Sorry I suck at keeping this thing updated. I am having so much fun here and I'm so busy all of the time that it seems like the blog is harder than I thought it would be. But no worries, I am determined to keep all of you curious minds informed about my adventures in Peru. If you have Facebook, make sure to check my profile, because I am better at posting pictures on there than I am about writing in the blog, but I promise to be better at that too.
So I have been in Peru for about a month and a half now. I am in the middle of training which means long and sometimes boring days. Training is in a medium-sized town named Chaclacayo which is about 30 minutes east of Lima, the capital. I live in a nice little house with a host mom, Victoria; a host dad, Santiago; and my host brother, Felipe, who is my age. It's a pretty sweet set-up because I get hot water, which is a rare luxury in Peru.
Every weekday I wake up at about 6:30 and eat breakfast with the family. Then I go to the training center around 8 and have 4 hours of language class. The language class is actually really fun and we mostly just sit around and discuss important matters like the Peruvian gossip column. Then we have lunch. My host mom packs me a lunch everyday and it's always AWESOME! Peruvian cuisine rocks so much! It usually has a lot of potatoes (Peru has over 2,000 kinds of potato) and rice, but that's cool because I love those things. Then after lunch we have technical training which, because I am a youth volunteer, often consists of us visiting a school and teaching the kids about hygiene, nutrition, self-esteem, community involvement, or sometimes just playing games or chatting.
That was my first 5 weeks of training. It started to get pretty boring, but there were always fun experiences tossed in there. I got to take part in a religious parade and carry a huge alter that was impossibly heavy. I got chased by toro locos (see the previous blog post for a description of this fantastic creature). And of course I've played my share of futbol.
Luckily, the monotony was broken up in week 6 when everyone took a week long trip to various sites in Peru. We broke up into groups of 10 or so and each group went to a different departamento (like a state in the US). My group went to Lambayeque, which is about 14 hours north of Lima by bus and lies on the coast. It was an amazing experience. I finally got to see some sites that volunteers work in and in which I may potentially be placed. After this trip I felt really confident to start my service.
Well that's about it for now. I just wanted to type out a quick general summary of what's going on here so you all know that I'm still alive. I'll try to update this thing a couple of times a week from now on with some more specific and fun stories.
Chau!
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