A little background info

Perhaps not everybody knows exactly why we're here or what we're doing. Catherine and I are spending a year in Peru as Notre Dame Mission Volunteers, which means we will be serving as tutors in the spirit of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, who dedicate themselves to educating the poor as a work of justice. Our placement is at the Fe y Alegria school in Lima, Peru, where we will be tutoring English and reading (and maybe a little music, now that the sisters have discovered my modest guitar abilities). We are living with three very nice sisters in a house five minutes away from the school. The Peruvian school year starts in March, because the seasons are the opposite from the Northern hemisphere, so between now and March, we will have another volunteer opportunity at the Hogar San Fransisco de Asis, a home for kids who need medical treatment. The home is an hour outside Lima; it is run by an American doctor who moved to Peru to work with children whose families can't pay for the operations they need. Dr. Tony provides a place for the kids to stay and organizes their treatment in the city hospitals. There are over 50 kids living there, with a cooking staff and everything, so they mostly need volunteers to play with the kids and spend time with them. Apparently this is great language training as well... if you know me and kids, you may have guessed that I'm also bringing lots of books to lock myself in my room with when they get to be too much.

We've been here for eight days now and are getting the lay of the land a bit. Living in a desert climate is very different--everything is dusty, including the unpaved street in front of our house, and most of the world is brown, tan, or dusty red brick, except the brightly painted houses and the little green patches of garden or cactus. The houses in our neighborhood look like they´re falling apart, but actually they're being built up; people here start with one floor and build upwards a little bit at a time, as they can afford the bricks. There are knee-high piles of dirt and/or bricks all over the place. Sometimes you see a very nice-looking house literally across the street from a shack of metal and wood that wouldn't look like a house in any sense except that there's laundry strung up inside it. Our house is very nice because it has running water and electricity; we cook on a gas stove that you light with a match, or in the oven. We boil all the water that we drink or use to wash food because the water isn't safe to drink or brush your teeth with. There´s no water drainage system to speak of, so when you shower, you have to stand in a bucket so that very little goes down the drain. Then you pour the water into another bucket and put it by the toilet so it can be used to flush. Fact: if you dump any old bucket of water into a toilet, it will flush. Who knew. Other than that, we haven´t had to change our lifestyle too much. The lack of Internet in the house actually hurts most, because I´m so used to having it at my fingertips to talk to people... we do all our Internet work from little cafes that have tiny little cubicles with old-looking desktops in them, but the connection is fast enough. There´s a TV that we watch the news on for language practice, and a radio/CD player. ...Oh, but before I talk about not changing my lifestyle too much, I still need to wash my clothes by hand. We'll see how that goes this weekend.

Cockroach count: Catherine 4, me 3. Llama count: 0.