Week one in Peru

Hola amigos y familia! What a first week this has been! We have packed much into a little time. On Thursday, we went to some other houses of students with disabilities to be introduced to some of the specific cases that Keri will be working on. Friday was a day of tourism with the OT profs that were here.

We first went to Pachacamac, some Incan ruins about 45 minutes away from Lima. Then we toured downtown Lima, including a cathedral and its catacombs (in which all of the bones of the people buried there were still in the catacombs and separated out into the type of bone they were to make more room since there were about 25,000 bodies found...yeah...grisly). After there, we went to the Indian markets, which are huge places filled with all kinds of artisan crafts. That night, we went to a Peruvian dance show where we danced to live music, but then took breaks to watch different traditional dances. They have these shows every night and were doing dances traditional to the North of Peru on this particular night. It was very colorful, very loud, and FUN! We went at 10:30 pm and we left early...at 1 am. The dance goes until 6am. These Peruvians know how to party!

The next morning, Saturday, we had to wake up early to go to CASP (the school we work at) because it was sibling training day. The siblings of 1/2 of the students that have developmental disabilities (the other 1/2 will be next Saturday) came for 4 hours. The first 2 hours, they were there by themselves with other siblings, and they talked together and did training and role playing in fun ways about how to best communicate and participate with their siblings with disabilities. Then, their siblings with disabilities came, and they all did fun activities together. It was a fun day! We in the US have so much to learn from this school and how they support the entire family! We got to sleep a few hours in the afternoon, and then we went with some of the administrators at CASP to ¨The Secret Garden¨( or el jardín secreto) the musical. Even though it was all in Spanish, we pretty much understood what was going on. Music is certainly a universal language! We enjoyed it a lot!

Today, we are taking a taxi alone for the first time to the house of an American teacher at CASP, because her husband surfs and she said he´d be happy to take CJ sometime! We´re just going to meet him today. We also found out that Santiago, the man of the house we´re living in, plays soccer most Sundays and Tuesdays or Thursdays. He was very happy to find out CJ plays and he´s going to take CJ with him sometime this week! We were very happy to make those connections within a week! The woman that we live with, Elena, is wonderful. We´re really enjoying getting to know her!

So we are doing well. A little bit homesick at times, but we´re mostly healthy and doing okay. We will try to put some pictures of our touring up tomorrow as a separate blog because we have dial-up at the house and that would take forever!