-“Look! Peru!”- My new 8yr old friend Julian

-I look at where someone had written Peru on the World Map a previous volunteer had done

-“Julian that’s not Peru”-Me

-“Yes, it says Peru”-Julian

-“Yes it does but that’s China”-Me

I’m back in “home” after spending last week on site visit. We all headed out last Saturday for our capital cities and because my site is on the southern border of Cajamarca my site mate and I ended up going to the city of Trujillo in La Libertad for our meetings. We spent the first 2 days in Trujillo, which is a pretty cool city, then headed out to site with our socio communitarios. Socios are our work partners in site and while we will have multiple the initial ones are the people Peace Corps found who were willing to work with us. The socios my site mate and I have to work with are fantastic. On Wednesday we headed to site which was interesting. Were 6 hours from Trujillo going straight up into the mountains on unpaved roads in what PCV affectionatly call chicken buses. In case you were wondering there is no bathroom. I believe the best strategy especially for girls is not to drink anything because they only make one real stop in a town 4 hours in. I will also be stocked with Dramamine for the next 2 years. Our site is a provincial capital of 5000 people set in kind of a valley in the mountains. Its really beautiful and know for growing apples and peaches. I have another friend in la Libertad whose site is huge in pinapple production. I think well meet half way and make a really delicious fruit salad. It is almost 9000 feet up and the whole town is on a steep incline. 3 words. Buns of Steel. Just you all wait. Were super isolated so the only cars are the ones transporting people. The perferred mode of travel, other than walking of course, is by burro. 

My house is actually really nice. My room i great except its about 10 degrees colder in there than everywhere else but i have bathroom with hot water and my host family runs the internet.I cant complain. Its defenitly one of the nicer houses in town which is probably because both my host parents are professionals and their kids are even studying at a university in Lima. Theyre super sweet but i think they dont eally know what to do with me right now so theres a lot of awkward silences.

We spent the visit touring town and being presented to people in town. Then we left Friday morning to head back to Trujillo. We couldn’t take a direct bus from our site to Trujillo. So we had to take a car to another town then a bus from there. It was quite the ordeal. There really just one, one lane, mountain road to use for the trip and apparently the decided Friday is when they wanted to do work on it. We ran it one bulldozer but the guy driving us used the gringo card to get them to move it and let us by. Then further us we ran into a much larger construction crew building a bridge….i have absolutely no idea why they would a bridge there or where it was going to. We got there at about 10:30 and they informed us we would have to wait till 12, when they took a break, to get by. Luckily I had my book but we also managed to get by at like 11:15 instead. We got to town and just missed the bus to Trujillo and the next wasn’t going to leave for 2 hours so we decided to try to take a car to another town and get a bus from there. The cars though don’t leave until they are absolutely full so we ended up sitting in the car circling for an hour trying to get more people in the car. By then the next bus was going to leave so we gave up on the car and took the next bus. It was absolutely exhausting. Well I could write a ton of stuff but im thinking people have questions so instead leave me comments with your questions and ill answer them in my next post. Photos to come!

Things I Learned this Week

-DO NOT get a 4 sole haircut even if they offer you chocolate

-When in doubt, take Dramamine

-Just because a crate of grapes was under a bus doesnt mean you cant eat them. Theyre just dusty.

-Dont complain. Theres always a site more....rustic than yours.