Evacuation route

The other day we walked down to the beach. Literally. As I've mentioned before, the park near our apartment overlooks the beach, but a cliff separates us from the oceanfront. We could see parts of the beach but hadn’t been there yet, save riding in a taxi along the highway which runs parallel to the water.

As this park runs south through Miraflores, there are several sets of steps cut into the hillside. On the weekends, it’s not unusual to see surfers climbing back up to the mainland, surfboard in tow, weaving in and out of groups of kids and dogs, out to play too.

We walked down several hundred steps to check out the beach and watch the surfers. 

We crossed the highway and walked along the dirt/sand/trash until we were close enough to watch a small group of surfers who must be immune to all the sewage and other contaminants in the water. This beach is definitely not for swimming!

 

As we turned to go, I noticed this sign. Tsunamis hadn’t even crossed my mind yet as a danger, even though earthquakes are apparently a frequent enough occurrence here. 

But check it out – there is the figure running again!

We were in downtown Lima over the weekend and at one giant crosswalk, there was an animated figure attached to the traffic light. When the light was red, the figure stood still. When the light turned to green, the figure sprinted into motion.

I think it is hilarious that the figures on the signs are always running. Granted, one would run in the face of a tsunami. But it’s crazy that running is the default mode for crosswalks. There is a crosswalk steps from our door, and what I love about it is that when I push the button for the light to change, it changes immediately. I kid you not; the light changes from green to red that instant. What I do not love about it is that many drivers choose to ignore their newly red light and zoom through the intersection anyway. It's not like they couldn't stop; they'd just rather not do so. Therefore, a green invitation to walk across the street must be accompanied by several moments of glaring at all the drivers who would sooner run me over than stop for the red light. Ah well.

Well, I should sign off; gotta run!

Peruvian bureaucracy is alive and well

Several weeks ago, my mom sent us a package. It was partly a care package and partly items that I had planned to bring (such as my favorite gluten free flour mix) but couldn’t fit in our luggage. After she went through some trouble to send it, she mentioned it should arrive in 6-10 days. That is, if it made it through the customs process. When she was packing it at the post office, she was given a list of forbidden items. She read it over and discovered that she wasn’t allowed to send food. Hmmm. She decided to chance it and send it anyway. Our waiting and salivating began… we were dreaming about the chocolate chip cookies we would make and the coffee we would drink after the package arrived.

 

Finally, a week and a half later, our upstairs neighbor Christina (who is also the office coordinator at Manos Amigas) knocked on our door. She handed us a document and said, "You've been sent a package, but the post office has decided to retain it."

She told us that you could either pay some money and fax your passport to the post office people, and they might deliver it, or you went in person to the post office and they most likely would give it to you.

Packages could be retained at different post offices, and ours somehow had been retained at the one farthest away from our neighborhood. It might take a couple of hours to get there, depending on the mode of transport used. A taxi would be quicker but would be pretty expensive. A bus that passes on our street might go there; she could check with the girls who work at Manos Amigas. They would know.

I should mention that at the time we had this conversation with Christina, I had yet to do two basic things: hail a taxi on the street and get on a regular city bus. We had heard countless stories (both while we were in the States as well as after arriving here) about the crime level in Lima and how dangerous taxis were in particular. One story that stuck in my head is about how the back seat doors are sometimes childproofed and so once you got in, you couldn’t get out until you were let out, after you’d been robbed and perhaps assaulted.

So, I was a little scared about hailing a taxi off the street. The señora had advised us to only take taxis that we’d called in advance, and for the limited number of times that we’d needed a taxi so far, that is what we’d done. (Except for the memorable time that she called a taxi for us going one way – it was 11 soles – and when I called to arrange the ride home, they told me it would cost 45 soles. “But I paid 11 soles this morning for the same ride!” I told the dispatcher. “There is a tariff on taxi rides from the oceanfront on Sunday afternoons,” she told me. Yeah, right. We took a very long walk back instead. And after the señora heard about that, she called up the taxi company and let them have it. It was nice to hear her sticking up for us. Actually, she was sticking up for tourists in Lima everywhere: “You think you’re going to get away with charging someone an exorbitant fee just because they have an accent? Why do you think people don’t come back to Lima? It’s because of you!”)

