This past week all 12 environmental volunteers, our language teachers, our volunteer representative, our tech trainer, and our program director all piled into a slightly more than 15 person passenger van and headed into the mountains. 

Our driver, Justo, did an incredible job navigating around the slow trucks and gracefully avoiding moments where death seemed to flash before our eyes. We climbed the highest pass in the world at 15,800 feet and then descended only slightly to stay near the highest volunteer in the world’s site. The transition from desert to steep green mountain scenery was a much-needed change and almost provided enough adrenaline to overlook the freezing cold aspect. The trip had two purposes: one to do some field based training, and the other to drill our program director with questions about our future sites to see if we could get any information out of him. Officially we find out our sites on Tuesday but after a lunch of much gossip I found out that I’m going to the AMAZONAS!!!!! This means I’ll be in a cloud forest in the mountains, and apparently living in a town of 400 people, which seams like a dream!

            Anyways aside from the gossip we also taught in schools about different cultures and ecosystems around the world. A group of three of us taught 5^th graders about Africa including performing an engaging story that took way too long to translate into Spanish, and too many characters to take on with just three people. Upon arriving at the school I realized that I had forgotten my copy of the script at home thus adding to the overwhelmed frantic feeling that all of us were having about this skit. However we dove into it passing back and forth scripts and cardboard eye glasses to represent the narrator, and grabbing for our handmade masks that enabled us to leap into the characters we were trying to portray. My rendition of a crocodile that tries to eat the hunter brought laughter throughout the classroom, which the teacher for some unknown reason tried to hush up quickly. We made it through the skit somehow or another, and I was even able to create a Sub-Saharan ecosystem food web in Spanish with the students. 

            Throughout our week we drove on some of the windiest steepest one-lane roads that I have ever been on, as we descended into valleys where people are truly surviving off of the land. We ate traditional food from the area called Pachamanka, which is meat and potatoes cooked under ground with delicious flavoring. We even built stoves for families who had been relying on open fire to cook in their houses. These stoves felt like quite a feat using paper to measure out the brick spacing and a delicious combination of mud and rocks to seal them together. Our stove was the last to finish because when it came time to put on the chimney it became apparent that there was no hole in the roof for the chimney to go through. We were a team of 5 girls and the lack of hole in the ceiling seemed like too big of an issue for us. The father of the house came in to assess the problem and before I realized what was going on he was on top of this mud made cabinet with a dull knife in his hand stabbing holes into the metal roofing. We got a semi large enough hole and then had to tackle the problem of getting the chimney down the hole, which was on a very steep incline. My job was to hold the rickety ladder as the Jaime, the father of the household climbed up the side of the house. As soon as we began to hand him the chimney the physics of him reaching over to the hole and then trying to get the chimney upright was just not going to work. So we recalled the chimney and Jaime climbed down the ladder. We then went to the other side of the house and someone came running down the road with a rope in hand. This time Justo our driver got involved and we successfully tied two ropes around the chimney, hoisted it up into the air and somehow landed it right down into the hole. Inside we quickly slapped what was left of the rock/mud mixture on the chimney to stabilize it, and danced our way back to the van happy to have completed the project!

            It was an incredible opportunity to see some of Peru’s remote landscapes, and I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to live here for the next two years! Book your tickets to the Amazonas!!!!!