New host family, travel, eco project and heavy floods

Now I am getting back after a long time. The last few weeks have been very eventful. As mentioned in the last report, I have been living with a new host family since the end of January. I no longer live in the city of Chiclayo, but in a beach town called Pimentel, which is about 20 minutes away from Chiclayo. I now only need 2 minutes to walk to the sea, something I take advantage of very often in the hot summer here. I feel very comfortable with my host family, even though they definitely live differently than my previous host family. All in all, life is much more chaotic but also more adventurous and fun. My host family has a restaurant on the beach promenade and a surf school, which is also our house. That's why there is always a lot going on, because the surf teachers often spend the day with us at our house. Some of the restaurant staff are often here as well, and of course the guests of the surf school too. But since I get along very well with the surf teachers, who are all around my age, I was able to make friends right away, and now I do something with them almost every day. Of course, I am also learning to surf myself now, we play soccer once a week, watch a lot of soccer, and just hang out together. So I am also happy that I changed host families. My first family was also super nice and at first, I didn't think it could get any better and I was a little afraid of the change. However, I have found many more friends now and the location right by the sea is already very premium. We always have lunch together at the restaurant, where I usually help out a bit afterwards. Especially on weekends, it is always busy in the summer. I live together with my two host parents, two host sisters, a host brother, and another volunteer. But as I said, there are always other people in the house, and it feels like a huge big family.

Due to the long summer vacation in my project in the preschool, I decided to help out in an ecological project for two weeks at the beginning of February. The project was called "Eutopia Ecoaldea", translated "Eutopia Ecovillage" and was run by a family. During my two-week stay, I helped to build houses for an eco-hostel, took care of the animals (ducks, goats, guinea pigs, and rabbits), and picked mangoes and passion fruits. I was also able to stay on the premises in a small house that the family had built specifically for volunteers. The ten days were a lot of fun, even though it was sometimes very exhausting and I woke up with sore muscles every day. I was able to learn some new things about the construction of eco-houses and was outside almost all day for two weeks.

On February 13, we then went to Lima, the capital. Since the political events and protests had calmed down, we were able to hold our mid-stay seminar by the organization. We spent 5 days in a beautiful hostel near Lima and reflected on the first half of our volunteer service. It was very nice to see all the other volunteers again and it was also very interesting to hear about their projects and families. I also realized that I have been very lucky so far. Because there were some who had many problems with their family or their projects. Many of them are almost never allowed to leave their homes and in the project, some have tasks that they cannot do without help. After the seminar, I continued traveling with some other volunteers. First, we stayed in Lima again over the weekend, as our seminars were never directly in Lima and we had hardly seen anything of Lima so far. We visited the historic center with impressive old buildings, also visited modern artistic neighborhoods, and took advantage of the fact that we found a culinary variety, which is not just rice with chicken or fish :))

We also took advantage of being able to go out partying together, and the absolute highlight for me was a visit to the stadium for the Peruvian classic, the Limaderby Universitario de Deportes vs Alianzia Lima. We bought jerseys of the host Universitario in front of the stadium for the equivalent of 4 euros and after entering the stadium, we couldn't stop being amazed. The atmosphere of the 50,000 spectators was incredible despite the close 1-2 loss. However, the mood was sometimes very aggressive and spectators with 'wrong' jerseys were aggressively beaten up.

All in all, I really liked Lima, even though I had always heard many negative things about it. Probably my positive impression also comes from the fact that we were mostly in safe tourist areas. From other volunteers from Lima, you can hear that it is normal to fall asleep with gunshots, etc. Fortunately, I didn't have to experience these things.

From Lima, we then continued south to Ica, which is about four hours by bus from Lima. Here we spent the next four super varied days. On the one hand, Ica is almost directly located in a large desert area, so we could go on a trip to various oases and have fun with sand buggies and sandboarding. On the other hand, there is also a large nature reserve near Ica called Paracas with beautiful beaches and small protected islands with a great diversity of species. So we had a full program for four days and got to see beautiful landscapes. The only downside was the scorching heat, which made visits to the desert only possible early in the morning. All in all, it was another wonderful little trip and I am glad to have finally got to know the south of Peru, even though there is still a lot that hopefully will be added at the end of the year.

Now I have been back with my host family for some time and am waiting for my projects to start again. I was actually supposed to start again two weeks ago, but extremely heavy rainfall prevented the start of school, and in my preschool, the walls are still wet two weeks after the rain. There were heavy rains in northern Peru, which led to flooded streets and great losses in many families. Fortunately, it was not so bad here in our seaside town. We had no electricity for some time, and the streets were partially flooded here as well. But many other places were hit harder, and the clean-up work is still ongoing. Two days ago, I was in the preschool myself to clean the building of mud and water. Unfortunately, Peru lacks good infrastructure that could prevent floods. Short heavy rains can already trigger catastrophic conditions.

So now I am still waiting for my projects to start again. The holidays were really nice and I had a lot of time to travel, and the ecological project was very interesting, but now I also feel like continuing with the social projects for the last 3 months here in Chiclayo. I am also currently in contact with a children's home where I will probably start teaching English soon.

I will be back soon :))

P.S I have also uploaded some photos again