While we’d taken the Metropolitano bus, which runs on a dedicated street lane on a very specific route and was therefore easy to find and use, I hadn’t hailed a regular city bus yet. Buses don’t exactly have names or schedules. You flag one down and ask if it goes where you’re going. Everywhere I’d needed to go so far, I either walked or took the Metropolitano.

Back to the package dilemma. Christina said since the post office was so far away, perhaps it would be better to just go through the electronic process and hope that the post office would deliver it. But then she added that she had really pissed off the post office folks the last time she contested a retained package, so if she were the person emailing in our information, there was a decent chance we wouldn't receive it simply out of spite. 

We decided we would have an adventure and go get the package. There was gluten-free flour and coffee in there, after all! No way should we leave it to chance.

Christina thought that having Simon would be to our advantage: “If you can get him to cry too, that might be helpful.” After consulting my giant Lima map and figuring out how we might get there, I thought it might take an hour to get there, an hour back, and maybe a half hour at the post office. We’d be back in time for lunch and Simon could take a nap at our apartment. My nerves were a little fried after I read in my Lonely Planet book that they considered the post office’s neighborhood "one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Lima." Great!

The next day, we walked about 10 minutes to a bigger street, then we caught a bus to take us to the Metropolitano line that would take us across the city. We took that until we got to the street of the post office, then caught a mini bus and took it the rest of the way to the post office. That took an hour and a half.

Conveniently, as we walked up to the post office building, Simon fell asleep in the sling.

Simon asleep in the sling, not on the post office trip but during an artisan visit... you can see how  lovely a sleeping boy can be!

Then we went to not one, not two different windows/people to be processed, but FIVE.

First, the woman who took our paper and inspected my passport told me that I couldn't pick up the package because I wasn't Manos Amigas. Then she told me I needed two copies of my passport and then I'd be called to another window.

Sam had to leave the post office and find a copy place to make said copies. Twenty minutes later I was called up to the window; the official filled out some paperwork and the box is brought out. That was pretty easy, I thought. How great that we are about to get the box!

Not so fast. Two officials cut open the box and started inspecting all of the items in it, making a pile of loot on the table next to it. Sam and I were elbowing each other: look at all that Equal Exchange coffee!

I was quietly panicking that they were about to confiscate items in the box, which would have been excruciating after having a glimpse of all the chocolate, coffee, gluten-free treats, etc, just on the other side of a plate of glass. I was holding my doctor's order for a strict gluten-free diet in case I needed to plead my case to someone, and Sam was whispering quit fidgeting, just look normal.

They didn’t say much to us, just filled out a massive amount of paperwork, taped the box back up, and directed us to wait for official window #3. After another 15 minutes of waiting, I was called to another postal person, who typed a crazy amount of information into the computer for an eternity. Either that, or he just pretended to type while surfing the web!

Finally, he gave me still more paperwork and told me to go to line #4 for my box processing. Sam waited in this line while I sat holding Simon, miraculously still sleeping through the cacophony of this giant waiting room, replete with an intercom in frequent use, buzzers, crashing doors, wailing children, and a loud TV.

The official woman in line #4 stamped information on various sheets of paper multiple times, asked me to fill in passport information, typed still more information into the computer, and we signed for the box. Then we went to door #5 to actually retrieve our box. Finally. We quickly discussed: Should we open it up now and eat some chocolate? No, maybe they would realize their mistake and take it back. Let’s leave.

As we're leaving the post office complex, the security guard stopped us, inspected our paperwork, and carefully wrote something important in his log book. Simon woke up as we left, having slept through all hour and 15 minutes of our post office experience.

We hailed a taxi back to the bus station (and I immediately made sure I could open the doors from the backseat!). The bus was packed. We were exhausted. We got off at our stop and decided to walk until we found the bus to take us the rest of the way (a 30 minute walk). We never found the bus and just walked verrrrrry slowly until we passed a chicken place 8 blocks from our apartment and rewarded ourselves with lunch - at 3 pm - complete with pisco sours for us and chicha morada for Simon.

We got back to our place at 4, opened the box, and commenced rejoicing at all of our loot while devouring Trader Joes’ dried cherries and Swiss chocolate. 

