Friday, June 22:
My dad drove me to O'hare at 4am. I met up with the other nursing students and
our initial flight left Chicago at 10am (which was actually 11am... Spirit
Airlines) and landed in Ft. Lauderdale. The connecting flight to Lima was
scheduled to leave at 5:30pm but was 15 people overbooked. The airlines offered
promotions in an attempt to get passengers to take a different flight the
following day. Although two free round trip tickets, $100, and a hotel room for
the night sounded extremely enticing, the 10 of us decided, after much
contemplation, that we better not volunteer to get booted. We arrived in Lima
around 11pm, went through customs, and found our lovely taxi driver amongst the
crowd of people awaiting the arrival of their guests.
Saturday, June 23:
Our taxi driver drove us to a gated hostel community which appeared to be part
of a Catholic Parish. The drive there was quite interesting. My first hostel experience was fairly nice. It was more
like a hotel than a hostel. We settled in by 1:30am and got up by 4am to
catch a ride back to the Lima airport for our final flight to Piura. Needless
to say, we were exhausted.
We arrived in Piura at 7:30am and were greeted by a large
Marquette sign held by the lovely parishioners of Sacramento Santisimo, whom
will be our hosts.
We rode to the parish compound where we will be staying for
4 weeks and the 10 of us gals settled into rooms, ate breakfast, and unpacked.
We toured the public hospital in town during the morning and anxiously returned to our
rooms afterwards for a much needed afternoon siesta! After napping, we went on
a tour of the hospice center. Having been in Piura for less than 24 hours I have already fallen in love with the Peruvian people...they have the biggest hearts/smiles. We were greeted
with hugs and kisses from patients at the hospice who had close to nothing yet
were SO happy, gracious, and loving. I'm excited to visit with them
numerous times over the course of my stay. They were so sweet. Mass is at 7pm (we attend mass daily and sometimes twice on Sundays). Dinner is after mass and now we are hanging out enjoying one of our last nights of freedom. I'm dreading this aggregate project already, gah. I'm also hoping a little more Espanol comes back to me : /
Here is the view from our room...
