We really are in Peru! We survived our first two weeks with a few cases of giardia and salmonella but we seem to be on the mend.

The boring background...

We live in a volunteer house in the neighborhood of Larapa which is about 15 minutes by taxi from Cusco. We live with one other volunteer who is a lovely woman from Canada.




We have been extremely busy with our volunteer work with Peru's Challenge and it has been amazing. Peru's Challenge is a non-profit organization that works with local communities on education and improvements. They have been working in the poor, agricultural community of Puma Marca for 5 years and have had a remarkable impact. When they started working with the community, there were only a handful of students attending a very small school. Now there are over 100 lively kids that attend a beautiful community built school. They also started a successful women's handy-craft collective and helped sponsor many children to attend high school in Cusco.

















Five days a week we take a small van up to the school which is about 20 minutes from our house. There are about 100 of the cutest kids you have ever seen that attend the school. Two days a week we go to the school to work in the garden or do construction work- we are building a new room for the school kitchen and a new classroom. The kids get a snack and a hot meal at school, which for some, is all the food they get in the day.
























Three days a week we go to the school to teach art, computers, English, hygiene, and physical education (all in Spanish- which is quite challenging since none of us speak the language!). We are taking Spanish lessons and are learning at a rapid pace, but being proficient at ordering lunch and teaching a class are very different things. We spend a lot of time preparing for these lessons, but no amount of preparation can control what happens when 33 Spanish speaking kids realize that your Spanish is limited to a few sentences written down from spanishdict.com. In a word, chaos. But fun chaos.





Sinclaire and Elena are in charge of hygiene which involves encouraging the kids to wash their hands and face with soap, dry with the towel, put on face cream and get a snack.