What an adventure! Now we’re hopping on buses like pros and I am even negotiating cab fares with taxi drivers! Who knows what the next package delivery might bring? (Just please include some Equal Exchange coffee and chocolate!)

You know what they say about assumptions...

So far at Manos Amigas, we’ve worked on their website, visited five artisan groups in and around Lima, and prepared for the remate (clearance sale) by unpacking and cleaning products, looking up prices, and creating displays. We are in the process of putting together a presentation on product trends for a capacity building training for all of their artisans later next week, about which I'll post separately. But perhaps the biggest aha moment for me so far has been working on their product catalog.

Several weeks ago, Yannina mentioned that Mario was almost done with the new product catalog. “Would you be able to make it into a smaller file size so we can send it to people and post it on the website?” “Of course,” we said. I assumed he was creating a document with product images; that he sent this document to their clients; and I needed to PDF it or otherwise shrink the file size.

That will be pretty simple, I thought, and we moved on to another project.

Last week, Mario told me he was done with the catalog. Could I come look at his computer while we discussed the catalog? Of course!

We sat down in front of his monitor. He opened a folder on his computer that contained 1,116 images. “Here is the catalog,” he said. “Where?” I asked. “Here.” He gestured to the images.

I didn’t think I understood correctly. “No, what do you send to your clients?” I asked. He looked at the computer. “These images, several at a time.”

What?!? After several more exchanges, I realized that he sends up to 50 emails to one person, with 15-20 individual product images attached, and it’s up to each of his clients to open each email, look at each image, and then tell him what they would like more information about. He then gives them dimensions, prices, etc.

Yikes! I’m surprised that any of their clients are so motivated to actually order products! It has worked fine for them so far, of course, but still.

After realizing that we needed to pull each of those images, plus the file name, into a document, Sam and I went back and forth for a day, researching ways to do it automatically and perhaps using Excel as the final document. Then we realized Mario wanted the catalog ASAP and wanted us to wait to research options until the next catalog issue.

So, back to the basics: we put each of the file images into a table in a Word document, typed out each file’s name below it, and then PDF’d the final result. It took us two days to get it done, and a weekend to get it uploaded to the website, but it’s available now as a private link they can send to their clients.

Everything takes longer than we think it will, almost always because of some computer or other technical issue. And since we are the ones who know computers the best (another yikes!), we’re trying to figure these things out at the same time as we’re trying to meet deadlines.

Part of me always wants to research more options and tinker around to have a more polished final product, but I keep reminding myself that a) there isn't time, and b) I need to keep working on solutions that are sustainable for them after we are gone. Having a slick way to produce their catalog now won't mean much if it's not feasible for them to replicate it next year.

It’s been fun to be working and problem solving with Sam on this. I get to a certain point on a project in the morning and fill him in over lunch; then he works on it in the afternoon and fills me in on where to start the next day.

And just when we think we’re almost done, we find out that everyone has to drop everything and sew product care labels inside woolens for an order that is late in arriving to Manos Amigas but must be shipped in two days. As we joked often at a previous job, referring to the line that was included in everyone’s job description: “Other duties as assigned!”

The sunny day

Recently the sun was shining when we got up in the morning. This was rare enough to be slightly shocking. It’s normally gray most of the day, with perhaps a 1-5 hour window of sunshine, back to gray by the late afternoon.

I had been expecting lots of gray: I’d read something crazy like Lima gets 51 days of sunshine a year, and that those days only occur from December through March. Contrast that with one of my reasons for moving to Tucson in 1999: it had something incredible like 330 sunny days per year. (I’m making these numbers up from memory; they are definitely not exact!)

That day, however, was the first and only day in our nine weeks here that the skies were clear the entire day, morning till night. We even got a glimpse of the full moon that evening, always special to see.

In the late afternoon, Simon and I walked to the park overlooking the ocean; he rode his little car around while I saw a beautiful sunset. A paraglider sailed by above us; Simon immediately signed that he wanted to see more. 

Simon signing "more" as if I could summon another paraglider to sail by... you can just barely see it in the sky.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the several hours of sunshine nearly every day. But a full day of sun; that was nice. We’re looking forward to more sunlight - and the beautiful glow that it gives everything - as we get closer to this summer.

