Mi Casa y Mi familia

I´m still working out the kinks on uploading photo albums to my blog. I´ve tried a couple different ways but the internet connection is really slow and takes a wicked long time. For now, here´s a couple photos of my family and my house for the next three months. Above is my host niece, in the kitchen are my host mom and cousin (My cousin doesn´t live with us, she was just over for lunch. Photos of my host sister to come later), below is my neighborhood Chacrasana and my house and room. It took me an hour just to load these photos, so enjoy! :)

El Cuerpo de Paz

This is my very first post from Peru! I´ve been here a little over a week now and Peace Corps keeps us so busy I haven´t really had a chance to sit down and write an entry. It all started in DC- we had a two day orientation called "staging" which by luck happened to be at the Georgetown Holiday Inn. I flew down to DC early so I could see all my Hoyas one last time before I left. After staging, we flew to Lima and had another two day orientation at a sort of family campground place called Huampani. The last day of the orientation, they took us to the Peace Corps training center to meet our host families. The Peace Corps training center is beautiful! And the staff that runs it are amazing, so up-beat and excited to have us. More on the training center later.
Now for more on my family and living situation. The training center is about an hour outside of Lima in Chaclayo. The volunteers live with host families in different communities around Chaclacayo. I live in Chacrasana with my host mom, host sister who is 24, and my host niece who is 1 and a half. My host dad apparently lives in Chicago and comes to Peru twice a year. My host brother in law comes home from somewhere twice a month and I have yet to meet him. My family is also related to the majority of the people in the neighborhood so I have a lot of uncles aunts and cousins. To get to my house you have to walk up an enormous hill, so I should be in pretty good shape after my three months of living here. So far, everything is going well with the host family. It´s all girls so it´s a real chick house. I have my own room which is maybe a 6 ft x 10 ft box that shares a plywood wall used to separate my room from my host mom´s. We also share a chandelier for light at night that has one working lightbulb. We have running water from about 5 am until 10 pm, a toilet (I was prepared for a latrine so I was psyched about that), cold water shower (it´s pretty freezing so I boil water and take a loofa bath), cable tv, and a phone. I actually feel like I made out like a bandit. This is Peace Corps luxury.
The food so far has been delicious!! My host mom is a great cook and is determined to make me gain 2 kilos. The big meal-lunch- mainly consists of rice, potatoes, and some kind of meat. No G.I. problems yet so far, knock on wood. Tonight I´m going to attempt to bake cookies. My host mom keeps talking about how the last volunteer baked for them all the time so I´m gonna give it a whirl tonight. The other volunteer also was a vegetarian so the first couple of days I had to reasure my host mom that yes, in fact, I do like meat.
I have many stories to tell already and lots of pictures to share, but unfortunately my time is almost up at the internet cafe so I´ll have to wait until next time. They give us 8 soles a day (around 3 dollars) as part of our stipened, so I´m trying to budget a little. Most of that money is spent on the combis (little busses) to the training center, which is a whole other story itself. Ciao for now!
Shannon