Day 5

I think I've encountered my first problem. Wait, first was the language. So I've encountered my second.

Today I waited to meet my counterpart at the bus stop. It was 7:20am and I waited for an hour and a half. We were warned about "Peruvian Time" and so I decided to be generous. After 1.5 hours of reading "Mere Christianity" on the street and somewhat freezing, I decided that she wasn't coming. I went back to the ProPeru office (beating the employees to work) and let myself in to wait.

It turns out that a transportation strike caused all sorts of problems so I ended up working in the Caritas office instead. I ripped a bunch of pictures out of a notebook (they were glued in) and put them in a real photo album. Then I copied all the captions into the album which took awhile. This was awesome because I got to see pictures of what the health section of Caritas does. Plus, I learned the Spanish word for disabled people: personas con discapacidad (PCD for short). Afterwards I made flashcards for mute children. I can honestly say that it's the first time I've ever drawn a llama. Not to brag, but it was pretty good.

Anyway, to reiterate, the three problems I've encountered: 1) language barrier 2) culture of Peruvian time 3) basic infrastructure problems. Things are still good though!

I had my first Spanish class today...in a word: awesome. One-on-one attention AND I found the location of a good Chifa (Peru/Chinese fusion) restaurant. Also, I've decided that speaking foreign languages is not only useful, but just straight hot!