So yesterday afternoon after lunch we went back to Rosario orphanage, which is what we will do most days and taught a lesson to the moms on drug addictions and how to watch for these and prevent this with the children and teens (which are not actually the moms of the children, they are women who volunteer to work for the orphanage and live there 6 days at a time to care for the children and be like their moms--the children come from very rough family homes of violence or drug addictions)...Anyway after we just hung out and played for like an hour and a half with the kids, futbol, basketball and such which they looooveed! They are not used to so much attention, although they wore us out quickly in this altitude! One 16 yr old girl, Doris, asked me to help her with her homework, which was pretty difficult bc I had to help her read through a tough poetic play in Spanish! ayyy...But she is very sweet and smart and wants to be an engineer, I just hope she gets the opportunity to go the university. We are very busy, hardly have time to ourselves because when we get back we eat and then have to plan, create, and translate into Spanish our lessons for the next day at night. But my group is so awesome, we are having a great time. It's crazy how none of us except 2 knew each other before, we are from all over the country and we all get along really well, we have been laughing like nonstop!!

After cool showers in the cold mountains, sharing 3 rooms and 2 bathrooms with 9 people and doing my own laundry by hand on the rooftop balcony, and being woken up by dog fights in the middle of the night, I feel like I am truly living the vida peruana now! haha But it's great, I talked to our host mom for a while this morning and she is so sweet. There are like 5 "houses" all connected like a compound here and she said they are all her family. So everytime we come in the gate I feel like we see someone new!

This morning I got to do rounds in the Daniel Carrion (poor) hospital in the women's surgery unit. A sweet med student from here, Ansley, took us around with the doctors. It was crazy. All the women who have had surgery or about to are all in ONE room, it truly looks like an army ward off the movies...The medicine here is so old fashioned, NO computers in the hospital, it seems so unsanitary, dirty beds and blankets, literally just the bare essentials. Most of the surgeries done here are just gastrointestinal so I saw lots of cases of intestinal calculos (stones), which apparently is really common in women here because of their diets. I saw one women who was abused badly by her lover with ribs broken, one 86 yr old indigenous Incan woman whose intestines were all blocked with hair from her food and she has pneumonia in her lungs! There are many indigenous people in this hospital, which is obvious by their traditional Peruvian dress, with wool woven shawls and the hats and rugged rugged faces. Ansley told me that many speak just Quechua or both. She spoke no Spanish so really I just would ask her what I did not catch from the doctors which was a lot and she would explain more in Spanish, then I would explain in English to my partner from FIMRC! Then we went to Rosario and did lesson on First Aid to kids, lots of fun, I basically had to wing a lot of it in Spanish, but I can already feel myself getting more comfortable just speaking. The kids loved participating and volunteering with CPR and choking and such. We go back this afternoon to do more lessons to Moms and kids and play with the kids more. We have decided we want to go buy the kids some nets for their soccer goals and basketball goals and some more balls, because they have like 2 basketballs total and no nets. We played soccer with basketballs! So hopefully we can find that for them and give it to them before we go.