Pictures...

So, the transportation system of Peru has decided to strike in protest of increased fines for traffic violations, a very noble cause I am sure, so no buses - no classes her in Peru :) Granted I found this out after 4 of us, being good students had already walked halfway to class as we were told to do, but a day off is a day off!

In light of my unexpected vacation, I decided to update again, this time basically with just a bunch of pictures. I have to admit I stole most of these from other volunteers, yáll know I never actually take out my own camera but I love pictures. So here goes my pictorial tour of life in Peru:

Our training center in Chaclacayo:



Yanacoto from my rooftop (other people have better pics from when we climbed up one of the mountains that I will try and post later):




A few pictures from an evening out in Chaclacayo where the restaurant turned into a dance party thanks to the Peruvians to our left :)


Our first trip to Lima: (I have to say, not the most beautiful place I have visited...)

Plaza Mayor in the center of Lima

Park in Miraflores

Miraflores

My original language class the day we made Ahi de Gallina (Chicken, rice and potatoes for a nice change haha):


Chosica - a bigger town nearby with a huge market and bars and discotecas (aka where about 30 gringos go every saturday night):

Yup giant Jesus statue in the Plaza



Part of the Mercado from above

Here Cristal is a domestic beer, so yea, I drink Cristal all the time in Peru...

Its always good to have a few Peruvian friends out, then its not so bad cause you are practicing Spanish ;) We have actually been told this in classes...

By the way, I started this like a week ago, but it took 3 visits to the internet cafe to get all the pictures uploaded so I hope you enjoy.

Bienvenidos a Peru 13

Life for the Next 3 Months

Well, I finally caved and decided to make a blog after all…I am still not convinced that anyone will find my life here all that interesting to read about, but I’ll give it a shot. My goal for the next few months is to update about once a week, but despite the fact that internet is just down the street and costs about 33 cents for an hour, I am honestly too lazy to go that often, you would be surprised how easily you can abandon your facebook addiction

Since I have already been here for 3 weeks without posting anything, I don’t want to overwhelm anyone who decides to actually read this so I will only post about my first 2 week since a lot happened in that time and Ill add more in a few days. Feel free to skim and just look at the pictures if you prefer. I’ll understand :)

Week 1 in Peru – Meet the group that laughs through a 3 hour delay on an airplane…

I got to staging in DC the first week of June and met the other 35 people crazy enough to move to Peru for 2 years with me. We are half Youth Development volunteers and half Small Business Development, so I am again surrounded by business people haha. We are a pretty motley crew from all over the country. I turns out that I am the baby of the group, the only person born in ’87. We have one married couple from Montana who I think are amazing. They are in their early 50s and applied almost 30 years ago to go into the Peace Corps, but ended up starting their own business and never went. 30 years later they sold their business and decided to actually go through with it! Everyone so far seems pretty awesome, but as one volunteer pointed out, everyone is really nice the first week on the Real World too...

After the plane ride from hell, where we sat on the runway in MIA for about 3hrs and held up our flight to Lima for that long, we arrived in Peru at about 1 on Saturday morning. (I think is says something about the people that we are as a group that no one really complained the whole time. I think the rest of the plane hated us because we were all joking and hanging out on the plane while they got pissed off. Flexibility is the single most important characteristic of a pc volunteer, we never know what the hell is going on. ) We spent the next 2 days in a ridiculously nice retreat facility. In no way was this what I was expecting from the peace corps. We had the first of what is turning out to be an endless stream of powerpoint lectures about the inevitable fact that you will get very sick and you will get robbed while you are here… que bueno... We also had language interviews the first day, and I realized just how much I have to learn while I am in training. 4 years of high school Spanish just isn’t cutting it for me. In our group we have 2 native speakers and 2 guys who have traveled enough to be completely fluent, but the rest of us filled out a pretty good range of abilities from novice to advanced. I ended up in intermediate low (not quite sure how I got there haha), which means I only need to move up one level to intermediate mid to go to my final site in August.

