Well, I've finally made it to Peru. It's both more and less than I would have thought. I was utterly exhausted from my two nights in D.C. As well as the night before flying there. In those three nights I got approximately ten hors of sleep, and not good, deep sleep either. Anyway, I was exhausted and couldn't sleep on the plane rides, so the additional hour and a half bus ride to our "retreat" lodging was torture. I tried to take in all the new and potentially exciting sights, but it was 11 o'clock, and frankly the sights weren't very exciting. It was a pretty busy two lane highway, and a lot of graffiti on poor, run-down places. I was getting a little scared about it all when we got to a somewhat nicer area. So while it wasn't too bad overall, it made me conscious of how much I'd need to pay attention to everything going on when out. It wasn't a friendly looking place. After getting a solid 6 hours sleep at our retreat compound and seeing how pretty it is here, I felt much better. The birds were singing, and everyone was excited again. We're staying at this place so that the Peru staff got a chance to introduce themselves and do some general overviews and explaining. All the speeches were very motivational, and the staff friendly and funny. I really like everyone so far, other trainees and staff. I think the only down part to the day was realizing that the 30 health volunteers are leaving for their training facility tomorrow. All those awesome people that I probably won't see again...but I very much look forward to tomorrow. That's because I'll meet my host family of the next ten weeks and then settle into the training on Monday.
I've also learned a lot more about what my time as a volunteer will likely be like. While I still don't know where I will be placed, it will be somewhere in Ancash, Lima, Lambayeque, Junin, and Pasco. Also, it will very likely be somewhere rural, with around 200 to 500 people. There are three goals that the environmental group works towards. They are environmental education, natural resource management and solid waste disposal. Basically, we're supposed to do environmental lesson at schools, plant trees and build micro landfills. Any other project is optional based on the community interest. It sounds exciting, doable and useful all at the same time. I'm really looking forward to getting started. However, I have a long way to go on my conversational Spanish first.
After we got through the trainings, we had quite a bit of free time. Tina, one of the other environmental trainees was talked into teaching bellydancing which was a lot of fun. After getting some of the basic moves, I wandered off to play volleyball. I'd been looking forward to that since learning there was a volleyball net. We played volleyball until dinnertime, when it was too dark to be playing much more anyway. We had spaghetti for dinner with soup and jello. It was interesting; the spaghetti was very yummy actually. By then it was still only a bit before 8 pm so I joined a group playing a game I'd never seen before. They called it "challenge". You receive four cards arranged in a square facedown. You can only look at the two cards nearest you once, and can't look at the back row at all. The objective was to have the least amount of points, and each of your four cards was tallied at the nod of each round. Twos and threes were negative of their value, and four through ten are face value. Jack is worth zero points, while queens and kings are ten points. The ace is worst of all, being fifteen points. The top card of the deck of cards is flipped and the person after the dealer gets to take that card or draw from the deck. You can either blindly replace the back two cards or replace the known ones in front. Then you discard and the next person gets to choose that one or from the deck, and so on. The round was over when someone was satisfied with their setup and said challenge. That meant everyone else got one more chance before the cards are flipped to count up. We started adding fun rules like if you had three cards that were the same, you added them up as normal but then divided your total points in half. And it was like hearts where the rounds keep going and you accumulate points. Also, if you managed to get your total to 50, 100, and so on, your points went to zero. It was pretty fun. Would have made a fun drinking game I feel like, if all the losers had to drink at each round. We played quite a few rounds with two decks of cards and like ten people.
Things on my mind right now:
What will I talk to my host family about?
Will their home be far from the training center? I don't want to take the combi everyday.
How bad is the language training going to be?
Well it's getting late finally, so I'll get some more sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a big day, get to meet the people I'll live with for ten weeks and I'll get my two checked bags back (currently they're all locked up, and while loading the bus I could smell the bug spray I packed so clearly at least one broke and got out of the gallon bag it was packed in. Get to see how bad the damage is tomorrow. At least the bag will smell awesome and repel bugs. And doesn't have any Deet.)
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