PERÚ it may concern

After wrapping up my Peace Corps service on November 4th, I spent a week and a half traveling around Perú with my cousin, Gabriel, saying farewell to this beautiful country I called home for the last two years. The past two weeks have been spent soaking in my return to the States and enjoying some much needed family time as the holiday season begins. But before I detail the adventures of Jamie and Gabriel and my long awaited arrival home, there are some larger details I haven't had the time to share from my last month in site. So it's time to play a little catch-up. My last few weeks in site were pretty wild. It was a whirlwind of finishing up last minute projects, helping with trainings, packing the past two years into three small bags and saying goodbye to my friends and family who helped me through this experience. Time flew by in that last month, as time tends to slip away when you need it the most, and I was nervous I wouldn't be able to get it all done. Luckily, I h...

Next week, the group of PCVs I arrived to Peru with, Peru 20, just two years ago will be heading down to Lima for our Close of Service (COS) training. Our lovely training staff will be schooling us on closing out our grants, wrapping up projects, writing final reports and preparing us for re-assimilation into good old American culture. This will be the first time we'll all be together since we left training in November 2012. The reunion is sure to get wild so I'll update you all on that when I get back. As the final couple months are coming to a close, I have a few basic projects I'll be finishing up including my English class in Casa Blanca where we're also working to install two biosand filters to treat their well water before they drink it and my leadership and hygiene practices (yes, it sounds odd but I'll explain more later) group, Mano a Mano, in the local girls' high school; however, on top of these smaller in-site projects, I got roped into one last p...

As Peru 20 comes up on the second anniversary of our arrival to Peru, I catch myself reminiscing more and more about the amazing, sometimes frustrating and often ridiculous situations I've found myself in as a Peace Corps Volunteer, about the differences between now and then. Around mid-service I realized I had more questions about Peru, about why things are the way they are, than I had at the beginning of my service and even fewer answers. Where do the beliefs that drinking a cold beverage, drinking water while sweating or eating too much fruit will get you sick come from? Is there any sort of waiting-in-line etiquette here? Does the technical meaning of "de repente" ever actually come into play? Why are loud, explosion-filled and action-packed movies the go-to choices for 11pm night buses? Would I be able to answer any of these questions by the end of my service or would the list of unknowns continue to grow? In my second year, I've somehow made the unconscious de...

After over a full year of dealing with the inconsistency of water availability, I am no longer surprised when water doesn't pour out the faucet when I open the tap. In our neighborhood of Guadalupe, El Molino, water is available in the mornings from around 5:30am to 1:30pm. Tanks of water are filled up daily to be used for bucket baths, cooking, washing dishes and pour-flushing the toilet in the afternoons once the water is turned off for the day. When the tanks run out, my family has a well in the backyard and, since I still can't figure out the flick of the wrist required to fill up the pail, my host brother is kind enough to pull water from it when I ask nicely.  Of all the things I could have been forced to live without, running water all day long was definitely not the worst. I quickly become used to washing dishes with a jug of water, using face wipes to wash my face at night, saving my showers for the morning (not the best after an evening run, but...