Monday, June 05, 2006

Learning More About Peru

I decided to take a class offered by the Instituto Bartolomé de las Casas called Introduction to the Peruvian Reality. It started today and lasts three weeks. It´s oriented toward foreigners who are working in the area of social development in Peru. There are twenty of us in the class, and I think I´m the only student who isn´t associated with a religious order.

There was no electricity at the institute today because someone had stolen an electrical cable a block away. (It´s not uncommon for people to steal electrical or telephone cables and sell them as scrap metal.) So we weren´t able to view the PowerPoint presentations or videos, but I learned a lot about the early history of Peru. The Incas weren´t the ones who invented the impressive agricultural and architectural methods that we still admire today. (No, it wasn´t extraterrestrials, either.) They evolved over several thousand years and several different civilizations that preceded them.

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