Colombia

In March of this year (yeah, writing this a bit late I know) I flew to Colombia for a week. After three months of living in Pisco, surrounded every second by the rotation of 60-80 other volunteers from dozens of other countries and cultures, facing the troubles of keeping the biodiesel project afloat through its many hiccups, and being without proper good veg food or beer, I was badly in need of a vacation!

I met up with a friend from Arizona, Matt. It was his first time really traveling; he had to get a passport and everything! I was pretty excited and amused by this, because I got to hear observations of another country from someone who was so green. I was also very excited to see the familiar face of a good friend, as traveling gets lonely even when you are surrounded by people.

We met in Bogotá and decided to explore the city for a bit then find another town nearby for some trekking or sight-seeing. Bogotá was a very beautiful and lush city, probably because it rains all the time! We spent a couple of days walking around, eating great food and finally drinking good beer! I get sick of plain beer really quick, and it seems like most other countries (at least in Asia and South America) only produce these tasteless lagers and have very few other choices. In Bogotá we found the BBC (Bogotá Brewing Company) which had its own line of beer and even a Belgian wheat beer, my favorite! We found a lot of other good food, but admittedly didn’t eat very much Colombian food – I was craving American, European and Asian food like crazy! We did eventually eat some Colombian breakfasts and I found that I absolutely love arepas. They’re like little patties of cornbread, but can range from very tasty to a bit bland. Put a fried egg on top of a good one and you have a delicious breakfast! Going to bring that idea home. They also sell them hot on the street and that was a great snack.

(View from outside our hostel in Bogotá)

(Matt and I trying new beers and fantastically huge chocolate milkshakes)


(I was so excited about balsamic vinegar, good pizza and beer I had to take photos)

(Fanciest Burger King ever! Even the McDonald's in Bogotá was stone with pretty gold signage.)

We loved walking around the city, checking out old buildings, trees covered in moss, and interesting graffiti. Walking seemed to be the best way to go because the buses were confusing and you have to call for cabs on the phone and give them a code when they pick you up for security reasons. The code is the last two digits of the phone you called from. Usually the hostels will call cabs for you, but good luck getting one once your in town. Nobody seemed to want to help us with this! That was frustrating, because we couldn’t just find a payphone to call for one, not knowing the language well or even where we were. And the adventure isn’t over once you’re in the cab. The cabs are metered, but you have to match the number on the meter with the price listed on a card in the back pocket of the seat. We saw this, but then there’s a list at the bottom of extra fees for things like riding on a Sunday or at night, or going to the bus station or airport. But it’s in Spanish and a bit vague. When does “night” start? Either way, the drivers always tried to overcharge us. I figured it out quickly and gave them a piece of my mind every time they tried it on with us. Usually they would just tell you a price that was a dollar or two more than it should be (then I would sharply correct them, which would be followed by a sheepish smile from them). It drives me nuts the way people like this prey on foreigners.

(cute dog near our hostel)

(Bogotá graffiti)

(Bogotá graffiti)

(Bogotá graffiti)

(Bogotá graffiti)

(Bogotá graffiti)

We made it to the Museo de Oro (Gold Museum) on one of its free entrance days and explored how many pre-Incan and Incan civilizations in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia mined for gold and used different techniques to mold it into jewelry, trinkets, and armor. Much of the gold was stolen when the Spanish came. At the museum I noticed a little boy standing next to me wearing some kind of sports shirt from Minnesota! I met his parents and found out they were here adopting a child and were from Eden Prairie (the suburb right next to where I grew up), such a small world! I can’t believe this even surprises me anymore.

After a few days of rainy Bogota, we searched the net for another place to see and found that Villeta was only two hours away and very warm! It seemed like the entire area within 8 hours of Bogota was raining except for this tiny town. So we hopped a little bus and drove through beautiful mountains down into Villeta. We stayed at a guesthouse owned by English people who were very helpful and showed us where we could go hiking. We saw some waterfalls and many butterflies. On one mountain hike, as I was busy checking out butterflies and other weird bugs and plants, Matt realized the ground was a bit glittery. We looked closer and found that we were walking on crystals! They weren’t huge, but I did get a few rocks covered in a crust of clear crystals. That was really neat!

