'bamba.

Hey y'all.

From Urubamba!  After an incredibly long period of orientation sessions, I have moved in with my host family and am no longer living out of suitcases!

Street view.  Those interesting vehicles you see are called mototaxis,
and they will take you anywhere in Urubamba for 1 sol.

It sounds cliche, but it's true; Urubamba is gorgeous.  It is surrounded by mountains on literally every side, and in many places, you can see the glacier, which is spectacular.  Eventually, we will be hiking there!

If you ask anyone in Urubamba how to describe the town, the answer will be, almost undoubtedly, "tranquilooooo." (meaning "calm, peaceful, chill")  And tranquilo it is.  There aren't too many cars; the streets are instead alive with mototaxis, pedestrians, dogs (mucho), bicyclists, and the occasional van.  It's hard to explain, but in Urubamba I feel like we have so much more time in a single day, at least when compared to my previous lifestyle in Nueva Jersey...

Rosie, Rachel and I work on a stove

Today, I went a rural area not far from the town where ProWorld is working to install cleaner burning stoves in many families' homes.  (Sorry I don't have pictures...you can check out the project here: http://cleanburningstoves.blogspot.com/) First, we watched as Jaime, the project coordinator, showed us the process from start to finish.  Basically, the stove base consists of nine clay bricks, which are fastened together with a mud-water-guineapighair/hay mixture.  There are also clay panels that lie on top to form the shapes of the circular cooking holes.  The stoves also have exhaust tubes which release the fumes into the air through a hole in the roof.  It's s a really simple and sustainable process (the stove is built entirely out of clay, with three pieces of old plow parts for support) that only takes about an hour, but can really improve the quality of life for the people who receive the stoves.  And now for the point I was planning to make when I started this paragraph...after we finished one of the stoves, the elderly couple invited us in to have some comida (food).  Though we told them we had to get home to have lunch with our families (it was nearly 2 o'clock at this point), they were unphased.  "Sit down and have some," they insisted, as if to say "there's time."  And if you're wondering, I can't remember exactly what they offered us, but it tasted like sweet potato.

My photo-uploader is really slow at the moment, so I'll post more later.  Peace.