Swearing In and At Site

September 6th thru September 13th La, Encantada, Peru

Now at Site

I was little worried about getting to site with ALL my belongings but fortunately there wasn’t the slightest problem. So far I have not done a whole ton. Everyday, I wake up between 7:30 and 8:00am and eat breakfast which consists of a couple of rolls, either a super salty fried egg or two boiled eggs, and some hot condensed milk. Then I usually study Spanish in the morning for a while before I join the president of the artisan association I will be working with. We do some things in the local where classes on design are taught. In the evenings I play soccer or go running. Quite often there is a meeting at night with all the artisans and they discuss splitting up large orders and such.
We don’t eat dinner until 8:30 or 9pm. Then the telenolevas come on. Sometimes I try to watch their silly nonsense, but often I read.

Restaurant Possibility

The reason I got assigned to this town in particular is because of my restaurant experience. The town has petitioned the government to build a restaurant for the town since none exist for the population of five thousand. It is going to be operated by a group of mothers and all profits will be used for the development of the community. I went with Jose, the president of the association, to the capital to talk to the director of tourism there. We discussed how far along the funds are such.

September 3rd, 2006 thru September 5th, 2006 Lima, Peru

Swearing In Ceremony

Swearing in was less eventful than I had imagined. In the past, President Toledo has come to the ceremonies because he had a Peace Corps Volunteer in his house when he was a child. But we weren’t even lucky enough to get an Ambassador. After the ceremony we all said goodbye to our host families which was actually pretty emotional. My little sister cried pretty bad.

I had a really cool language class because it was all males. Our language instructor studied English in Buffalo, New York so obviously one day we talked about the Bills and buffalo wings for quite a while. He took us to a place where we could find some delicious wings. Then he busted out some Cuban cigars. We had mentioned how they are hard to find in the States and are costly. He surprised us with these and we smoked them on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. He said they only cost $1.25. I got to find the place he found them.

Later we all went out to the discotecas and then turned in around 4:30 am. Unfortunately, we were all awakened at 8:00 am because our Visas had arrived and we had to individually sign for them in the hotel lobby. We ate breakfast and then did some shopping in Lima. We went to this huge market of pirated material. You can find any movie or television series pirated at perfect quality for only $1.25 per disc. You can also find any computer software program for the same price. It is going to be hard to refuse purchasing pirated material at such a low cost.

That night we all departed on 4 separate buses to our department capitals. Here we each spent the night and then headed off to our sites individually.