Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Peru

Ruins about 3 hours outside of Machu Pichu.



Temple where the Spaniards found a statue of Jesus Christ. BofM anyone?



The Sacred Valley. The Incas used these tiered planters to acclimate their potato plants to altitude.



Dead guy we found. Still wearing his tuque.



The guinea pig we ate for dinner.



The Shaman Priest giving an offering to Mother Earth.



Filming in the Andes.



The valley of the community we stayed with.



The NorthFace tents they put us up in.



Cuzco city center. This Catholic church is the biggest building in town.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Impact International Trip to Peru

I just returned from a trip to Peru and Bolivia with Impact International. Impact was founded by my younger brother Daniel with the purpose of involving students in support of other worthy, established non-profits that don't have a student arm. The purpose of the trip was to document and create marketing materials for the non-profit Deseret International, a medical non-profit that supports local third-world doctors in performing corrective surgeries on cleft lip, cataracts, and clubbed feet. We also shot footage for a piece that Impact will be doing on food and starvation.

The trip was awesome. We made stops in:
  1. Cuzco, Peru
  2. Puno, Peru
  3. La Paz, Bolivia
  4. Lima, Peru
I will post some pics of the sites and the cities, but first I wanted to drop a few of our pics of the children we saw that were being treated:







I grew up serving within the ranks of Operation Smile, another non-profit dedicated to fixing cleft lips in third world children, and though I have seen thousands of pictures just like these, it was incredible to actually get to see the children and hear the stories of pain told by the mothers when others treat their children so terribly. To see the surgeries was incredible, that in a few hours and at the cost of a few hundred dollars, a person's entire life can change so drastically.

It was an amazing experience and I am grateful for how lucky I am to be blessed with a healthy body, a beautiful and healthy family, for the ability and freedoms to work and provide for ourselves, for a brother who is so proactive in making the world a better place, and the many factors that facilitated and allowed me to participate in this trip.

Those interested in supporting Impact International can do so by making a donation here. For $20 a complete surgery can be performed, changing a child's entire life. This cost per surgery is the lowest I have found anywhere in the world, and is facilitated by a genius and well executed model used by Deseret International. Through the use of donated American medical supplies, supporting the local doctors, Deseret is able to support these doctors in doing the surgeries for just a few dollars.


Find more videos like this on Impact International