The good, the bad, and the quirky

Instead of the whistling and the other instruments in “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly” theme music, imagine this post being set to that music but played by the Andean flute-pipe instrument. More appropriate!

The good: 

The food: From the sopas, huevos, and nearly every cena (dinner) at the señora’s house to the crema de zapallo (squash soup) at the Hare Krishna restaurant, the falafel/hummus at Café Beirut, and the chicken and salsas at the pollería down the street from our apartment, the food is incredible and delicious. We have eaten fantastic food. We even found a Mexican restaurant that is as good and as authentic as our favorite Indy restaurant. I want to take cooking classes to try to more accurately replicate the Peruvian flavors in our home here.

Pisco sours are the drink of choice here and we are enjoying sampling them around the city. Pisco is grape brandy, and to make the sours you add simple syrup, lime juice, and a beaten egg white. Dangerously delicious!

Don't worry, Simon is enjoying his water, not his own pisco!

This bar, just off of a square in Lima’s downtown, is our favorite to date. Sam’s also enjoyed the pisco sour that our language school offered as a congratulations to each student upon finishing their studies – a lovely tradition, no?


Parks are everywhere, tucked in between side streets, along the oceanfront, in the spaces between apartment buildings. Most are small. Some of them have exciting things like stones that we can step up and down on; one near us actually has a sandbox that the youngest member of our family particularly enjoys. The parks are fabulous and a constant source of amusement as well as beauty.

The bad: La contaminacion, the pollution, is horrible. Plumes of black smoke billow from nearly every vehicle on the street. Awful and relentless. And somehow people still smoke cigarettes! 


We live on a really busy street and although there is a tall wall separating us from the street, there's no separating the air. A couple of days after moving into our apartment, we were trying to figure out what this black stuff was that we were somehow tracking around the floor. And even after sweeping and mopping the floor, it's still not clean; I often take a napkin to pick up food that Simon's thrown onto the floor and it's black after touching the floor. Finally we realized the blackness  was all the dirt and soot and black air particles that filter down and covering the floor. Oh. 


So while we can clean every day, we can't really adjust how we breathe. We’re more than a little worried that all this exposure will result in asthma for Simon, but we’re also not sure what to do otherwise. Tips?

The quirky:

La ciudad morada: During the entire month of October, Lima celebrated El Señor de los Milagros, or el cristo morado (The Christ of the Miracles, or the Purple Christ). There’s an icon that was brought out four times and paraded through different routes of the city. Women got up very early those mornings and covered the pavement for the entire route with flower petals. And it’s not just a beautiful carpet of flower petals; detailed images from Christ’s life were designed with these petals. Impressive! I haven’t seen these for myself; these routes were far too crowded for us to get anywhere near them. Anyway, what I see as the endearing and quirky part are the clothes. People wore purple clothing as a sign of their penitence during October. It might be a purple scarf, it might be a purple dress, but there was purple everywhere. I would estimate I saw purple on every third person. The snappiest version I saw was on a businessman – light purple dress shirt, dark purple silk tie, black suit.

The call of the wild: On our first afternoon in Lima, we kept hearing this strange, loud call from down the street. It sounded like a weird animal, possibly in pain. My bet was on an ostrich; Sam thought it was more likely a peacock. I just hoped that it wouldn’t cry all night like that. We didn’t know what was normal for Lima – maybe everyone had a pet ostrich. I finally asked the señora what that sound was. It’s the ice cream man, blowing through his funky horn as he pedals his freezer of treats on his bicycle. Right. Slightly more plausible than a pet peacock. 

So the ice cream calls are very much a part of the background music of the day. And they swarm places where there are kids. When school gets out, there might be four of them pedaling through the parental traffic. The parks invariably have one or two cycling through. I want one of the horns, not the ice cream. While I'm at it, that bicycle looks pretty awesome too; look at all that frozen storage space! Hmm, maybe that is what I need to peddle my homemade ice cream while pedaling around Indy...

Which llama? We were looking at a statue in central Lima that has a woman’s figure at the base. She has a llama, the animal llama, on her head!

