Lindsay´s adventures in being ¨un poco menos Peruana que la papa¨

July 11, 2008- On the Way Out

2008-07-12T10:12:00.000-07:00

June 23rd marked exactly two years in country, and my group is currently closing its service and preparing for its departure from Peru. Some Volunteers from my group are receiving replacement Volunteers to continue the projects they started at site, and these replacements are currently training in Lima. It is hard to believe that they are at the beginning of their Peace Corps journeys, and we are at the end of ours. It seems surreal, to say the least. To be honest, there was very little severance between thinking my service would never end and its actual conclusion. I really expected everything to unfold in a more gradual manner, with me conscious of each passing moment (especially considering the lack of diversion and distraction here). Frankly, I am really taken aback that two years passed me by with such rapidity. It seems like just yesterday that I came, but at the same time, I almost forgot that I would one day leave.

We started with 37 Volunteers and are ending with 32, which is not too shabby of a record. I think all of us are currently pondering how Peru has changed us, and how we have affected our little niches in Peru. From day one of training, we were taught that if we impacted just one person in two years at site, that this would be a true accomplishment. In the beginning, I naively viewed this as an underachiever’s opinion, but now I believe it to be accurately aligned with my experience. It is hard to believe that with all the work and effort I put in, probably only a few people from my community were truly touched. It took me a long time to be okay with that.

In terms of the effect that Peru has had on me, I believe this will take awhile to fully surface. I see small changes in my attributional style and general mentality, but nothing too notable. Today as I was on a combi back to my site, a few traditionally-dressed campo women were staring at me with wide grins spread across their faces. I thought, ¨There must be some food on my face,¨ and tried to see my reflection in the window to rectify the problem. Two years ago, I would have thought, ¨How much longer are these people going to find entertainment in how white I am, or what I am wearing, or how much water I have consumed in the short period that I have been in their presence?¨ Now, for some reason, when I consider how I appear to the outside world, I always think that I look just like the women from my site. This could be no further from the truth, considering I have in no way changed my appearance since arriving (aside from gaining 20 pounds of pure rice and potato weight), and also taking into account that they are some of the most indigenous human beings I have ever met. Delusions such as my thinking that we bear any likeness in appearance might signify that I have been here a little too long.

I suppose I have adequately expressed my confusion at where all the time went, so I will move on. Things have been a little uncomfortable with my host family. I am the third Volunteer to live in their house, and I think they are over having house guests. At first, gringas were such a novelty to them, but now they seem genuinely bored. I guess it has finally occurred to them that people are people, no matter their origin. I wish they could have waited a bit longer to have this epiphany because it has made for some tension in the house. I think they feel really conflicted about how to treat me, and I have been receiving some seriously mixed messages from them. When I am here, they often forget to feed me, and when my starved self surfaces, they look pissed as if my existence presents a huge burden to them. Keep in mind that I pay rent, and usually eat a mere tea plate full of food per day. If I were not here, that food would still exist, and would be fed to our chickens. If I pose an imposition to them, I can´t figure out why or how. I get excited to tell them if I have a trip to the capital city planned, because I think it will relieve them of an inconvenience, but then they complain about me being gone. Should I stay or should I go? Make up your mind, people. And if I am doing something to so horrifically bother you, just tell me. I am a flexible person. I can change.

As I have expressed in just about every other blog entry, communication style has been a big source of frustration for me here. I was relieved when my host aunt confided in me, without me prompting the discussion, that my host parents were not normal communicators and that I should not consider passive aggression a cultural characteristic of Peru, but a personal one. This made me smile for a while, until I realized that this knowledge was in no way alleviating how uncomfortable they sometimes make me feel. I think I finally figured it out tonight though, after only two full years in site. Whenever my host dad is irked with me, I have noticed a pattern in his behavior. He tells me, ¨Tienes que ir a la iglesia conmigo esta noche.¨ This does not translate to, ¨Hey Lindsay, there is going to be a cool presentation in church tonight. You can accompany me if you want.¨ It actually translates to, ¨You are a sinner and there is no way out of coming to church with me tonight.¨ So tonight, as with many other Friday nights, I sat in church for hours on end. However, I didn´t realize until tonight that this was a necessary step in restoring the equilibrium of my household ambiance. I will never know what I do that pisses them off so consistently, but tonight I can rest assured that it only takes five hours in a very painful church ceremony to right my wrongs. I feel cleansed, and yes, that last admission is dripping in sarcasm.

Since our church services usually consist of singing the same song over and over again for three to five hours, and I memorized that melodic gem after my first time hearing it, I usually come up with other activities that I can subtly perform from my pew to keep myself from going crazy. Some nights, I count all of the right angles in the church (there are thousands!), and other nights (but only when I am feeling especially imaginative), I try my hardest to envision the traditionally-attired women in flared or skinny jeans and a fitted top, with make-up, straightened or curled hair, and stiletto heels. It is like a mental game of paper dolls, but with three-dimensional characters. It might seem shallow and materialistic, but think about it. These women, for some reason, exert no form of individuality. Each and every one of them, each and every day, wears a layered knee-length skirt, sandals made from recycled tires, a white button-down shirt, and a cardigan sweater. It is hard to believe that I have never seen a woman at my site wearing pants, and that because their clothes are so bulky, I have no real concept of how their bodies are shaped. They all wear their hair in a long single braid down their backs, and as I was in church today staring at the back of their heads and preparing myself for another rousing round of mental dress-up, I realized that I could not tell which one was my host mom. It started freaking me out, like I had stumbled upon the Peruvian-version of Stepford Wives, or whatever that creepy story/movie is called. I love that Peruvian culture is so intact here, but I wish it didn´t come at the expense of women enjoying no form of individual expression. Kids and men seem to be able to wear whatever they want, and act like idiots if they so desire, but as soon as girls hit a certain age, they quite suddenly settle down and transform into cookie-cutter campo women. In my classes, it is nearly impossible to get the girls to contribute their ideas, and the teachers don´t scold this lack of active participation, as though it is proper and expected for girls to keep their mouths shut. I would almost pay money to see a girl walk into class one day with a lip ring or Mohawk. I don´t know why we criticize kids in the states for strange behavioral outbursts. At least they have unique personalities. At least they feel comfortable straying from the norm. My hope for Peru is that it can maintain its rich cultural components while liberating its women and rewarding creativity and individuality in its children.

Following this thought, I recently administered a vocational exam to my two oldest groups of students. They had to answer 60 questions about their likes and dislikes, and their tabulated responses led to a list of professions they might enjoy or be good at. I was watching them so I know they weren´t copying from one another, but somehow, most of them arrived at the same list of professions, when there were nine different lists in all. What is it about my community that is creating such robotic personalities? It is really disappointing to see a group of children who aren´t being introduced to their full potentials. It is even more disappointing that I hit such resistance from teachers and community members when I try to introduce anything special to the school system. I need more than just two years. I need a lifetime!

April 2, 2008- The day I made my host mom cry over milk (that wasn´t spilt)

2008-04-06T11:29:00.000-07:00

We were forewarned that Peruvians eat very light breakfasts and dinners, and that lunch is the heartier meal here. I haven´t really warmed up to this custom, and I find myself regularly famished both before and after lunch. I miss big breakfasts terribly, and whip up pancakes often to address my longing. It is rude to cook anything here and not offer it to your host family, but seeing them slyly feed all of my creations (from French toast to tacos) to our mangy dogs has made me a bit less generous with the culinary luxuries I allow myself. The straw that broke the camel´s back was seeing them dump my deliciously fluffy banana pancakes (that they claimed they LOVED, and always beg me to cook again) with expensive imported maple syrup in front of our collection of spoiled chickens. I swear, these animals eat better than I do. Anyway, let´s get back to the point.

For as long as I can remember, I have come downstairs for breakfast and my host mom has placed a thermos of hot water in front of me as if she spent hours laboring over the stove to prepare it for me. Enjoy your breakfast gringa, she says, and by breakfast, she means wood-flavored water. Two times a week, there is bread to accompany my water, but other days, a lone cup of water greets me with no promise of anything tastier. I have been having my parents mail me instant oatmeal packets, so you shouldn´t feel too sorry for me, but for the last year and a half, I have been simply puzzled as to how these people work so productively on their farms with water as their only morning sustenance. A few weeks ago though, I learned their dirty secret. I inadvertently broke my morning routine, and ended up downstairs fifteen minutes before my usual feeding time. I opened our dining room door, and was greeted by the ashamed faces of all of my family members around the table, enjoying what can only be labeled as a smorgasbord of food. Soup, fresh bread, potatoes, fish, rice, hot chocolate, and fresh cow´s milk. Wait a minute, now…I thought Peruvians had ¨light breakfasts¨ consisting of nothing more than hot water. On this fated morning, they reluctantly invited me to sit down, and passed some bread to me. I was not upset at them for not sharing the potatoes and rice, since I get my fair share of those two things in this country. But my body is so protein deprived, that I think I hallucinated the fish calling my name. I just wanted some fish, or some milk, and after chewing my stale piece of bread, I went up to my room to sulk. How could they lie to me all this time about what breakfast is all about, and then when I catch them, not offer me anything even though I saw an abundance of food on the table behind us? I had a lot of trouble letting this go, since my life is essentially driven by food, but I had to be careful about how I handled this situation because Peruvians are not the most direct or communicative people in the world. My host dad thinks he is a saint for being so non-confrontational. He says that whenever he is angry, he lets God deal with his problem. He doesn´t seem to realize that while he is waiting for God to get down and dirty with his issues, that he (my host dad) is incredibly passive aggressive, and can be really hateful with his remarks. So whenever I have an issue with my host family, I have to be sure to pick my battles, because sometimes confrontations just cause them to gossip and make the situation more awkward than I could have ever imagined. For some reason (reason being I am obsessed with food), I could not let this go. I marched downstairs and told my host mom that I am still hungry after just a cup of water, and asked her if she could at least please save me a cup of milk every morning. I told her that if it was a money issue (which is impossible considering a cup of milk cost 7 cents and she just inherited a huge heap of money from her dad that would even equate to a lot in the States), that I could pay her more money. She cried, sat down with me and told me how embarrassed she was, promised to serve me milk every day, and then proceeded to offer me hot water the next morning. I just can´t win. I have even gone as far as to buy us milk (even though we get milk daily from our 8 cows), and she still doesn´t serve it to me.

This is probably one of the most challenging things about being in the Peace Corps. You live with the same family for two years, so you assume that you will grow close, like a true family. In many senses, that is true. However, many cultural differences make it impossible to get past a certain point. I grew up in a place where communication is valued and rewarded. They grew up in a place where it is better to gossip about your problems or ignore them than confront the source of your issue. This has created a rather large rift between us, because it is a cultural component that I cannot seem to accept from them. Many times, they agree to things they are not comfortable with, and even feign enthusiasm. Then they grow resentful of what they agreed to, and blame you since you asked them to do whatever it is they are doing. It is really maddening. It leaves you constantly wondering what the heck you could have done to rub them the wrong way. They think that they are doing you a huge favor by not burdening you with their concern, but they are unintentionally making things tense by holding in something that bothers them so.