On Sunday we left the retreat center and walked over to the PC training center. Again, I was shocked by how amazingly nice everything is here. Our training center is a gorgeous house in Chaclcayo with a huge backyard and pool (that we are not allowed to use but still looks pretty cool, it’s winter anyway). They gave us a quick intro to our lives in training - we have language class every morning mon- fri for 4 hours, and technical training in youth development or sessions on health, safety etc each afternoon, and then we have sessions each Saturday in Lima. (Our first afternoon session was a 2 hr lecture on diarrhea – welcome to the Peace Corps) So basically I am back in a very intense high school, I feel pretty bad for the people that are more than a year or so out of college, sitting for hours in lectures kills them. Then, they took us all out into the backyard and our host families picked us up. It was such a ridiculous moment, we are all just sitting at tables with our language teacher and a very nice tiny little women walks over and Ivan tells me her name is Rita, and I should head out with her. I am then getting into a 15 passenger van with a women I cannot really understand or speak to…my life is ridiculous. There are 14 other volunteers that live in my community in Yanacoto, which is about 15 minutes from the center on the combi (more about the combi later). A few of the other volunteers, who are thankfully better at Spanish, took the same van out to Yanacoto with us and I officially settled in in Peru.

My House and Family: We live up the hill in Yanacoto, and by hill I mean a small mountain we have to walk up every day. I have a host mom and dad, Rita and Jorge, a host sister Lily who’s 14 and a host brother Richo who’s 26. Again, I am shocked by how amazingly nice their house is. I almost died when I walked inside. You can see from the pictures. I definitely have one of the best situations in terms of housing. My family is really amazing as well, but they speak soooo fast. Like me fast haha. Ill have to get a picture of them to post soon. They are all my size though, I love that about this country – I am average height in Peru :) It’s a little frustrating living with people, and not being able to understand everything, but they are really helpful and patient with me. They had another volunteer from Peru 12 so they kind of know the deal. By the way, my family owns about 8 cuyes (guinea pigs), but in case you were unaware, cuy is a classic Peruvian dish, as in food not pet. Yeah, that should be interesting…

Week 2ish – Poco a poco…

Life in training is an interesting experience. In a way we have all gone back to grade school. We live at home with parents who make every meal for us, including packing a lunch to take to the center, we have to be at school all day where we play get to know you games (dinamicas is the fancy name for educational games in Spanish fyi), we have to ask permission to stay out late, we are told to never do anything by ourselves, and we get an allowance of 8 soles a day (about $2.50). It is pretty hard since most of us have not lived at home in years, and are very used to living independent lives. Overall training is pretty amazing though. I love my languages classes, even though they just make me realize how much I don’t know, and I have an awesome instructor. What I do not enjoy is being required to go out into the community randomly to interview people. Yea, random people on the street. Por ejemplo: "Excuse me sir, I am in the Peace Corps and I need to practice my Spanish so can I ask you a few questions. K thanks, how many schools are there in Chacalacayo? What do kids do afterschool?" - How do you say awkward?? I get the idea that we need to get comfortable speaking in Spanish, but that is seriously awkward in any language. O well, if it helps my Spanish I can deal. Poco a poco is a favorite Peruvian saying, basically little by little, that every single person says to you when you say you are learning to speak Spanish but it is hard. It’s kind of become our little motto.

After classes most days people stay for a while in Chacalacayo, you can only have conversations about your day in broken Spanish for so long, working out or drinking, or both. I tend to favor both J On going out in Peru: going out generally means drinking beer at a small plastic outdoor table that may or may not actually belong to a restaurant that sold you the beer. We have bought many a restaurant out of beer (at least cold beer – Peruvians are not so worried about drinking things cold from what I gather). Apparently is socially acceptable to buy beer from a liquor store and drink it at a restaurant, bakery, etc J Beer here comes in 650mL bottles and everyone gets a little glass. You don’t drink straight from the bottle here, and they refill them.

Poco a poco I am getting used to the food here too. For the most part, its all really good food (except for the liver and the weird skin thing I ate). They just give me sooo much. Every meal comes with rice and potatoes, yes both of them. Half of your plate is rice, period. And it’s considered an insult to not finish your plate. I nearly made myself sick the first few days with all the food I had to eat. Its gotten better though, my portions are a little smaller and I am used to eating heavier food now. Healthy food is not an issue here, everything is doused in oil and covered in salt or sugar. By the way, they don’t drink much coffee here – they export all of it. For those of you who know me, you can only imagine the pain this fact is causing me L We finally got a coffee maker for the volunteers at the training center, and occasionally I get a little instant coffee with breakfast, but it just isn’t the same…

Okay, this has gone on far too long, and I doubt anyone has actually read all of that. I promise that I will be more brief in the future. If you want to know about anything specific let me know and Ill add it next time. Also if you want to send a letter so I can feel cool at the center when I get mail my address is:

Susan Lawton

Cuerpo de Paz

Calle Los Cedro 647

Chaclacayo

Lima 8, Peru, S.A.