bruise three separate times within one week and a day of each other one the same knee.. and you start to reevaluate your ability to operate your own body.
i have never claimed to be as graceful as a swan (by the way... why ar swans called graceful?) but since being in Peru it seems my ability to keep bruises off my body, er specifically off my right knee, has essentially vanished.
incident one:
two saturdays ago i had my first Larco grupo de jovenes experience (aka youth group.. aka more like a singles group that happens to play games like youth group... aka its a blast) if you know me a slight bit at all im sure you are already aware that i was already a bit nervous approaching the new experience anyway. what you dont know is that the floors in the larco church, and everywhere else in peru, are very slippery. and are capable of making any pair of shoes sound like a flock of geese in and of themselves. but the squeakiness is irrelevant to this story, its just an added quirk. the point is, the floors are slippery. so when we were playing a game that involved quick speed in getting across the room with another person to grab another person to then go back and get into the seat next to you... im sure you can imagine perfectly what went down. namely my face/knee/entire ventral portion of my body. my partners adrenaline and strength surpassed my ability to keep my feet in the proper working direction, and i sailed across the floor, superman style. in front..of all my new peruvian youth group friends. it was fabulous. what a great first impression right?! luckily i walked away with only a bruised up right knee.
incident two:
exactly one week minus a few hours since incident one. this past saturday morning i went with a group from the church to help work on a families house. we (the guys) were tearing down a dilapidated wall and we (the girls and guys) were sifting through things and moving out reusable blocks of adobe. there is no story i can express for you about how my next bruise ended up on my knee other than i just wasnt paying attention and dropped a brick of adobe on myself. way to go coordinated one. so i scraped up my knee and it bruised nicely the next morning. the funnier thing in this circumstance is how many times we moved the same pile of adobe. how many you ask? three i tell you. the same pile you ask? yes i tell you, the same pile. why you ask? because this is peru i tell you. move one: from shambles to somewhat aligned rows near the street. move two: to neater rows farther down from where they were because there was a car coming to unload materials that needed the space. move three? well thats the thing, after move two was a success we were cheerfully informed that it wasnt the right pile of adobe to be moved at all, it was the other wall, and could we please put it back where we found it? yeah. although the upside of that is that i was able to put what i learned in my spanish class that week into action. 'me duele la espalda' : my back hurts.
incident three:
the very next day. Sunday night. our first of many soon to come of interns getting together on Sunday nights with our new intern director to get to eat some good food together, have a bible study together, pray together, ...and watch american football together? yep. ;-) well this night.. i happened to be in the yard with heather playing an oh so friendly game of ping pong. im really not that much of a competitive or athletic person (not that it takes a superb athlete to play ping pong.. and not that ping pong isnt a sport) ... and its not that heather was trying to blast me with the tiny white harmless ball. okay, maybe she was. an uninformed bystander could have mistaken her for the competitive type, but in actuality she just liked to launch the balls at me to then laugh at the drama that would then and always happened in my facial expressions. so naturally at one point in the friendly game... the ball sails toward my upper body with great speed and i...? i think i will defend myself with my knee apparently because i jerked my knee up which was actually under the ping pong table because i was standing too close and i cracked my knee cap to the edge of the table.
oh what grace i have. and oh how many colors my knee has seen this week.
**by the way, for those of you wanting to see pictures.. i am currently working on loading some into a google album but i dont have it all figured out yet, so i will soon update you on how you can see for yourself some pictures from some of my random photo experiences in peru!**
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