Lourdes going to Europe - Happy Solstice!

 Lourdes leaves next week to see our great-gand-daughter Maria and her sister Eden for the first time in Dornach, near Basel, Switzerland.  She will also go to Berlin and Istanbul.  I'm staying behind and renovating our 'Estrella de Sauce' educational center here in Sauce.  Happy Solstice to all!

Ye Olde Wooden Fort Gets New Conscripts

 Our friend Olga, an ex-Waldorf parent, gave us this beautiful wooden fort with 24 wooden soldiers that had been used by her now grown up children. That was 8 years ago and it has been a favorite plaything with our kindergarten-age children.  It has recently been showing signs of wear and tear from the vigorous play of the children and attacks from voracious wood-eating termites here in the Amazon jungle region of Peru.  I repaired one of the damaged towers and the rotten floor, but what to do about the garrison of soldiers that had mysteriously been reduced from 24 to 5?

I decided to make new soldiers on my wood-lathe.

Here I am turning the bodies of the new personnel:

I also turned shields on the lathe, made arms and a carved sword.  Here are the first soldiers of the emerging battalion:

Gotta always include a leftie, right?

Khuyay Waldorf School in Tarapoto

 We are glad that the new Waldorf school called Khuyay (love in the Quechua language) has just re-opened for the southern hemisphere school year in Tarapoto. a city in the northern jungle of Peru, after being largely closed down during the Covid crisis.  We have built an octagonal Kindergarten structure which I have helped to finish by installing two solar-powered fans in the roof to keep it cool, making wooden play blocks and a special cabinet for watercolor paintings to dry.  Right now we have five teachers and 38 children but more parents are applying so hopefully soon we will have more students.

We finish our southern hemisphere summer program

 In the past we have had up to 100 children for our 'summer camp' but this year, due to Covid restrictions we were only able to accept 25 children and youth.  I taught English to two teenagers who thnkfully were keen to learn.  We also advanced in table-tennis skills.

Lourdes and one helper had the younger children learning english songs, doing arts and crafts as well as academic subjects.  We finished our 8-week program with a celebration in which each child received gifts and good things to eat and drink.

Our regular program will resume in March.

Classroom furniture

 

One way of looking at Waldorf education is to consider the right and left hemispheres of the brain in the developing child.  Arts and crafts are right brain activities which tend to to balance the tendency to over-emphasize academic left brain learning in modern education.  Since the beginnings of Waldorf education over a century ago, grade school age children have been doing water color painting with high quality plant-based paints.  To let the paintings dry on their individual wooden boards a special cabinet with a drawer above for paper, brushes and paint has been designed and a variation of this classroom furniture is to be found in most of the 1000 plus Waldorf schools throughout the world.

I just completed this one for the Khuyay ('love' in the Quechua language) Waldorf School in the city of Tarapoto, Peru which is just now finishing a new kindergarten structure set in lush tropical grounds.

I dyed the wood with diluted Stockmar paint and finished up with 3 coats of water-base varnish.

Jungle Ping-Pong

PHOTO:  ZAIR SILVA
 

I just put together this ping-pong table made from 3 sheets of 3/4 inch (18mm) plywood at the back of our Sauce headquarters of Estrella de Sauce, a Waldorf education community outreach program.  Here are Gabriel and Bruno, 2 grandsons visiting from Lima, trying out the table for the first time.  The top will get 2 more coats of green paint ready for when we begin our southern hemisphere 'summer camp', known as 'vacaciones utiles' (useful vacations) here, on January 17th.  The old geezer is me, Martin Stevens, your humble blog author and wood butcher. Game, set and match!

Photo below added

January 19

Photo below added Feb 20

Merry Christmas from the jungle of Peru!

 Despite a year with various challenges we have been able to keep our Estrella de Sauce Waldorf community outreach program going with two groups of children and our grandmother's weekly gathering.

Today we had our end of year celebration for the children who received good things to eat and drink and various gifts along with live Christmas music, games and a revision of all the songs and poems in English they have been learning throughout the year.

Thanks to all who have helped us keep this program in Sauce and the new Tarapoto Waldorf school Khuyay (love in the Quechua language) going and flourishing during this difficult time on planet Earth.

