Time passes in funny splurts. One day I am complaining that the month of June seems to stretch eternally in front of me, with loads of empty days to somehow fill, and then suddenly it is the middle of July and I am over 6 weeks behind on my blog. My apologies, but I swear I don't know where all that time went.

To recap June, in many ways it was a letdown after the busy month of May. After taking a trip to the northern part of Peru for a Peace Corps workshop the first week of June, I came back to site to find that all my work opportunities had pretty much fallen flat while I was gone, through circumstances outside my control. The school was celebrating its anniversary, which meant a lot of parties and not a lot of class, and construction at the recycling center had ground to a halt in the absence of the engineer in charge. Fortunately I could look forward to another trip to Lima with the WID/GAD committee. We put together presentations for both PC staff and the trainees, and the stress of throwing together two presentations in one day was a welcome break from the slow pace of life in the mountains. I guess I am programmed to feel more useful when I am stressed and strung out on Starbucks.

My beautiful recycling center, if only it were operational

Thus far July has brought a few exciting events- my secondary school kids won first place in a district dance competition, and I taught my very first environmental class at the school and helped the kids make a compost heap. This was huge for me, since environmental education is one of my program's goals and I have been working very hard to get my foot in the door at the school.

The boys before the dance competition

Other than that, I spend a lot of time reading and eating cookies. I find that inactivity is a powerful trigger for my sweet-tooth. Intending to use them as a reward for kids who helped with a garbage clean-up (which never happened because of more school parties) I purchased an 18-pack of fiestachip cookies, 4 cookies to a pack, and over the course of about 4 days, I somehow managed to eat every last crumb. You do the math. It's ok, though, because I recently learned that I am eating for two (or perhaps two thousand). I think of it as a test of character... of all the challenges to be faced as a volunteer, I had still been living in fear of the prospect of getting a stomach worm, or worms. Well the day arrived, about two weeks ago, when I found irrefutable evidence of having at least one little friend. I'll spare you all the details, and the pictures, but I'll just say that when all was said and done, I handled it with much more composure than I had thought I would. I passed the test, and I am now pretty confident I can handle anything the Peace Corps can throw at me.

Anyway... I am now looking forward to my folks arriving in less than 2 weeks. Get ready mom and dad, you're gonna eat guinea pig!