Well, we´ve passed the one week marker of our trip, and we still haven´t left Lima. The gloom and the noise are beginning to be annoying, but we have had so much to take care of this last week that we couldn´t leave. Also, Jess has been sick for the last few days, so taking the bus up into the mountains probably isn´t the best move yet. We´ll leave by the end of this week, hopefully.
After a few days in Central Lima, we decided to move to Miraflores, the more leafy, safe, and affluent side of Lima. Both of us prefer Central Lima, however, because in many ways, Miraflores is just like Canada -- KFCs and McDonald´s restaurants are even more pervasive than in Edmonton! We really just wanted to see the contrast: between the Peru where people have everything, and the Peru where people have nothing.
Yesterday was a really productive and interesting day. We went to change our return flight dates (we´ll be home on June 15, 2005-ish) and ran into Jess´friend, Ryan, from her Anthropology class. He was working at an archaeological dig site in Ecuador with a group from Grant MacEwan since early June and was in Lima yesterday, waiting to go home. This wasn´t totally coincidental, though. We planned to meet up with him, but not until later in the day. It´s still funny running into people you know on a street in Lima.
After having lunch with Ryan, we went to meet with the people who run the NGO we´ll be working for starting mid-August. The organization is called Manos Libres (Free Hands), and they have been around for about 3 years. They´re a Peruvian organization but have been receiving a significant amount of funding from the Canadian government (through CIDA). Here´s another coincidence: there is a Canadian girl working with them right now, and where is she from? Edmonton. How crazy is that?
Anyway, among their current projects are youth and community programs in a small town in the mountains called Puquio, in Ayacucho. The goal is to keep kids away from gangs and alchohol once they get out of school, as this is an all too common problem in a country where work is so hard to find, never mind decent paying work. However, their projects also extend into areas such as healthcare. They distribute medicine to the high, isolated areas surrounding the town, where access is limited.
When Jess and I walked into the Manos Libres office, we were greeted with hugs and kisses from the ladies working there. They are really gratefull that we´ve come to volunteer our time, and we couldn´t believe how friendly and welcoming they were to us. We spent about 45 minutes in their office, and by the end of it, I couldn´t form a single sentence more in Spanish. There was so much pressure! There were two ladies asking me questions, which I had to try to translate to Jess and answer, and I had our questions to ask as well. It was like a Spanish oral exam, only for 45 minutes! As we walked out of the office, I thought my brain was melting. Is this part of the learning process when acquiring a new language??? All in all, I probably understood 70% of what they were saying, but I got the essential parts: "be in Puquio for August 15," etc.
Prior to starting work, we plan to head into the mountains to check some weaving towns and the city of Ayacucho, where the Shining Path was born at the University of Huamanga. Some interesting times ahead.
Tonite, we´ll meet with "my" Irish nuns, who have been doing aid work all around Peru for more than 40 years, and we hope to visit the orphanage in Zapallas tommorrow. Thanks to Jess´mom, we´ll be able to distribute notebooks, pens, and beanie babies to the orphans there. I´m sure they´ll appreciate any gesture giving them the chance at some kind of a normal childhood.
Next time I write, we´ll be in the mountains!
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