January 15, 2007- ¨Lindsay, did you just say you were 2500 meters tall?¨

Yes, in fact, that is precisely what I said. Hmmmm…2500 meters. One tall girl I am, that´s for sure. I wish I could blame my response on confusion about the metric system, but after nearly seven months here, I have that system under control. What I don´t seem to have under control is simple conversation, such as answering the question, ¨How tall are you?¨ Somehow the question sounded like ¨At what altitude do you live at?¨ to me, and boy did I feel smart when I knew the answer to that question. When the nurse that asked me the question started arguing with me, I was wondering why she even asked if she knew the answer, but then I realized that I had misinterpreted her question and she was merely pointing out that I was about 2499 meters off in my height estimation. It was very reminiscent to a situation that my friend Rob encountered while we were in Argentina. After we went skydiving for the first time, we excitedly returned home to tell our host families all about it. Rob, to his unenthused host parents who hated him for some reason and liked to see him flounder language-wise, accidentally exclaimed that he had just jumped 10 million meters out of a plane. They just sat there unamused, probably thinking, ¨So your plane was circling around outerspace then? What the hell are you talking about?¨ Mistakes like this happen to the best of us, I guess.

It is only logical to assume that the more comfortable you become with your surroundings, the less opportunity you will have to find yourself in ridiculous situations. You know what they say about assuming though. Just this week I have found myself in some starkly silly situations, so I guess my familiarity with my environment is aiding me in no way whatsoever. First, my family made a huge deal out of planning an excursion for us to some nearby tourist attractions. They were doing this mainly for my benefit, and I felt honored that my host parents were actually considering leaving the farm for a whole day. It is nearly unfeasible to convince them that they could always dig their millions of potatoes out of the ground the next day (as if we need any more spuds in our diet, anyway). On the morning of our outing, we packed a picnic lunch and piled the 8 of us into a rented truck. With the sun as strong as it was that day, I thought it might be a nice time to debut my Christmas present from them, a slightly gaudy sun hat. As ridiculous as I looked all day, I was happy to be wearing it for two reasons: 1. My scalp would have instantaneously combusted without it, and 2. They were so appreciative that I was getting use out of it, and told me that before that day, they had thought I hated their gift to me. On our last stop as we were circling around a large laguna, a huge gust of wind came and blew their present into the middle of the lake. So much for showing my appreciation, eh? Even though we paid money to tour this site, my family became obsessed instead with retrieving this hat. We won´t let it go, don´t worry gringa. Uh, I hate to tell you guys, but I sort of let it go the second it became entangled in muddy algae, about ten seconds after the first seagull took a shit on it. Really, let´s go to the petting zoo and I´ll buy a new hat later.

But nooooooooooo…..my 11 year old cousin who forgot to mention that he couldn’t swim (or even float for that matter) decided to strip down to his superman underwear and take the plunge. What a frigging hero, attempting to save my already ruined hat, an act that almost resulted in me jumping in to save his drowning ass in the 3.5 feet of water (feet, not meters, this time I am not confused). I finally convinced my incorrigible family members that I was over it and that we should walk around and enjoy the rest of our trip. Just when I thought the scenario had been erased from their memories (two hours later), they insisted that we stop by the laguna to see if my hat had floated to the edge. I didn’t want the hat after it was in the infested water for a mere 2 minutes, but sure, I´ll wear it after its been in there for three hours. Why not? I walked/ran ahead of them, and quickly glanced at the lake before exclaiming, ¨Nope, its not here, must´ve sank, let´s go home and call it a day.¨ But Lindsay, you didn’t check over here….OH MY GOD, HERE IT IS! We´ll save it for you and you can wear it tomorrow! And that is precisely how I came to wear a moldy hat on a daily basis.

On to other topics, like the killer rat that lives in my room. My room is really cozy when I don´t have a rat clawing at my face as I sleep. It started out as no big deal. It was just a little guy back in the day, maybe even something that I would describe as cute (Natalie, you understand how cute these sorts of things can be, don´t you?). Occasionally, I would wake up in the middle of the night to see it scurrying about in my corner, causing nobody any harm. All of the sudden (I am convinced that it swallowed my kitten who has been missing for a few weeks now) the rat resurfaced as larger than my head (insert jokes about my big head here, I´m used to it). This here rat, as soon as I get comfy in my bed each night, exits its habitat in whatever wall it hides in, and takes a running leap onto my bed. Aside from the diseases that it is most likely carrying, what gets me most is its thick, long, snake-like tail that slithers over my face as it is making itself at home on my pillow. Many people theorize that intelligence can be judged by how quickly a person adjusts to habitual and startling occurrences that they encounter. By this theory, I am a raging moron because I have not adjusted AT ALL to this ¨habitual and startling occurrence,¨ unless convulsing and screaming for my host parents connotes a healthy adjustment. Every night, at approximately 2am, they come up to my bedroom with huge sticks to annihilate the rat, and every night, the rat outsmarts us. Last night, my host mom came up with a more immediate solution.

Graciela (host mom): ¨Lindsay, just rub this powder all over your sheets and body.¨
Lindsay: ¨Is this potent rat poison powder, Graciela?¨
Graciela: ¨Why, yes it is…so you are familiar with it then?
Lindsay: ¨Um, I am familiar with it being toxic enough to kill a person, if they, I don´t know, RUB IT ALL OVER THEIR BODY.¨
Graciela: ¨Silly gringa, it will do you no harm. Trust me, we do this all the time.
Lindsay: ¨All right then¨ (as I lather myself in some rather pungent rat poison).

