Welcome to Sacsa

It has been a while, and so much has happened in the past three weeks. All 47 volunteers in my training group swore in as PC volunteers on November 28th, and from there we all went our separate ways. I moved up to Ancash with 8 other volunteers from Peru 12, and we did all our pre-site shopping in the capital city of Huaraz, buying mattresses, sheets, and other necessities. Then on December 2nd, Erica and I hired a taxi for the three hour journey to our sites. I can only imagine what people must have thought about the two strange white girls driving around with two mattresses on top of a stationwagon. But we made it, and have managed to settle into our respective homes in towns about 20 minutes apart from each other.

So about life in Sacsa- things are pretty calm in a town of perhaps 500 people, and my main responsibilities right now involve smiling and saying "buenos dias" to everyone and trying to remember names and faces. I spend a lot of time hanging out at the kitchen table, which is in an open-air patio in my adobe house, talking to my host parents and my two little host sisters, who are 5 and 3 and love to chat. They have been a big help in introducing me to the kids in town, and now I can't even walk out the front door without some kid yelling my name from down the street. I also read in the plaza a lot, just trying to get myself out there. If there's one thing I have learned in the past two weeks, it is that you never know what will happen once you set foot outside. On Thursday, for example, I took the ten minute hike out to the hilltop where I get cell phone reception, thinking I would just make a quick call and then walk to Erica's house for a relaxing evening with her host family. Instead, I walked past the school and ended up getting pulled into the primary school's graduation party and sitting with a family I had never met and then eating soup and guinea pig at a table with the 12-yr-old graduates in front of the entire gathering. I am really bad at eating guinea pig. There is definitely an art to it that I have NOT mastered. Something to work on in order to fit in better, I guess.

My first three months in site will be dedicated to these sorts of awkward activities- meeting the important figures in town, starting to develop relationships with the various organizations with which I hope to work, and just figuring out how to survive in general. So far, so good. The people of Sacsa have been so friendly (an older woman approached me in the plaza to give me cookies and I could have cried I felt so welcomed) and the landscape is absolutely stunning. On a clear day, I can see the tips of six snow-capped mountains from my cell phone rock.

Me talking on the phone with the nevados in the background.
And with my neighbor, Erica, taking advantage of the cell reception.

I will also need to start learning Quechua, since most of the adults in my town converse with one another in the Andean tongue, and I would like to know exactly what people are saying about me when they converse with each other in Quechua, glancing at me and throwing in key spanish phrases like "cuerpo de paz" and "estados unidos." But one step at a time.