Just live your life...

Onto week 6! This means I have only 4 weeks left of training! I can't say this was the best week I've had yet, it started off kind of rough, Monday we got the results of our Spanish interviews and I wasn't so happy about where I was placed, but it's okay. After a rough Monday, I came home and promised my host Mom I would go to church with them, so we went to the Catholic church in the Chosica. That really helped turned my not-so-good day into a much better day. Mass here is IDENTICAL to mass in the U.S. Everything was the exact same, the only part that I liked better was that the music had that nice salsa sound to it. So when we sang "Hosana in the Highest" I felt like dancing. The other difference is that latin culture celebrates the saints much more than we do in the states. For example this was the month of the saint who represents dead mothers, which was the reason for us going. After mass my host family approached a bright shining picture of the saint and touched it then blessed themselves. I think that this experience made me very proud to be a Catholic, because there is something special about sharing such a sacred set of traditions in a different place in the world.

This week we went to a local health center. This place is smaller then a hospital but provides many different services. They are funded by the Ministry of Health, so they are government organizations. Thursday, we went to do house visits with the nurses, because apparently for families who are too busy to make it to the center the center will go to their homes to do check up for the children. Unfortunately most people weren't home but we were able to meet up with 2 families, and that was intersting. We also went to check out the facilities that are similar to "soup kitchens" however, people pay to pick up their lunches there for their families. It is really cheap, and it provides food for those families who cannot afford much. They were little kitchens who were run by volunteer mothers and they cook lunch 5 days a week. Along our lovely walk through the town, we came across a "camal" this is the place where they slaughter cows, it smelt lovely, and attracted tons of flies, and this seemed like it caused problems for the entire neighborhood, at one point we were looking into the river near by and we found were the blood from the camal is drained into the river, it was disgusting and disturbing!!!!

Friday we went back to the health center and sat in on exams for babies. The babies here seem gigantic, overweight for their age, and behind in their development in comparison to the babies in the US. This will be a topic we work with at our new sites. One child did come in that the nurses said she was underweight and she had dirt under her nails and looked unkept, one of the nurses just kept yelling at the mother repeatedly while 3 of us sat there, it was sort of akward.

Later that afternoon I did a presentation with 2 other volunteers to 15 students in the school about STD's. I was really surprised how much they didn't know, they couldn't even tell us what it stood for. I keep thinking back to when I was 15 or 16 and I may not have known about all types but I could probably tell you what STD stood for. We put together a few activites to define it as well as identify types of STD's and methods of prevention. It was really fun, even with my novice spanish I enjoyed it and the kids were helpful when I got stuck. It was fun! I can't wait to start doing some of that stuff at my site.

I finished up my week with a trip to Panchacamac yesterday, which is a small town about 2 hours away from where I live. We went there to learn about small animal husbandry. We visited a few different homes who were raising chickens, pigs, ducks and guinea pigs. All the families also had organic farms. It was cool to see, and was a town probably similar to our sites. The scary part was that we took those crazy buses called combis, and we went on a lot of unpaved roads that bordered mountains and cliffs, it was really really sketchy!!! Afterward, we were dropped off at the mall, and went to the nicest pizza hut I've ever seen in my life and ate pizza!!! It was great!!!

And today, being the awesome volunteers that we are, we met at the house of another volunteer with the kids from our host families to practice some of the diagnostic techniques we will be using at our sites. We had them draw community maps and make calendars, and these are ways for us to identify certain aspects about their cultures that could help us when it comes to diagnosing our new sites. Afterwards, we had a cookout and actually sat outside and ate at my house, I really miss cookouts.