Raise your Hand if you haven't blogged since last year!

You can't see me, but I'm raising my hand.

WELL.

Anyway, I'm back in good old Trujillo, soaking up the sun and the 70 plus degree temperatures. This Saturday will be my first beach trip of the summer and I'm sorry if I'm making my winter weather readers a little bit jealous. So if you'd like, you can come visit me and we can go to the beach together....I don't mind going alot.

I'm still more or less recovering from my Christmas Extravaganza (which I don't know about you but to me that seems like it was 100 years ago). It was a good time...restful in the sense that it was soul-nourishing to see a lot of my family and friends...not in the sense of me actually getting rest. What really wore me out was the waking up at 4am on Friday morning and arriving to Trujillo at 5pm Sunday night. Yeah. It was a doozy.

But I did arrive and that's what's important; AND on Sunday, before I went back to Trujillo, I did get the opportunity to visit the kids from our CompArte Peru Music ministry who were in Lima for a musical festival. This is a weeklong music festival that is like a music camp for the kids to develop musically.

As you probably know, since our program is in a rather undeveloped part of Trujillo, the kids we teach wouldnt normally be able to afford this (The registration alone is 70 dollars, and the travel and foods costs are another 55, comparitively, which is really alot of money to spend, and almost an impossible fee for a Porvenir Income- I think I've read that the official minimum wage in Peru is about 500 Soles or $156 monthly) But thanks to many generous donations, we are able to pay the fees for the kids. 2 days before I left however, I received word from Ronald, the program director, that we were short on money for 5 children who wouldn't be able to go, but I am happy to report that thanks to generous donations, all 5 of the children who were not going to be able to go to the Suzuki Music Festival in Lima Peru were able to attend, giving us a total of 21 children!

I don't have any pictures yet, but hopefully will post them soon. Other than that, things here are going well, I'm back to teaching, and back to life in general, although these last six months are shaping up to be a little bit busier than normal as I have been selected to lead the choir for these six months as our normal director Julton is going through his medical internship at a hospital to be a doctor. We'll see how this goes.

Well, I'm gonna go plan some classes, or do some teacher like things, so good luck to all of you northern hemispherers. Hope you stay warm.