PERÚ it may concern

Last week we found out which departments we would be living in. If Perú was the United States, departments would be like the states, provinces would be like the counties and districts would be like the cities. I will be living in one of the northern departments of Perú called La Libertad. A land of liberty and eternal springtime, or so I´m told. ALSO, apparently in one of the sites there is an annual pineapple festival!! How refreshing does that sound?!  A map I made weeks ago for a presentation in my Spanish class, little did I know how forshadowing it would be.         We aren´t supposed to find out which district we´ll be living in until this Thursday, but the truth is that most of the program directors already know where they plan on locating their volunteers and have been dropping weird hints to each of us. The other day I was chatting with my director and I guess he could tell that I was so distracted by my own curiosity that  he ended up ju...

It’s hard to believe that Week 5 of training is already coming to a close. We’re halfway through training and halfway to swearing-in and being released into the wild. YIKES. Mid-way through Week 4 I found myself with a case of what I would guess to be food poisoning, but who really knows. I’ve still got a ways to go before I become fully accustomed to everything I’m eating so I’m just hoping to get longer than a week before my next sick day. Unfortunately, my last sick day landed on the day I was scheduled to have my language interview. I could have rescheduled but I decided to just get it over with. I know I could have done better but the good news is I advanced to the next level (intermedio-bajo) and have only one more level to go to get to the required intermedio-medio! Poco a poco, as they say… After a couple days of recovering, the WASH program left for a short Field Based Training trip or Mini-FBT. We traveled to the coastal province of Cañete, about 3 hours south of Lima, an...

Buenas, amigos! I’ve finally got some pictures for ya’ll, as promised. I feel like I’m still not taking as many as I should be (especially because I forgot to bring my camera on our Lima field trip last Saturday, LAME) but here’s a few for now. This is the training center in Chaclacayo where we spend a giant chunk of our time. We have classes in Spanish (and some Quechua starting week 5, I believe), Safety and Security, Peruvian Culture, and general training from 8am to 5pm, Monday thru Friday. This is LuLu. She lives at the training center and is my favorite pup in all of Peru! Mostly because the majority of pups around here are raggedy/sketchy street dogs who roam around and chase cars/joggers/each other. There are also a lot of roof dogs who are used kind of as a security system. Sometimes, for training, we’ll be assigned to a district and have to ask locals about their water system. The first week we all got rabies shots, just in case. YIKES. I was feel...