draining the blood from the alpaaca

mini reconnect in lima

tearing the skin off of the alpaca

cut it up!!

lots of alpacas and llamas

cool pic

the lake at about 4500m

so many

im herding alpaca





That is the question of the day. I feel as though October has just flown by for me. This is in stark contrast to the first month here at site when I was rather bored. However, now that I am a little over two months in site, I’m finding my grove. I have really begun to like my host family. My host dad is my community partner (this is peace corps lingo but this basically means he is my co-worker and my connection to the community) and he has been awesome for me. I’ve heard about other volunteers’ community partners and they have had some poor experiences with them. Basically, I would call my host dad one of the superstars of my town. He knows everyone, has all the connections and has his head on straight too (meaning he knows whats going on in town and what needs to be done, hes not ignorant). The only bad thing about this is that a lot of people were coming to my host dad when they needed to talk to me instead of me. I have fixed this now and it is much better. Pretty much everyone in town knows me by name (whether it be Brian or Ryan, they cant pronounce Ryan very well) which is pretty cool. Anyways, let me recap a little of what I’ve been up to:

Last week, on Monday, I went up to one of our annexes up on high about 4500m up. Luckily, as opposed to site visit, the altitude didn’t kill me. It was a 5 hour combi ride up to the annex and we left around 3AM. The reason we were going up there is that about every 15 days all the people from my town who live up there come into the annex to meet, sell and buy goods. Most of them are alpaqueros meaning they are alpaca sheppards. So, we got up there, took a tour of the surrounding area where there is a really cool lake with trout. The birth of the amazon river is around there as well but a little farther away. Then, all of the people came in and had a town meeting which was a doosey too say the least. There was a lot of finger pointing at our mayor b/c he was supposed to come up that day but didn’t. It lasted, as do all meetings here in Peru, way, way too long. By the time the meeting was up it was time to head back. I did get to see them kill an alpaca. I also ate pretty fresh trucha..trout. By the time I came back I was not feeling well at all and the next morning I had diarrhea and a bad fever because of the trucha. So, that day I spent in bed pretty much. It was inconvenient timing because the next day I was to leave for Lima for the artisan fair.

Luckily, being the PC volunteer I am, I left the next day with my artisans for Lima. It takes about 21 hours in a car/bus to get to Lima from my site. Which really sucks when you are sick haha. However, we made it in one piece to Lima. The first day was a workshop on Marketing and Working at a fair in general which was held in the US embassy. The US embassy in Lima is one of the biggest buildings in Lima and is rather ridiculous. We weren’t even allowed to bring our cell phones into the embassy for security. I think my artisans were rather in awe considering this was their first time outside of our department. Once the workshop was over we made it to our hotel with complications of course, this is peru haha. However, traveling with my artisans was a bit of a pain because I basically had to hold their hand through the whole week. Anyways the next day was the fair. We sold a decent amount but none of the products had much of a margin on them to make a lot of profit. The highlight of the day was that the ambassador bought stuff from our table and then took a picture with us because my artisans were in their traditional dress. After the fair there was a mad rush to find a bus ticket back to Arequipa. We ended up riding on one of the more ghetto lines but we made it in one piece back to Arequipa.
This week I’ve been solidifying my Entrepreneur club and my computer classes. Both of which look to be starting next week finally. It’s been a painnnnn to get this stuff going but I think it’s going to be worthwhile. You would think something that is very beneficial to the community wouldn’t take so long to get going but not here. As you can tell I’m a little bitter about the whole process. I’m pretty sure without the pull of my host dad I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. Tomorrow, there’s an EXPO here in Lari and then this weekend I’m heading back to Arequipa for a regional meeting. Thus is my life right now. Hope everyone is well back home!