PERÚ it may concern

As I am super behind on blog posts and have been avoiding a large and exciting chunk of my Peruvian adventures because it is too daunting of a task to tackle on my own, my dad decided to take it upon himself to begin the chronicles of the Perez Fam Peruvian Adventure. My parents and younger sister came down for a 2 week long visit at the end of June and it was amazing! Here's my pop's take on the beginning of the adventure (with just a couple of my own footnotes at the end). This is the first installment of many. We (Chris, Marlee and I) left June 15 th and spent 17 wonderful days in Peru traveling. We stayed in 7 different places and saw so many amazing things. But of course, our favorite attraction was our very own Peace Corps Volunteer - Jamie.   Let’s start with getting there….the plane ride – we got up at about 4am, to make it to SFO early enough for our AM flight to Houston. We had a scheduled layo...

Many of you may be asking yourselves, what is a cocina mejorada? Allow me to explain. A cocina mejorada is something us WASH 20ers know all about, were trained to construct and can give you a well-rehearsed lecture on its benefits as well as a basic tutorial on how to use it. It is an improved cookstove, improved meaning it's better than putting a pot on a couple stacks of bricks and cooking over an open fire which is a pretty common way to cook out here. Cocina mejoradas are enclosed cookstoves with chimneys to allow smoke to exit your home and away from your lungs. They use less wood than open fires and, when constructed properly, are quicker and more efficient. We built a couple throughout pre-service training and you can find all that here in a previous post. When I first arrived, my site mate, Amanda, was working in a small secondary school in one of Guadalupe's annexes, Casa Blanca, and the director of the school was interested in a cocina mejorada to prepare breakfast...