Here is an example. I am doing a project with another Volunteer, who lives about an hour from me. We are often spending time at each others sites, getting to know each others host families while planning our course. We figured it would be a good idea to plan a special lunch where our families could get to know one another. We decided to buy a live turkey that my host mom offered (offered, not agreed) to kill and cook. My mom mailed me Stove Top stuffing from the States, so we figured we would make a Thanksgiving-type feast. I was responsible for picking out the turkey, and since I didn´t have much faith in myself in this area, I brought my host sister with me who claimed to be experienced in the realm of livestock. We picked out the biggest turkey we could find, and I brought him home for my host mom to cook for the lunch, which was scheduled for the next day. She laughed in my face when she saw the turkey. She said it was too small to kill and that it had the ¨meat of a chicken¨, whatever that means. Instead of offering me a solution, she just continued chuckling. I found myself silently cursing my host sister for pretending to be so knowledgeable. Finally, I interrupted my host mom´s constant criticisms to ask her what she suggested I do. Well, she said, you have to raise it for at least a month before I can kill it. When I told her that I had never raised a turkey before, and that I would need her advice, she was really vague as to what I needed to do. I blindly went to the city to get my new pet turkey some food, made the mistake of getting attached to him and naming him ¨Leap Year¨, and for a month, fed him as much as he would eat, trying to fatten him up. My host mom, the guru of animal-raising, offered me no help at all. She changed her attitude towards me, which I could not understand considering I was doing all I could with the turkey. I bought everything, was always home for his feeding times, and made sure he was interacting well with her other animals (as opposed to her turkey, who tried to take my life with his killer beak and claw combination at least four times). Leap Year was a good pet, really timid and agreeable, never attacking or stealing food from the chickens who so readily stole his food. Each day I woke up to my host mom being a little more cold towards me than the day before, but when I would ask her what was wrong, she would dismiss my questions. Until one day I woke up to her laughing with her friends, all of them announcing at the same time to me that my turkey was sick, and would surely die by the end of the day. What kind of sickness? What could I do to save him? Why were they laughing about it? All of my questions went unanswered. I managed to keep him alive for a week more, and I thought he was getting better. I made the decision to move him to my friend´s house (try transporting a live turkey sometime. Great fun) because I thought it might alleviate the tension in my household, the tension that no one would explain to me. Leap Year died a few days later, and provided that my host mom didn´t poison him to get rid of him, I seek solace in knowing that I was able to give him a pretty good life while he was with me. Strangely enough, all the weirdness in my house has disappeared. I refuse to tell them the turkey died. They might throw a party.

I also refuse to consider my communication skills a weakness, and hate that they do not reciprocate my openness in confronting issues. I can´t believe it took moving to Peru for me to realize how much I value directness and honesty. I think there should be Communication Volunteers in the Peace Corps. After the experiences I have had in my town, I would certainly sign up to serve in that sector.

February 14th, 2008- Carnival and the misery that followed

2008-02-15T11:19:00.001-08:00

They say that the South American experience is not complete without staying on for Carnival, and after my second year of doing exactly that, I have to agree with them (whoever these experts actually are). While I didn´t think it was possible, this year´s festivities beat last year´s by a landslide, probably because nearly my whole group was able to make it, and maybe because we know we only have so much time left in Peru together and people are getting sentimental about their departures. Despite the reason, it was a blast and I feel proud to be a habitant of the region that calls Carnival its own. This year, I was a lot more aware of all of the preparation and tradition involved in the celebration. It is a more festive holiday than Christmas is here. For the two months that the party spans, special music that is specific to our region plays on the radio telling stories about the different municipalities of Cajamarca. Everyone is busy collecting apparatuses to hurl water, buying paint to rub all over their bodies, and making floats to be in one of the parades that officially closes the Carnival season. In a country that doesn´t oftentimes exhibit unity, this is a nice custom to witness. While Peruvians are generally friendly and accommodating of foreigners like us, Carnival is unique in the sense that for one day we are not treated like outsiders. Peruvians invite us to march with them and stand by their sides as they attack other Peruvians. At night, they invite us to dance and be part of their drum circles, not exoticizing us or asking us to teach them English as they usually do. It is nice not to receive unwanted attention for a change, even if the change only lasts for 24 hours.

With all of that said, it must also be stated that Carnival does not lack in drunken debauchery. On February 2, true participants awake early and start drinking whatever liquor is available. Peruvians have a habit of homemaking their liquor, a strong concoction that inebriates them about 2 minutes after it passes their lips. They join their friends to march through the streets in gangs, carting water guns, balloons, buckets of water, paint, shoe polish, and of course, their homemade liquor. They either attack you with water or paint, or offer you some liquor if your appearance pleases them. It is offensive to decline whatever they offer you, even if its taste is unbearable. Because of how generous Peruvians are, everyone ends up what can only be identified as under the influence by about noon, and most are asleep by 2pm, only to leave their houses again at around 8pm to sing and dance and drink some more on the plaza. During the day, the whole world seems to disappear and your only goal becomes finding a target for your paint and water. When I say ¨the whole world,¨ I mean things like cars, as a Volunteer was hit by one this year because he cared only about destroying his adversary. It is really wild to see a whole city soaking wet and covered in paint, with everyone engaging in the same game. No one and nothing is off limits, and most buildings have to be repainted after the festival ends. What an experience!

The least pleasurable part of Carnival is removing the paint from your body, especially since many people buy the wrong type of paint for the occasion, opting for a more permanent variety. The hotel that everyone was staying at ran out of hot water early on, so many of us were forced to go to Los Baños del Inca, a thermal water spa right down the road. This spa isn´t anything fancy, except for it never runs out of hot water (a coveted commodity around here). You can choose to use the bathhouse or shower wing, and you pay a couple of Soles to use the facility for however long you want. It was packed when we got there, which clued us into the fact that we were not the only ones who ran out of hot water. After waiting in a long line to pay, we were told that we were too painted and dirty to enter. How, exactly, can you be too dirty for a shower? Isn´t being dirty the point of showering? My friends and I stood on the curb feeling quite dejected, trying to think of an alternative plan. We tried to rub the paint off of our bodies and pull the paint helmet off of our heads, but it was painful and useless. Luckily, a little girl took pity on us and led us to a carwash in the parking lot that allowed dirty gringos to enter and wash themselves. The only downside was that the water was scalding hot, so we were not able to tolerate it for long enough to clean ourselves entirely. When we got back in line to buy tickets to take a shower, thinking that we were clean enough to at least enter, the guard rejected us again and told us that we had to go out back to where there was a thermal bath to give ourselves another preliminary scrub down. I wish that I had brought my camera. When we reached the bath, we found multiple Peace Corps Volunteers, kneeling over the ledge and submerging their heads in water that had algae and some other unidentified things floating in it. Quite a hilarious sight it was to see a line of so many butts in the air and heads under water. After about two hours of waiting and scrubbing, we were finally allowed in the showers. Needless to say, it was the most satisfying shower I have ever taken.

When Carnival had ended, I still had something to look forward to, or so I thought. Last year, my host sister´s grandfather passed away in February, and since then, she has been talking about the one year death mass and party that would occur this February. Since my town is predominantly Seventh Day Adventist, I have never had the privilege of attending a party within my town´s borders. I was really excited to be part of this death celebration that I have heard so much about. I can´t emphasize enough that I had no idea what I was getting into. At 7:30am, we all headed to Cajamarca city to attend the mass, which only lasted for 45 minutes, so I figured the lunch and party would be equally as speedy. We were all loaded into buses outside of the church, and taken to a small community that is about an hour up the dirt road from my house. It was at about this time that I learned that the party was to last for three days and that no one was allowed to leave during that time. It was also about this time that I wanted to start crying, as I came entirely unprepared. I was wearing a skirt and it was freezing outside (where the party was), I had no jacket, and I really didn´t want to sleep on a flea-infested sheep skin that was pointed at when I asked my aunt where we would sleep. The next twelve hours was spent planning an escape.

I thought that the food that would be served to us would offer a brief respite to my panic, because my host family assured me that the best part of the party would be the meals, which the family would have spent days preparing. Considering I rarely get any protein where I live, when I was asked if I wanted meat in my soup, I enthusiastically responded. I didn´t realize that meat meant sheep and pig intestine, and that just the smell would make me gag. I am not picky when it comes to food, but when I looked down at the plate that was placed in front of me, my hopes of anything good happening at this party faded. I really tried to have a positive attitude, and treat this as a necessary cultural experience. I promised myself that I would not escape unless a Peruvian suggested it, because then I wouldn´t feel so guilty. At about 2pm, my aunt said words that I almost didn´t recognize as ¨Let´s go now,¨ because they came so unexpectedly. I wholeheartedly agreed with her, but somehow, we were still at the party five hours later. Peruvians habitually proclaim things that seem exciting and urgent, and then they never execute their stated plans. Somehow, I haven’t caught onto this, and I am still filled with glee everytime they promise me that we will leave an uncomfortable situation ahorita (right now), or in a ratito (small second). Unfortunately, they do not differentiate between a second and two hours, and this has gotten so annoying to me that it makes me want to cry out of frustration even to think about it. When I realized that we weren´t leaving anytime soon, I sat down next to my aunt on a bench, and we managed to pass out for an hour, at least passing a little bit of time. When we awoke, the music was blaring, and something was about to start. We gathered our benches in a circle, and a traditional death dance started. The whole family of the person who died has worn black for the last year, and has not partaken in any drinking or parties, so this is quite a big deal for them. They, unlike me, are actually excited to party for three days straight with nothing outside of sheep intestines and skin to look forward to. If I had to pick a part of the party that I actually enjoyed, it would be the traditional dance. Each member of the family was assigned a Godfather and Godmother, who had to dance with them, pin money on them, and wrap a red scarf around their bodies to symbolize the end of the mourning period. It was really beautiful the first time, but waiting for every member of the family (30 members large) to do this dance proved quite tiring. After it was over, we all joined in the dancing. The same song was played over and over again at a level that was about 15 notches above too loud. We danced and drank homemade liquor that made me ill in 5 minutes flat. For a while, everyone (including the 12 year olds) was too scared to dance with me, many of them seeing a white person for the first time. I think my host sister had to pay her little brother to ask me to dance, which I was happy for because it gave me something to do aside from feeling sorry for myself. After two dances, my head was pounding and I felt like I was going to vomit. But as is customary, I couldn´t decline the liquor every time they passed it to me. Before I knew it, the sun was going down and I was losing my chance to slip out and walk home safely. I turned to my aunt and told her I was sick and needed to leave. I suppose that leaving was so much of an impossibility that she chose to ignore me, instead throwing me on the dance floor to dance to more Huayno. This is not an easy dance to perform when you feel that you might be dying. It is quite acrobatic, and was making me feel worlds worse. I have no recollection of what happened between 8pm and midnight, but I felt safe losing track of this time since I was with my family. Safe is completely different than happy, though, and at around midnight, I heard a mother of a baby say that she had to leave because the baby was sick. I don´t even know if I asked her for a ride, but I do know that five minutes later, I was sitting in her car. What should have taken us 15 minutes to drive took us an hour because we kept getting stuck in the mud. I could have cried tears of happiness when I finally reached my bedroom. The next day I could not move any part of my body without feeling the worst I have ever felt. My host dad (who did not attend the party because of his religion) decided that while I was on my deathbed he should give me a lesson on all worldly sins, the first being drunkenness. I assured him that not only would I vomit on him if he didn´t leave, but also, that I was not drunk, I was just sick from the gross liquor that Peruvians insist on whipping up for every party. When I was finally able to leave my bed, I was ridiculed for only lasting 17 hours of the 72 hour affair. Somehow I don´t feel bad at all about that, and I vow to never attend a one year mass and fiesta again. I commend Peruvians on their longevity, but sometimes they go a little overboard. Why can´t they last so long when I am teaching them something important? If only partying and generating nauseating beverages was their only job, they would be an utter success!

