Integrating

As a desperate act of integrating into our communities, Emily signed us up this week to present a dance at her town's high school anniversary celebration. We thought long an hard about what we could do to impress these peruvians - they've got more than their fair share of typical dances to choose from. Although both of us enjoy dancing to hip-hop music when we go out, we decided it may not be appropriate to present a number like that. We then thought about the Electric Slide, Cotton Eyed-Joe, and everything else down to the Macarena. In the end, we decided to present a swing number to the tune of Go Daddy-O. The only hitch is that neither of us dance swing. Even so, after a solid 3 hours of choreography and practice we entered center stage at the celebration and wowed the peruvians with our incredible dance talent.

http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=-Pv4OJIXeDU

In other news, Peace Corps Arequipa (we function practically like a separate country down south) has started working closely with the NGO CoPlan on their current project of promoting leadership and the role of citizenship and democracy in small communities. There are a lot of different forms that CoPlan's projects can take on, which is nice to have the flexibility to mold their project to help our specific communities better. They use volunteers from various universities around Arequipa to travel to rural communities and empower other peruvian youth while providing a solid model of success for the youth, being successful and motivated peruvian students themselves. It's a very interesting partnership for Peace Corps to be working with CoPlan and it's really nice to meet some people close to our age and education level in the city as well. They came to my site to do a training with students at a technical institute as well as people from the municipality this week and we have plans to develop a larger project together early next year.