English, Spanish and Dutch

Hi everyone!

How are you doing? :) I am going to write my first blog in English! I hope you're going to enjoy it. I would be very happy to know how many people are reading the English versions (maybe Google translate will do?) so that I know if it’s actually necessary. So feel free to comment or like! Thanks a bundle :) And by the way, you can fill in your email address on this page as well, so you get a mail whenever I posted something new. And for everyone else: I'll keep writing blog in Dutch as well :)

Alright, here we go!
As most of you know, I am in Peru right now. I arrived two weeks ago, together with my dear friend Maud. We both finished high school last year and we wanted to travel and expend our horizons. We did some research, listened the experiences of others and eventually made up our mind: Cusco, Peru. We found a really nice organisation called “Mijn bestemming Peru”, who arranged our Spanish classes, host family, apartment and project.

Right now, we are busy studying Spanish. We are with a small group of people, following classes for 4 hours a day. It is quite hard, but because we are hearing it everywhere around us all the time, it goes quite fast. We even manage to have a conversation with our host mother Emma, every once in a while :) Hopefully, we will be able to survive without dictionaries and hand gestures in 3 weeks from now.

That is also when we will leave our host family. It must be nice to have our own apartment, but I’m also gonna miss Emma, our Peruvian mother. She is a 65 year old woman, who is taking really good care of us. She had three daughters, but they don’t live at home anymore. Her own mother lives with us as well, but we never see her, because she has to stay in bed all the time. The food Emma gives us is amazing as well, luckily. I was kind of afraid that we had to eat Alpaca and all sorts of weird vegetables all the time, but we have it only sometimes and it’s actually really good!

We’re going to share the apartment with one other Dutch guy, who is also in our host family and Spanish class. Furthermore, we already met a lot of other great people, both from the school and from the organisation. So now time to get bored! There is some much to do in Cusco… The first couple of days, we were just walking around, looking to the beautiful buildings, the people, the tourists, the shops, living the Cuscanian life.
It’s awesome to just sit at the main plaza with a cup of coffee (Starbucks…) and just look around. Luckily, the weather makes it possible to do that! The day we arrived was really nice, and the next day as well. The only difference was that it was clouded the second day, so we didn’t use sunblock. And off course, our skin got burned…. Because we are high up in the mountains (3360 meters), the radiation level is extra high, so we thought we had learned our lesson. The week afterwards, it was clouded most of the days, and a lot of rain as well. Today was really sunny though, and we forgot our sun cream. And yes: we got sunburned within one our again. Well, I think it’s better then in most parts of Europe right now :) Not to make you jealous or anything…

Next week, we will probably have less time to get ourselves burned though. We decided to start earlier with the project, because they are really short on volunteers and money to hire people. On Monday, we will have another meeting with our team, to talk about different workshops we can do with los niño’s. It is also our mission to find a good cause for the money we raised with a charity afternoon in Holland. There is a lot that need to be done in the house, like new beds and some repairs on the building, but also new board games and Ping-Pong balls. I am happy that we have quite some time to figure it all out, since we’re going to be in the project for 11 weeks. Wait, I just realise that you probably don’t have a clue what I’m talking about. The project we are going to work in is called “Qosqo Maki”, which ‘children from Cusco’ means in the old Inca language. Children who live on the street can come there to spend the night, have fun and get breakfast. Most of them work on the street in daytime and are very unfortunate. Our task can be to play with them, but also to teach them some English maybe, or organise educational workshops. Maybe also in daytime, for children who have a home, but come from poor families in the neighbourhood. There is also a library, which got closed because the government cut some of their funds. Our job can be to open and run the library again. Long story short: there are lots of options and I can’t wait to get started and get something done.

One more funny detail about our stay: apparently, there was an earthquake last night around 11 pm... We were walking from a bar to a club around that time I think, but we didn't feel anything, haha! Most people did though: 3.8 on the Richter magnitude scale... Well, better luck next time.

Next blog: more about the project, earthquakes and Starbucks. I’ll probably write a Dutch blog soon as well, and there are pictures coming up!
I hope that you are all doing well and that I’ll talk to you soon! I would love to hear your stories.

With all the best, from Peru, with love!
Suzanne