A taste of normality

The other day I went to the US for coffee. Then I walked back out onto the street into Peru again. This magical space warp is commonly known as Starbucks. And I actually went more than once. More like three times in three days during a shocking dip into urban life last week. I made my first trip back to Lima after three months in the mountains, and although I absolutely love the easy-going Andean lifestyle, Lima was a refreshing return to "normal" life.

In the short but busy trip, I started each morning with a grande coffee from Starbucks, which feels exactly like a US Starbucks except that the menu is in Spanish. Then I was off to the Peace Corps office for a 9 to 5 day of meetings. I am working with the Women in Development / Gender and Development (WID/GAD) committee, which is a 5 member team in charge of developing gender-related training programs and resources for Peace Corps staff and volunteers. It is a relatively new committee, and we spent almost two full days working on mission statements and developing a set of objectives to direct future WID/GAD activities in Peru. It was a lot of nitty-gritty work, and by the end of the three days, I was tired, a bit frantic, and totally strung out on coffee. In other words, the most normal I have felt in months. I also got to meet a bunch of new volunteers, eat good food, and get updated on all the Peru gossip. All in all, a very successful first business trip.

Now I am back in Huaraz, but things haven't slowed down much. I catch another night bus tomorrow to go to reconnect in Pacasmayo, where all the Peru 12ers will be together for the first time since November. It's going to be a crazy time on the coast, mixed with official business of course. Sorry to all of you who are still battling the last days of winter, but I'm off to the beach!

A few life observations:

1. I don't understand Carnaval. It is a seemingly endless celebration that starts in January and lasts through the beginning of March, and for the entire stretch you have to watch out for kids with squirt guns, water balloons, and buckets. I've tried several techniques including intimidation (yelling and running directly at the offenders), the classic Peruvian finger shake that means 'no way,' and even pleading (por favor, soy una pobre gringa), all with very little success. And whatever you do, DON'T sit by an open window in a car or bus, because you will get drenched. And then sometimes the woman next to you will decide to change her entire outfit right there in the back seat of the car where you are squeezed in with 5 other people.

Carnaval is also a festival that involves lots of drunk men trying to raise a full tree in the plaza using ropes and ladders. Then more drunk men with axes cut it down. Highly entertaining, but watch from a safe distance.

2. Crayons are God's gift to teachers everywhere. I made it through 6 weeks of English classes which included students aged 5 through 15, a smattering of baby brothers and sisters, several regular dogs, and even a chicken on one occasion. And who would have guessed it, but the 15-year-old boys love coloring just as much as the 3-year-old.


3. I am currently living every 7-year-old child's dream: I get to eat french fries for dinner all the time!! Just french fries, sometimes with white rice. Whenever I am wishing I could have just a little something green on my plate, I remind myself that as a kid I would have been in heaven.

4. I always planned to spend my golden birthday somewhere really cool. As a first-grader, I was thinking something more like Hawaii, but if you had told me that my 23rd birthday would involve an adobe hut and a pot of chocolate pudding, I think I would have liked that.

The rainy season has set in here in Sacsa, and although it has been abnormally dry according to my neighbors, we still get plenty of damp and chill. Pretty much every day, the clouds come creeping down the mountains and settle into town, shutting out the spectacular scenery and sometimes even the house across the street. The clothes don't dry, all my pants are spattered with muck, and there isn't much to do in the rain besides sit in my room. There is an undeniable coziness, however, to bundling up with a cup of tea at the kitchen table and watching bits of cloud wander through the patio.

The town plaza on a sunny day

On the homefront, the bathroom is finally progressing, my siblings often remind me after breakfast that we have to brush our teeth, and I have a brand new cement floor! My host family is always a trip, with the three kids behaving just like like siblings anywhere, picking on each other, fighting over the small spoon and the seat near the fire (mom, read: the window seat and the piggy glass), and playing together like angels when they think no one is looking. Those are the things that make me feel most at home- the 14-year-old boys stealing hats and shawls from the teenage girls (seany, I think of you every time), a bunch of farmers giving the NGO representative bunny ears in our group photo. And the other night I followed a tremendous ruckus to its source and found my entire family in a monkey pile on the bed, my siblings piled on top of my dad and my host mom on top of everyone. Of course, like all family fun, it ended with someone crying.

My front door

My daily activities have expanded a bit. I have been attending quite a few community meetings, gathering information, and working on lesson plans for English classes, which I am now teaching twice a week. My first class started slowly, almost an hour late, with only eight kids, but more kept showing up. At the end of the second class, there were 24 kids, two babies, and a dog, with four more kids peering in the windows. I had to kick everyone out at lunch time because everyone wanted to stay and color more.

The view down my street on a cloudy evening

My new favorite activity, though, or call it an obsession, is looking for cactus fruits called tunas. Erica and I conquered our first cactus together and harvested five fruits. Three had worms. But we thoroughly enjoyed the other two. Somehow that, more than anything, made me feel accomplished.

Erica working on picking a tuna, trying not to get covered in spines

Enjoy!

Happy Holidays!

Happy New Year!! Everyone have their yellow underwear on for good luck? Or is that just a Peruvian thing? The markets switched from red and green garlands to a sea of yellow ribbons, necklaces, glasses, and of course, yellow underwear of every imaginable variety and level of indecency. I settled for a moderate pair, no lace. Hope they bring me luck this year. I certainly am going to need it.

Although life in site has been pretty smooth so far, the first month in Sacsa has still been a real challenge. There is a lot to get adjusted to, most of all the incredibly slow pace of life. The first three months or so are dedicated to getting to know the community, rather than starting any projects, which means I spend a lot of time wandering around aimlessly or sitting on a log outside my house reading a book. This strategy actually works pretty well for starting conversations with the neighbors, since everyone is very curious about the fact that I actually read for FUN. People always ask if I am working, and since I started reading "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," which is thick and hard-covered, several people have asked if they could borrow my Bible.

Christmas was also an interesting experience. There were a few parties in town, but mostly on the days between Christmas and New Year's. On Christmas itself there was a bit of dancing (and a lot of drinking) at the school, and I got my first chance to embarrass myself dancing in front of half the town. Then we ate some paneton, which is like an oversized, super dry muffin studded with red and green candied fruit and raisins. Not my favorite holiday treat, and I have eaten it either for breakfast or dinner or both every day for the past two weeks. Reason #1 I am glad the holidays are over. I am looking forward to moving into my second month in Sacsa without the pressure of the holidays hanging over my head, and hopefully getting started with some little projects to keep me busy. My current initiative involves encouraging my little sisters to brush their teeth. Starting small.

Happy holidays to everyone!

Welcome to Sacsa

It has been a while, and so much has happened in the past three weeks. All 47 volunteers in my training group swore in as PC volunteers on November 28th, and from there we all went our separate ways. I moved up to Ancash with 8 other volunteers from Peru 12, and we did all our pre-site shopping in the capital city of Huaraz, buying mattresses, sheets, and other necessities. Then on December 2nd, Erica and I hired a taxi for the three hour journey to our sites. I can only imagine what people must have thought about the two strange white girls driving around with two mattresses on top of a stationwagon. But we made it, and have managed to settle into our respective homes in towns about 20 minutes apart from each other.