January 8, 2008- I couldn´t make this up if I tried

2008-01-09T13:55:00.000-08:00

It is summer time in Peru, which is not nearly as exciting in my region as it would be in the States. Summer in Cajamarca brings rainy season, and right now we are averaging 8 hours of robust rainfall per day. My daily attire has developed into black thermal stretch pants tucked into bulky rain boots, and multiple sweaters layered under a loose black raincoat. Summertime and the living´s….not easy as much as it is ridiculous! The other day a Peruvian asked me if someone I knew had died, since I was wearing so much black. I´m sorry, I didn´t realize that style mattered in rural Peru when every time I leave the house I am forced to wade through countless inches of mud, animal feces, and rainwater. Next time I will consider my color choices, I suppose. The only pleasant thing that comes with summer here is the end of classes. We ended classes on December 17th and they not scheduled to start again until March 3. This gives me approximately three months to strategize ways to more effectively domesticate naughty Peruvian mutants that so shamelessly populate my classes.

I really wish I was exaggerating their cruel nature, but unfortunately, I have a friend working on a project with me at my site who can attest to how horrifically the kids here behave. You would never suspect that my small and quaint community serves as a breeding ground for such ghastly creatures. They are so badly behaved that they overshadow any academically-dedicated students that may or may not exist in my classes. I offer you the below anecdote to not only illustrate my above point, but also to show how the professionals hired to teach these kids are just perpetuating how shockingly they conduct themselves.

For the last ¾ of the academic year, I have been doing a vocational orientation course with the two oldest classes in the colegio (secondary school). My main goal for this ongoing capacitation was to introduce more career and educational options to students who were previously very closed-minded about what they could do after high school. After interacting with the kids during the preliminary stages of the program, it was clear that we (my friend and I) had to start at a very rudimentary level with these kids since they apparently were having trouble grasping concepts as simple as respect and responsibility. We hoped to end the year with a panel of professional speakers, but considering these kids could not stop whistling at us or throwing things across the classroom for a mere five minutes, there was no way we could even think about bringing anyone else into this chaos. We started at the most basic level we could think of, and noticed that the class was much more controlled when the professors accompanied us. We preferred their presence anyway because in order for this course to be sustainable, the teachers have to be learning from us as well. However, after the first two classes, the professors vanished into thin air, even though they were being paid to be with us for that hour. We had a meeting with them and insisted that they be there at least for our last class, the culmination of all of our work. For this class, we finally felt confident enough to bring in a speaker from the closest city. Both the director of the school and the professors agreed to be there for the event. Getting a guest speaker is no easy task in Peru. Very few people have private cars, and the transportation we use is very unreliable. In addition to that, people do not get paid by their employers for being school guests, so not many people feel motivated to do so since the majority of them cannot afford to. To ensure that our guest would show up, we agreed to pay him for two full work days.
We decided to invite a mechanic to talk with the kids. More of our students are males, and most of them are interested in being mechanics and civil engineers. Both the kids and the professors seemed really excited about the activity, but somehow, their enthusiasm turned sour on the day of the actual event. The director told us that he could no longer accompany us because he had a really important meeting to attend, the professor showed up fifteen minutes late only to proceed to the director´s office to suck on a mango, and the kids refused to ask the questions they had prepared, instead opting to mock the mechanic and throw things across the room. I was mortified, to say the least, but luckily the mechanic was light-hearted about the whole catastrophe. He was around our age and was actually really gracious towards us even after this all went down. He thanked us for sacrificing the comfort of our lifestyles in the States to work with youth who were clearly ungrateful towards us. He was able to add a cultural context to the behavior of the kids, which actually made me more motivated to continue working with them. He made me want to resist taking things so personally.

We thought we were free from disappointment after the presentation ended, but as we walked up the hill to my house, we came across the director playing soccer, the activity he claimed earlier was a ¨very important meeting.¨ I really don´t think I have ever been so furious. After hiding behind a wall for a few minutes and trying to decide whether a confrontation was worth it or not, Reannon and I marched over to bitch him out (excuse my French). Before he thought we saw him, the director tried to hide (clearly COMPLETELY aware that he had done something wrong), but fortunately for us, there are few hiding places on a soccer field. I told him that he should be ashamed for not taking part in activities that we had worked so hard to plan for his students. He stuttered, and said very little that made sense, but we did get a promise from him that he would partner with us more willingly during the next school year. It was never my intention to bully people into working with me, but it really does seem to be my last resort.

I am still pretty aggravated about how the school year ended (the above incident occurred on our last day), but the beginning of Carnival has come at just the right time to alleviate my stress. Usually, I am not a fan of how long it lasts (2 months), because it means I am not safe from paint or water balloons being thrown at me for what seems like an eternity. Try carrying important paperwork in a war zone! This year, I have changed my attitude though. Before anyone could hit me with a balloon, I decided to perform Carnival´s opening ceremonies with two friends. These ceremonies consisted of renting a room with a balcony for a full afternoon, filling countless water balloons, hitting people who thought that Carnival hadn´t started yet, and suppressing giggles as we ducked behind the wall when they tried to figure out what in God´s name had just come flying at them with such force. My friend Evan spent the holidays in the States, and because he is a very forward-thinking guy, he brought back the mother of all water balloon slingshots. This thing shoots balloons up to 75 miles per hour, and we managed to hurl balloons up to two full blocks. Unfortunately, we can´t hit people with it because it is rumored to cause facial fractures, but somehow (maybe as a result of mild alcohol consumption), hitting buildings and roofs was beyond entertaining. Last year, I made elderly people my target because they are slow-moving and easy to hit (don´t worry, I was gentle and my attacks resembled wet kisses more than water balloon smackdowns), but this year, my aim has improved and I plan to hit any teenager who looks like one of my students. Beware if you fall into their age bracket. My facial recognition is fairly poor when I am on a balcony looking down on the world below, so I can´t be blamed for hitting the innocent. And to be honest, hitting any teenager has proved just as satisfying as bombarding my actual students. I would say that it is all done in good Carnival fun, but the thing is….

Ahhh…the ways we choose to relieve stress in our lives! Water balloon fights are my new favorite release! I can´t even imagine how fulfilling February 2nd (the official date of Carnival) will be.

So the end of this holiday season was much less depressing than last year´s, possibly because I am coming home in 7 months. I also decided to take a trip to Lima after Christmas to further cushion my post-holiday transition. I haven´t gotten the chance to know Lima very well, so my boyfriend and I made every effort to conquer the city. We (he) mastered the bus system, and we were able to navigate our way to the presidential palace, the art museum, the main plazas, and many phenomenal restaurants. My favorite memory of the trip is unknowingly walking into one of Lima´s nicest restaurants with him wearing an uber-casual ¨Booty Hunter¨ t-shirt adorned with a giant colorful pirate. Once we realized how utterly ridiculous we (again, he) looked, we were already too far into the restaurant so we awkwardly sat down and ended up enjoying some of the best Italian food we have ever had. Even though we were still dressed like Peace Corps Volunteers, it was nice to eat more luxuriously for a night. I really miss excellent food. Inspired by the Italian restaurant, I cooked up my version of a nice Italian meal for a couple of friends to bring in the New Year with, and we ended up welcoming 2008 with a nice conversation, something else I find myself really missing here. Not too shabby of a holiday, especially for one spent in a foreign land, away from family and friends.

December 17, 2007- Random observations

2007-12-23T15:41:00.000-08:00

Regretfully, I have gotten too lazy to continue a written journal. From now on, this blog will serve as the only proof that I was ever here in Peru, so I suppose I should start being more detailed about things that make this country so unique to me. In contemplating its distinctiveness, I have recently concluded that Peru can, in a sense, be categorized as a stiflingly ordinary locale. While I agree that it is the most quintessentially Latin country in South America, and that its culture is nothing short of extremely rich and vivid, I feel that there are very few things that Peru can call its own (if skeptics of the above idea include something other than Machu Picchu in their arguments, I might be willing to reconsider my opinion). For instance, Peruvians are proud of having invented the Pisco sour, the national cocktail down here. However, I have talked to countless Chileans who claim that their country not only has better Pisco, but that Chile is the actual responsible party for the invention of the Pisco sour. How we will ever resolve this pressing concern, I know not. Or take Lake Titicaca, one of the most breathtaking sights in Peru. Part of it belongs to Bolivia! There is no escaping the fact that Peru is being overshadowed by the rest of the world! This is why I am just going to take note of the things that strike me as unique, because Peru might not stand out as extraordinary to the most seasoned traveler, but it´s still got my full attention.

I recently read my first Vargas Llosa book. He happens to be one thing that Peru can call its own, and I was impressed by my first read. It was a murder mystery written in the 80´s, and while it could have been more suspenseful, what it lacked in suspense it made up for in how well it captured coastal culture. Rather than continue this book report I have started, I really just wanted to comment on one thing. I was surprised and amused to find how often ¨your mama¨ jokes were used throughout the book. Because my host family is not composed of comedians, I have never been witness to such jokes in Peru. Who knew that your mama jokes were universal? When tension arises between countries, I propose the involved parties table the disagreement for a second and attempt to wow each other with their different spins on the traditional your mama comic template. It could really alleviate conflict I think. After all, isn´t it small similarities like this that bring people together?

Moving onto something I don´t understand. Peru loves its soccer, as do most Latin American countries. I cannot escape seeing at least one amateur game per day, but unfortunately its ubiquitousness has not aided in my learning how to play. This is why I am trying to introduce badminton to my community, but that is a different story all together. What I cannot understand about soccer here (aside from why it is still more popular than badminton) is the attire that everyone chooses to wear on their feet while playing. They wear thin and low-cut canvas booties (similar to Keds) with small plastic tips. The shoe, in all of its glory, has less support and comfort than a stiletto high heel. It really is perplexing. And this is just one of the many HIGHLY important things I spend my afternoons pondering.