(going hiking in Villeta)

(sugar cane field)

(sugar cane field)


(very creepy old train bridge with a narrow board to walk on)

(very creepy old train bridge with a narrow board to walk on)

(very creepy old train bridge with a narrow board to walk on)

Villeta was also really cool for me because it was safe to be out at night (unlike many parts of Bogota) and also because we found an amazing vegan restaurant. It said vegetarian, but I’m pretty sure there were no animal products in the food at all, but it was still incredibly tasty and healthy. I love vegan cooking in particular because it’s not so easy to do. Meat is hard to screw up, but vegetables take a little extra care, and when the chef gets it right, it’s the best! Also, as Colombia was a bit more expensive than Peru in general, I was happy to get a 3-course meal with fresh juice for only 3 dollars! We ate there three days in a row. The town also had a very pretty main plaza. The trees in it were gigantic and covered in vines and orchids. There was also the church of course, and in the middle of our stay in Villeta we went to see the people who were going in for Ash Wednesday. Half the town had a black smudgy cross on their foreheads that day.

After Villeta, we went back to Bogota and had some more interesting experiences with the public transportation. We got to the bus station and tried to get a taxi, but the line for the taxi stand was literally hours long. So I tried to find someone who spoke English who could help us. We found two Colombian girls who showed us where other taxis were, but these taxis were charging about three times the amount they should have been! We figured out that they were all commissioned by hotels, so they charge more if you want to go anywhere else. The driver was so low, he even looked at my notes for my hostel reservation and told me that he was sure I didn’t have it right – no hostel in that area is so cheap. Apparently it’s normal for these drivers to tell people their hostel or hotel doesn’t exist anymore, or other lies like this to get you into their hotel. I figured out the game they were all playing and headed back to the line. Luckily, I noticed other foreigners in the front of the line and asked where they were going – same area! So we hopped in the cab with them after waiting only about 15 minutes. Saved ourselves quite a lot of time and money and even made some new friends! We did meet up with them in their hostel later and Elena gave us a taste of some of the exotic new fruit she’d bought (there is SO much fruit in the world I’ve never heard of!)

The next afternoon we went to the Botanical Garden, a perfect place for a couple of plant geeks like us. It was basically overloaded with beautitful, exotic plants. They also had a butterfly exhibit going on at the time, which was a steamy room with butterflies, cocoons, and catarpillars all over the place.

Another funny transportation experience happened after we finished touring the garden. We got outside and tried to find someone who could help us call a cab, but even at the garden, nobody could help us. So I figured I would try out the buses. Bogota has one city bus company that doesn’t go everywhere, so there are many private buses and collectivos that go all over town and show their routes in the front window. We hopped on the next bus we saw that was going toward the north. One problem solved, sort of, we didn’t know where to get off! I asked the friendly woman next to me, and with my broken Spanish, she figured it out and told me she would show us when to get off. But then these two university students got on the bus to tell jokes. Yes, jokes. They figured out we didn’t speak Spanish, so one boy started his funny story in Spanish and the other one would copy him in English. It was really funny and made for such a great bus experience! The woman next to me told them we needed help, and they actually got off the bus with us and showed us which streets to take. This made me a bit nervous – I just knew they were going to ask for money. They walked us up to this great gothic cathedral where some other friends of theirs were doing comedy as well. They poked a little fun together at us foreigners getting lost, but it was all in fun. Then they gave us their phone number in case we wanted a tour of the city, so nice! They never asked for money, but we were happy for the help and gave them some anyway. We later learned that there just aren’t enough jobs in Bogota for everyone, so some people do things like this or play music on the bus or street, or bag groceries for tips.

I had a really great time in Colombia hanging out with Matt and exploring another country. Even though I knew I didn’t want to stay much longer at PSF, I started missing “home” and was excited to get back. It was really nice to get back to PSF and see my roommate Karine, other familiar faces, and many new ones I would quickly get to know.

