Who knew Asia was a country?

I can´t remember whether or not I've mentioned that I've been working on painting the world map on the wall of the local school, which is absurd because it's pretty much all I've been doing for the last month. Granted, it wouldn't have taken as long as it has if I had abandoned my perfectionism and allowed the kids in my summer class to draw it with me. That, however, would have been utterly disastrous. I'm not just talking slightly off, but more like entire countries would have been missing and those countries that did make it might have ended up looking like the rabbits I attempted to draw with them earlier in the summer. In other words, frightening.

So I've been working on the map quite diligently. Occasionally people wander up to see what's going on. I've made friends with an older man who lives across the soccer platform from the school who routinely brings me mangos. Frequently, people ask me what it is that I'm drawing. Many of them have no recognition of the world map--something which is hard for me to fathom. Today I was asked if the Atlantic Ocean was the Mediterranean Sea and if Antartica was the ocean. I haven't met one adolescent who can correctly identify Perú on the map. My very own host-sister thought Asia was a country. She still does. This reality tends to be somewhat amusing on the surface but also says a lot about the poor state of the Peruvian education system, which is apparently one of the worst in the world.

Anyway, I finally started to paint the map with the kids the other day. Somehow they managed to paint outside the lines despite the presence of rather thick borders which I had painted to prevent just such an occurrence. The second day of painting they improved markedly when I realized they were all holding their paint brushes about 5 inches from the tip, allowing the brushes to flail wildly about. Then this afternoon came and all hell broke loose. My plan was to go paint more borders around the countries to prepare the map for my class. Reality was nothing approaching peaceful. It started off well enough, with the standard crowd of about 4 kids watching, messing with my stuff but not doing any harm. Then, that kid who shall go un-named came. This is the same kid who has locked himself in my classroom and me out of it when I was supposed to be teaching, and the same kid who the previous time I was painting painted my cell phone number in bright red onto the sidewalk. That calm that previously existed instantly vanished with his arrival. One little girl dropped her sugarly slushy onto the floor, beckoning an instant swarm of ants. The others began to open all of the paint cans, sending splatters of paint into the sticky ant pool. Mysterious finger smudges began to appear on the map. My little host-sister´s perfectly white dress rather quickly became not so white. The "instigator" aquired a paintbrush and made wild stabs at the paint cup in my hand. Finally, I conceded to let him paint an old sign hanging on the wall. Meanwhile, I had only managed to paint about half the border of Greenland in about 20 minutes. At some point my sister asks if she can go to the bathroom so I open up the school. I decided it would be best to lock the paint into a classroom so no one else could mess with it. A short while later I realized the "instigator" had vanished from the scene and took little notice. Then I found that he had broken into the classroom, opened the paint cans and spread paint all over the floor. What's worse is that he did not relent at this point, but rather popped back up running around with his paintbrush and attempting to lock me into the school. I wasn´t exactly happy but didn't think faltering Spanish would accurately convey my disappointment. Instead, I just said, "No soy feliz" which I think comes across more like, "I'm not joyous." Of course I was being watched by about 50 drunken community members celebrating after a eulogy. They were too far away to hear anything but close enough to witness me frenetically running about like a mad-woman. Needless to say, little progress was made on the map. On my way home, the drunken males belted out a nice little serenade in my direction.