And so it begins...

The last of the volunteers arrived yesterday morning and we spent yesterday settling in. We met in the morning to go over the program, and to learn which community we will be building our wind turbine for. I promise to tell you all about the community in a moment. After lunch we took a tour of the workshop and spent some time in the city centre last night with the Peruvian engineers we'll be working with. Today was more introduction, but of a different sort. In the morning, we took a walking tour of the city with a local woman who is obviously very proud to be from Trujillo. Particularly since it was the first region to declare independence. I learned a great deal about Peruvian history, which I will share as topics arrise. This afternoon, we had our first of two Spanish lessons to help us better communicate with the engineers we are working with and, eventually, the community members during the installation. It was a great language school & although I'm doing pretty well, I think I might try to take additional lessons to learn as much as possible while I'm immersed. Almost no one speaks English in Trujillo, so it's a great opportunity.

As promised... The Community:
I'll spend the next 4 weeks building a wind turbine for a small community in the northern Andes called Canlle (kan-yay). Canlle has about 250 people (no census, no exact population numbers) and is at an altitude of 3,645m which is just short of 12,000 feet. We'll be acclimatizing for a day in another town called Cajamarca and then proceeding into the village. It's especially important to ascend slowly as we'll be doing physical labor while installing the turbine, which is rough at high altitudes.
To get to Canlle, we will take a bus 9 hours from Trujillo to Cajamarca, spend a day, then take a minibus to another, smaller town for 3 hours. From there we catch 4x4 vehicles to take us down a trail for about 3 more hours, then we walk about an hour and a half through the mountains to Canlle. While this sounds like a lot, I'm excited to be so truly disconnected for a week. What amazes me most, is how the wind turbine is getting there. We will ship it via truck from Trujillo to the trailhead, and then the community members will carry it the length of the mountain trek. This is many, extremely heavy, steel components. They've been told how much everything will weigh and they seem to think it will be no problem at all. Remember, this is high altitude as well. They impress me already.

We have some Peace Corps volunteers staying with us for the week, so I'm going to wrap this up and head off to be social. Feel free to post any questions you might have and it'll prompt me to learn even more. Buenas noches.