Here are some pictures of the school i´ve been working at for the past month in a neighborhood outside Trujillo called Nuevo Jerusalem. This is the outside of the school, which has 17 students. It´s pretty basic, with a dirt floor and reed mats for a roof. Fortunately the weather here is almost always dry and warm.

The neighborhood with a mountain in the background:

The kids who took most of these pictures were surprisingly good photographers:

Laura, the youngest student, is five years old:

The kids get a lunch of soymilk and a sandwich at the end of school every day:

Some of the boys found a lizard on the playground:

One of the girls surprised her uncle at his house:

This is one of the girl´s cousins- only four days old!

-Lauren

This is a video of a hairless dog that lives at a ruined city called Chan Chan that is right outside Trujillo. The dog is swimming in an artesian well in one of the city´s palaces that we toured. Enjoy!

-Lauren

Now that Andrea and I have been in Trujillo for almost 2 weeks (and the guys have hopefully been home for a week and a half), we figured it´s time for an update. We´re working with an NGO called the Bruce Organization, which runs schools in some of the poorer neighborhoods for kids who haven´t been going to school so they can get caught up and enrolled in public schools. We help the teachers in neighborhood schools in the mornings and teach English to adults from the community in the evenings, which earns money for the organization.

We got two days off last week because there was a nationwide paro, or strike, to protest high food and gasoline prices. Nothing too exciting happened in our city, but there were some people marching around and giving speeches in the main square:


We went to tour some nearby ruins called the Huaca del Sol and Huaca del Luna. It´s sandy because we´re in a desert and near the beach. The ruins are guarded byPeruvian hairless dogs.


Andrea and some of the other volunteers like to play soccer in a nearby park- here´s a picture of them in action. Lauren avoids the leering Peruvian men by going to spinning and ´Super Tramp´ (trampoline) classes at a gym around the corner from our house.

Here is us with some of the other volunteers from the US and Ireland at someone´s apartment:

Here are some Peruvian and volunteer guys we hang out with:


We went to see a salsa competition at a bar nearby. Here is one of the couples warming up:


We were very surprised to run into our friend Sara, who was my orientation week adviser four years ago at Rice, at the bar! It turns out she has spent 4 months in Trujillo working with another NGO so she was able to give us a lot of advice.


Last weekend, we visited a city called Cajamarca in a valley in northern Peru with two guy volunteers from New Jersey, another girl from California, and her Peruvian boyfriend. A few hours into the bus ride, we were confronted with this view from the front of the bus:


It turns out they were repaving the road, but after we waited for about half an hour they were kind enough to shovel most of the torn up road to the side and let us drive through. Here´s a church we visited in Cajamarca:


We went to Cumbe Mayo, a bunch of rocks that look like forests, and had a great time hiking around. We had a great visit overall, except for some minor digestive upsets caused by Turkish food and one of our friends getting pretty sick due to some kind of allergic reaction.




This is a piece of recent Peruvian art that represents feminine fertility:


Here is Cesar, a Peruvian friend who traveled with us, on the seat of the Inca:

As our last stop in Brazil, we visited Foz de Iguazu, a city on the Brazil/Argentina border. We visited the beautiful Iguazu waterfalls from the Brazil side the first day and the Argentina side the second day, and a few of us also went to Itaipu, currently the largest hydroelectric plant in the world. Here´s everyone right after we got to the falls:

Some views from the Brazil side:

Andrea got very excited:

This is what the guards really did:

Dario`s dream car?

Itaipu dam:

We wanted to try out the video feature, so as a test here is a video of a funny sign I took in Curitiba. ´Quente´ is Portuguese for ´hot.´



-Lauren

Here are some highlights from the two days we spent at Dario´s house in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. This is a drawing of young Dario on the wall. The ones of his brothers were a little more masculine.

Derrick needed to pick up some souvenirs since he only had a few more days with us. Here he is getting assistance from a VERY helpful (and admiring) saleswoman.

We saw some very funny monkeys that live in someone´s backyard. Apparently they steal cake during parties, and here one is eating a roll we brought.


After Paraguay, we embarked on a 20 hour bus trip to Buenos Aires in executivo class. The bus was almost empty, and we spent the trip watching movie, sleeping in the reclining chairs, and getting meals and drinks from the attendant. Greyhound should take a lesson from these people!


-Lauren

One of the things we´ve most enjoyed while walking around the cities here has been checking out the ubiquitous graffiti and street art. Here are some highlights....

This is from the favela we visited in Rio:

The chemical engineers in the group appreciated this toluene molecule from the wall of a house in Curitiba:

This one is announcing an upcoming protest in Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires:

Also from Buenos Aires:

Banned books?

Lauren liked this one:

Hello all,

Tim here with a short update. We made the trip by bus from Dario´s home in Asuncion to our hostel here in Buenos Aires with no problems. For the past few days we´ve been checking out the city and enjoying the local restaurants and attractions. On Wednesday Derrick flew back to the U.S. and Dario returned to Paraguay yesterday, so it´s just the four of us (Andrea, Lauren, Nick and I) for the remainder of our trip.

Sorry for the lack of new posts/pictures -- the computers at the hostels we´ve been staying at here are in pretty heavy demand, and the one I´m on right now doesn´t even have a USB port. We´ll try to add more information when we can.

Adios,
--Tim

This is Lauren with a belated update on our second-to-last stop in Brazil. Since the keyboard in the Buenos Aires hostel barely works, this entry will be mostly pictures. Andrea, Nick, Dario and I spent two days in Curitiba, a medium-sized city about 12 bus hours south of Rio. Dario, his friend Jose, and Jose´s girlfriend met us for a drink. Andrea, Violeta and I particularly enjoyed the sweet Italian-style wine.

Jose got us a deal at a hotel along a downtown pedestrian street. Here´s the view from our window-

We met this nice dog outside our hotel.

We checked out the merchandise at a huge street fair, and since it was surprisingly cold, we picked up some hats.

Curitiba is known as one of the most sustainable cities in the world primarily because of its excellent bus system. Here´s one of the stations- it´s elevated so you just walk into the bus.

Dario says this model of Volkswagen truck, which we´d never seen before, is very fast.

We went to one of Curitiba´s many parks in the hopes of seeing carpinchos (capybaras in English). We saw some from a distance on an island in the middle of the lake and almost left disappointed when a whole group of them swam across to eat the grass right next to us. I snuck up on one and touched it, then ran away.

On the last day, we hoped to take a tourist bus around the city, but since the bus along with most other attractions in Curitiba was closed on Monday we took a maraton walking tour instead. The tour resulted in a few blistered heels, but we also made it to this beautiful museum for the architect Oscar Niermeyer.

Other highlights of the visit included visiting Russian, Mexican, and German bars, and for everyone except me, a huge meat buffet. Curitiba wasn´t as outwardly environmentally friendly as we expected, but it is a well-planned and pedestrian friendly city with great public transportation. Recycling bins were widely available, and as in many other cities here, people with carts go up and down the street s at night picking cardboard and other recyclables out of the trash to sell. We had a fun and relaxing visit, and hopefully we´ll be able to update you on the rest of the trip soon!