Por fin, yo he llegado!

Hey all. Here are photos of my site! I have been sent to the hot, arid north of Peru, the frontier. When my host family down south found out where I was to be sent, they told me I was going to the land of the monos. No, there aren´t a lot of monkeys here. It´s just close to Ecuador, where the people eat a lot of bananas. The Peruvians teasingly call the Ecuadorians ¨monkeys¨.

I am up here in the North to work with a national park called Cerros de Amotape. My counterpart is the head of INRENA (like the National Park Service). I get to give a lot of presentations, promote tourism of the park, and teach environmental education in the school in my town of Rica Playa, as well as several other towns in the same school district. All the towns border the grand (by Peruvian standards) River Tumbes, which converts the dry landscape into lush fertile ground where mangos, lemons, and platanos are grown in abundance.