Earthquake

I'm good, I was on my way to our Business Director's house on a combi (mini-public bus) in Lima when the earthquake hit, and I was practicing Quechua with another volunteer in the back of the combi. We were busy reading our notebooks, and we just thought we were on a bad gravel road and didn't even bother looking up. It wasn't until we stopped on the side of the road that we asked what was going on and at that point all the people were out of their houses and in the street. We went into our Director's house and we could see how some of the pool water had jumped out of the pool. The epicenter was south of Lima close to Chincha, Ica, and Pisco. I had actually visited Chincha the weekend of July 29th, which is a beach town with a diverse population of peruvians, afro-peruvians, and tourists. The living room in the house we were staying at collapsed during the earthquake and the people there have no water or electricty, but thankfully the family we stayed with is okay. About 30% of the Chincha is leveled, the town of Pisco is pretty much gone with half the hospital collapsed, and 25% of the buildings have collapsed in Ica, which has about 120,000 people. The richter scale of the earthquake was upgraded to 8.1, and there was about a dozen tremors over 3 days. The power went out for a hour in my barrio and a couple others the day after the earthquake, but the volunteers and I were pretty much unaffected by the earthquake and fortunately the majority of volunteers happened to be in Lima at the time at the Peace Corps Center for a variety of meetings. I had my future site visit last week, I'm going to be living in Tuti, Arequipa which is 3,790 meters above sea level (12,343 feet) which is over 1,000 feet higher than Mount Hood. I need to take two more weeks of Quechua before I head out, which is the language of the Incas. I don't need to know it, and I'll be using plenty of Spanish in my site but it is going to help with me intergrating into my site because the older people use at times and the people will have alot of respect for a gringo who can speak Quechua. There a few different types of Quechua but my group of 4 volunteers going to Arequipa are fortunate to have a Peace Corps professor of Quecha who is of Arequipa and knows the correct Quechua for us to learn. It's optional but I figured why not take advantage of getting to learn an indigenous language for free and maybe I'll have come home with 2 new languages. My primary project will be me working with the cheese company in Tuti. They want me to help look for new markets but first they need to standardize their product. I talked to them about changing their packaging since they only use ceranwrap for their product. I also connected up with 3 different youth associations about doing future projects with them, all the people want me to teach english, and there's a couple projects I want to do with tourism like helping them develop web pages and repairing the guardrails and chairs at sightseeing site and making a tablet with information about the Valle del Colca in Spanish and English. If your curious about exactly where will I be, look up Valley of Colca (Valle del Colca). I will be living in it, and it is spectacular and one of the must see sights of the world, there should be plenty of info about it in the internet.