Apparently the word for flame in Spanish is llama, just like the word for the animal, and when the order for a statue with a llama on her head came in, the workers didn’t really think too much about it, they just put a llama on her head as directed. Here’s a closer view.

Our doors: We live in the ground floor apartment and there is a family that lives above us. We each have a separate entrance to our homes, with separate keys, from the street. They both open onto the same patio/parking space. None of us uses the other's door from the street. Why don't we just have one door? Weird!

The doors that open from the street onto the patio/parking space

Simon shows off which door is ours

We survived the señora

After an early post about our struggles with our host family, several good friends wrote with some supportive words. One phrase in particular stuck with me: “you will survive the señora!” That became a sort of mantra over our month in the homestay.

I should preface all these comments with the statement that Sam is not necessarily in agreement with all of them. We have different memories of what happened and how we felt about it. But since this is my blog, I get to put my perspective on it. He can blog about it if he so desires!

One month – I tend to believe I can do anything for a minimum of three months and most situations I think I could stick out for two years. So one month? We’re having difficulties? Piece of cake; at least it wasn’t three months. But I was surprised by how long that month was. After a week and a half, we considered moving out but I really liked the food and dreaded the thought of being in a hotel for several weeks. At two and a half weeks, we were pretty certain we could stick it out but the situation was slightly outrageous. At three weeks, I considered leaving school early and traveling for two weeks instead of one.

I’m glad we finished our month, but it wasn’t easy. And I’m left with conflicting feelings about the experience.

On the one hand, the family clearly loved Simon. The señora bought him a car, the type of toy he’s been coveting from every other little kid at the park and would play with at any opportunity, so he’d have something nice to play with at our apartment. She lavished him with her versions of love and affection. She was so proud of Simon and bragged about him and his good behavior to everyone who visited.

On the other hand, we had real power struggles over boundaries with Simon and food (both for me as well as Simon). I’ll give a couple of examples.

Most group meals bordered on the comical in their carnival aspect. Everyone watched, silently, how Simon ate his food and the señora would narrate as if she were doing play-by-play for a ballgame: “Look how he eats with his hands! How funny! He’s like a little monkey. Oh, now he’s going for the rice! He likes it! Have more. Have a bite, here. Eat it! Eat! Oh, he just wants his mama. Always his mama!” (Mimicking Simon) “Mami! Mami! Maybe your mama will let you have a little treat after dinner? Maybe she’ll let you have some special cake that is for the king of the house?”

She loved to hold him, but Simon didn't like to be held. While he warmed up to her somewhat, he would frequently cry out and protest when she picked him up and handled him. No amount of protest on his part could convince her that he did not want to be held by her. I eventually would take him back, but she would  usually start mimicking Simon's cries and, clearly annoyed, mutter, "Mami! Mami! Ya!" 

Yes, we stepped in to set boundaries. But that didn’t make us popular. The señora pouted when we asserted ourselves. At the same time that I wanted to extricate Simon from certain situations, I also wanted to let things unfold and not swoop in at the first sign of his being upset. I would give Simon little pep talks in our room: “You are doing a good job of letting the señora know when you don’t like what she is doing!” Those pep talks were probably about as much for me as they were for him.

One of my food struggles with the señora was over brown rice and quinoa. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m celiac and therefore cannot eat gluten. An unrelated issue is that I also am intolerant to white rice. So, I’m a fun dinner guest two times over.

When we first moved in, I was impressed with how often we had quinoa. While it’s native to the Andes, I had heard that it wasn’t frequently eaten here. As it’s a grain I can eat, and is extremely easy to cook, we ate lots of it back home. I asked at one dinner if they normally ate quinoa or if it was because of my dietary restrictions. Quinoa is a way of life for us, she told me. Excellent! So they normally eat this; it’s not just because of me. I was relieved.

