July 9 & 10: Peruvian Smurfs and “I thought there was going to be dancing”

Saturday morning we went on a hike to a waterfall near San Geronimo de Surco. It’s a town about 1.5 hours from Santa Eulalia. The hike was great. The sun was out and there were lots of things for us to stop and look at: a religious shrine, a waterfall and some really old ruins. The view from the shrine was amazing and while the waterfall was more of a trickle than a fall it was in a beautiful spot and we all sat there for lunch. I spent a lot of time talking with Lindsay, my TAPs group leader, on the hike. She told me about all the craziness that has been her 5 years in the Peace Corps and I actually ended up talking about Nat and Mark’s accident. You two now have more people sending you good wishes from Peru <3 After lunch we hiked back down the mountain and stopped to look at the ruins. I have absolutely no idea how to write the name of the culture, but it sounded like Yow-Yow, I think. Remember this was all in another language. Anyway, our guide was telling us how they were actually a race of fairly short people and then he started pointing out the different houses. To give you an idea of the size of these houses, I’m pretty sure any child over the age of ten could not walk through the doors up right. Now it was eventually cleared up that they weren’t that short; part of the houses were underground…..we were all confused for a bit though :-P Fun fact, in case you’re wondering, Smurf is Pitufo in Spanish.

Sunday was the first meeting of our youth group that Nick, Kelsey and I have been working on. We live in a tiny little association that is actually just half of one street, so it’s been pretty difficult to find a whole group of children. Finally we just decided to go with Kelsey’s three host siblings. Not exactly the idea of the original project, but it’s more important that we actually have the meetings at this point :-P Anyway, we started out with a dinamica called human knot and then we did something called The Personal Flag to get them thinking about personal values and goal setting. Afterwards we had peanut butter and bananas as our healthy snack. Now this may seem unremarkable to you, but peanut butter is quite rare down here and, therefore, a nearly priceless commodity amongst many PCVs. I was more excited than the kids that Kelsey decided to share! After the snack we turned on some music and scared the little kids with our dancing….wait I mean, we all had a little dance party in Kels’ living room.