It’s official. I am a real Peace Corps volunteer. I have been at my site since Monday afternoon. My site you ask? It’s amazing.

We all found out our sites a few weeks back at the main PC office in Lima. I was lucky enough to be placed in the department of Ancash. The name of my site is Huashcao. It is a really small village in the Andes Mountains that sits at the bottom of the majestic mountain of Huascaran (see picture in other post). The entire community has about 900 people spread out in a “city” center and 4 surrounding “caserios” or annexes. All in all a very tiny but beautiful place to be living. Three weeks ago we all left Lima for a week for another field based training and a site visit of our soon to be homes. Everyone came back with tons of interesting and funny stories of their new families, houses, communities, and general gringo happenings. We spent our last week together in Chaclacayo fixing up odds and ends and bringing everything to a close. We threw a party for our host families last Friday at the center with food, entertainment, and of course more food. Then on Saturday morning we were officially sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers. There was a big red, white, and blue tent, music, some more food, and speeches from our country director, a host father, a representative from the embassy, and our very own president of the training class. It was a great ceremony.

Then just like that we packed up our things and got ready for the real world. My bus left Saturday night at 11pm and arrived in Huaraz (the “big” city in my area) Sunday morning at 6am. I arrived with my three friends and fellow new Ancash volunteers to the hostel with all our belongings and a lot of uncertainty. We enjoyed the great city of Huaraz (we lucked out, Huaraz is awesome) on Sunday and made dinner in the hostel. Monday morning we hit the market to buy everything you would need for two years. This included the basics like a mattress all the way to the “must haves” like hand made Andean artisan craft and wool sweaters. We had lunch and then gathered in the PC regional coordinator’s 4x4 with all our stuff. There was a lot of it. We packed the car full and then had the hilarious task of tying our 3 mattresses on the top. And with that we drove away from the city and up into the mountains to all of our individual sites. We were dropped off and told to have fun and be safe. Now the job really starts….

My site has been great so far. My new host family is amazing. They are funny and really glad that I am here which helps out a lot. It’s already awkward enough being the only gringo in a very small rural town that speaks Quechua as its main language. Oh yeah did I mention that? Well Quechua is the lingua franca here in Huashcao. Spanish is a close second. Almost everyone speaks Spanish but chooses to communicate first in Quechua. This will pose a bit of a fun challenge until I learn some Quechua myself. So far I have down “the rain is coming” which is a key phrase that is useful every afternoon here due to the rainy season. I haven’t completed any milestone projects yet but the people are all very friendly and have expressed interest in some environmental related projects, which is great. I have the next three months to complete my community diagnostic, which will include what the community wants, needs, lacks, and all the basic info in between. So my job for the next few months is to hang out and chat it up with everyone of every age here in my site. I love hanging out and talking so this should be fun. After that I can start directing my focus to the planning and carrying out of specific projects. What an adventure it will be!

I sit here writing this on Thanksgiving Day. No turkey, but luckily (or un-luckily?) my pig was suffering from the cold so we killed him this morning. So far nothing but skin, blood, and intestines have come from him but as of now it looks like we will have a feast tonight. Maybe not the traditional Thanksgiving feast, but big old mountain pork is a pretty good second!
Tomorrow I am meeting up with the other Ancash volunteers in Huaraz to celebrate Thanksgiving in our own way without slaughtering a pig. It should be great to talk and compare stories from the week.

That’s all I have for now, hope the holiday found you all in good spirits with good spirits!

Chao,
Pete

The swear-in ceremony. Awesome.

My dad preparing our spur of the moment thanksgiving feast.



A view from my backyard. Pretty beautiful eh?


The patio of the new house, as seen from my room.

more photos

Here you go...a few more pictures that have finally uploaded. The first few are more from the Ancash trip last week, then I added a random shot of my neighborhood of Yanacoto. Enjoy!

This is the small village we gave our trash talks in...they all seemed to enjoy watching six gringos dig a hole (the micro-relleno) afterward.

Our mini-FBT group at the ruins near Pashpa in Ancash.

The mighty Huascaran. Tallest peak in the Andes at nearly 6800m...it's huge.

And the panoramic shot of Yanacoto...home sweet home during training.

So I finally had enough patience to sit down and upload a few photos of my surroundings here in Peru. They say pictures are worth a thousand words...now you won't have to read five thousand more of my boring words. Enjoy!

The pool and back porch of the training center. The pool is off limits don't worry. The have threatened death upon anyone who goes for a swim.

Our trash diagnostic during our dia de practica. The MAC group never looked so good.

Lomas de Lachay during the winter, green season. Pretty amazing place.

Me and the family at an all day bingo event a few weeks back. We won the beers in a ring toss game...way better than a stuffed animal.

up in the andes

It has been a while since my last post. Training is slowly coming to an end and things here have been very busy the last few weeks. We have recently begun week 8 of the 10 week training program. The time here is flying by! The highlight of the last few weeks has most definitely been our mini field based training in the department of Ancash.

