Potatoes!

Good day from Peru! Wow! We´re all doing fine here. The work we originally had in mind is far from finished, but we´ve accomplished even more things and have to leave sometime. Dale thought he would give some individual consultations after the big presentation on Saturday, but he´s been seeing wheel chair clients steadily every single day since then, and there have been two more presentations also. See the link to watch. We did a lot of construction and painting projects, and are leaving supplies that the Maestro (that´s his nickname) can do later. We also have purchased quite a few tools and supplies to leave here at CASP for their use. On Thursday we went to the International Potato Center. They don´t allow a lot of tourists, because they are a research facility. They maintain a seed bank for the thousands of varieties of potatoes in the whole world. We saw the scientists, microscopes, and row upon row of tiny tiny plants in test tubes at a very cold temp. If something were to happen to one of the potatoes that they´d developed over hundreds of yrs., they could go to the seed bank and retrieve their variety. An example is like when the Shining Path terrorists were in Peru a few yrs. ago and villagers were afraid to go out to their fields, therefore losing all their potatoes. Then we had the honor of being invited to Dr. Liliana Mayo´s house for supper.  She´s the founder of CASP.  I say honor because on her wall she has pix of herself with the Queen of Spain, and the the secr-general of the UN.  And she took the time at supper to thank each of us individually for our efforts at the Ann Sullivan Center.  She learned our names the first day here! We will all have wonderful memories of this school, and are all planning our next trip back.   Paz, Rita