I made it to Peru!

My first week in Peru has been really amazing.  It is very different here.  I live with a really nice host family.  They are very warm and make me feel like a part of their family.  It does help that they have hosted several other Peace Corps volunteers in the past, because it takes some of the pressure off.  They already knew the rhythm of Peace Corps PST (pre service training- technically I am not a volunteer yet, I will only be official at the end of my training when I get sworn in at the end of November).  I go to classes every day at a Peace Corps training center in my host family’s town called Chaclacayo.  They are used to my appalling Spanish skills and I am very thankful for their patience with my language skills. 

In my host family I live with a grandmother; I call her Mama Vicki (or at least that is how I would spell it in English since her full name is Victoria), her two daughters Karin and Lourdes, Lordes’ husband Miller, and their two kids Lesly and Sting (pronounces eh-stin, I know, I thought it was funny too when I saw his name written “Sting”).  Lesly is 13 years old and Sting is 7 or maybe 8 I always forget.  Sting loves to play games with me; cards, hide-and-go-seek in the street with the other kids, and puzzles from a Spiderman coloring book I brought for him.  Lesly and I do our homework together at the kitchen table at night and sometimes we watch the telenovelas or soap operas together.  Both Lesly and Sting are huge fans of Justin Bieber.

My room in the house is usually the living room, but when they are hosting a volunteer they convert it into a bedroom.  The Peace Corps pays for my room and board with my family, it is a nice way to make some extra money for their family.  There is a small store in the front of the house and the family sells food, school supplies, as well as toiletries.  Directly behind the store is the kitchen which is where we spend most of the family time (since I live in the living room).  The stair case to the upstairs as well as the hallway between the kitchen and my room are just an open skylight type setup; there is no ceiling over this part of the house.  Lima and its surrounding suburbs (Chaclacayo is one of the smaller surrounding towns) are in the desert and there is very little precipitation here.

One major difference in my new Peruvian home is water.  The water here is not drinkable (even for the locals) and the majority of people boil their drinking water.  The water is fine for bathing, brushing teeth, dishes, and laundry.  Any fruit or vegetables that do not have peels need to soak in water with 2 drops of bleach for 15 minutes to wash, because washing with water from the tap will make you sick.  With that being said a lot of the vegetables I have eaten have been cooked, and I haven’t had a lot of vegetables in general.  Later on I’ll write more about the water system here in Peru it is very interesting to me, because I never spent a lot of time worrying about water in Michigan. 

One last observation that I want to report to your class about is the dogs in Peru.  There are a ton of dogs in my area that live on the streets.  They don’t necessarily belong to any one family in particular and I’m under the impression that they most scavenge for food in the trash.  I was surprised by the variety of dogs.  There are all different breeds of dogs.  I included a picture of my family’s two pet dogs; Gringo and Oso, as well as some pictures of the street dogs in my neighborhood. 

I wasn´t sure what to write about in this first post-there are so many things that I want tell everyone about and I didn´t know where to start!