June 6 We arrive in Ayacucho

The small propeller plane bumped and whirred over the Andes mountains which stuck up like knives into the sky, the sharp peaks topped with snow and glistening mountain lakes. I was reminded of the remoteness as we looked down on the dry barren landscape, we had climbed above the tree line long ago, and all that remained was hardy brown grass and cacti.

The view as we arrived in Ayacucho

Our first sight of Ayacucho! The city in the desert. The plane touched down on a dusty runway lined with cacti and crumbling concrete houses. The remoteness was even more obvious as we waited on the runway while the two or three runway workers rolled out the staircase by hand, there are flights only twice a day here (three arrive about 5:30am and three arrive at 3 or 3:30pm).

The view as we arrived in Ayacucho

When our luggage arrived we picked it up and headed out to meet our new host family. Rudy and his nephew Antonio had come to meet us. They were both extremely nice, especially since they had been waiting hours for us because they thought we were on a different flight. Rudy is an economics professor in the local university and Antonio is a student. As we drove through Ayacucho Rudy told us all about the city and the culture.

The houses here are like giant hollow bricks that have been piled on top of each other or attached together with the grace of a three year old playing Legos, all in arrays of topsy turvy structures. The streets are dusty and full of stray dogs chasing empty plastics bags or rifling though other trash. The ride home was also terrifying because of the lack of any road lines, street signs, or road rules. It's basically a free for all where every intersection is a near death experience, I've only seen two traffic lights so far.

Our home is wonderful, the front door leads into a short hallway with a few rooms and then out into the back patio which has this beautiful red vine covering one wall and a detached kitchen in the back corner. Alison and my room is on the second floor off the balcony overlooking the patio. Like the other homes ours is built out of cement blocks and our room is cement all around. We can see all of our neighbors from the balcony.

We unpacked and took a wonderful four hour nap before waking up for lunch. In Peru there is really only one meal of the day and that is lunch. Breakfast is bread and a bit of butter and marmalade, lunch is a three course affair involving soup, a platter of rice and potatoes, and usually some kind of chicken, and fruit, and then dinner is nothing more than leftover bread from breakfast. At lunch we also met the other volunteers in the house, Nicole and Joyce.

Nicole: A nineteen year old college student studying at a Catholic school in the northeast. She's smart and confident and is one of the fastest walkers I know even those she's short - and she doesn't look back.

Joyce: A seventeen year old recent high school graduate from the greater Toronto area in Canada. Even though she's only 5'8'' we've yet to meet anyone here, male or female that's taller, which goes to show how short Peruvians are. She wants to be a doctor.

In the afternoon all four volunteers took two rickshaws to a local youth center to start volunteering.

The tiny rickshaws

Lanes? Two way streets? Meh who needs them anyway.

The center is a place for children whose parents can't look after them at the present time for a variety of reasons from custody battles to work hours to having an unsafe home environment. The kids ages five to eighteen stay at the center until four and the volunteers help them learn English and do their homework. It was intimidating at first because there were so many kids and all in one big open patio but the kids are wonderful, I spent over an hour practicing English with one sixteen year old kid named Luis. He was so eager to learn and I was reminded what an advantage it is to have English here, it opens up so many opportunities, which is especially important for these kids who have been unlucky in the lottery of life. The center was severely under-resourced and it took me fifteen minutes to acquire paper and pencils, and when I finally got them I was told to watch that the kids didn't steal the pencils. The thin, wooden one cent pencils.

After work the four volunteers went for dinner in the plaza de armas, the main plaza and center of Ayacucho.

The view from the restaurant

The whole day had been a bit of a culture shock. Everything looked, sounded, smelled, and tasted different and especially for Alison who hadn't been to a third world country before. Ayacucho is a very local city and we hadn't seen but one other foreigner the entire day. It felt like the other side of the world.