Arriving In Lima, prepping for the project

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hola,

Quite a peculiar day today, i´ve never been affected by jetlag or unsettled sleeping patterns before. I woke up very early this morning after being awake for about 30 hours, I thought I was early for the alarm so showered and got ready expecting it to go off, it didn´t and i gave up and went to sleep again, it was 5 hours later that the alarm woke me up, what a tool.

consumed a small breakfast and loads of Coco tea, yeah ladies and gentleman, Coco tea (not the chocolate variety), its not stimulating and tastes of grass, but the novelty factor is pretty good. Went to the main Injen (charity centre) to do country orientation, rules and guidelines and all that crap, Dont drink, be in at 8 and dont travel by yourself, thats fine on the project as its pretty dangerous, but i will have a few beers in Lima as its pretty safe and its nice to relax. I´m not really to bothered about drinking though as its been xmas and i´ve over done it as ever.

Initially I thought our project would be based where we were. Which is pretty nice, I was very wrong. It rained here today and our main supervisor Rocino explained how her roof leaked this morning and she lives in a nice area, her first thoughts were ¨the poor people of Patchacutec¨(the project) because the rain will hit them very hard.

The area we are working in is called Patchacutec (Pat-cha-cu-tec) which is in an area called Ventenillia, in total 277000 people live there. The majority, if not all are displaced people from the Shining Path insurgency of the 1980´s and early 90´s. This was the moment I realised I was going to a pretty bad part of the Peru....i.e...a shanty town, the type I have driven around in the past and thought ¨they must have it pretty hard¨.

They said people use twister boards as curtains, cardboard as walls and have open sewage is the allyways, not to mention the lack of water, education and most of all prospects.

We´ll see.

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