Touring San Pedro

After a good night's sleep, we got up at around 6:30, treated a number of headaches (altitude we figure) and headed to breakfast. After that, Yeseña took us on a tour of San Pedro. The village is home to about 1000 people and is situated at about 10,500 ft. It's really perched on the edge of mountains. The homes are mostly one room, with dirt floors and no heat of any kind. The streets are dirt and/or cobblestone and are pretty steep as well. Wild dogs & cats roam the streets and burros, sheep and one llama all walk around freely. People here seem to carry all kinds of things on their backs using some cloth wrapped over their shoulders. We saw the town square, the church, the school, and even the cemetery during our two plus hour tour.

The cemetery was interesting...it's all above ground since digging into the ground is so difficult. Apparently, people spend a lot of time visiting those who have passed and even drinking with them...there were many empty bottles left in the area.

After the tour, we had lunch, then took a rest. We then went back to the restaurant and started preparing teaching materials as we are going to teach some English classes tomorrow! The kids also played some soccer with some of the locals who were their age.

We met Dave and Kaitlyn, a young couple from New Hampshire today as well. They are here in San Pedro for 8 weeks, volunteering as part of a program for which they'll get credit at school (UNH). Dave speaks a little Spanish, but Kaitlyn is like us...not much at all. They will be having meals with us and we'll be working with them on the irrigation ditch and adobe brick making projects throughout the week.

We were also assigned with coming up with a play that we could perform that would talk about recycling and its importance. We went back to our room after finishing our materials, took a rest, read a little Red Pyramid (the book we decided to read out loud as a family), and worked out our play. We returned to the restaurant, went over everything with Yeseña, had dinner, and then went to bed early. We we tired!