Five Feet, Nine Inches Above Ground

Thursday October 23, 2025

I played hooky from painting the finished house; there were plenty of others to do the job, and spent Thursday going back to school with my friend Dante. We met five years ago while I was involved in building a home for Luis and his family. More about that later. We have stayed in touch since then via the internet. Dante, a native of Pucallpa, teaches English as a second language and runs his own private school. He volunteered throughout the week on the house building project and was available whenever a translator was needed. During the pandemic, he attempted to teach me Spanish but I wasn’t a very good student and eventually gave up. He invited me to participate in a presentation he was giving at a private school where he used to teach. This was a morning gig, so of we went accompanied by one of his students, Alexia.

It’s a large downtown campus with plenty of indoor space but absolutely no outdoor/green space. It was a treat to see Dante mobbed with love by many of the students he used to teach. The presentation consisted of me reading a text about the benefits of learning English in English with Alexia simultaneously translating to Spanish. The upper year students had a chance to win two scholarships to Dante’s school. It was a lot of fun and the students really got into it.

And then it was time for lunch and a break. We took a motocar to a part of town I had never seen before to a restaurant that specialized in grilled meat. After lunch, we took a stroll down to the river edge where the city has developed an area for festivals and fairs. There wasn’t much happening on this particular day but the view and flowers were lovely.

And then it was time to get back to school, Dante’s school, where I met his students and they had a chance to ask me all kinds of questions in English and I did the same with them. Some of them I had met in online classes that I attended.

Class was dismissed and I headed back to the hotel to have a nap and prepare to go out for dinner. The restaurant chosen was a recently opened venue within walking distance of the hotel. It’s owned by the same people that run the restaurant in the hotel.

We were a large group and the service was somewhat slow. The food, however, was delicious. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the Peruvian fertility symbol above the high chairs in the entryway. It was a great day!