Some of the things I noticed in my very short stay in Colombia were that the people seemed much more open, friendly, and polite (at the time my comparison was to Peru). Bogota is much more metropolitain and advanced than Peru’s capital city, Lima. Because of my upbringing, I notice the way strangers treat each other. In Korea, strangers don’t hold doors for others. That drove me nuts! In Peru, when I’m walking down the street, people barely get out of the way for me. In Bogota, people give you a lot of space to walk around and nobody rudely bumps into my shoulders. There was a bit more PDA in Bogota though, it wasn’t uncommon for Matt and I to see couples making out in restaurants or on the street. That doesn’t really bother me, it’s just a bit strange. All in all I really liked Colombia and would love to come back, especially to the northern coast for some scuba diving!

Leaving PSF

photo by Carlo Ricci

Tomorrow I will leave Pisco with the man I've come to call my boyfriend in the last couple months. We're going to travel around Peru a bit, then head to Bolivia and see what happens after that. I'm very excited to see new things, eat better food, and experience other parts of Peru that aren't the desolate, coastal desert. I think in a couple of weeks or so though, I will be missing PSF big time. I can tell already as I start wrapping things up.

In the last week, I've been handing over my job and training a new guy to make biodiesel. He's doing well, though he does have a bad habit of doing things just by memory and not re-reading the manual first (and when I'm not around to correct him, things don't always go swimmingly). I'm sure he'll be fine though. He has to be. He's the link for the next month between me and the next biodiesel manager, who must keep the project afloat. There were so many goals that I would have liked to see happen; selling biodiesel to locals and teaching Peruvians to set up their own systems. Both have just barely started, as there are always so many hiccups. I'm sad to let go of my job, but happy to not have to deal with those hiccups anymore!

I've been thinking quite a lot lately about what to say tomorrow in my goodbye speech at the morning meeting. I've been here for 5 and a half months and have heard many great speeches, so I feel like I have something to live up to. Part of me wants to complain a little about Pisco, about PSF, about the itchy sand fly bites that have scarred up my legs...and part of me wants to leave out any bitterness and just make a happy and emotional statement about my time here. I'm sure I'll leave PSF and finally see just how awesome this experience has been and how much it has changed me.

I've done so much here that I have never done before and never really expected to do. I learned how to make biodiesel! That's so rad! I helped to clean up a man who fell, drunk, cut his head open and passed out on the floor. The pool of blood on the floor and the blood covering his head and tee shirt amounted to the most blood I've ever seen in real life by far. I had my first conversations completely in Spanish and my first friends with whom I don't speak any English. I still suck at Spanish though. I have gotten to drive a tuk-tuk, a concrete mixer, and also had my first driving accident ever in the PSF work truck, whoops. I saw wild dolphins and penguins for the first time here. I can't even really think of all the "firsts" right now. Hopefully none are "lasts."

PSF really is a unique organization. It's not trite, religious, or overly do-gooder. People here are real. They work hard and play hard, just how I like it. The range of emotions (and health) that I've been through here has been pretty ridiculous (and tiring). The friends I've met here will stay with me forever and I can't wait to see many of them again (find me wherever I am in the world and come visit, I love you guys). What a start to 2011 and my mid-twenties. Ciao Pisco, another gringa is leaving. Thank you for everything (except the cat-calls and wolf-whistles!)

Typhoid

Caution: Explicit material. Maybe don't read this one if you easily get queasy or don't want to read about vomiting and other nasties.

In February, I got typhoid fever. The illness and recovery lasted three weeks, and all in all it was the worst sickness of my life (though I've had worse nights of terrible fevers, sore throats, and stomach bugs before). I'm one of about four people I've known at PSF who have gotten typhoid, and every one of us was vaccinated prior to traveling.

It started out with me just feeling generally tired, achy, and just plain sick. I randomly got stomach cramps, but I didn't think anything of it. I do live in Pisco after all, where volunteers reguarly get what we call "Pisco Belly," suffering from an upset stomach for days on end. I went camping on the beach in the Paracas National Park, as we often do, although I really didn't want to. That night, I felt terrible. My head pounded, my stomach cramped up, and my back was tense and achy from being bent over from the stomach pain. Luckily, a friend gave me a strong painkiller and I was able to eat dinner that night.

