I know, I know. Almost two months. Here then...

Oh, god. Too many things.

I left this in Ancash, in Huaraz, in a bar called Trece Bujos. Giant Jenga, Shot-Skis, and amazing friends. Hung out with volunteers I hadn't seen since training and made an awesome new friend that night too. I heart Huaraz.

Ben and I then had a chill day and then hit the Cordillera Negra on horseback to get some good shots of the Cordillera Blanca.

Large mountains camoflauged by clouds...

That's my horse, Canelo.

We then decided to leave Huaraz and spend the last couple days back in Lima. A good friend of mine had just finished service and was on her way out, so we got to spend a couple of days hanging out with her and some other Lima buddies.

When vacation ended and Ben took off, I hurried back to site to try and do as much work as I could, knowing I had less than two weeks before I had to head back to Lima. Turned into one of my hardest times yet, work-wise. I had to run around finishing up shopping for my Kids to Kids mural/astronomy project, have obnoxious meetings with the Mayor about the library, and teach a Vocational Orientation class to all four sections of Second Grade at the high school. I got thoroughly screwed by the school, teachers and the director abandoning me in classes and even the other teachers going into my classroom after hours and stealing a couple hundred soles worth of school supplies I had bought. I was super ready to leave when I took off to Lima again, even though it was so soon. One year slump hit hard.

School girls hiking up the hill with water buckets between classes.  Have to do this when they go to the bathroom.

Marching classes.  So.  Many.  Afternoons.  They cancel so many of my activities in order to work on their marching.  More important than reading, yes.

My Science Club geeks working away.

Festival time was starting in my town when I left. Luckily, I managed to miss th

e whole thing.

Teaching too many at once.

Mom rustlin' up the grub.

Jose took me out for bday beers before I left site.  There was no electricity that weekend, but as long as there are candles, the bar stays open.

Birthday cuys.

Mid-Service Meetings and Med Checks. Already. So I was able to arrive in Lima on my birthday, which was beyond excellent. A bunch of friends and I spent the day at Mistura – the largest annual food festival in South America. It was AMAZING. A rare beautiful sunny day in Lima, hanging out with my favorite people, sitting on the grass in the sun all day listening to music and passing around amazing foodstuffs. In the night, we went out to shoot pool at this grubby little dive that I love and apparently everyone else hates. There was a dinosaur exhibit in the park and I got to hop the little fences and get pics with the dinos til I got chased out by the guard. Couldn't ask for a better birthday.

The next week was just boring meetings and doctors appointments that turned into a strange clusterfuck. For someone who had gone to med checks believing myself perfectly healthy, they sure did manage to find things wrong with me. First the dentist decided that a cap on my tooth that was supposed to be replaced many years before, but had been neglected due to lack of insurance need to be replaced NOW. Tried to get him to wait for rainy season, but he insisted, so Cuerpo de Paz went along and made me stay a couple weeks just for that. On top of that, my sore shoulder that Doc Jorge had told me was just “drunk arm” and I slept on it wrong and it would be better in a week, was still sore a month later, causing another non-emergency emergency. Seeing as how I couldn't move my arm the first week after I hurt it and it was almost all better at this point, I assumed it was in the clear. They however were shocked to hear it still hurt at all and sent me in for an MRI. Turns out I had a little tear in something-or-other and they started sending me in to daily physical therapy. So, I was stuck in Lima.

Luckily, I managed to sneak out a week later or so to run home and take my girls to ALMA. ALMA is each department's annual girls leadership camp. I had to run home (17 hours) pick up my four girls, gather donations to pay for their transportation, repack all of my belongings to prepare for camp, another stay in Lima, and a jungle trip, take the girls to Chota (3 hours), and from there to Cajamarca (5 hours), to the Baños del Inca, to the retreat center where we have the camp. Camp was a couple of amazing days, explained below in only pictures, and then I had to put the girls on a bus home and hop another straight back to Lima (16 hours more.) Over 40 hours of buses in just a few days and only 22 hours in site.

My girls in the Chota plaza.  Yes, they are all four wearing track suits.  They regularly tell me I really need to get some.  It's the height of current style.

Team building games.

Creating the egg babies they have to carry all weekend long.

The whole group.

I kidnapped egg babies I found unattended and held them for ransom.

Dead baby.

Sex vs. Gender charla.

Large group condom demo.  With wooden dildo.  Wood.  Ha.

My small group condom practice.

Yeah, I ate the banana.  And the girls played with their condoms for a good half an hour.

Panel where girls got the opportunity to ask questions of women leaders in various professions and then to talk with three teenage moms.

Quiz games.

University tour.

Everyone who wasn't a Jehovah's Witness got to go swimming!

Skits of girls pretending to be drunk boys and practicing shooting down advances.

Introducing s'mores.

