My Ayacucho volunteer placement...

With my trip only 10 days away, I finally received my volunteer placement! I'm very excited that on this trip I will have 3 volunteer placements! 3 days a week I will be working at a local Wawa Wasi (Quechua for "Baby House"). These government funded day care centers were created to give impoverished, working parents a safe place for their small children to spend the day. The children range in age from infancy to 4 years and will no doubt be totally stinking cute :) I'll be there to help with the babies, play games with the children and hopefully help develop some early English speaking skills. The other two days of the week, myself and another volunteer will visit Los Libertadores public school and Mercedes public school for girls. Los Libertadores is located about 15 minutes from where I'll be living and comes with an enormous challenge - there are 800 students for only 15 teachers. Mercedes is an all girl public school and is considered one of the largest in Ayacucho. With over 1,000 students, Mercedes is both a primary and secondary school and offers "workshops" for students in the areas of making clothing, arts and crafts, and other academic subjects.
I'm very excited to be able to lend a hand in what I'm sure will turn out to be an amazing community of people. I'm a little nervous about my lack of Spanish speaking skills (and by "lack of" I mean I speak NO SPANISH!) I'm hoping that my willingness to help and my enthusiasm for learning will overcompensate for the language barrier.
Here's to a new and exciting challenge! See you on the south side!