Back From Vacation

Hello once again folks!  I´m back from vacation and ready to start writing again.  Ok, I wasn´t actually on vacation for a couple of months; I just never got around to updating this site.  Whoops!  So, here´s one big update to bring you up to speed on what I´ve been up to.

Work:  The work that I have been completing over the past few months at the Instituto Chaminade Marianistas has been moving along slowly but surely.  If you recall, the big project that I am developing is to create an information system accessible via the Internet in order to help the school better maintain the information they have about their students.  The specific goal of the project is to give the marketing group at the school a better way of tracking prospective students as they proceed through the matriculation process to become students.

This project has been a huge challenge for me from the get go.  I have had to teach myself how to use three new technologies in order to make the final product, which has given me more than a few headaches along the way.  I´ve also been designing and developing everything by myself, which has made the project take much longer than I though it would.  But, the good news is that I´m pretty much done with everything and will be submitting my work for review next week!

Life In Peru:  Apart from the work that I´m doing, I have been having a great time living here in Peru.  It does have it´s difficult moments at times, but overall I am very happy with the experience thus far.  When I´m not working, I´m usually hanging out with my host family at their house, or visiting different places nearby in Callao or Lima.  I´ve also been participating in a few extracurricular activities with students at the school, including a guitar class and a dance class.  Yes, that´s right, a dance class.  Dancing is a very big part of Peruvian culture, so I figured that I might as well learn somthing so that I can at least act like I know what I´m doing.

I´ve had the opportunity to meet a ton of new people here, including people from the U.S. as well.  There was a group of students that visited us from St. Mary´s University in Texas.  I met a medical student with ties to the University of Dayton who was working and studying in a nearby hospital for about a month.  Currently, I am living and working with Ken, a fellow UD student who is participating in the ETHOS program as a volunteer like I did last year.  We´ve been having a great time together, and I´ve been helping him out in getting adjusted to life in Peru.

My host family has been treating me great as always.  It´s been really nice getting to know them better during the past months, and they always seem to be giving me a hard time about something.  A special shout-out goes to Cintya since she tells me that she actually reads what I write here and has been giving me a hard time for not writing anything for so long.

Travel:  I have mananged to find a little bit of time to do some traveling in Peru while I´ve been here.  I traveled to the northern part of the country for about a week to visit a small town in the mountains.  While there, I stayed with a group of people who work at a Marianist mission and who serve the rural mountain communities with teaching about faith formation.  I got to stay in one of these communities for three days, which was a really humbling experience.  While up north, I also visited two sites that have ancient ruins as well as a beautiful beach.

In a little over a week, Ken and I will be heading with a group from the Instituto on a week-long mission trip into the mountains nearby Lima.  We will be helping out with different faith formation activities as well as just getting to know and spending time with the people who live in these small villages.  I´ve heard that this trip will be especially difficult, so I´ll be sure to share my experiences when I get back.  Ken and I are also thinking about trying to travel to Machu Picchu and possibly the rain forest sometime in July, which would definitely be a great experience.

Well, that´s about it for now.  I apologize again for the long break between posts and also the lack of pictures.  I´ll try to keep things updated a little better during the next month-and-a-half that I have left here in Peru.

Chau!!!