The Adventure

The Adventure: For ten weeks from June until the end of August, I will be working with Village Life Outreach Project in the surrounding villages of Shirati, Tanzania. VLOP works on health, education, and life enhancing initiatives for the people of the Rorya district of northern Tanzania. To check out all the great projects VLOP has, go to http://www.villagelifeoutreach.org

From the end of September until the end of the year, I will be completing my final (Capstone) project for the Clinton School in Lima, Peru. I am working with Minga Peru, an NGO that works with women, children, and entire communities in the Peruvian Amazon to increase awareness of health issues, reduce violence, train women in leadership and health information, and build communities through the empowerment of women, income-generation projects, and establishing of municipal partnerships. For more information about Minga, go http://www.mingaperu.org

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Two Spencers in One Airport

According to the UN World Urbanization Prospects report, Lima is the 27th largest metropolitan area in the world with almost 9 million people living in the metropolitan area, so it would be crazy to think that I'm the only Spencer in Lima.  But who would have thought that there were two Spencer's landing at the Lima Airport at midnight on given night? I sure didn't when I was looking for the taxi driver that my host arranged to pick me up.  I saw a sign with "Spencer" on it and when I asked if his name was Gaspar he smiled and nodded (evidently not understanding me).  Beside the taxista asking me how my flight from Quito, Ecuador was, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.  We had a wonderful ride (approx. 40 minutes) to Miraflores, and I got a bit of Spanish practice telling him about my project and learning about his family.

Then, we pull up to the Lion Backpackers Hostel and he tells me this is it..."No, this is not it, I'm staying with a family." And all of a sudden, the light bulb clicks.  The sign he was holding at the airport also said Andrew on it and in my daze of traveling all day I just ignored it; he wasn't wrong in asking me how my flight from Quito was.  Turns out two Spencers with arranged taxis to accommodations in Miraflores (one of 49 districts in the Lima metro) landed at the Lima airport at midnight on September 26th.  Unfortunately, I chose the wrong one.

This would not have been a problem if I had been prepared and had written down Laura's contact information OR better yet, taken down the address.  But I had figured the taxista would take care of that... Luckily the manager of the Lion Backpackers Hostel was very helpful and allowed me to use their internet to look up Laura's phone number and then called Laura for directions to her home.  So, an hour and a half after picking up "my" ride home, I finally made it to my house for the next three months.  We never found out what happened to Spencer Andrew but hopefully he made it to the hostel.

Home sweet home in Miraflores, Lima, Peru. 
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)