biblioteca

After months of fundraising planning, building, and preparing, our community library is finally done! With cemented floors and walls and a nice paint job, the community members are very impressed with how it looks and anxiously waiting till it opens. It has been a great experience to see nothing there five months ago to now having literally the nicest building in our village. We have requested books from a program called PromoLibro, which is part of Peru’s Ministry of Education. Part of the budget that I had from kind donations also allowed me to purchase additional books for the library. A few weeks ago we had a community meeting and invited the local mayor. The library committee and I informed the community members and leaders about the advances with the project. Then, the mayor agreed to support our project by paying a small tip to the person who will be working in the library. Our next steps are stocking the library and cataloging all of the books, training the community member how to work in the library, and getting word out about the library.

falta un mesito

It is really had to believe that I only have about a month left in Peru. After spending 27 months here, I have mixed feelings about going home. I am really excited about coming back to my friends and family, but it is going to be hard to say goodbye to my friends and family here. This experience has definitely come with its ups and downs. But overall, it has been and very rewarding two years. I know that my life will never be like it is now. I will never be living among rice fields and thousands of mango trees and passion fruit vines. I will never again be bathing in the river, carrying 20 liters of water on my head every morning, and using the bathroom in a hole in the ground or a bucket in my room. I will never again be so integrated into another culture and family so different from my own. I will always have the memory of my 27 months in the Peru, but it won’t be the same. I am doing everything I can to appreciate every single day that I have left.

peregrinos a ayabaca

For the second year, I got the unique opportunity to experience a pilgrimage of devout followers of the Saint Señor Cautivo de los Milagros de Ayabaca. Señor Cautivo is own of Peru’s important Saints. Every October, pilgrims walk to the town, Ayabaca, where Señor Cautivo is the patron saint to touch the feet of a large statue of the saint. I watched thousands of people pass through my town on their way to the mountain town Ayabaca, about a two-day walk from Pampa Elera. People come from all over Peru. Some people come all the way from the southern departments such as Ica and Lima (I even heard there was a pilgrim from Chile this year). Some had been walking for over a month when they arrived to my town. It was a remarkable and even spirtual experience, to just observe so many people devoted to a saint that they would walk for days, weeks, or months to go to this town in the mountains of Northern Peru. The trek is not an easy one, as the pilgrims carry their belongings, navigate unmarked trails, climb over mountains, and some even carry large crosses or statues of the saint. This year I saw children as young as one years old to 60 or 70 year olds making the religious journey.

día de la educación física

Last week was World Physical Education Day. Every year the primary school celebrates this day by holding a “field-day” event. Because the teachers and students are so used to seeing me running in the morning areound the community, they asked me to help out with the event for the second year. I was in charge of the “Maratón,” where the kids ran about three kilometers. I walked down the road with about 30 elementary school students and got them ready for the race. Then we started our “marathon.” It was fun to run through the town with all of the kids and have community members cheer us on. After the race, kids also participated in a ball-throw contest, long-jump, and sprints.