Day 4

Woke up at 7am to go to my first day of internship. After meeting with Victoria (my project counterpart) and the rest of the staff at Caritas (including el Padre) we left for the countryside. After two buses and forty minutes, we arrived at the artesian workshop in Ccorao. I stayed mostly in the ceramics workshop and translated sentences from Spanish to English. I then repeated the sentences a couple hundred times so that the women in the workshop could practice. Today I made worksheets because I'll be teaching English on Wednesday.

It turns out that an inability to speak Spanish isn't working against me because most of the women in the workshop speak Kechua, the indigenous language. So I'm learning to speak Kechua completely phonetically. Don't be jealous...okay, go ahead and be jealous!

I have a ton of ideas for advertising and different products that they can make so I'm excited to share that in a week or so. Even though I'm in a different place almost every day of the week, I am excited to learn and see everything. It's a lot of travelling, but that's what I love!

Some problems that I've encountered so far: Spanish doesn't have the "th" sound so they can't say "thirty" very well...which happens to be how much they sell their little clay houses for. I'm trying to think of a phonetic tool to help them, but haven't come up with anything. Email me if you think of something...

Also, I got off the bus after my internship today only to realize that I didn't know the name of my apartment complex. So I got in a taxi and said something along the lines of, "I live by a park." Then I let him list off all the names of places in the area until I recognized one. It was sweet. Oh! I almost forgot, there is no stopping for pedestrians here and on my worksite there is no bathroom, just a hole. This is all just to say that nothing could have prepared me for Peru better than China. I keep wanting to say, "You think THIS is bad traffic? You think THIS is a gross hole of a bathroom? You haven't seen anything!"

I like it here.