This post is dedicated to Yanni

by Micah

Normalcy has found its way back to Chota now that the 5-day strike that ground virtually all human activity to a hault has finished. Schools, business, and other organizations have re-opened their doors, so Alisha and I are back in action gathering diagnostic information.
We're also making progress on the world map we're painting at a local high school. Yesterday, after concluding a fruitful session of painting and grid-drawing, we ran into the bike gang pictured above. Don't let their sweet faces fool you: this is by far the edgiest, most hardcore bike gang we've come across in the Southern Hemisphere. After exhausting their knowledge of the English language on us (hello, good morning, good afternoon, good evening), one of the ringleaders asked us, "So, what are you?" Not knowing how to handle this question, we paused, which allowed one of the girls to quip, "Obviously, they're people!" We all got a good laugh out of that. Then we delved right into a nuanced international economics discussion: the smallest kid in the picture said "The exchange rate for the Euro is 4 soles, and the dollar is 3 soles." Not what you would typically expect from a seven-year-old.

Now, you're probably wondering why there's a magnificent picture of Yanni looming just above the text you're currently reading. Here's why . . .Last night, Alisha and I were invited to a friend's house to watch a documentary about Atlantis as part of a series of documentaries and other films of "high cultural value" that said friend shows on Thurday nights in an attempt to increase high-culture offerings in our small, isolated, rural city. So, Alisha and I were the first to arrive, and when we did, our friend was watching a a DVD of Yanni in concert. As if that weren't enough of a gem in and of itself, a few minutes later, another of the guests comes strolling in, and he bore a striking resemblance to the entertainer on the screen: long, luscious locks and a mustache to boot. Additionally, he possessed an uncanny amount of trivial knowledge about the life of Yanni, such as the fact that Yanni's hometown, Kalamata, Greece, is the site of none other than the ancient city of Sparta. We're still processing the whole experience.