Quick trip to Lima Peru

We did a fast trip to Lima to introduce Helping Babies Breathe to a group of Doctors. Saturday morning we flew down and Monday morning we met at the Church Offices in Lima. Jeff did an introduction and overview to the course. 

One of our neighbors made hats to take and donate. 

That afternoon we met with US AID at the US Embassy. We would like to have support from all entities in the HBB endeavor so that everyone is working together.

On Tuesday we met with PAHO which is the Pan American Health Organization. They agreed to work together. We will return in September to do a training. Dr. Jaimie Joo and his wife Georgina are long time friends in Peru. We have done a lot of training with them. They are the mainstays of the program in Peru. They do a lot of Humanitarian projects in their country. 

After a couple of days of meetings we were on our own so we decided to see some things that we have not had time to in the past. We went to the old downtown Lima. San Francisco Church has a lot of cool things in it. We took a tour of it. 

The ceiling above is all wood work and very beautiful. The library is full of old old books, some of them are handwritten. If you look close you can see the spiral staircases to the upper level of books. 

The real attraction here are the catacombs underneath the Church. There are up to 75,000 people buried here. It was the first cemetery in Lima but now is under the Church. There are tunnels you walk own into to see the catacombs. They took all of the skeletons and put the different bones into different piles. There are some deep round pits that have following stacks of bones. 

We drove around and had fun seeing sights of Lima. We drove by a glassy window and I shot this picture of us. I had Jeff wave. That is me with the camera. 

Jeff and our driver had a lively conversation. 

I love the colors and old doors and windows around Lima. 

There is a great museum we got to see. It is the Larco Museum. They had a resident Peruvian Hairless dog. He liked Jeff. 

The gardens here were so beautiful. So many vibrant colors. 

The museum had a lot of fun Peruvian things in it. These skulls were from people who had brain surgery done on them. It is believed that they survived the surgery. 

We caught the Hairless dog up to no good. 

Jeff pointed out that all the beautiful flowers had a little white flower inside of them. 

 Wednesday we a had a day all to ourselves. We stayed an extra day in case we had to do more meetings. So it was like a mini vacation. We slept in and took it easy. For lunch we found this fun little Italian place. It was very good. Right across the street was a pyramid. So we walked over and toured it. It was a dirt hill that they discovered was really a pyramid. They are slowly reconstructing it. 

 You can see the pile of hand made bricks that have been falling down and the newly placed bricks. They dig them up and put them back in proper order. 

 This pot was smashed in a ceremony. They smashed them and then they were integrated into the new walls and floors of buildings being built (anciently). It took 40 people a year to reconstruct the pot in the little museum. 

I took this picture from a moving taxi. It is an olive tree in a large olive tree grove. I have recently been interested in olive trees, olive oil and presses. We just went to the Mideast a month ago and I am reading books on the history there. I have learned how important olive trees and olive oil is in history. I was very fascinated with the fact that these trees were up to 1500 years old in Lima. History is similar no matter how far you go back in the world. I think I will do a future post on olive trees and olive oil.