Munay (Love & Beauty): Stories of Life in Peru: Travels for Early In-Service Training

After the first three months in site, the Peace Corps give us what they call "Early In-Service Training". This means that we all got to be reunited in the training center and neighborhood in Lima where it all began for us! We spent about 4 days in out old neighborhood and received training on topics like literacy promotion, teaching critical thinking to our students, and teaching sexual education. We even got to stay with our old host families! It was so much fun!! It was SO good to see everyone and exchange stories about our sites, new host families, and strugglesl and successes that we have experienced being volunteers. Here are some photos of being reunited in Lima for the training:

Reunited in our old neighborhood!

People asks me to give them haircuts because we don´t trust Peruvians to cut our hair haha.

So good to see everyone and be together again!

After our training in Lima, our group of 30 got split in half, some to go to norther Peru and some to southern Peru for some practicum experiences. I was in the group we went to souther Peru. We went to Ica, which is a very hot area in the desert! We worked with youth on HIV/AIDS prevention because the day we got there was World Aids Day. We got to see a street march that an older volunteer had organized in her community and then we gave presentations to youth on HIV/AIDS education. The next day we got to help out with a big World Aids Day Fair in the main plaza of a big town. There were tons of booths about HIV/AIDS education and we even did some skits for a big crowd of people. I learned a lot about how to educate my youth on HIV/AIDS and since I have returned I have already entering classes and teaching my kids about HIV/AIDS. I want my kids to be educated on HIV/AIDS so that they can make good choices and live healthy, long lives!

Marching through the streets the promote HIV/AIDS awareness.

Running a booth at the World Aids Day information fair

On stage!

After our practicum experiences, we even had a little time to have some fun :) We headed to a small tourist town in the desert near an oasis. Surrounding the oasis there is nothing but miles and miles of desert, sand, and sand dunes. They have little buggy cars that take you out in the sand dunes to drive you around and then go sandboarding. We went out in a buggy and had a blast!! It was during that time that I really realized how thankful I was to have the time to be away from site and work and to just hang out with my fellow volunteers while doing something fun and seeing new parts of Peru :)