Still Truckin'

So we've almost made it four weeks through training and got about 7 left. We were treated to a holiday yesterday. It was a federal holiday to commemorate the battle of angamos. I thought the peruvians had won the battle, but they actually lost it. It was a naval battle and one peruvian ironclad had held of the Chilean navy for five months, this heroic ship was finally defeated. It made much more sense to celebrate it after I found out the back story.

Things are going quite well here, we're actually getting into the meat of our health program education. Learning about the extreme prevalence of anemia in not only pregnant mothers but children as well. The importance of well rounded nutrition to avoid stunting and irreversible impediments in cognitive development of children. It's actually really cool stuff, I've been finding out that this public health education stuff might be pretty fun. If anyone wants a fun book to read on the topic check out "Mountains beyond Mountains." It's about a doctor named Paul Farmer who did a lot of work for public health in Haiti, Russia, and even Peru. I think it's gonna be awhile before someone is bored enough to write a book about my life.

Spanish is coming along well, we had another round of language interviews today to gauge our progress and possibly move up (hopefully) or down (hopefully not) depending on how the interview goes. It was a pretty relaxed interview and the interviewer poses pretty open ended questions, I think we started with describing my host family and eventually the conversation got around to me attempting to describe my worst EMS call, which I sure don't have the vocabulary for. I spent my free day reviewing the vocab for how to tell about my daily routine (shower, eat, walk to class, etc.) So I should have known to stick to my topics and only mention things that I could speak well on.

We've got another weekend coming up and I think I'm gonna use it to catch up on some sleep and do some reading, I've been doing pretty well not getting sick as of yet and I want to try to keep it that way if possible. Of course I say this now, knowing full well that there is a concert saturday night that I will most likely be attending. I'm off to read harry potter in spanish...took me about 20 minutes to get through the first 2-3 pages yesterday, I'm gonna see if I can once more break the land speed record for reading spanish. Hope everyone is doing well where ever you're at.