It turns out that keeping up with people individually, at any meaningful level, is quite hard at this range. Skipping around Inca ruins and taking day trips is a lot of fun, but it is not really how we've been spending our time, nor is it what we came here for (though it's a huge bonus). This is a documentation of the day-to-day stuff, that doesn't get much of a mention in the photos, and we're hoping it'll evolve into a travel blog when Joel joins us and we travel for two months from Lima to Rio in the Summer.

So we're into our sixth week of our Andean Adventure as the Ginger and the Giant Gringos (I am 2 inches taller than the average male Peruvian, and a full 7 inches taller than the average woman. At church last week I was the 6th tallest person in a room of nearly 1000. And no-one here is has ever seen a ginger before. Sarah was met with screams of genuine terror at one pre-school.) Sarah and I are living with a missionary family in Cusco, and we're mostly doing a lot of kids' work, in churches, communities, schools and the Regional Hospital. It's tiring (especially at this altitude, where apparently the body needs an extra hour of sleep every night!) but it's going well, and I'm certainly learning a lot.

The Sunday School groups are going well. The Sunday School at the half Spanish, half Quechua church we attend was started by Jenny (the missionary we're living with) primarily for her own children about two weeks before we arrived. It's held in what is effectively a builders' dumping yard - complete with 10 foot piles of bricks, tyres, piles of construction materials, sheep and dog poo. Still, holding the session outside means that children from the neighbourhood can see us and join us, and there's a bit more room to run around in (albeit an obstacle course of almost life-and-death risks, with rusting nails and glass). Members of the church have now put up a piece of tarpaulin, held in place with sticks, to shade a section of the area. What is lacking in resources is certainly made up for in ingenuity. We now have about 20 children who come regularly, and we always have a little audience of shy children from the area who sit and watch us from the hill, so our numbers are growing each week as we coax them down with biscuits and colouring!

The work in the Regional Hospital is good, but challenging. This hospital is where people who have no insurance get treated, so they're the poorest people in Cusco. It serves the whole Cusco Region, which is nearly 30,000 square miles in size, so the families who live in out-lying villages in the mountains have to travel for hours to get to it. We go in during visiting hours a couple of times a week and visit the children in Surgery, Trauma, Pediatrics and Burns.The kids are usually in for quite a while  - especially in Burns, where they are often in for months at a time - so we are getting to know some of them quite well, and they get very excited when they see us coming through the entrance door of the ward. Sometimes, patients and their parents, especially from the further-out villages, don't speak much Spanish - only Quechua, the indigenous language - which means they don't understand what the doctors are telling them. They are desperate and scared, and parents often follow us down the corridors to speak to us about their children. Of course, there's not much we can do, apart from listen and pray with them, and try to alleviate their boredom and pain with colouring sheets, games, conversation, puppets, crafts and songs. (On the days I don't take the guitar, they always ask for it, and the men lying in the other wards shout at us to come and sing with them too! My repertoire of Spanish songs is limited, but they absolutely loved the kids songs we sang with them - recording it and watching back the recordings before we'd even left the ward... I certainly wasn't expecting my Year Abroad to include singing and playing Spanish children's songs to a room full of Quechua men lying in beds - and more watching from the doorway - but there you go.) The kids are so well-natured, considering some are bed-bound, and they're all fairly ill. One of our favourites to visit is in a room with two older men, and when he chooses his colouring sheets from our book, he beams and says "¡Qué bonito es!" ("how beautiful!") So even though we can't help much, it's a pleasure to provide just a bit of excitement in the days of the patients!

We are also working in two pre-schools. The first is a private pre-school, and the kids seem to be between 3 and 5. The first time we went, we explained that we were here to learn Spanish, and would like to see how the pre-school classes were run, and to help where appropriate. The teacher introduced us to the 34 children: "Children, the Señoritas are here to teach you songs. Listen to them" and with the threat of a whip in her hand, left the room, leaving us with the children, some crying, some fighting, some speaking only Quechua, some without chairs, some on their first day, to do 'Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes' (in Spanish) for 45 minutes until we found her to tell her we had to leave... This week was largely the same: perhaps even slightly worse as the teacher decided to have a meeting with the parents just outside the door while we looked after the class, so there was a fairly constant flow of distraught children running out of the classroom to their parents.

The second pre-school seems to be looking after about 8 children aged from 1 to 3. It seems to be fairly well organised, and we haven't been abandoned with the children. Yet. They just cry. A lot. I think we were the first Gringos they'd ever seen, because some of them were absolutely terrified of us at first! There is some cultural progress to be made.

The other kids group we've been to is called CORASON (an acronym with a pun on the Spanish word for 'heart'.) We spent the afternoons of our first three weeks there on the side of the mountain, playing with the kids, telling Bible stories in full costume and face paint, playing frisbee with the pros and trying to skip Double Dutch. Every afternoon, as we walked through the village to the building, the kids would run from their houses shouting 'HERMANA, HERMANA!' and walk up the hill with us. We enjoyed it so much that we've been trying to slot in one afternoon a week there since we've started at the hospital and the other kids' groups.

So that's a bit of an introduction to the other 6 days a week, when we're not spotting llamas in the mountains and finding chicken feet in our soup. See it as just a little insight until I can tell you all the details in the flesh.