So about life in Sacsa- things are pretty calm in a town of perhaps 500 people, and my main responsibilities right now involve smiling and saying "buenos dias" to everyone and trying to remember names and faces. I spend a lot of time hanging out at the kitchen table, which is in an open-air patio in my adobe house, talking to my host parents and my two little host sisters, who are 5 and 3 and love to chat. They have been a big help in introducing me to the kids in town, and now I can't even walk out the front door without some kid yelling my name from down the street. I also read in the plaza a lot, just trying to get myself out there. If there's one thing I have learned in the past two weeks, it is that you never know what will happen once you set foot outside. On Thursday, for example, I took the ten minute hike out to the hilltop where I get cell phone reception, thinking I would just make a quick call and then walk to Erica's house for a relaxing evening with her host family. Instead, I walked past the school and ended up getting pulled into the primary school's graduation party and sitting with a family I had never met and then eating soup and guinea pig at a table with the 12-yr-old graduates in front of the entire gathering. I am really bad at eating guinea pig. There is definitely an art to it that I have NOT mastered. Something to work on in order to fit in better, I guess.

My first three months in site will be dedicated to these sorts of awkward activities- meeting the important figures in town, starting to develop relationships with the various organizations with which I hope to work, and just figuring out how to survive in general. So far, so good. The people of Sacsa have been so friendly (an older woman approached me in the plaza to give me cookies and I could have cried I felt so welcomed) and the landscape is absolutely stunning. On a clear day, I can see the tips of six snow-capped mountains from my cell phone rock.

Me talking on the phone with the nevados in the background.
And with my neighbor, Erica, taking advantage of the cell reception.

I will also need to start learning Quechua, since most of the adults in my town converse with one another in the Andean tongue, and I would like to know exactly what people are saying about me when they converse with each other in Quechua, glancing at me and throwing in key spanish phrases like "cuerpo de paz" and "estados unidos." But one step at a time.

New mailing address

Hey hey everyone! I am only five days away from becoming a REAL volunteer, and as such, I will be moving to the very very very small town of Sacsa in the department of Ancash. If you are looking for it on a map, you probably won't find it. But if you look just to the north and east of the city of Caraz, I am in that general area. I got the chance to visit two weeks ago and see my new home and meet my new family. So while I am totally scared out of my mind, at least I know what I am in for. I leave for the department capital city, Huaraz, with a group of other Ancash volunteers on Saturday night, and from there I am on my own as I head to my site, probably on the 2nd of December. I will put up some pics and a more detailed post once I get to Huaraz, but for now I just wanted to call attention to my new mailing address, which is posted on the right, just in case...

back from the campo

I just got back from a week of field-based training in the department of Lambayeque, up in northern Peru, and what a crazy week it was. We got to explore the department capital city, Chiclayo, and visit three volunteers in their sites in the bosque seco (dry forest). Our activities for the week included getting blisters digging a garden plot, more blisters chopping wood with machetes (which is not as easy as the Peruvians make it seem), presenting a lesson and game to a class of 40 school kids, blisters on top of the other blisters digging holes and putting in fence posts, trying to control over 100 children during a garbage pick-up, and then sorting through that garbage bare-handed to pick out the recycling.

Here we are after conquering the bosque seco with our machetes. And another photo of our little group captivating the peruvian children with a lesson about trees.

Ah yes... I almost forgot about the donkey. The one that i rode for over two hours. In the dark. Yes mom, I know I promised that I wouldn't wander around the campo by myself at night, yet somehow I found myself, on my first night out in the country, seated on the back of a little burro named Reina with my twelve-year-old host sister, going out to the store to buy food for dinner. Little did I know that the store was over an hour away, and that it would be pitch dark by the time we got home at 8:30 PM. The whole time I just kept hoping that I wouldn't become another tally mark under the category of Peace Corps volunteers lost or injured due to stupidity. And all we bought was a bag of rice and some sweet potatoes. And we didn't even eat the the rice. After all that work, just potatoes for dinner. That is my life.

A couple more photos, just to prove that I am actually alive and well. Above I am with my travel group, plus a few more volunteers, putting my feet all over some ancient pre-incan petroglyphs. And again with a couple girls from one of the schools we worked at. The girl on the far right is my host sister, Victoria. The one who protected me on the donkey. In other news, I am excited about the elections tomorrow, finding out my site on Thursday, and going to visit it for the first time on Sunday!!! Until next time...