Back in Lima. More dental, more physical therapy. And then, vacation! Right in the middle of my medical crap. Awesome. The Cobbs hit town, picked up two friends from the airport (Mike and Felix, woot) and we all headed down to Huancachina for a day of dune buggy and sandboarding insanity. And insanity it truly is. I was honestly not to hyped on the idea. It really doesn't sound all that cool. It was really, truly wild. Apparently you cannot flip a dune buggy. No matter how fast you go, no matter how steep a drop off you fly down or how much air you catch or how much insane spinning and tilting you do. We did not die. To my deep surprise. Sandboarding: almost as nuts. Throwing yourself off three hundred foot almost-cliffs, head first lying down on a snowboard. The last dune was so steep and so huge that you couldn't see over the edge – it just looked like a drop off. When you see the others get down to the bottom, they are just little specks. But they are still alive. So you jump. You can use your feet to break, sticking them down in the sand to slow yourself down a little. On that last one, I got going too fast to break. Tried to put my feet down and it was like power sanding the tops of my feet. So I just kept going faster and faster until I flew past everyone at the bottom and halfway up the next dune. It was a very good time.

Adrenaline exhausted, most my clothes soaked from being shoved in the pool, and slightly in love with that little oasis town – possibly the most tranquilo place I have yet encountered in this country – we had to head back to Lima the next day to fly out to the jungle.

We spent a week in the jungle, including a three day raft race. We built our own rafts and paddled our asses off for a brutal 180 kilometers from Nauta to Iquitos. I will describe this in my next blog. It deserves it's own space. One of the most amazing times of my life.

At the end of the race, we flew back to Lima. I had yet another dentist appointment and had to stick around a couple of days to deal with the fact that I had managed to incur first degree sunburns down the fronts of my ultra-white legs. Blisters and open wounds and skin sloughing off. It was pleasant. It also healed remarkably fast. Three days later I was back north, in Chota for a regional meeting, gauze off the legs, no more ibuprofen for the shoulder, and teeth all shiny white and brand new.

Now I am back in site, completely overwhelmed with the ungodly amount of work I have to do with more than a month away. I have been spending these first couple of days just putting myself back in order. Washing WAY too many clothes by hand, cleaning my room, dealing with backed up email and reports and other bureaucratic shit, and trying to lay out a winter-long plan. I have no plans the next few months to leave this place again, besides my standard sanity-jaunts into Chota to have a beer and American food with my family of vols there.

I have a trip planned for Thanksgiving and one for New Years. Until then, I am planning on finishing Future Planning classes with the rest of the Colegio students, launching the 7 (yes, SEVEN) new banks I have lined up to start, opening the silly business-that-can't-win with my entrepreneur girls, and completing my maps/model-solar-system/telescope project with my Science Club. And, of course, the epic library battle will continue...

I will write up the jungle race soon, I swear. With lots of pictures.  Love you.

Vacations are Fancy

The last three weeks or so have been the biggest whirlwind of my service so far. I feel like I say things like that a lot. Then again, I feel that my experience is in such constant flux that maybe it just always feels like that. Except for the dead times, which are sneaking up again.

My business group girls finished their business plan. After a six-week course on Youth Entrepreneurship, in which they were able to realize some micro-businesses for a week, with “very official” loans from the Bank of Courtney, I selected all the winners to participate in a further course. We spent the last few months delving much further in to how to run a business. It culminated in days and days of actually writing a full business plan. They had slowly been preparing this same business idea throughout the duration of the entire course, but when it came time to actually sit and write it, it was quite the trial.

These kids graduate high school having never actually read a book or written anything longer than a paragraph. When they do write a page or two, it is copied by rote. These girls knew their business, knew the principles, and had a solid idea of what they needed to put down. But I had them write a full 18 pages, typed up, to send in to Lima for the National Youth Business Plan Competition. It ended up being meeting every day, for hours, to get it together. I refused to do even a sentence of it for them, instead making suggestions on every paragraph or so. They did it.

So one of the girls and I went to Lima, with a profesora from their Colegio accompanying to escort her back after. She had to give a presentation of her business plan to a panel of professional judges from the Embassy, the American Chamber of Commerce, and heads of Peruvian businesses, and in front an audience of other volunteers and students from around the country. I made her do this all herself too, even the powerpoint. She did well.

In a moment of unbelievable excitement, my girls won second place. I had sadly been a doubter. My girls were the youngest there, just barely 15, while others were college students in their early 20s. My girls' idea was one of the more out there ones – opening an art center with classes and an artesanía shop, while most the rest were juice stands and cuy farms and things more tangible. My little girl's powerpoint was so much less polished than the rest and she had gotten so flustered in her presentation that she forgot to explain what the business IS. I was glad to see my doubts shattered.

