Busy-Crazy-Exhausting-Bliss

Meet  Pip. They have lots of baby chicks so we all got to pick one to be 'ours' and named them. (Mine is cuter than Carrie's, just sayin)

On the walk to the pool...beautiful!

We had a runaway cockroach and I didn't really want it under my bed while I was sleeping so we convinced it to come out.

There are little rectangles above our doors and most of them have glass but a few don't, including the one to our front door. On occasion it has been necessary to send a little kid through that gap to unlock the door. We wanted to see if I would fit...I fit enough to reach down and unlock the door, but not get all the way through. 

We had secret friends for Valentines day with the young adults but didn't have time or the supplies to wrap them so we improvised and used paper towels from the bathroom...

Flor got adopted on Thursday. She is so stinkin cute!! I miss her so much!

One of the activities with the young adults was fun random activities, one including one where we got wrapped up in balloons and our teammates had to pop all the balloons. The catch is their hands were tied behind their back...it was hilarious.

Chan Chan = absolutely incredible!! 

This is Alfredo. He's coming home with me. 

We helped them make valentines for each other and then delivered them on Monday to all the kids. They were all so excited! It was really cute. 

classic game of chicken in the pool. We take them swimming every monday, wednesday, friday. A lot of them don't know how to swim though so I spend a lot of time teaching them how to swim. We put a huge log in the pool and the kids love to try and stand on it and balance but since there's at least 10 of them trying at the same time they find it kind of difficult. Entertaining for me though! (no that isn't a coloring fluke, the water really is brown due to all the algae floating around in it) 

Random Facts

We were serenaded by a big Peruvian band in tights.

The kids in the Aldea are hilarious. Especially when the boys laugh in a high pitched squeal, gets me every time.

In February they have a festival where you throw water balloons and everyone, so we are going to get soaked everywhere we go. The older boys in the Aldea have already started a war, they don’t stand a chance.

All of the sidewalks and floors at the Aldea are slippery because they wax them regularly…needless to say there’s never a shortage of entertainment from people slipping.

It’s not a good thing to be skinny in Peru because then they’ll just try to give you even more food to fatten you up.

 I don’t know why they even bothered to paint lines and arrows on the roads or put up stop signs, they really don’t mean anything.

We had 26 people in a combi (kind of a mix of a van and bus…don’t really know how to describe it) that had 15 seats. I was on a wooden stool that decided to tip backwards after 5 minutes, so for 30 minutes I was trying to balance myself on a wobbling stool on bumpy roads so I wouldn’t tumble back onto the clump of people packed in behind me. Not unusual circumstances.

I still love Peru.

Peruvian parties are insane. We had a dance party with the young adults from our ward on our roof for Carrie’s birthday that went from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. They named it the ‘white party’ and we had to dress in all white (shirts, pants, shoes, everything) which actually looked really cool until at the end when I sat on a stool that was wet and muddy…that didn’t look so cool. It was so much fun but I am exhausted!! They kept making me and Katie dance ‘americano’ for them, ha good thing they don’t know what it’s supposed to look like. They all got a big kick out of seeing us white girls try to dance their dances, so much so that I only got to sit out a few songs the entire time. Fact, our hips just don’t move like theirs do. They would all watch us and laugh then try to tell us we were doing good…yeah real convincing. It might have helped if someone would have been willing to teach us, but they didn’t want to, they were enjoying watching us look like fools too much to teach us how to really do it. But they tried and couldn’t do our dances so we got to laugh at them. All in all it was a very entertaining night.

some of us at our white party

my friend Brian, we taught Wendy and Candy a game called chubby bunny and they loved saying it so much they nicknamed Brian chubby bunny...I don't think they really know what it means ha

the band that sang to us

typical view of Peru. I love it!

the view on the drive to the Aldea. There are sugar cane fields forever!