Christmas Eve in Peru

Today was Christmas Eve, which means a lot of us including myself had the day off work! Like most of you already know I grew up in Lima so I've definitely had plenty of Christmas days in the summer.  In fact I always thought a cold Christmas was weird. The day started of with a much needed sleeping in session until about 11am. I'm a very lucky person on this trip because besides having an amazing host family here, I also have an aunt, an uncle and two really close cousins that live in Trujillo, plus another cousin from Lima who flew in tonight for Christmas.  I actually got to go and eat lunch with my family today, which was amazing because I hadn't spent time with them in so many years.  After lunch (normally siesta time) we had a very interesting class from 3pm-5pm where we got to practice some techniques to get medical histories that we will be doing during our health campaign.  We also practiced taking vitals, so that during our campaign, the volunteers will be the ones doing the initial interview of the patient, taking vitals, and presenting the patient to the doctors, which will really help them and save them time.  After that, we all went back to our families.  In my case, we went to a Christmas mass at a park nearby, then went back to the house for la cena! Here in Peru, it's tradition to have the Christmas dinner at midnight, but since Ronald, Bertha and Laurita (my host family) are so amazing, they had it for us at 10pm so that I could after go to my other family and have Christmas dinner with them as well... yeah that's right, two dinners :-).  After that it was definitely time to sleep off all the food. The experience here in Peru has definitely been amazing in every aspect.  I will miss everything about it when we leave, but I'm sure it won't be long until I come back!!

Valeria