Miércoles, 23-Julio-2014
Adiós Part 1
We leave this morning on an 8am bus to La Merced and will be traveling straight from La Merced to Lima on Friday night. This means we must say our goodbyes to the Riveria family as well as to Huancayo. David and Aniña have been fantastic host parents and Arturo and Jhus have been awesome host grandparents. I have loved being in this city and getting to know everyone. Hopefully one day I will return but until then it's Adiós (goodbye forever) and no longer Chau (bye for now).
Last time we drove to La Merced it was very early in the morning and I was super tired from our 4th of July celebration. So I didn't really get to see the 5-hour journey from the Andes to the Amazon. This time however I was fully awake and ready to take in the beauty!
It was a lot of fun to watch as the vegetation changed as well as see all the tiny towns we drove through. It's amazing how different the houses are built based on weather type. In low attitudes more houses were built from straw and wood whereas in the higher altitudes the houses are contructed with bricks or packed dirt.
Real Life Telenovela
As we travel between any city, there are several police check points to make sure all passengers are accounted for and the transportation of people and things follow the rules. Well at some point this man got on the bus and sat down without paying for a ticket. When the police did a random raid of the bus, the guy didn't have a ticket which started a frenzy.
The police pulled the driver off the bus and started going through all paperwork with him. This was taking forever and so other Peruvian passengers started getting rowdy. They began heckling and yelling at the guy who didn't pay trying to get him to get off the bus so we could continue on. Erin and I sat and watched everything go down while eating some banana chips so it was pretty much like we were front-row at a Spanish soap opera.
Even with the excitement we still arrived in La Merced on time and so we had about 1.5 hours overlap with the other group here. It sounded like they had a great time so hopefully our couple of days go smoothly too!
Project Playground
One of the main reasons I wanted to come back to La Merced was to visit Orito Bajo again. This is the community that's 2 hours away and involves crossing the river by boat. Danel looked into what project we could do there and found out their playground was a disaster. We decided to take on this project and so we started planning.
The existing playground is legitamately made from trees and looks completely unsafe. The main areas we wanted to focus on were the swings, monkey bars, and creating a tire obstacle course. We split into teams and started to plan. The swing group decided to do on the current swing set. The plan is to replace the actual swings, wire together the infrastructure for more stability, and cement the whole thing into the ground. The monkey bars group decided to start from scratch and built an entirely new one. And the tire group focused on the obstacle course design.
Buying Materials
We went out to Texas City, the local hardware store, to get our supply and tool list. Turns out this hardware store is not a self-serve store and we had to talk to someone at the counter who then went to retrieve the supplies for you. Aka it took forever to get anything done.
In order to make the swing seats and entire monkey bar we needed to go find wood. There was a wood shop right down the road from Texas City. The employee was super helpful with the swings and soon the swing group was ready with all supplies.
The monkey bars group ran into a little more problems. Their initial idea was to use a ladder as the top and then built 4 posts; however there were no stand alone ladders that we could find. We needed a new plan and so I started channelling my inner Mike Davies. We soon decided to do metal rods as the monkey bar handles and so we went next door to the metal guy. Turns out it was too late for him to work but he told us what to do in the morning.
All of these stores are so awesome and while having a Home Depot is very convientent, talking and working with a true woodsman or metal man is awesome. I love how we walked into the shop and simply worked with one person to get a job done. What an awesome culture!
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