We send out heartfelt good wishes for the Solstice, Christmas,Yuletide, Hanukkah, New Year and all other seasonal festivities to all our family and friends.  Do please come see us!

Field trip for local children on 'La Laguna'

There is a great divide between well-heeled tourists who come for vacations to Laguna Sauce and children in the lakeside community who rarely get to go out in boats.  Today we took a group from our 'Estrella de Sauce' community outreach Waldorf educational project on a boat trip over to 'Recreo Paraiso' on the other side of the lake for swimming, games and other fun.

Three of my guitar students are in the front row.

Noble cider

 Asheville North Carolina's favorite beverage kicks off a unique promotional campaign here in South America with this tanker train stopping in the small jungle community of Sauce, Peru as its first destination.  Soon to be appearing in a cantina near you we hope.

Repair and re-vamp

 We had rain damage to a wood-framed wall at Estrella de Sauce and had to demolish it and re-build with bricks.

Following this we re-vamped our garden by changing the soil in our enormous planter made from a wooden canoe, planting flower and vegetable seeds and making a painted rock feature. Here's grandson Zair and friend Shilo painting and arranging rocks.

Then granddaughter Xiara and Lourdes repainted our tree-stump gnome.

Classes continue with both older and young children's groups in Sauce.

200 years of independence

 On July 28 Peru inaugurated new president Pedro Castillo and celebrated 200 years of independence from Spain.

Here in Sauce Lourdes invited 15 grandmothers from the community to a celebratory lunch at Las Cabañas restaurant followed by ice-cream in the Plaza de Armas.

Posing at Lourdes' son Luis Justo's Pizza Castle under construction.

                                                              Our community is called 'Sauce' which means willow in Spanish.

We begin building a new small house

 White string and stakes indicate the planned 8 meter x 8 meter (25ft x 25 ft) footprint of a one-bedroom house overlooking Lago Sauce on 2 hectares (5 acres) of land we have owned for the past ten years.  I'm remembering as a child seeing the construction of  my paternal grandparents Victor and Doris' retirement home at Lechlade on the river Thames in the UK and I guess we are doing something similar here in Peru.

We have in mind some solar power, organic raised-bed gardens, chickens and fruit trees.

We will proceed 'poco a poco' (little by little) with the construction and right now are at the very beginning figuring where the house will go, levelling the building site and clearing brush.

Also planned is a a rainwater collection tower that will double as an elevated lake viewing platform.

So far there are 4 posts in position next to a huge Ojé tree where the tower will be built   Stay tuned for future developments.

The Sacred Valley and Cusco revisited

 How time flies!

Lourdes and I have now lived in Sauce for over ten years and have just got back from Cusco and the Sacred Valley where we went to participate in a southern hemisphere winter Solstice gathering in the small town of Taray.  This was where we lived back in 2006 when we first met and married.  In the photo above taken on our second day I am chewing coca leaves to counteract the strange effects of altitude which in Cusco is over 11,000 ft.

  It was wonderful and slightly surreal to be back there after so many years.  There has been much building of houses and businesses and the children of Lourdes' Waldorf education class are now young adults.  Here's Tika who I remember as a 7-year old and is now studying chemistry at the university.  She is soon to fly to the US for further studies.

And here's Lourdes back at Ulrike's Cafe in Pisac, home of the best carrot cake in Peru.

          

                            

                Our hotel on the Plaza de Armas in Pisac.

                                                                                    Lourdes at the new crafts market in Pisac.

Here is the bonfire that kept us warm as we stayed up all night in the open air at 10,000 feet on the longest night of the year accompanied by music and traditional dances by many indigenous groups from all over Peru including the famous and fabulous scissors dancers of Ayacucho.

And here is Joel, another former Waldorf student from the Kusi Kawsay school, showing us his organic garden from which he supplies many local hotels and restaurants and whose water supply is an astronomical pool carved out by the Incas.

Some of our ex-students are now black belt karate champions, some of whom have been on the Peruvian national team.

We stayed two nights with our friends Sergey and Mercedes Baranov in the town of Calca at their natural medicine center called Huachuma Wasi.

We spent our last day visiting the city of Cusco with its curious mix of colonial and Inca architecture. I had a Guinness at the highest Irish pub in the world.