Adios Peru!!!

Colombia, here I come! Tonight I am leaving this country that I have learned to love over the last month. I have completed the Gringo Trail of southern Peru. I've made some great friends, eaten way too much good food (whoever said being vegetarian in South America would be hard is crazy), drank some local wines and Pisco and just generally lived it up in the last four weeks. My feet are now clean of sand and grit (for the first time in what feels like ages), my laundry is at the cleaners and I have slept in my last Peruvian hostel. What a good run it has been.

I got to Lima last night, after three days of hard labor while volunteering in Pisco. Just after writing my last blog, I made the smart decision to look up Pisco Sin Fronteras on the internet...why I didn't do that before I got to Pisco is beyond me...and figured out what exactly needed to be done to find all of the volunteers. It was quite easy actually. I got up early the next morning, hopped in a tuk tuk (it's an experience to be had on the bumpy streets of Peru) and made it to the house just before their morning breakfast meeting.

The organization is fabulous, and what they do for the community means so much to its people. It was founded two years ago by Burners Without Borders, a non-profit run by all of those Burning Man followers out in California. Burners worked on it for twelve months and then handed over the reigns to form Pisco Sin Fronteras, which has now been up and running for almost a year now. They work in Pisco and the surrounding villages to improve the living conditions of their inhabitants. They have close ties with businesses and politicians in the community that allows them to take on projects as they are needed. It is mostly building houses and laying cement, while doing some fundraising and building the infrastructure to use energy more efficiently. In the three days I was there people were being dispatched daily to about nine different projects.

The first thing I noticed as I arrived for breakfast is that they have developed a family in these two houses that they live in on the outskirts of Pisco. They have beds for the workers and provide breakfast and dinner everyday. They arrange futbol games and barbeques and other team building activities that keep people together as they do hard, and sometimes frustrating, work everyday. Some people had been there for months, and others for just days. It didn't matter, as long as you were there to help.

They had bed space for me, so on the first morning, I volunteered for my project and then ran to my hostel to pack my belongings. My first project was a Miracle Project, a two room bamboo house being built for a family with six children (five of which will be sharing one of the rooms, the sixth will be living elsewhere). These homes are incredible. As far as I can tell, they don't buy property, just find a space amoung the shantytowns that are all over the area and build on it. Most structures are built with the local palm reeds and plastic, and as they save what little money the have, they improve on it. This particular family had nothing, hence it is the Miracle Project. It was paid for by the fundraising of PSF and the house was designed by volunteer architects that happened to be working there at the time. The house was almost complete by the time I got there. I helped with the finishing touches by filling the gaps in the bamboo with a glue and sawdust mixture. It was the first day of hard work I've done in a long time, and it was incredibly satisfying!

My second and third days with the company were spent working in a village just across the Panamericana helping a family that needed us to pour cement floors so that their kids weren't running around in the dirt any longer. We started each morning by loading up Juan's truck with wheel barrels and other gear...and then ourselves, yes we rode 30 minutes in the back of this work truck like a load of livestock. Gringos in a truck! It was like a parade with all of the looks we got. I have lots of pictures...it was quite hilarious! In the time I had, we got two of the rooms done and part of the backyard. It was long days of mixing cement by hand (the mixer died the first day) and moving sand holes from the backyard to the front yard. Babysitting was another job as the two cutest little kids, Omar and Melody, kept running across the wet cement causing us to have to fix their footprints. It was difficult, but everyone seemed happy with the job we were doing and the days went by very fast.

I had to leave the project all too quickly. I could've stayed for months and would like to find somewhere else in the world that I could do this with. I met some amazing people and had such a great time bonding with them. My last night there, I was lucky enough to see their Wednesday night BBQ and sing-a-long. It was a great way to spend my last evening with these phenominal people.

So yesterday, I helped with the morning dishes and chopped some vegetables for dinner before hopping on a bus to Lima. Two of the girls were heading up here as well, so we all checked into the same hostel and went out to a nice dinner in Miraflores last night. The girl I met in Puno has just arrived and I'll be going to Bogota with her this evening. And to top it all off, someone I met in Arequipa will be getting to Lima in a few hours and I need to have drinks with him before I take off. Peru has been fantastic for meeting people. Everywhere I go I run into people that I've seen somewhere else in the country. In South America, travelers seem to buddy up a bit more than they did in Europe. It's a wonderful circle of friends that you get to enjoy as you travel around and see more of the sites. I have no doubt that I will find the same happiness in Colombia.