Peru - Day 5

Today we only had 6 people going up to Casacunca (the village). The plan was to help them recover the greenhouse. We have learned that things do not always go as planned here. :) We have a coordinator, Freddie, that is Peruvian that stays with us and plans our humanitarian efforts. Yesterday while we were up there he was supposed to go check out the greenhouse. Well, he did but only from the road. So we bought new plastic to cover it with and some wire and nails. We got up there today and went through and around the greenhouse and realized it will take a lot more work. I won't go into details but it just wasn't stable enough to work on today. So we went in search of a ladder so we could at least hang up the wire to drape the plastic over. We found one but it needed some help too. :) So we fixed that a little and let the men do the scary climbing on the scary ladder. We went back to the school after that to do some more painting while Freddie and another villager did what they could on the greenhouse.

This is Freddie cutting down the ripped plastic in the greenhouse and Sheila and Nicki are holding the sorry excuse for a ladder.

Nicki had had enough and fixed the sorry ladder. Leave it to the Relief Society!

The kids were much more open to us today...smiley and excited to see us. They followed us around wherever we went probably because they knew we had candy...hee hee. So we were able to be a lot more social with them. I gave out some of my crocheted flower clips to some girls today. They look so pretty with their dark hair. They didn't know how to open and shut the clips so we had to give them a little tutorial on that. And then we gave them candy necklaces and they had no idea they were candy. We finally had to tell them that you eat them and that they are candy. They looked at us weird and then tried it. They loved it.

When we got back to the school to paint some more, I found this little girl totally knocked out on the steps...Classic.

One of the girls I gave the flowers to.

The candy necklaces.

Another girl that got one of my flowers. Do you see their chapped cheeks? It's because they sunburn during the day and freeze at night.

How could I NOT take this picture? Are you kidding me with the cuteness?

Before we left I told Freddie I wanted to see exactly where we were working tomorrow so we wouldn't run into the problem we had today where we were unprepared. He said it was quite a hike down to where we were going to build a stable and I said, "Great! Let's go see it." So we hiked down through the village a ways and hopefully figured everything out for tomorrow. We shall see. I hope I don't screw it up since 18 people are coming tomorrow. :)

After we got back from checking out where we're building the stable, we found poor Larinda who doesn't speak a lick of Spanish getting bombarded with kids. Apparently word got out about the candy necklaces. She grabbed the rest out of my bag and handed them out. So fun!

So hopefully tomorrow...greenhouse and stables. Mel actually gets to come with me tomorrow. I'm making her co-leader...ha ha.