Today was a fun day! We went to the dia del campesinos (farmers) festival in Sicaya, the rural village outside of Huancayo this morning and had a booth with posters and information we made about nutrition of cuy (guinea pig) and quinoa (a grain from the Andes that is much better for you than rice, higher in protein)--My job was to teach about quinoa. We also had posters and info on how to purify and filter water using bare essential resources. We also had an example and showed how to make a water faucet to wash hands and such out of a reused big water bottle upside down for those who do not have any running water. Also, we taught about the dangers of the smoke from cooking with a wood fire inside the house, which many people do here and in small houses it is even worse. It can cause damage to the lungs and heart and cataracts in eyes, and even lung cancer. It increases the risk of TB because it decreases your immune system. The festival was crazy, I think everyone in the whole town was there and it lasted all day. It is a very rural farmer's hardworking town, and so all the kids even got out of school for farmer's day. Mostly people just walked by and looked at our posters and we handed out flyers with all the info and talked to them some if they wanted. Mostly though all the school kids especially would come just hang out at our tent and google at us because we are the only white people around and maybe that they've really ever seen. Most of their questions weren't about our information, but rather about us and the US! I had 2 little boys who hung around our area for hours and they just drilled me on questions about the US, I mean they went through every animal, every plant, every type of food asking me if we had that in the US too! So curious and so cute. We got to walk around and try all the different ways cuy and quinoa were prepared. Not so much a fan of cuy, I think I'd rather have it as a pet, but they are actually really nutritious for you. It probably didn't help that they had pens and pens of alive cuys for sale for people to buy, reproduce, and eat! We also saw them cooking the cuy on open fires, nasty. They even had cuy judgings to judge who had the fattest cuy and then dressed the winners up in traditional peruvian attire, hilarious! I'm going to be glad to get away from all the nasty dogs here too, they are everywhere on the streets! And I think the cat population in our little house compound grows everyday! We probably have about 15 cats in our little gated houses area.

After a long day at the festival we went to Rosario orphanage and helped with a big fiesta for all the children who had birthdays between January and now. I think they have like 65 kids total there, so it was tons of fun! We dressed up like silly clowns with some of Elena's friends who go around and do that and dancing for kid's parties. We did games and dancing competitions and they had a huge cake and lotttss of candies. They had a great time and it was fun to see them be able to have all the fun they wanted to. We leave tomorrow morning for our glacier hike, which should be fun! Thankfully, I'm breathing a little better, so hopefully I'll make it up there!