You would think that being in a third world country and seeing just how bad living conditions and quality of life can be would put things into perspective for me. Maybe ground me and help me better prioritize my ambitions and concerns. I think that was true to a certain extent up until last week, that is, when I was diagnosed with my first cavity in my 25 years of not just existing, but gorging myself with sweets. Instead of understanding how my dietary choices were catching up to me or even blaming the fraudulent Chinese toothpaste that I have been using for the last three months, I told my dentist that she best look again because I am impervious to mouth rot of the sort. She chuckled (I KNOW! Entirely inappropriate and insensitive, right? Perhaps I didn´t make it clear that with just a few words she had ruined my life) and told me that she was positive that I had a cavity, but not to worry, that it was just a small one and could be taken care of in a jiffy. I don´t really know why she thought that stating the size of the cavity would make me feel better. With the bad news that she was bearing, she might as well have told me that there was a Grand Canyon sized crater building its nest in one of my molars. Small or large, a putrefying chasm exists in my mouth, which was previously uncharted territory to anything having to do with decay. As if I am not borderline neurotic about enough, I am now entirely convinced that anything containing the slightest trace of sugar is out to get me. Christmas should be a blast this year! Don´t even get me started on the headpiece that that very same dentist prescribed for me. Some people bloom into less awkward people as they get older. And then there is me. Right after I slip into my nightguard headpiece each evening, I have nothing but a recurrent nightmare about possessing dentures at the ripe old age of 25 to look forward to. This whole dental debacle has really put a damper on my Christmas plan, which was going to Lima and spending all of my Peace Corps savings on peppermint hot chocolates at Starbucks. I could have probably afforded three, but there goes that plan. Here´s to all of you having a less inhibited and happy Christmas! Don´t forget to brush!

Oh…before I go, did I mention that I taught 15 comprehensive dental health classes in the last month? The irony KILLS ME!

November 18, 2007: Facing the facts

2007-11-27T12:27:00.000-08:00

Well, after a certain occurrence the other day, it is pretty clear that my only Peruvian friend has a crush on me. While I am as flattered as any gal might be in my shoes, I worry that Freddy being sweet on me might hamper our ever-growing bond. Here I naively thought that all of our shared good times were founded upon a strong base of platonic friendship. I feel betrayed and am desperately searching for a ginger way to let my friend know that the feelings he has for me are not mutual. Unless I want to destroy the beautiful connection we have created over the last year and a half, I must handle this matter very delicately. Freddy is not like most guys. He is sensitive and kind, and I don’t want him to shed tears over the affair, which he is known to do every now and then. Before I get carried away with this common tale of unrequited love, perhaps I should tell you a bit about Freddy. He´s seven. Amongst his myriad interests are not doing his homework, getting as dirty as possible in our front lawn on a daily basis, and drinking orange soda. He is missing his two front teeth, which has made conversing very difficult lately. Somehow, despite our broken conversations, Freddy has managed to fall head over heels for none other than me. How will things between us ever be the same?

Perhaps you are curious about how I came to realize his love for me. It all started with a simple sharing of an avocado, his favorite food. When I first moved in, all avocadoes were reserved for Freddy, the growing boy of our household. A couple of weeks ago though, while we were watching our favorite cartoon together (Backyardigans), Freddy plopped down next to me on my host mom´s bed, cracked open a ripe delicious-looking avocado, and handed me the bigger half (the one without the pit, what a gentleman!). I´ll admit that I wouldn´t have looked much into this incident without those that followed. Two nights later, I asked Freddy if he wanted me to make him another cheese sandwich during supper time. Normally, I would have received an eager yes, but on that fated night, Freddy seemed embarrassed by my gesture and proceeded to show me that he was actually quite skilled at putting bread and cheese together. Maybe you see his sudden change in behavior as a simple act of defiance, but I see it as Freddy trying to convince me that while we are 18 years apart, we are capable of very similar things. But what I am about to share with you next, my friends, is the kicker. A couple of days ago I went to the market to buy some rice for my family. As I was walking over the bridge to our house with the rice in tote, there was a moment when I could see my family farming in our garden, but they couldn´t see me. A moment later, they could see me, but thought that I couldn´t see them. The campo is so mysterious and chock full of blind spots! During that second moment, Freddy, who was previously kicking around a soccer ball, stole a gargantuan gardening tool from his mom, and started eagerly chipping away at the earth. When I came around the corner and everyone was finally in full view of one another, Freddy acted superficially surprised to see me, and in an exasperated tone (while wiping his brow of fake sweat), said, ¨Oh hey Lindsay, we´ve just been working in the garden for hours. I guess since you´re here now, I should stop. Maybe we could do my homework now.¨ His mom shot a very confused look in his direction, but being a good mom, I guess she didn´t want to embarrass him in front of his first love. Freddy put the garden tool that was twice his size back in the hands of his mom, and we went inside to do some short division problems. All in all, a very romantic evening spent in Huambocancha Alta.

Before I convince you all that I am a pedophile, I suppose I will change topics. I am sad to announce that I have lost my cool gringa status within my community. I enjoyed a year and a half of celebrity rank, but now, I am nothing but a has-been. Outside of Freddy, I no longer faze any of my community members, and it seems like the school kids are downright unenthused in my presence. Last week, my friend and I announced to our two classes that we would not be meeting the next week because of the Thanksgiving holiday. We actually witnessed kids giving the thumbs-up sign to one another, something that I immediately found myself wishing was not universal. I don´t need to be popular, but I certainly don´t want to be loathed. This may seem trivial to people with real jobs and real stress, but my friend and I felt utterly rejected and used. There is really nothing worse than planning cool activities for kids who don´t respect you and think your activities are a waste. In our dejection, we found ourselves coming up with some not-so-healthy coping mechanisms (drinking heavily and self-medicating), so hopefully our impending Thanksgiving vacation alone will rejuvenate us. We don´t want to have to turn elsewhere (to booze) for help.

In a couple of days a group of 15 of us are headed up north to the most popular surf spot in Peru (Mancora) to celebrate Thanksgiving. A traditional Thanksgiving is not an easy feat here considering that half of the ingredients had to be mailed from the States. Basically the only two things that can be found here are potatoes and turkey. Summer is just beginning in Peru, so it should prove to be a good time. Maybe after 18 months here and multiple trips to the beach, I will actually brave the robust waves of Peru´s Pacific. Probably not, though. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

October 20, 2007- A very unsystematically-written update...a stream of consciousness, so to speak

2007-11-04T10:46:00.000-08:00

Well, it´s mischief night, and instead of egging and toilet papering houses as is customary (as if I have actually ever done anything of the sort), here I sit at 7pm in my bed, with my host family already sleeping in the room beneath me. Another early night in the campo. Tonight, the closest I get to throwing eggs is smelling like a rotten one. I think it has been three weeks since I last showered, as we have had to ration our water lately since it has only been flowing freely (which means slowly trickling out of the faucet) for about thirty minutes a day. What is grosser than how infrequently we get to shower here is how accustomed we have become to smelling and being greasy. Little things, like flossing, have become so satisfying since they help us become as close to clean as we can here. Daily wet wipe wipe-downs and baby powder baths just don´t seem to be cutting it anymore. I can´t identify why my filth is all of the sudden bothering me, after a year and a half of being here. While it is alarmingly repulsive to think that in the 420 or so days that I have been living in my site, I have probably only showered 20 times, it is something that I had come to accept as part of the PC experience. Perhaps it is newly irking me because my work has picked up, and it is difficult to convince myself that I am a professional when I regularly have 2 weeks of dirt encrusted on my skin. Given the limited amount of amenities people have here to make themselves feel clean, self-satisfied, and worthy of attention, I wonder how anyone can question why Peru is not advancing at a more rapid rate?

Not that I do it very often, but feeling sorry for myself marks the start of a very destructive and depressing cycle. When my attention is drawn to what my life is lacking here, I am able to make myself feel better with the reminder that this is temporary for me, and that my life has many relief options. I could leave right now if I wanted to. If ever uber-frustrated by my luxury-lacking lifestyle in Peru, I even have the funds to go to a nice hotel to take a 2 hour long (and even HOT!) shower and sleep in a bed that is not rock hard. My frustrations are resolvable, which always comforts me, even if the above thoughts don´t spawn action on my part. My host family will never have the means to comfort themselves with the options or solutions that someone like me can so easily access. The life they have is that which they will always have, and while one can make the argument that they can never miss what they have never had, no one can convince me that they don´t feel a pang of envy when they pass a nicely-dressed or sweet-smelling person in the city, or when I let them use my computer or camera for the night. While I worked hard for the things that I have, I feel as though I have never struggled or sacrificed in the ways that they have had to in order to get the few things within their possession. They have shown me that no one is more deserving of something than someone else, because while we will always judge people who are different than us, we never know the private struggles they have endured. I don´t really know where I am going with these thoughts, but as I was watching my host dad and mom hoeing potatoes out of our garden today for 8 hours in the killer Peruvian sun, I wanted to somehow reward them with a warm bath, or massage, or at least a comfortable couch or bed to relax on. They will never have any of these things because the work they do is not income-producing, but this certainly doesn’t negate that they are the hardest workers I know. It seems unfair at times.

Following the above line of thought got me thinking about where motivation comes from, and I mean this on a deeper level than intrinsic versus extrinsic places. Before living in Peru, I never thought that sources of motivation could be so multifaceted and varied. In the states, I considered myself a very extrinsically motivated person. I always needed something to look forward to, something that would intellectually stimulate me and drive my desire to know more about the world. I placed myself on a rather rigid schedule, needing at least two things per week to look forward to, whether they were museum visits, art galleries, book readings, live music, etc. This schedule worked well for me, and I never really had too much trouble pulling myself out of bed in the morning. Obviously, in the countryside of the Andes, none of my above motivators exist. This wasn´t a problem in the beginning, because the novelty of the culture kept me intrigued and stimulated, but now that the novelty has worn of, I oftentimes struggle in completing, or rather beginning my tasks. I feel suffocated by the realization that I rarely learn anything new, or rarely meet someone or something that inspires/enlightens me. It makes me feel empty and makes me miss college A LOT! Again, my anxiety is lessened by knowing that I belong to a society that values the same things that I feel I am missing in Peru. As excessive as I believe the U.S. can be, I appreciate how well-rounded it is in most cases and places.

Anyway, back to the point. My source of motivation seems very shallow when compared to that of my host family and community members. They pull themselves out of bed at 5am every morning only to farm in the unremitting sun all day long. The women spend the entire day hunched over a wood stove cooking whatever meal comes next, and when finished this, preparing whatever is needed for tomorrow´s meals. Like mine, their motivators are extrinsic, but what a difference exists between our two motivations! I work for money to fund whatever it takes to quell my curiosities about the world, and find it very hard to work if these curiosities are not being replenished. My host family, very plainly and simply put, works to eat. They don´t read, nor do they know what it feels like to be knowledge-driven. They know what they know, which is sufficient for the tasks that they need to complete on a daily basis. Curiosity is looked down upon in my community because it takes you away from your family and your responsibilities. The differences between me and my community are so deeply embedded and layered that I can´t really rationally become angry with someone when he/she treats me like an outsider. The most interesting part of this whole PC adjustment process is that I always end the day thinking that the Peruvians I live with have more to teach me than I have to teach them. In the states, I spend most of my time exploring the many shiny distractions around me, while my host family here spends most of their time working together and getting to know one another better. I think it is clear which action is more virtuous. If only I could rid myself of my continuous desire to be on the move, I could relax and focus on what really matters. Only one question remains: If I am so excellent at doing this in Peru, will I be able to take this mentality with me to the States, or will the many tempting diversions overpower my desire to change my life´s focus? Am I only able to be the person I´d like to be when there is no persuasive force tempting me otherwise?

Speaking of how subtly smart Peruvians in our communities are, a volunteer who is ending his service soon wrote an essay about just this, but with as different focus than mine. He is an environment volunteer who lived on the coast of Peru, who set out to teach his community about recycling, water conservation, and other such environmentally related topics. In observing his community for two years, he left his service thinking that his community members didn’t really need him to teach them these things, but instead, that they left him with a much better understanding of the topics. I do not have the essay in front of me, but he brought up the question of what could he teach his community about conserving water when they bathed, cooked, and boiled drinking water each day with just a small bucket of water available to them? In managing their land and resources, I sometimes think that Peruvians are masterminds.

Enough rambling for now. Before I forget, I have something laughable to relay. As I mentioned in a previous entry, my closest friend recently left the Peace Corps to get married and move to Japan. To wish her off well, two friends and I decided to plan her a surprise party in the swankiest hotel of our regional capital. We thought that we were doing everything right. We asked our boss´s permission, we told the hotel of our plans, we even scrounged up the money to pay for the hotel room ahead of time. Kristen was as surprised as could be, seeing that Peace Corps Volunteers never stay at this hotel, obviously opting for more budget friendly locales. I went a little crazy with the purple silly string as we opened the door to surprise her, but we immediately found two staff members and promised that we would clean up the mess we made without their assistance. They smiled and wished us well, as if there were no problem whatsoever. Three hours after we checked in, and to be precise, five minutes after we joined together to sing The Little Mermaid´s ¨Kiss the Girl¨ (I mean it, the party was THAT G-rated), the manager angrily knocked on our door and kicked us out of the hotel, claiming that the mess we made was unacceptable. No warning, no request to keep our singing down, no nothing. In no time at all, we (with the help of some tape on our hands) cleaned up all of the silly string and confetti, leaving no trace of our party behind. We thought that this would be good enough for him, but he seemed bent on having us spend the night somewhere else, even though we had already spent an exorbitant amount of money on that room. He even threatened to notify our embassy, which left us all very confused. With the balloons wrapped around our wrists, and our party favors in tote, we were displaced from the nicest hotel we know of. It is pretty clear that we will never be welcomed back, not even to use the bar or bathroom, two things that every Peace Corps Volunteer in our region cherishes. It was a sad night in Cajamarca, that´s for sure. I´m still mourning the loss, both of Kristen and of the hotel.

Another interesting thing that happened recently was taking part in the national census. Since probably three quarters of Peru´s population does not have a mailing address, we were not allowed out of our houses from 8 to 6 one day in order to be counted. If you were caught out of your residence, you were arrested. People were hired to walk all up and down the mountains to count how many people were residing in each household, which could not have been a simple job, especially during rainy season. I went to the grocery store the day before the census to stock up on snacks (which I cannot live without, even if only for only 10 hours) and you would have thought the world was coming to an end. People were pushing and shoving, there were no more water bottles left, and the lines were horrendously long. This census could not have been that accurate, since I was counted twice (even though I argued against it) and since there are people who live so far away from a main road that I can´t imagine anyone in their right minds trucking all the way out there to count just a few more people of Peru. It was actually really difficult to stay indoors for so long!

One last thing. Last week at 10pm I was awoken by a pleasant symphony of the strangest whistles I have ever heard. They were tropical-bird like, and since I live in the mountains, they were incredibly out of place. I listened for a while, and they kept getting louder and louder, so I decided to put on my slippers and take a walk downstairs to see what was going on. Here I think that something is so beautiful, when in actuality, it is a warning whistle alarming everyone in the community that there has been a robbery up the hill from us. We don´t have police, we don´t have alarm systems, we don´t even have locks on our doors (some of us don´t even have doors), but thankfully we have our mouths with which to whistle. Since this incident, my family has been nervous about being robbed, which occurs both during the day and at night in our community. Is whistling really going to protect us? Typically, there is always one person in our house at a time to guard it, but the other day I came home mid-day to find myself alone, and I was really frightened. We have two doors leading into our house, both of which can be jumped over, and one of which is actually just a plank of wood that can easily be tossed aside. Our house is a major target because I live here, and so does a mine worker who makes more money than anyone in our community. It is crazy that I can´t feel safe in my house during the day or at night. That one day I found myself alone, I couldn’t even go to my room because if someone enters the house, I can´t hear it from upstairs. I took a chair outside and sat in front of the door for 3 hours until my family came home. What robbers typically do during the day is knock on your door to see if anyone answers. If someone does answer, they run away. If not, they come in and rob you. My biggest fear is being upstairs where I won´t hear a knock, and having someone come to my bedroom door because they think the house is empty. We have very little protection, which probably comforts the thieves who live in our community. You´d think that robbers wouldn´t exist in such a small, quaint, community, but I guess they are everywhere. What a shame!

October 2, 2007- To end the negligence

2007-10-02T13:33:00.000-07:00

It has been entirely too long since I last wrote, and to anyone who is still checking this and holding out the hope that I will post some day soon, I apologize. It has been a hectic few months and I am actually looking forward to writing this entry because it might be nice to reminisce about what has gone on lately, since I haven’t had much time to process it all.

We will start with August, when Blake came down for a trip that we have been planning for a year or so. A week before he came down, I was robbed of all of our trip tickets, money, credit cards, etc. While I was checking online to make sure our entire trip was set, some punk came into my private internet box, reached into my crotch (where my wallet was being clenched between my legs), ripped my wallet away while mildly violating me, and vanished into thin air. It was almost magical how quick he was! Believe me when I say that I was super sour about having Blake down here after this. I was sure with how American he looks that someone would try to rob or take advantage of him, so I was a bit paranoid the whole trip. My being robbed came only a week after my boyfriend was badly beaten and robbed of all of his belongings in a taxi (including his sneakers and belt), so these combined experiences left me with a really bad taste in my mouth. Luckily my trip with Blake unfolded beautifully, so my faith in Peru has been restored. Now, back to the trip. Initially, we really wanted to hike the Inca trail to Machu Picchu, clearly not taking into account that I am in the worst shape that I have been in in my entire life. I am serious when I say that sometimes I am breathless after just rolling over in bed. Note to self: get off your lazy ass and work on that. 10 weeks before our trip together, Blake tore his ACL in a pretty gnarly way playing lacrosse, and had to have surgery immediately, making the 5-day trek to Machu Picchu an impossibility. After how I responded to the few physical activities we did get to do on our trip, I am thinking that his injury may have been a godsend because we (I) may have died on the Inca trek. I mean, I am not at all happy that his surgery was painful and ruined his summer (obviously), but I think I may have needed a wake-up call reminding me that athleticism and hiking are not my fortes. I really am delusional when it comes to certain aspects of my existence.

Our first two stops on the trip were short. We went to the beach, but not for too long because it would have depressed Blake since he couldn’t even surf like he dreamed of doing in Peru. Next, we came to my site in Cajamarca so Blake could see where I live and meet my family. I really enjoyed being reminded of how effectively people can communicate even when they don’t speak the same language. Blake, with his broken Spanish, still made quite the impact on my family, so much so that they told him he should move here because in their professional opinion, Peru needs good teachers like him. I wholeheartedly agree with this, but fat chance that he (or anyone in my life for that matter) would ever want to leave the states to live here with me. And that is ENTIRELY understandable. Blake was impressed by how beautiful my region is and seeing things through his eyes for three weeks was really refreshing. After Cajamarca, we headed down to Cusco (with a short stop in Lima, only to experience the 8.0 earthquake) where we spent some time in the city, hung out in Aguas Calientes, and of course, visited Machu Picchu. We had to spend a rather exorbitant amount of money to enter the ruins twice because the first day (the day we had already paid for a guide for) I was suffering from a nasty case of altitude sickness and found myself miserably perched on a rock the whole day wishing the tour guide would shut the hell up. In retrospect, he was sharing some really interesting factoids about the locale but at the time it sounded like an endless blah, blah, blah to me and I truly was feeling a bit homicidal. I´d be lying if I said that I was a pleasant person to be around that day, but even my hellishness wasn’t enough to take away from how spectacular the scenery was. Luckily, I was feeling like a new person the next day, so Blake and I woke up at the crack of dawn to take the bus back to the ruins to catch the sunrise there. We wanted to hike the most popular peak within the park, but there is competition to get there since only four hundred people are allowed on per day. This seems like a lot, but considering there were 1000 people waiting for a bus at 5am, we were worried we might not make the cut. This fear was heightened when we got to the park and realized we had no idea how to get to the base of the mountain (Machu Picchu is quite the complex structure). As I was stopped to look at a map, a Peruvian tour guide literally shoved me out of the way, clearly worried about his group´s place in the line. Blake and I started sprinting after him (I am serious, it was this pathetically competitive), and somehow secured the 123 and 124 place in line. Seeing the mountain looming above us made me really anxious because it was so large and steep and I am so pitifully soft and untoned right now. These French people behind us brought their three young children to hike though, so I was reassured. UNTIL Blake and I hear that they just biked all the way from Lima (about 400 KM), implying that they were clearly in a different category than us. I seriously would have felt less intimidated by Lance Armstrong. After passing us during minute one of the hike, the Superfamily made it up the mountain 2 hours before us, even though it was only supposed to take an hour to hike in all. Our slow pace may have had something to do with me having to stop every 5 minutes for a 10 minute breather. Blake (the injured one) had no trouble with the altitude or the hike (go figure). I am a walking disaster, or actually just a disaster, since I can´t even handle walking apparently.

After Cusco, we headed further South to Arequipa. Arequipa is known as canyon country, and is renowned for its specialty dishes. Since my life revolves around food, this was the leg of the trip that I was most excited about. Here, we ate alpaca, guinea pig, and ostrich in various forms, along with trying rocoto relleno (stuffed pepper), Arequipa´s most sought-after delicacy. After two days in the white-washed city, we headed to Colca Canyon, a deeper hole than the one we have in Arizona. We had our own personal van and tour guide (it ends up that I hate tour guides and spend my time wishing they would shut up), and we really enjoyed seeing the topography change as we took the 4 hour drive to the canyon. Along with mistaking me as a Peruvian resident and trying to tax me 19% of everything we paid for, the tour agency messed up our hotel reservation and upgraded us to the nicest suite at the base of the canyon. We had our own private hot springs, a two story condo, and access to an all-you-can-eat buffet. It was ridiculously luxurious, and I felt like I was sinning. My favorite part of Arequipa was traveling to the canyon to watch the condors fly. I don´t know that I had ever seen one before this and they are truly the most majestic animal I have seen. They were huge (with 9 feet wingspans) and just floated over the gorgeous canyon below. I was really moved by them, and they are the only bird that ever made me wish I could fly. Blake and I must have taken 100 pictures just to try to capture them, but they move so fast, while seeming so slow and graceful, that we only got a few good shots. Towards the end of this leg, we ended up really bonding with our tour guide Beatriz. She decided to wait until our last few hours together to let us know how cool she was. She used to work under Vargas Llosa (Peru´s best author) and studied under the leader of the Shining Path. The latter is obviously not something to be proud of, but because of her conflict with him and the Fujimori government, she had to flee the country until the tension had eased. She had some good stories to tell, and instead of yapping about who knows what, she should have been sharing them earlier on.

After Arequipa, we headed down towards Bolivia where we stayed right on Lake Titicaca. We tried rural tourism (a new concept in Peru) where we stayed with Peruvian families and ate food cooked by them, to try to get the authentic experience. I don´t really need the authentic experience at this point, but I think it was a really neat thing for Blake to see. Our host spoke predominantly Quechua, but managed to really inspire me with the few Spanish words he did speak. I find myself frustrated by how many excuses Peruvians generally make to keep things the way they are, instead of initiating positive change. Our host in Llachon defied every Peruvian stereotype I may have developed in the last year and a half though. He never finished high school, but in watching the fishing boats go by his house every day, thought to himself, ¨Why don´t people want to stop in my town, where beautiful people and sights reside?¨ From there, he decided to start hosting people in his and his friend´s homes. It has become a really popular experience, and he has made a huge profit, all of which he has filtered back into the community. His house was really plainly quaint, but the view of the lake and the friendship of his spitting llama were unbeatable. We took two day trips, one to an indigenous island (Taquile) where we watched some craft and dance demonstrations and hiked to the top, and another floating island made of reeds, where small clusters of families still live. These islands were made in Pre-Incan times, and it was surprising how much these people do with regular water reeds. They make crafts to sell (mobiles and other adornments), build their houses and boats, clean their teeth, and eat materials that all come from the common water reed. Very resourceful, and their teeth are so white and perfect. Who ever said that toothpaste and flossing were necessary entities? Aside from Machu Picchu, our trip wasn’t overly tourist-y, which I liked. Most times, we were traveling alone and staying in places where other tourists weren´t. I hope as tourism rises here, that Peru can still maintain its beauty and traditions, since it ends up that´s what people want to pay for and see.

It was incredibly hard coming back to my site and I thought I might be clinically depressed. I guess it didn’t occur to me before my trip that traveling might be worlds more fun than being a volunteer, and having to struggle daily to fit in and achieve anything worthwhile. I have since bounced back, only to find out that my best friend is leaving the Peace Corps 10 months early to get married and move to Japan with her fiancé, who is in the air force. I am incredibly happy for her, because I know she couldn’t be making a better choice for herself, but it is hard saying goodbye to someone who has shared everything with you from the start. It has already been quite the ride that I can´t even imagine what will happen in the months that she is gone. I didn’t come down here expecting to make friends (since I mistakenly thought I´d be isolated in a cave for two years), so how much this is affecting me is coming as a bit of a surprise for me.

To make matters worse (I promise I will end this entry on a good note), I was involved in a bad car crash this past weekend. On the way to visit my friend who is leaving (who lives four hours from me), my bus driver lost control, overcompensated for taking a curve too fast, and sent our bus careening off the road, flipping over before it came to a stop. I was asleep at the start of the accident, and woke up thinking we were being hurled off a cliff, since over half of the ride is on a dangerous cliff. Our bus driver fled the scene (we are assuming he was drunk and didn’t want to deal with the repercussions). Two bus attendants were badly hurt, along with some other passengers who were trampled, but most of us surprisingly came out of the accident unscathed. I was fortunately with friends at the time, and all of us are still pretty shaken up by the whole experience. People were crying and screaming and pushing each other, thinking that the bus might explode. Some people tried to escape through our windows (now our ceiling), not realizing that if they stepped on the windows above our heads, they would crack in our faces. It was a total disaster and I couldn’t move for a while because I lost both of my shoes in the ordeal and there were shards of glass everywhere. When we were finally pulled out of the mess by miners who were passing the scene, we were able to see how close to death we were, and my legs and arms just immediately turned to jello. I was startled to how poorly I responded to the crash. It was as if my brain just shut down. I started yelling at Peruvians in English, truly baffled as to why they wouldn’t respond to me. I also became really freaked out that I had gone deaf, not realizing that I still had my Ipod blasting in my ears. I guess I shouldn’t be a doctor or emergency response worker. An hour and a half later, our regional coordinator came to drive us back to the city, and I vomited 11 times on the way home, all over his car and my sleeve and scarf. It was a really scary day. After being assured by the bus agency that they driver would be fined and fired, never again able to drive, we saw him driving with the same company two days later. It is hard to feel safe with things like this happening. I feel like I want to go into hibernation to forget about it all.

Despite how disturbing the last month or so has been, what with the earthquake and the crash, I am still really content here. I am not just saying that, either. I can´t imagine a place I´d rather be. My friend and I just started a project that lets us travel back and forth to each others sites to teach a vocational orientation in both of our high schools. With what a challenge it has been so far, I think it will be really rewarding if we can pull it off. Also, I have started corresponding with a former PC volunteer (who served in Ecuador in the 80s) who now teaches with Blake in Seattle. We have plans do to a year-long cultural and art exchange with our students, which I am excited about. Work has picked up to the point that I am busy every day from sunrise to sundown, exactly what I hoped my PC experience would be. It only took me a year, but it seems that things might be falling into place!

July 14, 2007- Catching up

2007-07-18T13:53:00.000-07:00

With how unpredictable life has been around here, I have barely had a chance to relay what has been going on in my life. I refer particularly to the category of diversion and travel, assuming that such entries are more entertaining to read than descriptions of what I do at my site, like massaging cow udders for milk (as opposed to for fun). At the end of June, I was able to take a few days off to attend the fiestas in Chota, a region in Cajamarca that is six hours away from my site. Chota is known for its bullring, which is the second largest in the country after Lima´s. Here, a three day bullfight takes place, and a week of heavy and severely drunken partying ensues. Chota, incidentally, is not at all fun to travel to, especially if you have consumed anything alcoholic in the 24 hours before your trip. A few of my friends and myself piled onto the budget bus to Chota, a ride that was conducted on a narrow unpaved road hanging over an intimidating cliff. It goes without saying that it was a bumpy ride, the bumps becoming even more defined by one of my friends pointing out that she might hurl after each glitch we encountered. While I am incredibly fond of everyone who accompanied me on the trip, it quickly became apparent that we were not accustomed to being together for extended periods of time. One friend thought it would be cool to buy a ¨party shirt¨ (neon orange and already sweaty reversible Nike muscle shirt from the 70´s) off the back of a Peruvian for 5 Soles ($1.50) and wear it for five days straight, which obviously elicits a wretched stench. The stench would have been ignorable if 5 of us weren’t sharing a hotel room to save money. Another friend (when I say ¨another¨, I actually mean the same friend with the party shirt) has become fond of cañazo, a homemade Peruvian liquor that is even more wretched that a human body that has worn the same party shirt for five days. It is generally served in a used soda bottle that is pulled out of the garbage right in front of you. Side effects of cañazo seem to be picking ridiculous fights, wanting to sleep on a filthy floor fully-dressed even after a sleeping bag and bed are offered to you, succeeding in keeping those around you wide awake ALL NIGHT LONG by talking/yelling in your sleep, randomly mentioning genitalia and other such obscenities in Spanish in front of classy Peruvian adults during mealtimes, and missing every bus/commitment you have scheduled. Keep in mind that I have shared only one person´s quirks, and there were many of us. It made for a very interesting few days, to say the least.

I wasn’t expecting much from the bullfight because I didn’t know that bullfighting was even popular in Peru. I attended a fight in Spain as a youngster, but left early because everyone with me was grossed out. Of course I pretended to be grossed out and angered by the brutality because I didn’t want to be considered barbaric by my friends, but in retrospect, I am pissed that I missed out on something so cultural. While I thought Peru´s fighting would be disappointing in comparison to Spain´s, I was very pleasantly surprised. All three of the bullfighters were actually from Spain, and seemed very practiced in their technique (which is wearing pink tights with pride and flamboyantly projecting themselves about the ring). Peruvians are actually serious about their bullfighting, and it might be the only event they show up on time for. My friends and I, who are now accustomed to the ¨hora peruana¨ (showing up an hour or two late to all events), strolled over to the bullring an hour after our tickets said the fighting would start, only to find ourselves locked out. With some loud banging and maneuvering, we were finally able to enter (much to the chagrin of the Peruvians who we blocked for a second to get to our seats. One of my friends was actually aggressively pinched on his leg while passing a pissed elderly woman! Old ladies can be so sassy, can they not?). One thing that the Spaniards are more organized with is the waving of the handkerchiefs. It was kind of haphazard with the Peruvians, all of them waving different colored chiefs at different times. I just realized that handkerchiefs abbreviated definitely is not ¨chiefs.¨ Whatever, you know what I mean. Hankies. Anyway, 6 bulls were killed, and in the last 10 minutes of the festivities it finally occurred to us that when a fight was well-fought, people would wave their hankies to signify that the bullfighter should receive an ¨oreja¨, or the bull´s ear. As if enough blood had not been shed during the murder of the bull. I don´t know if this happens in Spain, but I learned that here, if a bull is especially rambunctious and tough, he can be ¨saved¨ by the audience for breeding. This didn’t happen to any of the bulls we witnessed, but gosh was bull number 2 a treat to watch. The first thing he did was run out and collide with the wall, splintering his horns. I took this as a sign that he was a strong bull that didn’t respect boundaries, but I guess the rest of the audience interpreted it as him being a bit dense with poor depth perception. He was a fighter, that’s for sure, and he even forced the matador to jump over the wall to escape his wrath. I know it is a cruel act, but I really enjoyed myself at the bullfight, so don’t judge me. I feel like my enjoyment can be justified by highlighting that I rooted for the bulls the whole time. In leaving the bull ring, we saw all of the bulls that were killed just minutes before, skinned and hanging for sale. I was told that this meat is cheap, but gross, because bulls raised to fight are not tasty or tender to eat. Seeing their meat for sale made my stomach turn a little. I think it was enough to watch them lose the fight inside. I didn’t really need to see them hanging outside like that.

All this talk about fighting has made me sleepy. Before I go, I want to share something that continues to make me chuckle. Some things here are just so mismatched and nonsensical that it is humorous. Tonight at dinner, my host dad was listening to a program on his portable radio that he brings everywhere with him. He turns it up really loud when he feels overpowered by women at the dinner table, especially when all we are doing is gossiping about townspeople, a beloved Peruvian pastime. Tonight´s program was about prostate problems, genital discomfort, and sexual dysfunction. My family is really old fashioned, so I figured that they might deem this program inappropriate for my 7 year old host nephew (or me, who was losing my appetite quickly with what the radio show was addressing). But like the loyal listeners we are, we all tuned in to various callers around Peru talking about the troubles they were experiencing ¨down there.¨ Even more hysterical than my family unabashedly listening to this was the song that the radio station chose to play throughout this whole program. While one caller was talking about the extreme pain he felt while urinating, ¨I´ve had the time of my life,¨ (yes, the Dirty Dancing theme song) was playing rather loudly in the background. Do you consider pain while urinating an enjoyable life experience? Oh, Peru, you kill me sometimes!

