¿Lima?

Drum roll please........Yep, I´m staying in Lima. I´m pretty shocked to say the least and I´ll admit, it was the one place out of all the other 32 sites I was terrified of getting. All this anxiety and uncertainty about getting sent some place so rural and far away from anything familiar and circumstances will change only slightly from what they are now. There are 7 different departments (states) that PCV got sent to. Out of the 32 volunteers in Peru 9, I am the only one to be placed the department of Lima. To clarify, I will not be living in the city of Lima, but a half an hour south right on the coast. The next closest person from my group is about 8-10 hours away. To the south east, there are 4 volunteers in Arequipa way up at around 13,000 feet. To the north of me there are 3 other volunteers in Ancash all living at around 10,000-12,000 feet. It makes me feel very boring to be living at sea level. In the picture with me is Bianca in front of a map of the department of Lima. I am taking Bianca´s place as a replacement site. Bianca is staying a third year and will be living in the city of Lima and working at peace corps headquarters.

Disappointment aside, it really is a great site. Now that the shock is wearing off I can start to appreciate it for what it is. I´m so close to the beach! I´m close to Lima so at a moments notice I can go in for the day and get a starbucks, a book in english or pretty much any other comfort amenity I might crave. I´m so close to the headquarters of Peace corps. Although there aren´t any volunteers from my group in Lima, there are a handful of PCV´s from other groups as well as 3rth year administrative volunteers. Plus, people have to come to Lima all the time for med checks, administrative reasons and vacations. Whenever anyone comes to Lima they can call me and I´ll probably have more visitors than anyone else. I look at it like it was when we all went away to college and I was the only one who stayed close to home. Yeah, there was a big part of me that was really bumbed out I didn´t go far away, but I made up for it by traveling a lot and visiting all of my friends who did go away. And whenever anyone came back to good old woodland, they called me up and I had the party planned in Davis. The Peace Corps has tapped one of my finest skills, social event coordination.

The real reason my site is going to be so wonderful is not the location but the job. I have a fabulous job lined up that I couldn´t be more excited about. I working with both an orphanage and a center for sexually abused girls as well as community work. It seems so exciting although I don´t feel the least bit qualified to work with these kinds of kids. Maybe all those years of listening to love line may actually come into play finally.

Yesterday was totally crazy. They made us come in at 8 and have to hours of language class before they gave away our site assignments. We were completely unable to concentrate. This is a picture of Tom correcting a some common grammatical errors on the board cause we were too preoccupied to do any critical thinking. Tom came dressed in his suit for the occasion. Not only did we get our site assignments yesterday but we had our group picture as well. This picture will hang next to the other 8 groups of volunteers that have served in Peru. But of course, being Wacky Peru 9 we had to do something special for our picture. All the guys grew out their mustaches (some needed a little help in the way of an eye brow pencil) and wore their sport coats. The girls all wore neck ties. We also had a talent show to showcase our spanish abilities after two months. But really, we showed off our ridiculous sense of humor. Every one´s skit was hilarious. We all needed a good laugh after the build up of site assignments. They couldn´t simply tell s where we were going. They made us stand on one side of the pool while all

the staff members watched as we one by one fished Styrofoam fish out of the pool with our sites on them. It´s a cute idea in theory, for 5 year olds. But when you have waited months to know your site it´s pretty freaking annoying.

When I came home I told my host mom that I was staying in Lima. I thought ´my family would be disappointed because they´re from Piura and have been talking about how much they want me to go to Piura so they can come visit me. Just like everyone else, it took a moment for it to sink in with my host mom that I was just headed down the road. Once it hit, she grabbed me and gave me the biggest hug and told me ¡Felicitaciones! She was so excited for me and happy that I could come visit whenever. She offered to have me come for Christmas. I was really touched at the out pouring of effection she had for me and it was nice in the absence of my own parents to have a nurturing figure there for the relatively emotional day. All and all I am happy. True, I am a bit bummed out that I won´t be living as exotic a life as I had imagined, but I know my work in the next years will be more rewarding than I ever could have hoped for.