Peru - Day 4 (Part 1)

Since I have a few minutes this morning I thought I would blog a little bit since I think tonite I may be emotionally and physically exhausted. We had a meeting last night about how the week is going to run. Most of the medical people are here for a conference that they are putting on free for the Peruvian medical personnel here. On days they are not presenting, they can go do humanitarian work. There are only 4 of us here that are not medical and are purely volunteer. Well, it was determined last night that since I'm doing humanitarian work all 3 days and I'm the only one that speaks Spanish out of the volunteers, that I'd be the leader. What??? I did not sign up for leadership...I was totally along for the ride. So we'll see how that goes.

We will be going up into a little village about 50 minutes away all 3 days. There are various jobs they need help with. They live basically on corn and potatoes and their greenhouses were ruined in the floods earlier this year so we'll be working on those. We'll also be painting some buildings and rebuilding things that were wiped out. We'll do whatever they need us to do. Then Chad, our leader here, got pretty emotional and told us how these villages don't see happiness very much. There is much abuse of women and children and it saps the joy out of there lives. He encouraged us to be happy and joyful and to be great examples to these people. He said we may not get much work done the first day, we may just talk and play with the kids and hand out some of the donations that were brought along. Our job the first day is really to show them who we are, that kindness actually exists, and to just love them. Oh my...I think I may just be a basket case by the end of the day. Chad said that when groups leave every year that they always love the touring but the thing they wish they had more time to do was work in the villages so I'm trying to take it all in the next 3 days.

I'll try to post some more tonite...