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6 different homestay families

11 different cities

33 Rotary clubs

990 kisses

2 cuyes eaten

3 pirhanas caught

34 hours of bus rides

3 bouts of travelers sickness

Chris is sick with the gunk, puking and pooping here in Lima.  Luckily, he was able to sleep most of the day and work towards recovery, because we leave for the airport in about half an hour!  Keep your fingers crossed that he does not have to spend the next 16 hours of travel back to Minnesota in the bathrooms of airports and airplanes…

Here is a picture for you of Chris in more comfortable times, loving life on the Amazon River last week. 

Tonight we have our last Rotary meeting, this with Iquitos Amazonas, the only all-women club in this district.

Last night Amanda, Erin and I were talking as we were falling asleep to the sounds of the rainforest.  We have four days until we will all be back at our jobs, back to regular life.  It is hard to believe because this has become our regular life… getting up each morning, tired from last night{s fiesta, being rushed off to some meeting…

or waiting and waiting for a ride to come pick you up to get rushed off to some meeting or project…

eating a lunch so big you think you might burst, but if it is a lunch that includes cebiche or inca cola or chicha morada it is good with us… rotary meetings that don{t start until 9 or 10 pm…

…then to bed and ready to start all over again.  Four days left, that is it.  Yet, four days ago we were in Piura, just at the beginning of our stay.  We were off to Catacaos, the beach, with the Rotary Club of Piura Oeste.  It was wonderful, and just what we needed, yet it seems so far off now. 

Four days is a long time.

For the past month I have, in all seriousness, made close to zero decisions about my life.  I don{t decide when to eat, when to sleep, or when to get up.  People tell me when to get in cars, where we are going, and what I am going to eat for lunch.  I don{t even make decisions about what to wear in the morning, as we all wear the same color on the same day (today was a green day, but I missed that piece of information because someone told me to get into a car, I did, and I left before I was informed of the next day{s color choice).   I ask my host family what time I should get up in the morning and  what time we are going to have breakfast.  Someone comes to pick me up and we head off for whatever the host Rotarians want us to do for the day… visit an  orphanage?  Great! A school for students with disabilities?  No problem. Back to the university again?  Wonderful.  More pisco sour?  Okay!

“Be content with what you have;
Rejoice in the way things are;
When you realize there is nothing lacking;
The whole world belongs to you.”
-Lao Tzu

My sister has this on the bottom of her email, and I think it speaks for what all of us have learned in the past month.  Though I have had to hand my life over to whomever seems to know what is going on at the moment, the whole world has been handed to us.  We leave Piura tomorrow on a 16 hour overnight bus to Lima, where we will fly to Iquitos, in the Amazon rainforest.  Each day we are handed more and more amazing experiences…