Brown rice was trickier. I bought a bag of brown rice and made some once when I was sick; she showed me how to use the rice cooker. For the first two weeks, she would serve dinner with a plate of brown rice and a plate of white rice, so that each person could serve herself/himself accordingly. But then a second Japanese person moved into the house, and all the brown rice disappeared. All white rice, all the time. Instead of us being able to serve ourselves from the foods on the table, she gave us plated food. Everyone else (including Simon!) got full plates of food, including white rice. She gave me a dessert plate of whatever the vegetable option was. This was about a third of the food that everyone else had. I was perpetually hungry and would eat energy bars when I got back to our room. Finally, one morning I got up the courage to ask for brown rice; I was having a big internal debate over asking for more food, since I saw my request as being extremely impolite. But hunger – and the fact that we were paying a lot to live there and be fed there! – finally won out.

This is an abridged version of our exchange.

Alison: Can I make some brown rice so that I can eat rice when everyone else has rice?

The señora: No, the rice cooker has white rice in it. You can’t make brown rice.

A: Can I make it on the stove in another pot?

TS: No, I don’t know how to make it in a pot.

A: Oh, I know how to make it. I made it all the time back home.

TS: But it’s different here. It uses too much water. I don’t know the quantities to use because Lima is at a different altitude. The rice cooker does it in an hour but it will take too long on the stove. You’ll use too much gas. Maybe the maid could make quinoa, I don’t know.

A: Sure, quinoa would be fine. I just want something to eat when everyone else has rice.

TS: But we have to wash every single pot and pan and plate and utensil today because we are fumigating. The maid already has too much work. I don’t know that she can make quinoa too. You can buy rice to go at a restaurant.

A: Brown rice at a restaurant here? Where?

TS: All of them!

A: Would you prefer that I do that?

TS: Do whatever you want!

There is no brown rice readily available at restaurants, so getting it to go wasn’t truly an option. I gave up and figured I’d stock up on chocolate or raisins. That night, there was quinoa for me to eat. I thanked her for it, and she went on a diatribe about how the maid had to wash it for 30 minutes because quinoa is poisonous if you don’t wash it well.

This is why I started going to bed at 8:30 – I was exhausted from exchanges like these!

I appreciate that she was careful to serve me food I could have, and delicious to boot. I’m thankful that with a house full of people with different food preferences, she was able to accommodate us. But at the same time, we were paying her to do this.

We recently visited the señora so we could pick up several gifts she had given Simon but which we couldn’t take with us at the time. And it was a nice visit; she had made a special quinoa pudding for us to have as a snack (the irony of being served quinoa was not lost on me). We sat and visited while Simon played in the patio and babbled with the señora. She urged us to come have Sunday lunch with them on occasion, and invited us to come for Christmas.

I appreciate those offers and believe they are genuine. They made me wonder if things could have been as bad as they were. And then I open my journal and read about all the other occasions I haven’t described here, such as the time she told us we drank too much water and needed to buy it instead of having it at the house; the time I had to scrub a skillet several times over the course of a day to pacify her (even though the maid did the dishwashing); the time she told us we could no longer do laundry at the house because the maid was refusing to do any laundry and the señora didn’t know how to operate the washing machine, and then we found out everyone else’s laundry was still being done by the maid; etc.

At the end of the day, I suppose I’m glad we had that experience. Just like everything else, it was a time to learn and adjust and problem-solve as a family…. And the hardest part of that experience, the homestay, is over. Ya! 

Ay, que lindo!

There is something heartening about having strangers smile at you because of your child. We are so lucky to hear the refrain “ay, que lindo!” as we walk about Lima. People love Simon: his blond hair stands out and of course he’s adorable anyway. 

They aren’t usually talking to us; I hear it all the time between schoolgirls who notice Simon or groups of older women talking together. But it’s also nice to trade compliments with other moms and grin at our children’s antics.

While I'm on this topic, I'll include Sam; he recently wrote a very sweet post about Simon; check it out here.

I wonder at what age people stop thinking your child is beautiful and start thinking he’s annoying… perhaps that is in the eye of the beholder. I’m enjoying this bit of sunshine from people as they encounter Simon, regardless of however long it lasts!

At home, at work

As we were winding up our week at the beach, I was pleasantly surprised to realize how frequently I kept thinking, “I am ready to be home, in Lima.” I hadn’t realized that I’d gotten that close to Lima to call it home, but there it was. That feeling solidified over the weekend when we were with a group which had been in Peru for only a few days. Sam and I were both excited to share things we’d learned (such as passing on vital information that the restaurant they were headed to had unadvertised 2-for-1 pisco sours) or crazy things Lima does, like water the heck out of every strip of grass. And when I say “water the heck out of it,” I mean “use a fire hose to water the strip of grass where a garden hose would be sufficient.”

