Life in Lima

I have made some great friends in the short amount of time I've been in Peru.  During my first morning here, I was welcomed by the greatest volunteer crew the Hogar has ever seen (;
My friends Tina, Brian, Lotti, and Carla welcomed me to the Hogar with a cup of hot coffee and a tour around the home.  I adjusted quite nicely with them and they were great at giving me the low down on how the home functions.

Around 5:30 am, we start to hear the kids being woken up by the night nurses for their baths and by 6:30 almost everyone in the house is ready for breakfast.  At 7, the boys start to yell "Desayunooooo" and a herd of children get downstairs to the dining room.  Before every meal, the children exercise patience and wait to say their prayer before digging into the food.  From there, each child has their own schedule to follow: some will start drying dishes, some will sweep the floors, and others will get ready for their events of the day.  While most of the children go off to school, there are a few kids who must remain at the home due to their physical inabilities and they are taught by an in-home teacher.  Other kids have weekly therapy appointments or the occasional doctor's follow up that they have to attend.  In these cases, they often have to get up earlier and be ready to catch a bus at 6:30 am.

As volunteers, our job is to help out around the house with whatever needs to be done.  We have our regular responsibilities like washing dishes and taking the babies out of the nursery to play, but we also participate in other activities.  We often go with the children to appointments in Lima for most of the day.  Occasionally we will take the kids out on a walk or to the park to get them some fresh air.  No matter what the day has in store, volunteers are always ready to handle anything.

It is so fun to be in the home and around the kids when they start to get comfortable with you.  They will call out your name from across the house and ask you to come play with them or help them draw in their books.  There definitely are some days that tire you out since kids take up a lot of energy, but it is nice to be interactive with the children because you get much more out of the experience.

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As with my time in Panama, I spent lots of time talking to the volunteers about their experiences in life and their local cultures.  Tina and Brian are both involved in pediatric medicine in the US and spent some years living in Cusco, Peru (which is coincidentally where I will be heading next!).  They had an absolute blast with the kids and I had a great time talking to them about their lives as well as my travel plans.  Lotti and Carla are two friends who recently finished school in Germany and decided to spend 3 months in Peru working at the Hogar.

I have loved talking to all of them about our life stories, sharing details about our lives, book-sharing, and walking around the small town of Chaclacayo where we are living.  The 5 of us created a small community of travelers that came together because of our passion for helping children.  I am so grateful that I got to spend the last week with them and I have learned lots about the world because of them.  I also learned a little more Spanish as well.

The discussion that was most impactful to me was a conversation that we had about our family origins and genealogy.  As we got to talking, it became clearer to me that most of the people in North, Central and South America did not come from there.  Our civilizations as we know it exist due to migrations of our ancestors hundreds of years ago from the western world.  This is not to say that we do not belong in the Americas, but it goes to show how far our history has come.  Looking around Peru today also helped me to see how amazing of an accomplishment it has been.  To think that this entire cement city, constantly bustling with warm bodies resulted partly from the migration of people from the little country of Spain (the word little being used in a relative sense).  Without this migrations I would not have seen the bumper to bumper traffic with pedestrians weaving their way among the cars.  Without it, I would not see mothers with babies held in satchels on their backs while the mothers sell fruit, candies, and drinks on the sidewalks to provide for their families.  Without it, no constant blaring of horns to warn you that some driver is going to cut you off to get where they need to go.  Our lives as we know it would cease to exist without this migration into the Americas hundreds of years ago.

- Nicole

Jose, Josue, and Alexis playing in the salon/patio: