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.