It has been a while since I wrote blog post and a lot has happened. My family came for a visit during their spring break. We went to Cusco, the Sacred Valley, and Machu Picchu. It felt amazing to spend so much time with my family. Although I will admit I was a little bit stressed about money during the vacation. It’s one of those annoying little things about vacations, but also about living in Peru. There is this constant presence of this awareness of people trying to rip you off. Sometimes it is small things; like a taxi driver charging more for gringas than he would for Peruvians, but other times it feels bigger. Through Peace Corps I have official Peruvian residency and there are a lot of times when there are 2 prices for archaeological sites or even plane tickets.
There were a lot of hiccups, but
overall it was a great visit. Some of
the highlights include: a llama spitting in my face (you always hear about it
happening-and it did, it was gross but really funny), crazy tour guides whose
‘factoids’ proved to be a less than true when we googled them after the fact
(one lady told us that the stones that made up Machu Picchu were partially held
together by magnetism…that was a big fat made up fact), almost losing the expensive
somewhat irreplaceable train tickets (but we found the electronic versions on
my email), and the race to see who could hold out the longest without getting
sick.
I am embarrassed to admit that
although I was not the first one to get sick I did get pretty sick and before
it happened I may have been doing a lot of trash talking. ‘I’ve lived here for a year and 7 months
street food doesn’t scare me, and yeah, I’ll eat that salad off your plate, I
can’t believe you are worrying about those ice cubes’ I was tossing around a
lot of talk, but then I got super sick.
***Thank you Debbie for the Immodium***
Machu Picchu was probably the
most beautiful place I have been to in my life.
It gave me that feeling that the Grand Canyon gives you-it is just so beautiful
that you cannot believe it is real.
Except that Machu Picchu is manmade so it is different. Those crazy Incas were some determined and
hard-working engineers, because it seems that they could not have chosen a more
difficult place to build a city. And
tour guide Edith was wrong-those blocks were not even a little bit held
together by magnetism.
Anyway, now it’s back to site and
back to work. I got permission from the
director of the elementary school to do some cute activities with the kids in 5th
and 6th grade about self-esteem and peer pressure. I am going to work with the health center in
Tacabamba on a project about Early Childhood Stimulation. I am going to focus on moms with babies under
1 year. The youth health promoter group
that Diamond and I are doing together is doing really well. And the sex-ed class that I am doing at the
high school in El Naranjo (the town 2 hours walking distance with no
electricity) is kind of rocky. I am
planning on attempting to bribe them into participating with candy.
So things are going well right
now. Hopefully I’ll have some silly
cross-cultural anecdotes to write about next time. The best one I had this week was having to
eat 3 ears of corn on a house visit so as not to offend the woman who invited me
food. That was rough-thank goodness we
only eat corn at 2 out of the 3 meals a day (just kidding). Thanks for reading.
Chau for now,
kb
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