Huacachina, Peru

Hi everyone,

I've been volunteering in Peru for six weeks now and it looks like I'll be here for at least another couple weeks. Leah, Rachel, and I have all been given leadership roles because we have been here for awhile and because we are some of the only volunteers that speak Spanish. I just got back about a week ago from leading two groups of volunteers to Con con (just outside of Cañete) to continue work on the irrigation canal. This second part of the project was more difficult than the first because the canal was up high (from roughly 10 to 75 feet above the road) and so all the cement for the project (300 bags in total) had to be passed by chain all the way up. I don't think I've ever worked so physically hard in my life, but it was also very rewarding to be able to measure our progress each day and to get to know the 15 or so locals that worked with us most days. I found it much easier the second time to have conversations with the locals compared to the first time when most of them kept their distance from us and only answered questions when they had to. I think partly because they got used to us and also because we really had to work together to get the thousands of buckets of cement up to the canal. We were constantly yelling 'bucket' at each other and everyone, volunteers and locals alike, learned how to say it in English, Spanish, German, Romanian, and Dutch!

We finished the project last Friday morning and bringing up the last bucket of cement was a bittersweet moment. It was great to finish the project but I was also a little bit sad because that meant leaving Con con and the family that I was staying with, along with the beautiful views and the baths in the river. Once we finished the locals spent about an hour making a plaque near the endpoint for all of us to sign. After that we had lunch, rested up a bit and then spent the afternoon playing soccer. In the evening most of the guys that we had worked with came over to celebrate our despedida (goodbye party) and we danced late into the night with a couple of headlights flashing as our strobe light. On Saturday the group left for Pisco in the morning and I stayed for the day to go to a meeting about the possibility of Hands On fixing the existing drinking water plant for the town. The facility was built ten years ago and has been broken for almost as long so the people have not had safe drinking water for almost a decade. I'm hoping to go back to Con con on Monday to translate for an engineer that is volunteering with Hands On right now and it is our goal to have the plant in working order within the next week. We'll see what happens though because things usually take longer here than we think...

Transitioning back to Pisco was a little bit hard after two weeks away, especially since we now have about 70 volunteers so it was a crazy environment to come back to and I also realized how truly exhausted I felt. The director of Hands On strongly encourages everyone who has been volunteering for a month to take at least three days off so my friends and I decided to come to Huacachina for a couple of days. We arrived on Wednesday afternoon and aren't going back to Pisco until Sunday. Huacachina is a small resort area near Ica surrounded by huge sand dunes. We are staying in a really nice hostel and have been sleeping more than I thought possible. This afternoon we are going to go out on a dune buggy and sandboarding trip, I'm sure not the best thing to do from an ecological standpoint, but I was told it is something that we should try it once.

Lots of love,
Katie
p.s. I've started to upload some of my Cañete photos to facebook so to look at them click here. There's also some more photos and information about the irrigation canal on the Hands On website.