St. Paddy´s Day!!

So although I wish I could have enjoyed all day off to celebrate Paddy´s Day but I worked in the clinic in the morning. It was a decent day. I ran the admissions area and helped in triage. I went home to finish my public health stuff, eat lunch and then go meet up with Margot and Eric (the visiting doctor and acupuncturist). We all went to the Telecentro to teach the class. This week was nutrition. Keri and I had drawn a huge Food Pyramid poster so we talked about the importance of a balanced diet and then we played "Food Bingo". The kids loved it. We also know that what we are teaching each week seems to stick b/c we do a review when we first arrive and the kids are still singing the hand washing song and telling us why they need to exercise. We gave them bananas when they got a Bingo.

Now I need to figure out what I am going to teach next week. We had a meeting with Kennedy, Hayden (a new health volunteer), and Ben. We discussed the short term and long term needs of the lab in the clinic. Hayden is working in the lab. We also continued with our future plans and needs concerning our website and the health volunteer coordinator that we want to hire.

We had dinner and played with our 4 year old "host nephew" before going over to the pub to start the Paddy´s Day celebrations. Porfi had been able to get Irish cider and a few other English beers flown in from Lima to Cusco! Crazy! The cider was great. We had a good group out celebrating. At some point the dancing started and we didn´t end up leaving until 2:30 in the morning. I was dancing salsa with Porfi. It isn´t too hard when you have someone good at leading who knows what they are doing. I am looking forward to Saturday night in Cusco because Porfi is coming too so that means more salsa for me!!! The owner of the best restaurant in town was out with us and he is hysterical. His name is Alejandro and he is Chilean. He is probably in his late 50s and has this big bushy mustache that he curls as he talks. His dancing was just cracking us up!

So needless to say, I´m a bit tired today. I´m currently researching some more public health curriculum for the other volunteers to continue with the kids while I am off traveling for 3 weeks. We were able to buy our bus tickets to the beach in Cusco on Monday so we just have to buy our flights from Cusco to Lima. The bus is 17 hours long, but we got the full cama so your seat reclines to a bed, you get both dinner and breakfast and there is a steward on board to serve you food and drinks. Pretty swanky!

Hope you all had fun on Paddy´s day. We´ve got the breakfast to serve at the clinic tomorrow morning, some volunteer festivities tomorrow night, I´ll be working the Yanahuara clinic Saturday morning before heading out to Cusco to go dancing with the staff at the Ollanta clinic and some friends on Saturday night! What fun! I am going to come home as a pro salsa dancer!

Next week, I start my Quechua lessons. I had a woman talking to me at the clinic yesterday all in Quechua. If I want to work in the this community long-term, I need to learn Quechua. So wish me luck!