House visits- an eye-opening experience!

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Hi everyone.
I'm in Ayacucho now. Left the CCS house in Lima at 3.20 this morning and flew in to Ayacucho at bout 8. Can't tell you much about it, except that the house it really nice, we have hot showers and a tv, and theres internet access in the house, which is great cos a couple of people brought laptops and are very kindly letting me use them! It was sad to leave Lima and yesterday was just a day full of goodbyes which was hard but I'm looking forward to the next five weeks here. Theres quite a bit group of us here, 16 new volunteers (I think) plus 3 from previous start days, and they all seem really nice. Will fill you in on more details when I've been here a few days and know more about it.
But I've remembered that I never wrote anything about my day on thursday which was pretty interesting. Instead of going to work at Wawa Wasi I decided to go with one of the other groups for the day. Los Martincitos is a drop in centre for the elderly people of Ville el Salvador, where they come to be fed, entertained and seen by doctors, nurses, hairdressers etc. They run programmes at the centre on mondays, wednesdays and fridays, and then on tuesdays and thursdays they go out to visit the people who didn't show up at the programme on previous days, at their home. So I decided to go with a some of the other volunteers on these visits to the homes.
A couple of the homes we visited were one that the volunteers in this group had helped to rebuild following the earthquake and it was pretty sad to see how little they had. The walls that they replaced were just made of this thick cardboard held up by a few wooden posts. The roofs are just sheets of corrugated iron laying on top. One of the houses we visited wasn't even finished and had big gaps at the tops of all the walls and had no door. Because Lima is so humid the poor lady living here would have had rain/moisture coming in on a daily basis and it must have been really cold with nothing to keep the wind out. But the people living in these houses are so grateful because without Los Martincitos, they would have had even less. Especially because other areas of the country were harder hit by the earthquake, and all of the decent building materials have been shipped out there.
Even the houses which had concrete walls were pretty bad. The people have absolutely nothing and most live in one or two rooms with a bed, maybe a table and a chair but thats about it! Many of the houses has mud floors and all were dirty and smelt pretty bad! The idea of living there is really quite sad!
But I'm glad I visited them because it gave me a real idea of how these people live. Before, although I had seen the rundown houses, I had only seen it from a really superficial view, this gave me more of an insight and it was really quite an eye-opening experience. It made me quite sad, but also so grateful that the people have projects such as Los Martincitos to help them out. Their lives wiothout them would just not be possible to imagine. It also makes me soooo grateful and appreciative of the things we have, our lives are not even comparable! An amazing day!

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