PERÚ it may concern

Oftentimes peruvians see my 1/4 mexican complexion and dark features and assume that I am also peruvian. But then, I start speaking and it becomes obvious that spanish is not my first language and I am most definitely not from around here. I've been in Peru for 8 and a half months and in site for about 6 months and I'd like to believe my language level has come lengths as well; however, I am lacking chunks of vocabulary and still struggle to articulate my thoughts as clearly as I'd like. I constantly change my words from feminine to masculine, stumble over pronunciation and confuse similar sounding words. Let me give you an example... Last week I left for a training in Chiclayo, a city about an hour and a half north of Guadalupe. This training focused on working with counterparts and we were all asked to bring a member of the community that we work with to help them understand what Peace Corps is and our roles as volunteers. I brought one of the regidores from my municip...

April 22nd, was "Día de la Tierra" or Earth Day and I celebrated by pulling off my first real, solo Peace Corps event. By the end of March, I realized Earth Day was coming up and, even though I'm not an Environment PCV, I really wanted to do something to get kids thinking about making more of an effort to protect the environment. After some research of previous PCV projects and a lot of pondering I came up with a few possible ideas: Park and neighborhood clean-ups Movie night with an environmental theme to raise money to buy and install more trash cans around town Paint a mural to promote environmental awareness To get the project moving, I partnered with our Regidor del Medio Ambiente y Turismo. Now I'm not totally sure what that translates to with regards to the way our city hall is set-up and I'm also not positive that his title is exactly that but basically he's pretty high up in our municipality and takes care of Guadalupe's environmental and ...