Gracias Giving


A belated Thanksgiving to all of you who read this! Thanksgiving could have easily been a bit depressing this year but instead I think it was one of the best ever. Thanks to Peace Corps scheduling we had three free vacation days for the holiday and the youth development volunteers from my group had a training event right after the holiday in Huaraz, Ancash. So a big group of us decided we might as well go down early, meet up with the Ancash volunteers, and do Thanksgiving right. Ancash is also sierra with white capped mountains and it’s the trekking capital of Peru. We took night buses the 10-12hrs and arrived in Huaraz Thursday morning. We did a little sightseeing and prepared an overwhelmingly American meal. Thanks to the huge number of backpackers who make their way through Huaraz we were able to make a meal of homemade Pizza, Kraft Mac & Cheese, and Betty Crocker Brownies. Then we spent the next two days prepping for our real thanksgiving meal and sightseeing. We had planned to do a Thanksgiving dinner at my friend’s site with a Turkey Trot 5k in the morning. Guess what? Running at 10,000ft is kind of tough but it was a blast. About 20 Peruvians and 15 gringos ran. Next on the agenda was to start cooking Thanksgiving dinner for 50 people. This is quite the undertaking when you have modern appliances so it was real work without. After peeling kilos of potatoes and apples, negotiating the use of a bakery’s adobe oven, and learning how whipped cream can be made by whipping cream with forks for hours it surprisingly went off without a hitch. I have to share the menu because I’m quite proud of it.

1. 2 turkeys cooked in a baker’s adobe oven (it took a lot to convince them that it takes at least 5 hours, not 2, to cook a turkey)

2. Sweet Potatoes- adobe oven

3. Mashed potatoes with butter, milk, and rosemary -boiled over an open fire, never doubt Peruvians when it comes to cooking potatoes and doubt Americans when it comes to flavor

4. Green beans

5. Broccoli

6. Pineapple glazed carrots (one of our friends wanted to be a chef for a while)

7. Stuffing-adobe oven

8. Fresh bread from the bakery

9. Fruit Salad

10. Banana Pudding desert

11. 2 Apple Crisps/Pie (I was in charge and if I do say so myself they turned out amazing)-adobe oven

12. 3 Pumpkin pies

13. Fresh whipped cream

14. Spiced Apple Cider

There were 15 volunteers and probably 25 Peruvians who showed up for our dinner. It was really something special to share the holiday with Peruvians. Thanksgiving is a day that is supposed to be about being grateful, giving thanks and sharing and I think that our Thanksgiving embodied all of those things. I think they even liked the food…despite the fact that my friend’s mom fed a lot of the leftovers to the dog.

The week following Thanksgiving was our Early IST which is the training event after you’ve been in site for 3 months. We got together, discussed our diagnostics, possible project ideas, and did some practicums in communities. Since it overlapped with World AIDS day our practicums mainly dealt with HIV/AIDS education. It was so great to see everyone and hear everyone’s stories from site.

After the week ended we headed back to site and most of us had to stop in Trujillo between buses. I spent the night there and overloaded on America. I saw the new Harry Potter, used the internet and drank coffee at Starbucks, ate Pizza hut and McDonalds, and visited the supermarket mega store, Plaza Vea. It was a bit too much stimuli I think and happy to be back in site (with my new fuzzy alpaca socks).

As i said in the last post, internet is either non exsistent or painfully slow in site right now so my apologies for my lack of updating! Hopefully I´ll be in the capital soon using fast internet and i can upload another blog post and some photos before Christmas!

Chau!