Another Day in Huaycan

As our fellow intern Rob Collard mentioned on our previous blog, on Friday we returned to Huaycan to commence our next project. Behind Huaycan's community hospital, there is an empty terrain that the director of the hospital, Mr. Victor Garcia has for a long time seen as a possible resource to turn into a recreation area. The problem with this terrain, however is that it is rocky and not well suited for this purpuse. So here is where we, the helpul Peru Ascend task force, came in.

Early in the morning we commuted to Huaycan again and meet up with Mr. Garcia at the hospital to receive instructions as to what exactly we were doing. Before getting to the hospital, however, our fearless coworker Blake Royall, ventured to purchase a milk papaya smoothie from one of those little quiosks on the side of the road we interns were specifically warned to stay away from. The rest of us watched in awe as Blake consumed his papaya juice anticipating for him a restless night with the symptom of "la bicicleta" (the runs) which, surprisingly, never happened.





With the help of shovels, rakes, and pitch forks, we all began to dig up and extract the rocks from the soon to be soccer field. There were rocks of a variety of sizes, and because of their abundance, it seemed like an interminable job to do away with all of them. Although this we did not accomplish with ease, at the end of our hard laboring morning, we walked away from a much more arable terrain for soccer grass. Lucky me, in the midst of all the rocks and dirt, I found a delightful piece of underwear shown on the right.

Because of pending office work, we had to leave Huaycan early and did not get to finish building the soccer field that day. However, this is a project which we will continue to work on for weeks to come.