Hola. Estamos aqui.

We are three and a half months into our service and we are slowly, finally, settling into our jobs.

Jenny is getting her feet wet working with older adults. She’s been doing in-home wellness checks with her counterparts, which have been incredibly interesting and informative. She has revived a weekly lunch meeting of seniors that had been dormant for the last two years, and she worked on a program to collect school supplies for students. In October, she’s hoping to add some workshops for expectant mothers and women who are breastfeeding.

Jenny doing leg exercises with an older gentleman. It’s super common for people to have a store at the front of their home and living space behind.

It was a dance party!

Notice the big rolls of paper in each bag. That’s toilet paper. Each student is required to bring their own.

I’ve settled into a rhythm of working at a senior lunch program in the mornings and an afterschool program in the afternoons. I’ve come to realize that I could not have chosen worse communities of people to help me with my Spanish.

The senior citizens have thick accents that are hard for me to understand, and they are hard of hearing, which makes it hard for them to understand me and my bad accent. The kids are no better. Seven-year-olds don’t know how to modify their speech to make it easier for me to understand them. And they don’t have a good enough understanding of my budding Spanish to figure out what I’m trying to say when my words don’t make sense.

That said, it hardly matters.

Both of these communities have welcomed me with open arms, quite literally. I get hello and goodbye handshakes and air kisses from every single one of the seniors (up to 30 people on a good day!). And when I arrived at the school on Friday, nine little kids ran across the yard to give me a welcome hug. I felt like Maria von Trapp!

Sometimes I do wonder why we are here. Did I really upend my life and travel 3,000 miles to serve lunch to old people and teach little kids how to draw a monster?

I certainly did.

And I know that, for now, this is what I’m doing. Not changing the world, not doing much of anything really. But slowly and surely my Spanish will improve, my relationships will deepen, and I’ll be able to offer help in a more profound way.

Trust the process they say.

This is Elva and our friends at the senior center. Elva (pronounced “Elba”) has been cooking lunch here every weekday for 20 years.

I told everyone to give their monster a name and half of them named their monster Andy.

In other news, Jenny and I went on our first big mountain hike. It was awful.

Not because of the altitude or the verticality or the company, but because of the weather. It was raining, windy and muddy. Our destination was a place called Tres Lagunas. We saw Uno Laguna and decided that was quite enough.

But of course, six hours after we started, we arrived back at the base to a beautiful clear blue sky.

Really beautiful, but too uncomfortable to enjoy fully. Definitely “Type-2 fun.” (The kind of fun that is only remembered fondly from a warm place with a warm drink.)

This is our friend Marlee. She’s a volunteer from our training group who was placed only 45 minutes from us, so we’ve been lucky enough to see her several times already. Notice the giant rubber boots. Lifesavers on that muddy hike.

And finally, I got a bike! I found it used on Facebook Marketplace and I’ve already been putting it to good use. It’s electric, which has been a huge win in the battle against these mountains. I can do 3,000 feet of climbing over the course of a two-hour ride.

Unfortunately, that motor hasn’t done much to persuade the dogs not to chase me. Man, it’s insane how aggressive they can be.

I’m not in Illinois anymore!

I’m obsessed with these old houses.

I want to draw this one, but I don’t think I could properly convey the mud and earth walls.

This woman is walking along the road after cutting grass for her guinea pigs to eat. No matter what their day’s labor, the women still wear their little slippers, skirt, cardigan and hat. I love that so much.

A view of my city from high in the Andes. It’s very cloudy here. Not rainy, just cloudy. I don’t know if it’s going to change.

I took this snapshot as I walked to work then sketched it later that night.

And finally this. I traced this image on my iPad, I don’t think I could have gotten the perspectives right otherwise. But I still liked the way it turned out. It was like an adult coloring book. This is the juice stand at the market. I showed this rendering to a few of the ladies who work there and they seemed pleased.

That’s all for now. Much love to all our friends back home. Thanks for reading!