I´ll eat anything with cinnamon

This past week in Peru was the best one thus far!

It was great to get out of the classroom and do hands-on learning (aka non-formal education...a theme for one of the days). It started Wednesday with Spanish class. We spent the morning in the market in Chosica (about a 20 min bus ride) getting ingredients needed to make lunch on Thursday. Then on Thursday we made lunch! We made rocoto relleno (spicy stuffed peppers) and arroz con leche (rice pudding). They were both amazingly delicious and made me disgustingly stuffed. I don´t think I would be able to make the stuffed peppers on my own - they take forever and have a million ingredients - but I plan to make the rice pudding for sure. So far there have been a few dishes that my host mom had made that I´d like her to teach me how to make.

I guess now would be a good time to discuss Peruvian food (well at least what I´ve had so far). Every meal (well, not bfast) contains rice and potatoes. We eat a lot a chicken which I´m actually pretty happy about. Usually every chicken, potato, rice combo has some sort of sauce, so I usually just end up mixing them all together which is also pretty delicious. Also, Peruvians love aji (hot sauce) so if my rice is just too bland to eat alone, I just put some aji with it. I´m soooo glad to be back to a land of delicios fruit! Every morning I have some sort of juice. So far I´ve had pineapple, orange (I know not exciting, but it is fresh squeezed), strawberry and papaya - I´m even starting to like papaya! There are so many amazing fruits that just don´t even exist in the US (at least I haven´t seen them in Meijer).

After cooking and eating our amazing meal on Thursday, our WATSAN (Water and Sanitation) group split up and went out into ¨the field¨ to do a diagnostic. My group went to a little town about 30 mins away by car. We talked to the president of the town city council and some people from an international NGO that implemented the water system 6 years ago (as in, this town has only had running water for 6 years). We also got to see composting toliets which was really interesting.

In summary, it was just awesome to actually get to do things out of the classroom that will help us directly with what we´ll be doing when to get to our sites.

Training has been going really well in general and it seems like everyone is really settling in and get used to the routine. I´ve been really enjoying my time lately and I feel like I´m really starting to get to know people and feel comfortable with the routine as well.

Ok that´s all for now. I hope all is well at home! Un abrazo!