I have now been living in Lima, Perú in a suburb northeast of downtown at the foothills of the Andes called Huaycán. Why am I back in Perú? Wasn't I just here in June?
I'm here because I left my job in Colorado to search for a job in International Development, and I was hired by a Lima nonprofit named The Light and Leadership Initiative (LLI) to be their Program Director...
...which is turning out to be exactly the job I was looking for!
I arrived here a little over three weeks ago, and I am excited to say that - after observing all the programs and operation of LLI - I feel extremely lucky and honored to have been chosen for this position, and I feel that I will both do well at and excel in my new job. The nonprofit is quite well integrated into the local community, it attracts like-minded volunteers who are positive and engaged in their work, and it is working hard to educate and empower local residents. This is the kind of career I dreamed of having when I decided to study international development.
What I've been working on since I arrived started mostly as orientation, training, and observation. The program has English, art, reading, chess, women's, and teen programs that I've been attending and helping with. I have also been shadowing on parent visits, where we go to the homes of the parent of our kids and speak to them about the child's progress and notify them about program dates and events. We work in three "zones" (zones S, Z, and D) of Huaycán where we have classrooms. We go to the different zones because the ones higher on the hill (S and Z) tend to be poorer - one of the families we went to on a parent visit stated that they did not even have money to send their child to school in a nearby zone - a bus ride that costs 1.20 soles ($0.41) round trip.
Here are some cute pictures of our younger participants in art class in Zone S:
