Update!

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: