"Mom, I really can't believe you packed up three kids and took us to live in Peru for almost a month!" my now 12 year old son reminisced as we looked at photos of our trip to Cusco. Our family is now embarking on our 3rd volunteer trip to South America - a now annual tradition, born out of a virtual meeting with Celeste Marion and a leap of faith trip to volunteer at Manos Unidas (MU) in Peru. Many people ask me - how did you end up choosing Peru, and how did you find an or

I started to have second thoughts about traveling to Ecuador with our kids, ages 5 and 8, when it was time for the kids to get their travel vaccinations. It was with the first painful scream that I then wondered what on earth are we doing!? We were leaving the country in a month, flying on an airplane for over 15 hours, and bringing our kids to a country where they had to rely on their mother’s college Spanish to get them through and their father’s crazy, offensively defensi