But I digress. 

We’ve been in our apartment now for a little over a week now, and it feels so good to have a place of our own. It’s super tiny, but it is ours.

We couldn’t be better located. The organization we volunteer for, Manos Amigas, is across the street. If traffic is light, we can be from our door to theirs in 20 seconds. The director, Yannina, and her family live next door. Yannina’s brother, Roberto, and his family live above us. All of the adults work for Manos Amigas, so frequently in the afternoons Yannina’s daughter and Roberto’s son hang out at Manos Amigas until they close up shop for the day. Simon has greatly enjoyed playing with them whenever he has the chance.

The ocean is two blocks – and a cliff – away from us. There is a beautiful park that overlooks the ocean with a playground that Simon points out when we’re still a block away. I’m also excited about this park because flowers are planted strategically to echo the Nazca Lines in southern Peru, which I hope to visit in several months. The lines were made over a thousand years ago; their purpose is under debate, but they are visible from the air. Similarly, the flowers at this park are obviously visible as you walk across the grass, etc, but when you’re on the bike path above the park, the overall designs are more evident.

There is an open air market a block away, and we can shop for our fruits, vegetables, and some staples there. The produce is so ripe that we buy stuff a day or two at a time. I love being able to buy mangos and avocados and have them taste perfect every single time. We're also experimenting with jugos - we haven't made anything fabulous yet but are enjoying different flavor combinations - passion fruit with strawberries, chirimoya with aguaymanto. 

We hope to go shopping with Yannina at some point for tips, though, because we’re not sure if we’re getting fleeced at the market. Apparently negotiating the price on almost everything is standard, but that doesn’t come naturally or comfortably to me. But if we’re paying far more than we should, then I will become savvy at bargaining!


On our first day at Manos Amigas, Yannina gave us a tour and then told us about a couple of projects she’d like us to work on. Number one was building them a website. We’d noticed before we left the States that their website had disappeared. For several complicated reasons, they no longer own their domain name and had to register for a new one. And they didn’t have any of the data, pictures, or information saved on their computers. So, we were handed a password the website software site and given a Word document with some slightly awkward and stilted text to put on the site. (It’s written in English but I’m still not sure what some of it means.) The host provides a very basic software platform to design the sites, much less sophisticated than the platforms that Sam and I are both used to from website building and maintenance, so we had a bit of a learning curve. Still, it felt good to be able to do something for them quickly.


I will note that because it is so basic of a site, I was not going to include the website address here. But Sam argued that it will help build traffic for them. So, if you are curious to see what we’re working on and who we are working for, check out www.manos-amigas.com.pe. Disclaimer: I don't know how to adjust settings so that the formatting appears consistent across all browsers. It looks fine in Firefox on our computer and then looks a little off on the browser at the office. I’m sure we will continue to work on it the entire time that we are here, and there is a lot of information we will add once we learn more!


This week we’ve continued to work on the website by adding photos and finding more information to add in. We are also preparing for a year-end clearance sale that we are apparently going to run. This is right up Sam’s alley – pricing, display and inventory control. It will open mid-November, run for a month, and the proceeds will pay for an artisan training that they hold once every two years. Perhaps we’ll do our Christmas shopping at the sale too… after all, everything must go!


Sam and I are trying to figure out how to both volunteer but also care for Simon. Yannina is open to having Simon come too, since there is a lot of space for him to run around and play in, but he’s not exactly at the point where he can play independently. It is not very feasible to work on the computer or handle fragile items while also watching Simon. Right now we’re splitting the day: one of us works in the morning, the other in the afternoon. We are open to hiring a babysitter for several hours but we don’t know anyone yet! Once the kids are out of school for the summer, hopefully Simon can hang out with them more.


All in all, it is fun to have projects to work on, a kitchen to cook in, delicious and strange fruits to try out, and a city to keep exploring!

One of the fruit vendors keeps giving Simon tiny bananas, free, as a little gift...
it's a smart way to keep me coming back!