Saludos!

Today is my third full day at our training site, Chaclacayo, a town outside of Lima.  Here’s some points of interest of my life here:

-my host family is AWESOME, an older mother + her daughter and son-in-law, + the most adorable 4 year old girl that was ever born (hope to be upload a video soon of her singing)

-I live in a barrio named Chacrasana, which is basically an enormous dirt hill with bigger mountains around it.  There are 4 other volunteers in my barrio, and we describe where we live by “almost at the top” or “where the pavement ends.”  We climbed a small mountain yesterday, accompanied by 3 boys about 6 years old, each of which kicked our asses arriving to the top and returning to the bottom.

-the chickens (about 12 of them) in the coop near my room are very well-behaved compared to those I experienced in Nicaragua.  They don’t make any noise until about 6:20, and I wake up at 6:30.  Que suerte!

-an entire afternoon of our training was dedicated to diarrhea, and it is 100% guaranteed that each of us will get it at least once during our 2 years.  The advice sent to us from current volunteers was “never trust a fart.” Oh yeah.  Also, did you know there are 7 different kinds of diarrhea?

-my life at training is WAY more comfortable than it will be at site.  My family has internet, a kinda-flat screen TV, a flush toilet, and hot (warm) water.  My host brother is a civil engineer.  Only a few of us have hot water here, so again I am very lucky!  Although I don’t want to get too used to this before leaving for site…


-we often watch music videos during dinner, including Enrique and Justin Bieber.

-my language training group is focusing a lot on jerga (slang) like panza (pot belly), chata/chatita (small bottle of rum), choro/ratero (pick-pocket), mancha (group of friends), and bobo (heart)

-a girl named Hallie in my group made the great observation that everyone in our group is “so different while being so similar.”  This is incredibly true- we all come from totally different areas of the states, different life experiences, we have different personalities, but we are all very positive, humorous, and open people which makes for a really fun training experience.  Definitely a really fun group, and we are all already a little anxious about what it´s going to be like to move from this group to complete solitarity in the campo.

-our APCD (Program Director) wants to give us a lot of say in our sites.  We start talking about options with him soon, and final decisions are given Aug 3 I think.  4 will be in the South, in Arequipa, and the others will be in the northern regions.  There are 17 of us in total

that´s all for now!