Good news: For the first time in weeks, the rat didn´t attempt to bunk up with me.
Bad news: My skin is very obviously enflamed and I might die (but probably not).

Ahhh…just another ordinary day in Peru…

January 9th, 2007- ¨I abhor kids,¨ says the youth development volunteer

And sometimes it´s the honest to gosh truth. Kids can be so cruel, and many times I find myself praying that I didn´t give my parents as much trouble as some kids here give me. Is this karma, mom? Dad? If so, I sincerely hope that it´s a short-lived punishment.

So the kids here are on ¨summer vacation¨ for two months, with their sole assignment being to make my life a living hell. I am thinking of passing them all with flying colors because they are wreaking havoc like it´s their high-paying job. The bulk of my job begins with their next academic year, but I decided to try to form a summer English/culture club to get to know the kids better before March when classes start up again. So to get this club off the ground, I announced it in the schools before classes were let out in December, but I knew another form of broadcasting would be necessary as a reminder. I decided to create a number of huge and colorfully time-consuming posters to hang throughout the town to further advertise my mission. I spent about 4 hours making the posters and another 5 getting permission to hang them in various locations throughout my sprawling mountain town. Feeling good about my accomplishment, I decided to return home to reward myself with a few scoops of peanut butter and a catnap. Catnap is defined as a short period of shuteye, supposedly not long enough for some punk to rip down every poster I just hung around town. Are you kidding me? I wonder if the Peace Corps will pay to have video cameras installed so I can catch the ungrateful creep next time he/she (but don´t we all know it´s a he? This is me being realistic, not sexist) is defacing my property.

I kept smiling, though, with my optimism intact. After all, maybe a few people were able to read the signs before that callous character succeeded in his rebellion against who knows what. I continued planning for my first course, envisioning at least 15 smiling Peruvian faces before me. The day before my first class, I was doing pretty well. I spent half of the day planning interactive activities to teach the kids the English translations of physical and personality attributes. I was even able to locate the key for the school where I would hold the course (after a community member essentially told me that the only keyholder had died, and that the community thought the key may have accidentally been buried with him). Swell. So the only remaining thing for me to do was take a trip to the city to buy some supplies like chalk and posterboard. Let me preface the rest of this story by mentioning that my city throws a huge party throughout the whole month of February that mirrors and probably rivals Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. The most deplorable aspect of this carnival celebration is that there is not a space in our entire region that is safe from the hurling of water balloons, buckets of water, condiments like ketchup and mustard, oil, anything that people feel like tossing at others, really. What my host parents forgot to mention to me is that January 1st marked the start of Carnival season (meaning it lasts for 2 LONG months, and that it is impossible to escape your fate of getting drenched, and subsequently really pissed). It´s cold in Cajamarca in the afternoons after the rains come, and the last thing anyone wants after managing to stay dry from the rains is to be pelted by a balloon that really smarts when it hits and breaks on you. I managed to buy all of my materials in the city, only to be hit hard by two water balloons, about 10 supersoakers, and almost by a full bottle of beer that came crashing at my feet (real safe). The most creatively obnoxious kid didn´t like my non-reaction to his supersoaker, so he ran up behind me and hit me upside the head with his large water pistol. It suffices to say that someone in Peru almost lost their child. I was FURIOUS! It´s really scary. The cops do nothing to regulate the activity, so it´s like a two month long free-for-all involving mostly people who take things a bit too far. It makes me wish my mom was coming to visit another month, because this could surely leave her with a sour taste in her mouth. The city is really deceiving right now. It still resembles a picturesque European town nestled in the hills, but now it is equipped with furtive snipers on just about every corner. I am in the process of fashioning my mom and me some plastic space suits so that we are impervious to anything thrown in our direction. And I´m sure my mom will opt to wear hers considering how fashionable they will undoubtedly be.

I think the world could sense how frustrated I was with youth after this all went down, because my first course took off with no complications. An impressive 20 people showed up, and were even fairly respectful towards me. Since I tend to speak a different dialect of Spanish than they do (read: a dialect that doesn´t exist anywhere other than my brain), many times the kids here ignore me and don´t view me as an authority on anything aside from making a royal ass out of myself. The two hours with them flew by, and I think they may have even learned something. The Peruvian youth here generally aren´t too participatory or creative, so it is hard to get them to take part in the class, but I essentially forced them into it by calling on people. I´d say the class was coercively interactive. Now we just have to see how many of them come back next time.

Peru´s youth is still such an anomaly to me. There are times when I think that childhood and adolescence don´t exist to the extent that we know them in the states. I´ll be walking through the countryside with my counterpart when I regularly witness girls that look no older than 12 breastfeeding their babies or cooking some elaborate meal over their wood stoves. Other times though, like when 18 year old boys are hooting and hollering at me in the most mischievous and immature way, I think that in some ways, many of the youth here are less developed than those I know back home. While I recognize that it is never okay to generalize, it is difficult to work with youth without making some comparisons. Some days it still seems pretty unreal that this is my life for the next 20 months. I am happy though that I still cease to have many lasting complaints.