Coming home from Paracas, I cleaned up my camping gear and went to bed at about 5pm. The next day I explained my illness to a friend who suggested that it sounded like typhoid. I checked out my symptoms to what it said online and pretty much everything checked out: achy muscles, stomach cramps (that actually brought me to tears once or twice), fever, cough, frontal headache, exhaustion. I went in for testing that day. Testing meant going to the main plaza (Plaza de Armas), going up a narrow stairway off the street into a narrow hallway with a tiny waiting room and a door to a clinic the size of a bedroom. A nurse took my name, took blood from my arm for the typhoid test, and gave me a cup for a stool sample (to test for other parasites). The stool sample cup, no exaggeration, was the size of a condiment to-go cup you would get from a restaurant. Maybe an inch deep and 2 inches across. I'm not sure how I did it, but I got the sample without making a mess. The one thing they did not provide for me was a bathroom. I had to go to a nearby restaurant to get my sample. How nice.


I went back that afternoon for the results. I was negative for parasites, but positive for one of the types of typhoid. I'm still not sure what it means, but there were two types, "H" and "O" and I was positive for one of the two. They told me to take my results to a doctor. That was Valentine's Day, and not the happiest one I can remember having.

The next morning, I had a Spanish-speaking friend, Navin, take me to the clinic. For only 20 soles (about 7 dollars), I was able to speak to a doctor (at least I think she was a doctor). I told her what was wrong and showed her my results, and she put me on two weeks of antibiotics three times a day, with food. She asked me a few questions, like if I eat street food or, oddly, condiments?! I left slightly confused by that, but a bit relieved that I would be getting relief from my symptoms.

When I started the antibiotics, the side effects started immediately. I won't list them all, as some are quite personal, but at least I'll tell some of the interesting ones. For one, I was exhausted all the time. Walking up to my third-floor bedroom felt twice as hard and took twice as long as usual. I just laid in bed most of the day, relieved that I traveled with a laptop so I could have some entertainment. Another problem I was having is what they call "hairy tongue." My tongue did not look hairy or dark like the pictures I'd seen on the net, it just was constantly coated whitish, as if I'd gone to bed without brushing my teeth. And it tasted bad! I brushed my teeth at least three times a day, but the feeling came back so fast every time. It also affected my sense of smell. Most things smelled absolutely terrible, and this added to the nausea I felt most of the time. When I would walk downstairs in the morning to get some breakfast, I couldn't stand the smell of the scrambled eggs. I also couldn't eat the buttered rolls I normally ate for breakfast because the idea of butter turned my stomach. The only thing I really wanted to eat was chocolate! One night I bought a bunch and was eating it all, so my friend Josh had to hide it from me in my own room!


Not only did smells make me nauseous, but my system was holding in gas and making me incredibly bloated, like I'd just eaten a Thanksgiving dinner (or two). I didn't even have room for food! This didn't help the nausea at all. Most meals I couldn't eat, so I just ate a few soda crackers so that I could take the antibiotics with food, like the doc instructed. After a week of misery and two bouts of vomiting, my Spanish-speaking friend Louisa took me back to the doctor to request a change in medication. She said she could not change the medication - I had to take these ones because typhoid is a serious illness and requires strong antibiotics. She was able though, to give me some gas relief tabs that tasted really nice and relieved a bit of the bloating. I asked her if there were foods I should be avoiding, and she said I must have forgotten all she had told me! No condiments (that basically meant spicy sauces), and I should only eat certain fruits, rice, vegetables, and vegetable soup. Must have forgotten...yeah right. I can understand enough Spanish to know that she didn't mention any of this in my first visit. Either way, I did feel much better when I stuck to this diet.