July 11, 2007- What now?

2007-07-18T13:51:00.000-07:00

We are currently on day 3 of national school strikes, day 7 of no water, and day 3 of no way to get into the city for water or food. Things are looking pretty grim and I find myself getting sad and frustrated, my feelings probably being amplified by my extreme dehydration. Even if I were stupid enough to drink water from the river that passes by our house, I couldn’t because it has dried up since the end of rainy season. I am praying that the transportation strike ends tomorrow so I can treat myself to a tub of drinking water and maybe some food that resembles something other than stale rice. My family is having an interesting response to our current hardship, one that might entertain me if I weren’t so freaking thirsty. They stare at me and make comments like, ¨The gringa is looking gaunt and worried too, like us. What are we going to do?¨ As if I, as what they still consider a privileged white, am impervious to thirst, suffering, whatever. I recently read a Newsweek article about what a delicacy clean drinking water is in most developing countries, and I felt fortunate to be in a country where water isn´t too hard to come by. Now that I am getting a taste of the desperation that comes with waking up to the thought of ¨Where will we find water today?¨, I feel sick knowing that some peoples lives are made of the endless search for water. Maybe I am not cut out to be a development worker if I feel so paralyzed and sentimental about what people in disadvantaged situations have to face. How personal of a struggle this can be sometimes, even while those around you are going through the same experience.

From what I can gather, the school strike is taking place in response to a new law Alan Garcia is proposing to impose an evaluation system on the educational realm. I imagine his goal is to produce more qualified teachers and provide the students with a means of giving feedback about the quality of their classes and teachers. This is scaring many teachers since education is undervalued here, and many of them (I write from personal experience, and from experiences relayed to me by fellow volunteers) are less than serious about their jobs. Maybe some of you have read the recent Economist article about how poor education is in Peru. None of what I write here is meant to deny the fact that many talented and devoted teachers exist in Peru. Sometimes they just seem like the minority. In my last site, the teacher I was working with consistently showed up an hour late with alcohol so blatantly on his breath that his 10 year old students not-so-subtly called him Sr. Borracho (Mr. Drunk). At my current site, the students are barely in class. When I go to scheduled meetings with the director, I find him playing volleyball with his staff, the students nowhere to be found. When I ask him where the kids are, he looks at me impatiently for interrupting his game, and tells me that all 100 of them were tired, so he let them out two hours early (the school day is only 5 hours long). The teachers are refusing to come to school because they are against being evaluated and forced to be held accountable for what they are supposed to know as educational authorities. Obviously, as a bit of an outsider, it is possible that I do not have the whole story, but this is what I was able to pick up from newspapers and my townspeople. The strike has no end in sight, which is seriously hindering my work here with the youth. All of my scheduled activities in the schools have been indefinitely postponed, and I can´t make it into the city for my other job at the youth hogar.

I have no clue what is going on with transportation to and from my site, but I hear there might be a nation-wide business strike, or ¨paro¨ which is more like an organized halt in service that generally is short-lived. As soon as this blog entry gets posted, that means I was able to make it into the city, which is a very good sign. For the time being, the Peace Corps is advising us against travel as there are potentially dangerous protests all throughout the country. Since I can´t get out of my site to begin with, I guess the above advisory doesn’t really apply to me. Hopefully my next entry will be written with all things resolved.

June 17, 2007- A long awaited visit from home

2007-06-18T10:43:00.000-07:00

Since it has been a while since anyone has come to visit me from home, I like to pretend that other people’s visitors are my own. This worked out incredibly well when I met Kristen´s parents this weekend, since they are my biggest/only blog fans outside of my own dad. Conveniently, I didn’t have to share much personal information with them because they practically know me from reading up on me on the web. As predicted from all of the stories Kristen has told me about them, I loved them. At the start of our visit, they were just returning from what they labeled ¨a trip of a lifetime¨ across Peru, some of the highlights being the Amazon jungle, Lake Titicaca, and Arequipa (land of the greatest chocolate in the world, apparently). They seemed so energized and excited to share what a wonderful time they had, that I found myself absorbing their enthusiasm and letting go of some negative thoughts about Peru that sometimes surface for me and other Peace Corps Volunteers (see last 100 entries). I am really sad that my adopted parents will be leaving Peru soon, but I suppose all good things do come to an end. This entry is for Mrs. Judy Cummings, who politely accosted me for not posting often enough. My only excuse is that while living a slow and steady existence in the countryside, it´s easy to forget how in demand you are in the states. What a superstar I am.

Back to my changing view of Peru, it is so easy to get caught up in life´s small annoyances down here that I often forget what an idyllic setting I am in. Out of all Peace Corps placements, I wouldn’t feel presumptuous suggesting that Peru is among the most beautiful. I feel fortunate to be somewhere that is a desirable travel destination for my loved ones, somewhere that they feel safe visiting and excited about exploring. I really need to hold onto this reality when I feel myself starving for meat, running out of patience with my work, and missing home. To be honest, going back to the states scares me sometimes because I feel that in many ways, Peruvians have a more unobstructed view of happiness and what is important in life. Even when we are starving in my house because we are low on cash, or we can´t go outside because the rains are too heavy, or we (I) get cranky from coming to the conclusion for the 1500th time that there is little with which to entertain myself at my site, my family continues smiling because at least we are together. That is all that matters, is it not? We are together, we are healthy, and we have everything we really need (which ends up being close to nothing). I really do love this life and can imagine living it forever in many senses. My host parents remain one of the cutest couples I have ever encountered and sometimes when I am bored, I envision building a mud house on their land, having babies that I strap onto my back with Peruvian-printed tapestries, and cooking on a woodstove (something that is a little less realistic than my other two mentioned goals, surprisingly). Wood stoves are the WORST. Every day I try to start a fire and fail, and every day my host mom comes along and blows on what I have failed to begin and with one breath starts the master of all fires. Then she walks away chuckling. What an incredible vital capacity she has! Seriously, check out the lungs on that one! Most exciting about the possibility of staying here is growing my hair long again (did I mention I cut over a foot of my hair off because a knot the size of Texas was taking over my coiffure?) and learning to tend to it without a shower and keep it in two long silky braids like Peruvian woman. Just that seems like a good enough reason to stay.

It also might be worthwhile to stay in Peru considering the newly acquired habits I have learned to embrace, none of which would fly in the states. Some cultural nuances here are actually awesome, like not having to wait to eat until everyone at your table has their food. When food is placed in front of you, you are to begin eating right away. This means that I usually finish my meal before any of my family starts eating, since I am still the house celebrity and get served first. Also, no conversation topic is controversial or inappropriate here. If I want to ask my host aunt about the new roll of fat that has developed around her midsection, she will gladly (without a trace of embarrassment) giggle and tell me that she has been going a little overboard with her bread and whole milk consumption. In the same conversation, I could ask her her age and weight, neither of which she would conceal. A cultural difference that I have not adopted for obvious reasons is just laying my seatbelt across my lap as opposed to actually buckling it. Imagine getting pulled over in the states and trying to explain that one. ¨Are you serious, officer, when you say that this seatbelt just resting on my lap won´t protect me in an accident? What an interesting theory you have. Wait, are you giving me a ticket for something I never even considered a risk?¨ I also think about how Peruvians greet almost everyone they pass with an eager good morning, good afternoon, or good night. I wonder if I were to continue that trend in the states, how many people would respond to me (versus how many people might think I have a mild but friendly case of Tourette´s). Personal space is very different here as well. Do you think it would be acceptable for me to sit on top of two other people in a train or taxi in the states? There´s some food for thought.

June 23 marks a year in Peru for my group, and I feel that we are just now solidifying our jobs here (after one full year…crazy, huh?). My boss was just in town from Lima doing site development for the next group of youth development volunteers who just arrived on June 8th. She called me for what she proposed as a birthday lunch, but it actually ended up being another job proposal for me (something that seems heaven-sent). She mentioned that I have the smallest site out of all of the volunteers, and that she thought I might eventually get bored and feel unproductive. I have been having these exact sentiments for a while, but was waiting to see if any of my remaining strategies could whip up some meaningful work for me. My site is just really limited though, and Kitty (my boss) offered me the option of having a dual site (living in my site and working there for 3 days a week, and working in the city at a home for disadvantaged youth for the rest of the week). I will be working with a psychologist at the home which is right up my alley, so this all seems very promising to me. Next week I will visit the hogar for the first time, when I should get a better feel for my new work duties. It is just interesting what the universe sends you, right when you feel you need it most.

My host mom, who is a very traditional campesina always adorned in her Cajamarcan straw tophat and colorful layered skirts, had to take a trip alone to Lima (a very modern city) last week to deliver some paperwork. The mere thought of her traveling alone after 15 years of no travel gave me heart palpitations to the point that I thought of accompanying her. She left on Sunday and was supposed to come back on Tuesday, but Friday night at dinner we were ineffectively trying to figure out where the heck she was. My host dad was freaking out for a couple of reasons: she hadn’t called any of us even though she had a list of all of our numbers, our house was falling apart without her (our cows seemed sad and sick, and we hadn’t eaten a decent meal since her departure), and the family members she stayed with outside of Lima informed us that she had left for home days ago. We were all so worried about her, and had no way to reach her. Sunday morning, five days late, she nonchalantly walks in our front door with no explanation of where the hell she had been, only explaining that she had lost our phone numbers (not surprising for a woman who forgets to salt the rice EVERYDAY after having cooked it for 60 years). I don´t think she was doing anything scandalous, but my friend Reannon and I spent a good deal of time envisioning her ditching her campo gear for a week, buying herself some nice outfits and living like a metropolitan woman for a bit of time while she was away. Maybe she even put some makeup on and went to an upscale salon to treat her chapped and arthritic hands. None of this could ever transpire with how little money she has, but I like to imagine her being taken care of with how hard she works to take care of us. I wish she would accept this treatment from me. I swear her eyes were laughing when she returned. What was she doing in Lima for so long?

May 31, 2007- Dad knows best?

