Justin McCandless

I just talked about the day I spent volunteering through work in the previous post, but I wanted to talk about some more cultural stuff from the day as well (since I am in another country).

One of the main things I wanted to mention was just the difference in how my workmates treated the underprivileged kids compared to how I feel like it would go in the US. Firstly, they seemed to be just showering the kids in positive reinforcement. From when they first arrived and we all cheered them in, and practically served them food, to later going through the offices everyone we ran into was loading them down with any pens, notebooks, food, etc. that they could find. It seemed like a lot of positivity when Americans might be more conscious about "spoiling" them or giving them too much. Also, many of my coworkers seemed to take less of a friend or authority role, and instead be more like a parent, and almost lecture the kids about the most basic stuff. I heard the most typical things said to the kids like "Stay in school", "Don't play with matches", "Have faith in God even if your parents don't", etc., and me as an American felt like this would be seen as stepping on the parent's toes and doing their job in an overly forward way in the US. Note that the religious comment obviously has a much different feel here in Peru where the vast majority of the people and the schools are Catholic (including this school), but it still seemed like they were preaching to these kids they just met like they won't get it anywhere else.

This could have been affected by the fact that the kids were not like the neighbor's kids or something, they were from a very poor area outside of Lima. I was told most parents worked in furniture factories and the like by my coworkers, but I'm not personally familiar with the area. Some of them had fairly beat up back packs or shoes, but it wasn't horribly obvious by hanging out with them. My "little brother" in particular did have it bad though, he was missing about half of one of his fingers and his upper lip area was dented inward so that it was pretty hard to understand his speech. I couldn't tell if it was a birth defect or it had been caused later in life. He got by fine though, and he seemd to be accepted like normal by the other kids.

These were just a few interesting things I noticed while volunteering and wanted to write about. I had a ton of fun volunteering here, and I hope we gave the kids an awesome day. For me, it was an incredible experience being able to see and participate in something like this, not just back in Las Vegas but in another country!