So, finally, I made it to Huaycan!  After a pretty long day of traveling, I was thrilled to arrive in Lima.  After picking up my luggage, I exited the secure area into the area where all the people wait to meet the passengers and I spotted Lara in the back immediately- she was the tallest person in the airport!  I think the number one advantage of being the gringas here is that we will never lose each other!

I met Yrma there at the airport, she had come with Lara, and when we arrived at the program house, Luz was there too.  I am so happy to finally know the mother & daughter team that has been working so hard with Lara to get everything up and running here!  Getting to know them is very important to me and so far it has been great- they are both so funny and love to laugh!

Thankfully, the next two days were not LLI class days so I was able to rest and acclimate myself a little.  Wednesday, Lara, Leslie (LLI's other volunteer from Charleston, SC) and I went to Chosica to walk around and we met Yrma's sister.  She is a street vendor there and she makes picarones which are like ring shaped elephant ears with syrup on them.  They were delicious, I could eat them all the time!

Even though Thursday was an off day, we all went to Zone R, one of the places we hope to be teaching soon to do some scouting.  It can be difficult to find places to accomodate the number of kids we are attracting to our classes, so we walked around all afternoon and spoke with some of the residents.  Zone R is very poor and it is so hard to imagine what it would be like to live there.  We met a young girl, about 14 I think, who had been helping her mother in the kitchen a few weeks ago when she spilled a whole pot of boiling water on herself.  Most of her burns had healed, but one on her leg had become infected and was not healing. She was taking antibiotics but it was just so difficult to keep the wound clean because Huaycan is a desert and very dusty.  We are hoping that we can work something out to help her.  There may not be much we can do for the burns, but she has been out of school for almost a month so we are hoping to help her with her studies and get her back on track.

I've made a special connection with the son of Ana, the woman who makes our lunches (muy rico!).  His name is Fernando and he loves to play with the stuffed owl (el buho!)  I brought.  So far this week I think we have played with the owl at least 3 hours!  That's a lot of buho!

Friday and Saturday were class days.  Friday at Zone Z we made masks with the kids, practiced a little english and played a lot of games.  The kids were hanging all over me!  They were crazy!  Finally, we played 'escondidas' which is basically hide-and-seek.  Of course they would get so excited for me to look for them that I never counted all the way to 30 before they yelled for me.  Saturday I hoped would be a little calmer and I suppose it was, but we had more kids show up for art class than expected so finding ways to accomodate them was a little difficult and in the end we actually had to turn some away!  We made tops out of card stock and kabob skewers.  They were great but some of the younger kids struggled, so I think next week I'll come up with something simpler.  The trouble is the age range is about 6 to 13 years so keeping all of them stimulated is a challenge.  It's alright though, at night we have a lot of down time so I'm sure I'll be able to come up with something that will work for all of them.

It has been a great few days.  My spanish is improving little by little and I'm having a great time with the kids.  I can't complain about hanging out with my sister and playing soccer!  Talk to you all again soon!  Chao!