Things started to get better after this visit. I was still very tired, but one weekend toward the end, I had the energy to camp in Paracas again. The group was just too awesome to miss this one! I had a great weekend and was only queasy once. I came back to PSF feeling alright. But then I made the mistake of straying from my diet. On Tuesday morning, my last day of antibiotics (only had to take a breakfast and a lunch pill!), I ate chocolate cereal with yogurt. I could barely help it at this point, I was craving chocolate so much! I've never felt such strong cravings! Along with my bloated stomach, my friends joked that I wasn't sick, just pregnant. Very funny. Anyway, for lunch that day, I had some fried stingray with rice and beans (normal Peruvian food). HUGE mistake. That afternoon my stomach started acting up as I was being jostled around in the work truck, so I went straight home and back to bed to rest. Very soon after I was up and in the bathroom, sick. I was in and out of the bathroom vomiting for an hour and a half. It was so violent, the blood vessels around my eyes broke and I had little red dots all over and under my eyelids. I also was crying out of the discomfort, so my eyes puffed up and I looked a mess. Luckily, after one of my trips to the bathroom, my friend Josh (on the right in the photo below) noticed me and ran up the stairs to the rescue. He held me for a long time, reminding me that I had no more pills to take; it was all over. Then I curled up on Karine's bottom bunk and he read random bits out of one of her books. He also did the cleaning duty I had signed up for that morning - DISHCO, which is doing the dinner dishes (one of the biggest cleaning jobs you can sign up for). I couldn't have asked for a better friend!

I couldn't eat that night, which was a shame because Mel made pizza for dinner. I went right to bed after I was done being sick, and my eyes stayed puffy into the next morning. The entire next day I was too tired to work, so I spent one last day of laying in bed. Finally, the next day, one day short of three weeks of being sick, I finally felt better. Then the next day I had three ice creams, all bought by my friend Jack (on the left in the photo), because he felt sorry that I couldn't eat ice cream for three weeks without getting nauseous. He also bought us TWO bottles of my favorite wine to share! We had this wonderful sit-down meal at PSF that night, where four of the volunteers cooked an amazing AMAZING meal and served it to us at our tables. Complete with candles and apple cobbler with homemade custard for desert. Then the DISHCO crew (dishes/disco) put on some amazing tunes and we all danced in the kitchen, probably making it more dirty than it was before! It was a riot! I got a little tipsy and ate so much food I felt like I was going to explode! It felt amazing to be able to eat and drink again, to have energy, and to be with incredibly sweet and caring friends. It was one of the best days of my life.

PSF update

It's now been two months since I left for Peru. I'm still having a good time and I'm not ready to go quite yet, but I can feel that I need a break from PSF. Life in the house is hectic, stressful, crazy, and generally a lot of fun! I know I need more time to myself, but when I'm up in my room hanging out, I can hear the laughter of people in the courtyard, drinking beer around the fire, and I always have to come out.

Last week was a very stressful week. One of the hotels that supplies us with quite a bit of used vegetable oil was too busy to give us oil (twice!), and we skipped a week of going to the steel factory that also gives us a lot of oil. We were using more oil than we were producing and my stores were getting low. Then the one Peace Corps worker here in Pisco came by to see how much biodiesel he could get for the fishermen here, who get the fuel as a loan which they will pay back in a few months when their catch comes in. I couldn't actually give him any, and he was bugging me about getting more in a week...but I didn't even have enough raw oil to make more biodiesel! Luckily, the week turned out great because a new Burner girl named Page showed up who is interested in the project and also is fluent in Spanish! She called many places for me and has been running around town with me trying to find more. She even found a new culinary school just down the road and we're working on getting them as a supplier (will find out tomorrow - fingers are crossed!). All in all though, the week turned out okay. I got enough oil from places to turn out one batch that is washing at the moment, and tomorrow I'll start another. If they are good, I'll be all set.

On top of that good luck, today Page and I were walking around the main plaza trying to find more sources of oil, when this Peruvian man started talking to us. He asked first if we were PSF volunteers, then mentioned he is friends with Harold and Carolina (Harold is the PSF president and his sister, Carolina, is the house manager). He then said that he used to drive around with the old biodiesel volunteers to restaurants to get oil, and that he would do that for us for free! He said he's a volunteer too. How nice! So we got into his tuk-tuk and we stopped by a couple of places and talked to people. How awesome is that!?