Ancash is the department or region (similar to a state) directly north of the department of Lima. We spent last Thursday thru Saturday in Ancash around the city of Huaraz. Huaraz is located in the heart of the Andes Mountains and right below what is know as the Cordillera Blanca. The Cordillera Blanca is the stretch of Andes with the most snow capped peaks, hence the name. It is an unbelievably beautiful site. Due to the large amount of peaks and other outdoor activities in the area Huaraz has an outdoor touristic side to it. Many trekkers and climbers come from all over to explore the Andes around Huaraz.

On Thursday morning we arrived in the city of about 55,000 people at 6am after our night bus from Lima. The bus was surprisingly comfortable…as comfortable as an 8 hour bus ride can be. The seats reclined and I was asleep as soon as we left Lima. Once off the bus we split into our groups within MAC and loaded our car for the week. My group of six was awesome and we had our APCD (basically our MAC boss in Peace Corps jargon) as our leader. We all piled into one of the PC 4x4 trucks and headed out of Huaraz to a little town called Pashpa. This was about 30 minutes away from the capital city and a good distance up into the mountains and the Peruvian countryside. I think the pueblo was located at 3600m above sea level….pretty high up there! We spent the day with a current volunteer who has lived in Pashpa for a year now. We had a charla about the tree nursery there and planted a few trees around the health post. We spent the afternoon hiking around to some pre-Incan ruins that were in the area. Pretty incredible to see considering how well maintained they are for being a few thousand years old! That night we had dinner at the volunteer’s house. A true campo (rural) meal of…you guessed it...potatoes and guinea pig. To all the haters out there and members of PETA you would be surprised. The guinea pig (cuy in Spanish) was actually pretty good. It was a bit tough to eat mainly because it was comprised of bone and skin but it tasted great. It truly falls under the cliché of “it tastes like chicken”. One of the kids in my group didn’t want theirs so I was able to have two helpings…how lucky! So if anyone is curious I have a good recipe if you want to head to the nearest PetSmart and buy your next meal!

The second day of the mini-FBT we spent a bit further down the mountain in a pueblo called Collon. Here we gave a few charlas about trash management (we love trash) to some local people. In true Peace Corps fashion the people were not there for the talk and we ended up giving the talk pretty informally to some local men and women we gathered from the pueblo. After the talk it was time to put our words into practice. We built a micro-relleno in the community. This is really just a hole in the ground where people can throw their trash…don’t be too impressed. It was a great hole though, and the people stood around to watch and some helped us to build it. Actually one of the townsmen dug the majority of the hole a LOT faster than we could have. We were there for the moral support though which was good. After lunch we headed to the last stop on the trip, which was a smaller town about an hour away.

The last town we were in was in the footprint of Huascaran, the tallest peak of the Andes at 6700m or about 22,000 ft. It’s an incredible sight. It towers above everything else around it and when the clouds clear you can see the majestic snow capped peak…pretty awe-inspiring. We spent the day up in one part of Huascaran National Park near a glacial lake called Llanganuco. It was hands down the most beautiful area of Peru I have seen to date. Stunning blue-green water surrounded by Huascaran and other nevados (snow capped mountains). After spending some time here we did what all good Peace Corps volunteers would do at this point: go swimming in the cold glacial lake. We left our clothes on the shoreline and jumped in for a few cold seconds. It was an awesome time! After our time in the park we headed back to Huaraz and spent a few hours in the city before our bus left again at 11pm. We celebrated Halloween with a few beers at a local bar and then made the trip back to Lima.

Overall it was an amazing time. We were able to see Ancash and the Peruvian sierra (highlands) and how life works up there. Plus, it was a much more beautiful landscape than the training center in Chaclacayo and downtown Lima! It was a well needed trip and really got me excited for beginning my service in a few weeks time. We were able to see some real volunteer sites and activities, which were much more concrete than the technical side of training. A great, successful mini-FBT. I can’t wait to find out where everyone is going and to head off on our next field based training followed by our site visits next week! Only 3 short weeks now until I start my life as a sworn-in Peace Corps volunteer. It’s crazy to think about! In 3 short weeks I will have to start everything over again: new family, new town, new relationships, etc. Training has been a blast so far but I think I am ready (maybe not “ready” in the sense that I am fully prepared for this job…there is much to learn…but ready in the sense that I am excited to start stumbling through the job) to get to site and start the next phase of this great adventure!

I hope all is going well for you guys. Please send me an email update when you get a chance, I would love to hear how things are going for you too! Quick side note…my address will be changing when I move to my site, so anything you want to send snail mail will need to be sent to my new address. I will post it up as soon as I find out.

Anywho, thanks for reading and have great day!

Pete
















me and lake llanganuco. pretty cool eh?