Homestays Begin, Day 5

Family hosts arrive

After our long Machu Picchu day, we are spread out across Cusco in our homestay placements.
Another early morning, families started picking kids up at 7:30. The hour before pickup was a bit
anxious, as we prepared to meet our new host families.  There was a lot of nervous energy with kids
feeling unsure of their Spanish.

My goal was to photograph each student, as they left minutes after meeting their family. Hazel, Uma
and Siri were the first to leave, then my family arrived and whisked me away to my own homestay.

Zenaida, my hostess mama, is a teacher at the school where many of our kids are spending their mornings.  I am going to school on Wednesday with Zenaida and I will see some of our kids. Jesus is my family stay papa and he and I went to their apartment and I got settled, before we left to get fresh chicken and to the market to get veggies and fruit.

If you’ve never been to an open air market in Latin America, it’s a massive explosion of color, noise and
fast-paced buying and selling.  Smiling faces selling everything you can imagine from spices to whole
cow heads, blankets and mountains of veggies, fruit and cheese, smoking foods and delicious smells,
dogs roaming for scraps, children sitting with parents in stalls, dirt floors and corrugated patchwork
rooves, butchers and weavers, the food heart of the city and a daily stop for my family.  

A big lunch of ali de gallina, (Neal, we need to make this dish), I helped Jesus in the kitchen and what a
pleasure to make sense of Spanish over preparing a favorite Peruvian meal.  It was hard to keep my
goosebumps in check, working in a small Cusco apartment kitchen with a Peruvian man tasting
and cutting, shredding boiled chicken, scooping maracuya fruit and making a blender drink, peeling
potatoes, hearing names of spices and soaking in this incredible experience.  I am certain our kids are
having similar experiences and they’ll have lifetime stories to tell.

Sitting with Zenaida and Jesus and their adult children, eating a two hour lunch and feeling part of a new family, it's hard to describe the overwhelming sensations.

Although our first days have been an ordeal, our real adventure began today, as we assimilate into this
trip of a lifetime.  A couple reasons for international travel: new points of view and sensory textures,
from a beautiful wide world, so much larger than imagination.