Five Year Old Kids and Shining Path Guerrillas

For the past few weeks, I have been spending the majority of my time in a day care ´cuña´, where the majority of the kids live there for some amount of time over the week while their parents work on the street. The differences between the teaching methods and the behavioral responses here are so vast from those which I remember (not that I remember much from this period of my life) but worth commenting upon.

I´ve been working in two separate classrooms, both of five year olds who would love nothing more than to climb all over me all day, and scream ¨altame¨ until I obediently lift them up as high as I can. Working in Chimbote with kids ages 6 to 15, I swore that there could not be another age more difficult to control, but clearly, I was wrong. Sure, these kids spend most of their times looking cute and to the casual glance, they appear to be low matinance, however, they are anything but that. When complaining about their irreverent behavior to a fellow volunteer, I remarked how I was sure that I couldnt remember being so annoying in my life, and she replied ¨I bet your pre-school teacher could¨.

On a separate and unrelated note, an offshoot of the Shining Path has been agitating in the southern rainforest area, though their numbers are less and their objective seems to have changed. The New York Times reports that ¨the Shining Path, taking a page from Colombia’s rebels, has reinvented itself as an illicit drug enterprise, rebuilding on the profits of Peru’s thriving cocaine trade¨ (Cocaine Trade Helps Rebels Reignite War In Peru, Simon Romero, NY Times). The original Shining Path Movement was a Maoist offshoot of the Peruvian Communist Party, and is responsible for around 70,000 deaths from their beginning in 1980 to their supposed downfall in 1994, when their leader, Abimael Guzmán, was captured by the government in Lima. Today, the group that remains is reportedly smaller (350 millitants and 500 cocaine-producing workers) and better trained. Luckily, the pitched battles are being fought in the southeast Andean and rainforest regions of Peru, where coca farming is most proliferant, and I have thus felt no backlash.