the first leg

Disclaimer: This is the longest post I will ever publish, I promise. It was first written as an email to my parents.


Hola!

I´m beginning my first blogpost from Peru with the spanish greeting for hello, bacause i know it would just not be a proper first entry with the contrived use of the native greeting. :P Anyway, so far so good! The journey here went very smoothly. After 50 hours of travel time I finally arrived in Arequipa.

The bus ride here was very different than I expected. After leaving Lima´s thrving metropolis of a downtown (claire, they have applebee´s and chili´s) the bus reached the dessert. The kind of dessert you might excpect to find in Riyadh or maybe Mars. I´ll ba honest, it´s not that pretty, maybe that´s why you never see it in tour books. But it is very interesting and remarkable in its own right. The poverty I saw was extreme, much worse than anything I witnessed in Thailand. In the rural areas I saw, people live in small cinderblock houses carved into the giant sand dunes. With no visible agriculutre, one can only wonder how they are able to feed their families.

Arequipa is a striking contrast to the dry dessert that surrounds it, a kind of fertile valley, if you will. I arrived at the guest house and was greeted by a group of sick volunteers who didn´t make it to work today. I have some advice: if you plan to start a charity in a developing country, american and european students are an unreliable work souce. Their weak stomachs make them fairly useless upon arrival. Luckily, I have yet to get sick. The star fruit smoothie and accidently drank in Lima has yet to catch up with me.

The other volunteers, though, sickly are really nice. I cliqued especially well with my roommate Katie from Boston. Tomorrow the other two americans in the house are leaving and it will just be Katie and I. The rest of the group is from England and New Zealand. As I was sitting around the table chatting with everyone this morning an impromptu go-kart trip was proposed. So me and and a couple other of the volunteers caught a cab to try our hands at racing. It was a blast.

When I got back Katie and I went to the large market near our house and got some fresh-baked bread and fruit. It was a welcome departure from plane and bus food.

Tomorrow, I have a coffee date with Katie in the morning, then orientation, then I start with the kids! I still son´t know if I am at the orphanage or the school, but I´m fine with either.