It all came together and now my girls will be receiving the start-up money to actually open this crazy thing here in the Plaza in Santa Cruz. This means I now have a shit ton of work to do. But it's pretty cool...

As soon as the competition was over, the profesora and the child skittered off back to the mountains and I was officially on vacation. Ridiculously exciting. That next day was the first actual vacation day I had ever used. I had only gone before for the free days of Thanksgiving and 4^th of July, not more than long weekends.

That was Friday and the only other volunteer staying in town that night was Biz and we kind of owned Lima for a night. Biz fell up a flight of steps and I ran full speed into a wall. So that's a good night. The next morning, Ellen rolled in and she went with me to the airport. My friend Ben friggin' Brown flew in from the US to visit for 9 days. The first familiar face in 15 months. Super disorienting at first. So exciting too.

Ben and I went and did some Lima exploring for the night, after a big ceviche dinner with Biz and Ellen. The next morning they took off, Lisa rolled in, and we had a long semi-lazy day before en and I hopped an overnight bus to Huaraz, in the department of Ancash.

Huaraz is a high Andes town and the capital of mountain adventure in Perú. It is at about 10,000 feet and is the base camp for all sorts of mountain climbing, rafting, rock climbing, horseback riding, bungee jumping, ice caving, and a million other awesome things. When we rolled in, Ben, coming from sea level, was already hit with altitude sickness. So we relaxed all day that day, got on all the necessary meds and planned our next trips.

The next day we woke up at the crack of dawn to catch the van to the trailhead for the day's acclimatization hike. They said this hike was of a pretty decent level of difficulty and went to a lake at about 14,500 feet. They said if we could do that, we could survive any of the longer non-technical treks.

I had thus far been unaffected by the altitude, since I live at about 7,000 feet in Cajamarca. It wasn't until we got another couple thousand feet up that I got hit and it was brutal. Also, kind of hilarious. By the end of this three hours climb, I was taking a breath for every step, setting goal posts for myself on where I was allowed to throw up, and laughing and practically crawling along with this nice Argentinian girl.

The views were breathtaking the whole way, just climbing up and around all these huge glaciar topped peaks, but the lake itself was the perfect cherry on top. A color of blue that puts Crater Lake to shame, sitting literally feet below a huge sparkling glacier. As the sun shone on, chunks of ice starting falling off the glacier, into the lake, keeping it exceptionally cool for us. So, of course, we decided to strip down and jump in.

and so...  Panties!  Except the French girl, of course.  And I had already started getting dressed again before the group shot.

That last picture is the whole crew we were hiking with.  Some french kids, Argentinians, a Peruvian, an Ireali, some Austrians, some Swiss, and Ben and I as the sole Estadounidenses.  It was a great crew and we all became buddies.  We decided on the van ride back that we all needed like NINE beers after that trek.

To be continued in a few days...

Días normales.

My family and I - my brothers are absolute GIANTS in this country.

Breakfasting with my little bro.

Went to throw something away but it looks like some cuyes get the trashcan this day.

Cuyes and clothesline steak.  I took this photo from the breakfast table.

My mom was making eels or something and I was making a pancake with chin chins.

My anticucho lady in my plaza.  Best anticucho ever.

Movie night with the kiddies.

Some Science Club kids at movie night.

Getting ready for movies at the Muni.

Kids crying.  Science Club learned a valuable lesson:  Do not show pregnant woman slasher porn at childrens movie night.

My little entreprenuer girls working on their epic business plan.

Mom, bro, and buddies in from Lima.

My bro always gets me out with him when he comes to town.

They installed a fire hydrant in my town - which is just weird as there are no firefighters or a fire truck.  It is right near the colegio and it didn't take long for them to figure out how to open it up.  Whee.

This guy spent 40 minutes trying to close it but mostly just getting really wet.  It was hilarious.

It was the biggest excitement in my town i na very long time.

He eventually got it closed to a lot of cheering.  I walked by half an hour later and it was open again.

My Science Club is actually a Science, Technology, and Environment Club and they made this for their school.

Fiestas Patrias celebrations in my plaza.

Early morning running buddy.

More running friends.

Jesus Zack.

Just Zacking around.  I am making a Zackumentary.

Annie.  In sleeping bag.

I found him like this.

Inexplicable couch spinning hilarity.

Relax-y Chota.

Found him here again three hours later.

Two weeks after we despedida-ed Christi, we despedida-ed Lisa.  We actually went out for this one!  To the one bar in Chota.

We got all pretty before we went out.  Paid off too - the guys at the next table bought us peanuts!

Delicious peanuts.

Special.

And the inevitable 2am caldo.  This is something I will really miss about this country.  From 2am til dawn, soup stands pop up everywhere to fend off hangovers.  And its so delicious.

Pretty Chota.  I don't know how I will survive without Lisa.

The end.