In other news, my roommate Karine and I have become the new PSF barbers. I've probably done 5 or 6 men's haircuts/trims so far, and I have a bit of a waiting list now! I think though that from now on, a haircut is going to cost 10 soles (about $3.50) and maybe a beer. The beer for me to drink during the cut, and the 10 soles for the new jackhammer fund that PSF has started since our jackhammer broke and we desperately need a new one. I think I've been getting pretty good at cutting hair...but I really wouldn't want to do it for a living! I'd rather be a colorist, ha!


I like it here, but it really depends on the day and time of day you ask me. Some people here suck, and some are amazingly awesome. Sometimes I get stressed out driving the truck around all day, trying to get groups to their jobs, finding the places, and trying to get their quickly without smashing into a tuk-tuk or hitting a pedestrian that just walks out in front of traffic without looking. Sometimes I don't sleep well because it's hot and all night I can hear honking, huge trucks roaring by, and damned loud roosters crowing, so I get up in the morning tired and uninspired. And some days you talk to a local and have an amazing experience trying to sort through your broken Spanish and their broken English, but in the end you all just laugh a lot. Some days I forget I'm in Peru.

Bio-Dessel

It's been six weeks now that I've been at Pisco Sin Fronteras. I love it here. Every day I am doing something new and exciting, or meeting someone new and exciting. Of course it's very sad when friends leave... you wonder if you'll ever see them again. But amazingly, more awesome people come every day. I can't complain a bit!

Not long after I started learning to make bio-diesel here, the guy who was teaching me left. So I took over as bio-diesel manager. In this project I've worked on making safety guides, editing our bio-diesel manual, writing the trouble-shooting guide and fixing other odds and ends. I also get to drive out to Paracas where there are hotels like Hilton and I pick up their used vegetable oil to make bio-diesel. We use the bio-diesel to run our work truck (on b100 - pure bio-diesel - not a blend) and we also loan it to the fishermen nearby who will pay us for it when their catch comes in around June. In the long term, I hope to help streamline the process, find more good oil sources, and ready PSF for bio-diesel production for other customers. It's a bit tough to do this stuff without knowing Spanish well, but I do get help from other volunteers here.

I also have started a bio-diesel class here. There are many volunteers here who want to learn how to make bio-diesel. Thing is, when I make it I really don't need a lot of help, so other volunteers are usually out on site working when I make a batch. I had my first class last week, which I feel went well, but could have gone better. Now that I know what kinds of questions people were asking, I can do more research and be better prepared for the next one. I was shocked at how many people showed up - there were probably 30 people watching! I was hoping for a smaller class, where we could just all fit inside the bio-shack and just talk about how things worked. Maybe next time (fingers crossed).

A week into my PSF stay

It's been such a busy, exciting week I haven't had time to write my blog! Okay, so it's been a week and a half, but go easy on me, the internet's been down for a couple of days.

I flew into Peru and stayed the night in Lima before taking the four-hour bus ride down to Pisco. I was a bit worried as we drove through sand dunes and desolate desert villages. I was right to be worried. Pisco is a desert town. I'm used to this, sure, but I've never been in a desert that's so barren. They have a few trees and cactus planted about, but this town makes Mesa seem like a rain forest.



I went straight to the casa de voluntarios and headquarters of Pisco Sin Fronteras (PSF). I got set up in a hostel-style room with three other girls, nicknamed the Powder Room. I live on the top of a creaky wooden bunk bed and sleep on a mattress made of hay. I tried to soften it a bit by sleeping on top of a leftover sleeping bag, thin camping mat, and my fuzzy blanket. It helps slightly, but my limbs still fall asleep often because there's no cushioning to give them room when I lay on my side. I have actually made my lower bunk-mate think there's an earthquake going on when I've climbed down from my bed. There's a beam above my head that is where I need to take cover under if I can't get out of the house and an earthquake happens. I'm actually really excited for an earthquake to happen, just so I can feel what that feels like, but I really hope it doesn't happen when I'm up in my bunk bed!

