo is allowed to wander around at will, and I made a friend while sweeping; he followed me everywhere, stopping right behind my back and then craning his neck around toward my face. It was funny, though I was a little fearful that he might spit on me!

A daily zoo ritual is to feed bread to the animals (except some of the carnivorous ones). All of the different monkeys were so cute! We put the bread directly into their hands (and they'd grab whatever they could!), whereas for others we just threw bits into the cages. Well, once my llama friend spotted the bread he avidly followed us all around the zoo demanding more. I'd give him a piece or two and then feed the animals in one cage, then give him another piece, and so on. When I ran out of bread and had finished feeding all of the animals, I started toward the office to put away the empty bag. Of course, there were customers there at this point, many standing ahead of me looking at the myriad of birds, when suddenly the attention was on me. The llama galloped toward me from behind and head-butted me before I noticed what was going on! Evidently he was unhappy at the paucity of bread, haha. We were still friends after that, though.

Finally, Emily and I fed corn and lettuce to some of the birds and animals, refreshed some of the animals' water, and chopped up watermelon, bananas, papaya, and apples to feed to other birds. The toucan got his own big bowl of fruit with vitamin powder sprinkled on top - lucky bird!

Tuesday, Emily was sick, and Sandra didn't come either, so Martiza and I had quite a time juggling all of the feeding and cleaning (loooots of cleaning) while many customers visited the zoo. Now that it's a school vacation, the zoo gets many more visitors. Some animals, like the toucan, whose name is Juliana, and the many turtles, sleep in different places than those they inhabit during the day. Our first task (after the bread ritual) was moving the turtles into one of the big bird cages and cleaning out their sleeping crates. Then we changed water, fed corn to some birds and animals, did a lot of cage and bowl cleaning, chopped fruit and spread that around, and overall ran back and forth trying to keep up with the influx of customers while caring for the animals. It was a tiring day, but we pulled it all off. We had more help on Wednesday, but it was an even crazier day - a bit stressful, in fact.

Of course, at the zoo, there's always something to look at! The monkeys are so agile! They're active and funny, too; you can see their personalities in their facial expressions. The bears like to dance around, the puma likes to sleep, the ostrich is a little scary and nips at the deer (and would nip at me, too, if I got close enough), and the birds chirp like crazy when they see Martiza! I'm glad they didn't ask me to clean out the animal carcasses from the carnivores' cages, though...

A guy in our house, Paul, established a relationship with a school he visited to give vaccinations, and they asked him to come back and teach English. He has since visited them on his own every Friday to teach. The children there had brand new English workbooks, but they had never used them because their teachers didn't know how to pronounce the words and help them. I had told him how I'd enjoyed and missed teaching, so he invited me to come! I went with him to teach English today, though I was curious as to why this school wasn't also on vacation, but sadly it turned out that the teachers there hadn't communicated with Paul. No more teaching after all.

Josh is still enjoying the work at the construction site. He says he'll write a post about it soon :) They played soccer today (Josh scored the winning goal!), so there will probably be much resting up this afternoon. We have to get geared up for Machu Picchu tomorrow! We have our itinerary and tickets, and we're quite excited for this trip! Of course, the camera is charged, and there will be stories to report and photos to share very soon. Much love to everyone back home; Josh and I are feeling very far away this week. We're having a wonderful time, but we look forward to being near friends and family soon. Our thoughts are with all of you.