Living Heart

After a period in which it looked like I'd just made the greatest mistake in coming to Peru blindly, to work for an unknown organization, and I was questioning if I really wanted to do development work, really believed in any of it at all, when I thought I was just wasting time and money, and was thinking about moving back (to?)...now things are falling into place.

I bumped into a job with Living Heart (click to open website), an NGO run by an English woman, Sonia. She has a cafe (click to open website) in Ollantaytambo which is entirely non-profit and through which she finances nutrition, education, health and conservation projects. She seems very serious and professional and geniuinely dedicated, and the work looks a lot like the type of work I would have liked to do in the first place--except the project is a lot more solid as it doesn't depend on volunteers. I'd gone to talk to Sonia to see if she could receive volunteers from the Nick (the English organization who had originally sent Cristina from Bolivia to see Comunidades Unidas' project). When I told Nick I quit the job, he offered me to work for him and find another organization who could receive volunteers. So I talked to Sonia about this and she offered me to work for her as well, coordinating her projects and working in the cafe one or 2 days a week (which is gonna be really cool 'cos she has the best--western--food and coffee I've had in Peru, and lots of interesting people walk in and I'll wait tables and talk to them about the project and about life)...

I'll have to move to Urubamba, the capital of the Sacred Valley district. It's about an hour from Cusco, but I found a room with no kitchen and not-really-hot water, with 2 Australian girls who are teaching English and seem to know other foreigners in Urubamba (which is of course indispensable for survival :) ).