Every morning we get up for breakfast at about 7:30. It's usually oatmeal, fruit salad, scrambled eggs with veggies, rolls with jam, and tea. Sometimes the volunteers who choose to make breakfast will change it up (we got pancakes last week and they were GREAT), but it's generally this. At 8:30, we must be dressed for the day and ready to go, and at that time we gather outside for the morning meeting. The morning meeting serves as a platform for announcements, job placement, and hellos and goodbyes from volunteers who seem to be coming and going everyday. All the jobs are listed on a white board and people volunteer to clean various parts of the house, make dinner or breakfast, or go to a job site. Many people go to the same job site the whole time because they like the family or just get really invested in the work they're doing. Jobs include helping out at the ludoteca (like a free, voluntary school for kids who aren't at public school), helping build houses or pour concrete slabs, work on the earth-bag construction community center, gathering scrap wood from the gigantic metal factory and de-nailing it, or admin type jobs (I think you have to apply for those).


My first day I helped make dinner. This is an all-day job! First we spent some time picking up the ingredients at the market. The market is a huge maze of stalls with people selling everything from toys to fresh chicken feet to underwear. We had to go to multiple little stalls to get our veggies, cheese, spices, chicken, and oil. Back at the house we chopped veggies (after soaking them in bleach water) and fried up eggplant and chicken to make eggplant and chicken parmeasan. There's always a head count at the morning meeting to see how many hippies and monsters we have (vegetarians and non) so the cooks know how much of what to cook. I LOVE this! There are usually quite a few vegetarians too, though many who come to South America take up meat again because it's so difficult to eat here otherwise. I personally have started eating eggs again since we have them almost daily at breakfast, and I've been picking meat out of dishes often because it's either that or starve (and I turn into the Hulk when I'm hungry).




The next day I went to the largest steel factory in Peru, Aceros Arequipa. There, past the factory and through dunes, is a slab of concrete with piles of scrap wood and pallets. The company lets us sift through those and some old tarps and take what we can use, then trucks it back to the wood yard we use across the street from the volunteer house. This job doesn't take all day, but it is quite hard. I was looking forward to the early day, but when we got back, we were recruited to help out with a concrete pour. This is tough and takes many people - people to shovel gravel and sand into the mixer, to gather water, and to pour buckets into wooden troughs to make foundations and columns in buildings we make. Not incredibly fun.



Over my first weekend I went beach camping with about twenty other volunteers. We borrowed some poles, rope, and tarps to make one long tent to sleep in. It was very beautiful - a nice change of scenery from the sad, dusty desolation of Pisco. We had a campfire at night and stayed up drinking, then relaxed the next day, making a big sand castle and also catching crabs and mussels for dinner. While gathering crabs we found lots of little blue and purple crabs under the rocks which were very pretty! Also, walking along the rocky shore, a pod of dolphins dropped by to check us out! It was amazing!














The start of my second work-week was a very snotty, sniffly one. And just at the end of the week, when my sniffles were subsiding, I got the dreaded "Pisco belly." People generally just get an upset stomach and get dehydrated here, most likely from the poor water quality and eating foods that may have been washed or grown in it. People say there's fecal matter in the water because of the earthquake and the lack of a decent sewage system. We boil water for at least ten minutes before using it to cook, and all dishes and vegetables get at least a minute in water with a bit of bleach in it. But most of us still get Pisco belly. I didn't work Friday because of it and got to learn about the joys of delicious re-hydration salts. Yum!

The week was cool though because I got to work on the earth-bag community center, then finally on the bio-diesel system. We ran my first batch this weekend. Lots of little issues and things to fix! The methanol and lye solution that we mix with filtered veggie oil tends to crystallize in the pipes and block up the works, so we had a bit of cleaning to do due to that. Last night we mixed the meth oxide with the hot veggie oil and then let it settle overnight. Today, we have to dump the remainder, glycerol, and send the newly made bio-diesel into a series of water washes. The oil sits on top of water and the grit and crap settles into the water. Then it has to go to dry in another tank before it's done. But first we have to test samples of it to make sure most of the glycerol has been separated out.



Days we work hard and nights we sit around a camp fire and drink beer and eat cake (bought from the "cake lady" around the corner who has cakes, beer, water, and can do our laundry).