The study half of our term ended with our excursion to Machu Picchu. Now begins our time to give something back to the people of Peru.

Seven students are currently serving in the Ancash Highlands, home to breath-taking views of the Cordillera Blanca, or White Range, and the highest mountain in Peru, Huascaran (6,768 meters = 22,205 feet). We had a chance to visit this group of students on a recent journey through the long valley, or Callejon de Huaylas, that separates the snow-covered Cordillera Blanca from the lower, dryer Cordillera Negra.

Kristen and Chelsea are volunteering at a Comedor, a soup kitchen and community center operated by a Baptist Church that serves lunch to 70 children after school each day. After lunch they mingle with the kids and help them with their homework.

Martin volunteers for World Vision, traveling each morning to rural communities to photograph children who are part of a sponsorship program and helping out in the office in the afternoons.

Derek lives further down the valley at a hostel operated by the family of a mountain guide. He teaches English in several elementary schools.

Ben volunteers for an agricultural development project funded by CARE International. He visits cuy (guinea pig) farmers in the mornings to collect quantitative data and enters the information into a database developed by a former SST student in the afternoons.

Lindsey and Emily live in the home of a woman who teaches traditional Peruvian dances. Lindsey teaches English to kindergarten students at a public school nearby. Emily is researching the life and times of a community leader who advocated for the rights of the campesinos and strove to preserve their dress, customs and customs.

While most of the students in our group were beginning their service assignments in Ancash and elsewhere, eight others needed to postpone their travel to wait out a blockade of the main access route to the cloud forest area of Junin. Indigenous groups from the Amazon Basin blocked access to La Merced and surrounding communities to protest government policies that promote petroleum extraction and, in their view, destroy the land on which they live. The dispute was resolved within a week. In the meantime, the students made the most of their extra days in Lima by volunteering their time for several causes.

The group of eight students traveled to a neighborhood of low-income families in the outskirts of Lima, designing and installing a roof to cover the section of a family's house that had never been protected from the cold and rain. On another day the students traveled to an AIDS clinic with several members of the Lima Mennonite Brethren Church, visiting with women and children who are infected with HIV. And, on a memorable afternoon, they accompanied members of the Mennonite Brethren Church to a Childrens Hospital in San Juan de Miraflores, another poor community located on the southern end of Lima. The students spent time holding abandoned babies who are seldom held, reading to children confined to their beds and painting pictures with kids who rarely have a chance to express themselves through art.

By week's end, three of the eight students whose travel had been delayed by the protest had accepted alternate assignments while the other five were able to travel to Junin as planned.