Peru is such a wonderful country. It is beautiful, too, but I didn't plan an excursion of sorts to explore that aspect of it! I just had the ISL Lima trip, which allowed me the simple interactions with a fascinating culture with gentle people and, may I say, delicious food. Let it be known, I'm totes going back to see Macchu Picchu. It's officially on my to-do list.
It is still surreal to me that I have already been to Peru and back this summer! It's so weird how you can get on a plane in one world and land in an entirely different one. I apologize for the crazy posts that seem to be all over the place. I'm going to try to summarize the trip with some finality, so then I can move on until I reach present time.
We'd go into the villages every day around 8:30 AM and do clinic work in whatever space the village coordinator provided us with, which ended up being a Church for both the places we were in: San Lorenzo and Josué. Then for lunch we were fed by Sandra's (our Peruvian trip leader) mother. It was the cutest thing. Sometimes we'd go to her house, where we got to meet her family and her dad is the cutest peruvian man who wears glasses and sweater vests, or other times she'd bring the meal to us at the church. We wore scrubs, a stethoscope, and a nametag everyday. Clinic work was the following: there were 4 groups of 4 and 1 pharmacist. We'd sit in groups and patients would walk in and sit with whichever group was available, so we all usually had a patient. Then we'd go through a family history/symptoms/details sheet and diagnose the issue. Then, the working doctor with us for the day would come around and confirm or change our diagnosis and then prescribe treatment. The doctor with us for the first two days of clinic was really nice, but kind of incompetent. The schooling in Peru is really different. Basically, people enter medical school right out of high school and just continue with it for 7 years and graduate as M.D.'s unless they continue for specialization. So, he was just really fresh and pretty lacking in confidence about what he was doing. The doctor for the second part of the trip was Dr. Roxy Roa, but the guys called her Foxy Roxy because she was so pretty. And she was on top of it. I mean, you go girl. She knew exactly what she was doing and would teach us everything as she diagnosed. Also, she's a surgeon and she's 24. Talk about hardcore/impossible in the US. Well, unless you are one of those 12 year old prodigies.
We'd usually finish up with clinical work around 5 and head back to the hotel, where we'd relax for 30 minutes to an hour and then go out on the town. The signature Peruvian dish is Lomo Saltado. A delicious beef sauteé (like fajitas) with onions, potatoes, and tomatoes, served with white rice. The signature Peruvian drinks are the Pisco Sour and Algorrabina, among others. Everything was delicious. We were never hungry. Good thing, too, because the trail mix I bought at Wal-Mart had been expired for a month when I bought it. I didn't know because they were individually wrapped in a box. Thanks Wal-Mart.
The water situation was kind of a pain. We were in a nice hotel, but they were really wary about the water being contaminated or whatever, so we had to fill up water bottles everyday from 1 of 2 of the rooms that had huge jugs in there for us. And we had to use bottled water to brush our teeth. I ended up being like well to heck with it and using the tap water to brush my teeth because really, I'd been eating food all week that had been cooked and washed with Peruvian water, and I'm still alive to tell the tale.
So yeah. The shopping was great, we did that A LOT. I am now a proud owner of an Alpaca sweater, Alpaca legwarmers, and an Alpaca blanket. We also visited the super exclusive district of Lima, Miraflores. SO nice. It was weird going there because it was almost not Peru at all. Super touristy and rich and tons of American shopping stores. Also, it was on the shore, so I felt like it was a commercial version of Malibu beach.
There is so much more to tell but I think I've covered most of it. We traveled by bus everywhere and had a lot of bonding time. Haha. Oh man. And something else was that I ended up staying an extra day than everyone else because I was on the Delta direct flight which only leaves at midnight, and everyone else was on the American Airlines connecting flight that left at 7 AM, so I spent the day with the new group and got to know them. Such a big difference. We were 17, and they are 5. However, they were pretty amazing kids! We are facebook friends. Haha. Figures. The greatest thing about the trip is that we were all from UGA...
Can't wait for Perunions in ATH!
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