Unas cositas más...

A brief addition to yesterday´s entry:
- There was a country-wide blockage of roads by farmers on Monday, including the Panamerican Highway on either side of Chimbote. Big rocks were placed in the road, tires were burned, and protesters were out -- even throwing rocks at windows of cars or combis that attempted to get through. Transit passengers (including Emily and fellow hospice workers) had to walk through the barricade. The protesters were not harming the walkers at all, but she said it was a bit scary nonetheless. The protest was over the recently-signed trade agreement with the United States, the agriculture industry here fearing that they will not be able to compete in a market flooded with subsidized US products. The president of Perú believes that having US markets open to Peruvian products is worth it, though the situation reminds me of NAFTA, of which one large result was the bankruptcy of Mexican corn growers (and their subsequent immigration to the US) due to importation of subsidized US corn. Many folks were affected by the protest, which apparently was not as succesful as they had hoped -- lasting only a day when it was to last 48 hours.
- I arrived back in Lima to our house again without running water except for the outside faucet a couple hours in the morning. Our pump system had broken down again, but this time -- after a couple days -- the landlord and a friend have supposedly fixed the problem more permanently. We also had a refrigerator gradually losing its power to cool things, and we had eventually moved all the food to the freezer section and stopped buying any meat that we weren´t going to cook right away. We also got this repaired over the weekend -- was a gas leak (freon, which is not legal to produce anymore in the US), so we also appreciate more having cold water. We boil all of our drinking water and with the very hot weather, we were missing cold drinks. As I said to Nicole, warm drinking water and cold showers is a bit opposite of what we´re used to.
- We met last night with the group that went to Lima, and I am excited by their comaraderie and enthusiasm. We have divided into pairs for our first project, doing a house by house survey (and invite to the Confirmation program) of youth who live in the parish. We also are planning to coordinate a stations of cross up the mountain outside of town and to put on a Good Friday play in the parish, the beginning of a parish youth theater grou. High on their priority list as well is to strengthen the groups that already exist, such as workshops for the three parish choirs.

God bless!