2007-06-01T13:26:00.000-07:00

I recently received a massive package from my father, who I sometimes fear because of his sense of humor. While his jokes rank up there among my favorites, they can at times be borderline frightening. For the Christmas of my 20th year, I received from a family friend a set of stuffed teddy bears dressed in different holiday-themed sweaters. My dad, instead of allowing me to give them to a more age-appropriate recipient, insisted on keeping them. Occasionally, he asks me if I want them sent to wherever I am currently residing, which he gets a kick out of. For him, it is the joke that keeps on joking. ¨Lindsay, are you sure that you don´t want me to mail you at least 2 of the 5 teddy bears? They are awfully cute, after all.¨ So back to my initial point, I was sure that one of those pesky bears would find its way into the package he sent me, but maybe I successfully concealed them with all of the shit I stored at his apartment before coming down here, because my package was bearless. While lacking teddy bears, it did have some other interesting contents. My dad has a proclivity for sending me a mixture of things I love with random things he finds around his house. Items that fell into the second mentioned category this time around included a lone can of sardines, 2 expired pudding packs, some old black flip flops, and some miniature marmalades, all of which made me smile. Perhaps that can of sardines made you cringe? You maybe thought, ¨Ewww…sardines???¨ This, my friends, is where our true story begins…

All I think about is meat. If you want to play a fun game with yourself, try to guess what is running through my mind at any point during any given day. If you guess my family, friends, or work, you are wrong. If you guess meat, BINGO, you hit that nail right on its head. It´s fun. If you always guess meat, you will always be right, which sort of means you are a mind reader and that we are telepathically connected. Spellbinding, isn´t it? Speaking of meat and my lust and love for it, let us focus in for a second on the fact that I am served meat or another form of protein on average once a month, which has me a bit at my wit’s end. Don´t get too close, I´m not afraid of eating your flesh. Seriously. Here is a tidbit to illustrate how unbearable it has become. One of my closest friends Hana recently visited my region from her site west of mine, closer to the coast. She shared stories with me and Kristen about the wide range of insect visitors her room gets, including tarantulas and sizable scorpions. Instead of freaking out as the old Lindsay would, I sat there thinking, hmmm…tarantulas are large enough to qualify as animals. Maybe I could roast them over a fire and enjoy them over some pasta. Or, Im sorry, I forgot for a second where I was. I would actually enjoy them over rice. Silly me! Am I actually on Survivor? Will I win the cash if I start roasting tarantulas, because if so, that would be sweet!

Well, tonight after a dinner of hot water and dry flour (yes, they eat plain flour down here…don’t knock it until you´ve tried it. Just kidding, I won´t make you try it, as it tastes just like you would expect it to. What you must remember while eating it is that you can´t take too big of a bite or it will immediately suck all water out of your body, leaving you choking and gasping for air. Sweet treat, thanks for teaching me how to properly ingest it), I came to my room in a protein-seeking frenzy, ready to eat my wool blanket, which is as close to an animal as I could find. But wait! Did my dad NOT send me a pack of sardines? In a euphoric fit, I threw my entire packages contents (including Tastykakes, candy bars, and other such delectable goodies) aside to finally reach that flat shiny receptacle known as a sardine can. Reaching my fishy destination was more satisfying than Christmas, and in all of my excitement, I tore off the peel-off lid like I was opening my most awaited Christmas gift, which in case you were confused, is not a set of knit-sweater wearing teddy bears. What I forgot in opening the sardines is that their can was full to the brim of sardine-smelling fluid, not to mention sardines, all of which went flying all over the gosh darned place I call my room. Just when I thought my room couldn’t smell any worse from urinating at the base of my bed in a salad bowl, this calamity unfolds before me. Now, I’m sitting here trying to figure out if it is my room that smells, or just my hands from scooping sardines off my floor and shoveling them into my salivating mouth. All disasters aside, dad, you are a genius. Keep the protein coming, in whatever form you please.

May 24, 2007- A moment of candor

2007-05-25T15:47:00.000-07:00

I have encountered countless kind (though perhaps naïve) souls who have commended me and my fellow PCV´s for volunteering with the Peace Corps, as if the sole act of volunteering is dignified in itself. I should dedicate part of this entry to dispelling the above myth. Sure, committing two years to strangers in a strange land is somewhat of a triumph in the beginning, but no one should be continuously praised for this sacrifice unless they reinforce it by doing something extraordinary with themselves during their two years abroad. I am writing this so that you can all eulogize the one area that I have excelled in here, which is the maintenance of my mounting impatience with the children I am working with. Believe me when I say that I might be the most edgy person on this entire continent, and I am wondering how I came to qualify as this if this is never how I used to be. Should I allow some time and space for your applause?

The elementary school that is situated closest to my house just lost their English teacher. They are probably better off without her since she was teaching them words that don´t actually exist in the English language, but unfortunately, her abdication has gravely affected me. I was guilt tripped into taking over her position, despite my best efforts to shy away from all English-related responsibilities. In propositioning me, the director conveniently forgot to mention that the class I would be taking over resembles a pack of screeching and blood-sucking hyenas. I am certifiably afraid of them. While I feel I adequately asserted myself in the first class, making sure to highlight the fact that I mean business, they continue to treat me like that stereotyped submissive substitute that will be teaching the class for just one day. Judging by how miserable they are capable of making me, the only conclusion I have repetitively come to is that I have reached my own personal hell. I am being punished for something soooo bad…

Here are the 3 simple ground rules that I have set for the class, and the various ways these ballsy students of mine break them:

1. Have respect for your classmates and teacher. Raise your hand if you have something to contribute, and never speak while someone else is speaking.
-Perhaps it is my fault for not specifying that you should refrain from throwing pointy objects at your teacher´s eyeball, but two boys in particular just love to throw paper airplanes at my head WHILE I am looking directly at them, followed by them denying it straight-faced. ¨Oh, I´m sorry for accusing you, Rosmel. You´re right, maybe I was blinded for an instance by the UFO coming full-speed towards my head. I agree, it probably was thrown by my favorite student, who happens to be sitting all the way across the room, vigorously writing English words in her notebook.¨

2. Come to class on time, with all necessary materials.
-These little gems of mine take pride in showing up 15 minutes late to a one hour class, telling me that the rain hindered them from getting there on time from a classroom that is twenty feet away from ours. Hmmm…how uncanny that it was raining there and not here. What a conundrum nature is!

3. At the end of the class, please return all borrowed materials to the teacher in the same condition they were borrowed in.
-Since I didn´t specify under Rule 1 that the students should not be ¨making music¨ while someone else is talking, they feel completely comfortable creating a different kind of disruption by crushing my brand new crayons under their feet, or crumpling the notebooks I bought them with my own money. But how can I yell at them for making this kind of noise? After all, they´re not talking.

Since at the end of each work day I feel like bringing an end to every child within a ten mile radius, I am sure you can understand my intermittent confusion and frustration with my project. Remind me once more…Am I here with the Youth Development or Youth Abolishment Program, because I might really thrive at the latter. I guess it is safe to say that maternal instincts don´t kick in until you have your own children, but can someone like me (taking into consideration my present state of mind) really count on something like that happening?

Note to anyone important (Peace Corps staff) who might be reading this: I am mostly joking and am not homicidal. Thanks for reading.

April 12, 2007- Back in action

2007-04-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

It seems that no matter how many blog entries I think I am writing, I remain seriously indebted to this online journal of mine. I just got my computer back from the shop after it again decided to take a hiatus that we didn´t agree upon. It typically takes the guys at the shop 2 weeks to a month to ¨fix¨ it, and this time I am pretty sure they charged me for things they didn’t even do. My theory is that my computer serendipitously started working on its own, and the guys figured they could just mumble off some technical terms in Spanish and charge me for a job my computer did all by itself. They succeeded in their plot because I didn’t feel like mustering up the few argumentative Spanish words I know.

So here my computer and I sit, trying to remember what has occurred within the last month. My work finally seems to be coming together, and I am happy to report that I have 12 presentations planned in the schools for next week; some on nutrition and some on sex ed. I prefer the nutrition charlas (as we call them down here) because they don´t involve the kids laughing hysterically every time I say penis or vagina, or when I slip a condom on a cucumber. I´d rather skip those sex ed charlas all together, but considering most everyone in my community over 17 years old has a baby or a few, I guess this type of education is lacking. It´s so difficult to make friends in my community because everyone my age has a family to care for, and more responsibilities than I can relate to. Sometimes I think that the people in my town (girls especially) think that my existence is really perverse. Why would I willingly move to another country away from my family? Why don´t I have kids yet? Why is education so important to me? Will I EVER get married? If I can at least find some ground on which we can relate to one another by the end of my two years here, that will be enough of an accomplishment for me. It is interesting how many people feel pressured to get married and have kids in the states, considering we have so many other purposeful options there. Here, where not so many opportunities exist, the above mentality makes more sense.

Speaking of the girls and women in my town, you should see what hard workers they are. Just seeing them walk down the path to the main road makes me doubt my own strength. It is not uncommon to see a petite woman with two children strapped on her back, a live turkey tucked under her left arm (trying its hardest to peck her eyes out), and two large vats of milk in her other arm (probably weighing in at 10 kilos each). I see them towards the end of their journey since I live close to the road, but many of them travel 2 hours on foot before even getting to my house, and they look more energized than ever. That is something that I will never become desensitized to. How do these women cook every meal for their large families, care for all of their children, livestock, and land, and still have time and energy to endure the long and daily haul to the market? I get a kick out of how people travel here. In the states, it is barely acceptable to travel with your pet. Here, people load themselves onto the bus with any animal they can carry down to the bus stop, which makes for an interesting ride since all livestock is uncaged and restless (probably sensing their impending deaths). At first it really bothered me that I was paying to sit in a stinky bus only to have chickens peck at my ankles, but now I appreciate how relaxed everything is. It gives me room to get away with anything I want, but somehow I don’t see myself transporting a cow anytime soon.

My taxi driver hit a motorcyclist a couple of weeks ago. We managed to hit the only person in Peru I have ever seen wearing a helmet, which was very fortunate for him. And for me, since watching someone die might be my biggest fear. I could have killed my taxi driver though. I thought his response time was so quick when he pulled over and flew out of his car. I assumed I was about to witness some heroic act on his part, but instead of running to the victim´s side, he bolted to the side of his taxi to inspect the damage. After assessing only minimal damage, he got back into the car and drove off, saying to me, ¨I can´t believe that guy just hit us.¨ Uh….yeah, that´s not exactly what happened. I guess his attachment to his vehicle shouldn’t surprise me, since a baptism for a BUS just occurred in Kristen´s site.

In other news, a duck recently fell into our latrine, which holds all of my family’s feces from the last five years (but not mine, since I have started going in my room in a salad bowl). You shouldn´t judge though, for two reasons. One, the stench of the latrine is unbearable and once night comes, it is too dark to venture out to the dark abyss we call an outhouse. Two, if you are going to judge me for my repugnant behavior, I have to point out that I have converted two other volunteers to the salad bowl shitting squad. I won´t mention their names because I don´t want to discomfit them, but I am just saying that it can´t be all that bad if I have followers. Anyway, back to the duck who lost his balance. The day after this occurred, a new dish showed up in front of me. It was a delicious mixture of what tasted like octopus in a red vegetable sauce, served over rice. I wolfed it down, and afterwards, tuned into the conversation my family was having. They kept saying ¨duck¨, but they weren´t doing it in relation to the latrine incident. They were actually talking about how they went about cooking the octopus-tasting duck they just served me. Yes, this means that I ate a duck that was previously covered in urine and feces. I excused myself and proceeded upstairs to dry heave into the salad bowl formerly (and presently) known as my toilet. Some things are just too much for me to handle. At what point do these people declare a piece of meat bad? After resting dead in a river for a day? Nope. After falling in our collective bowel movements? Nah.

I just returned back from an amazing Easter vacation. Easter happens to be one of the few holidays where Peace Corps volunteers can travel without taking vacation days. A few of us actually received an extended vacation when we were invited to a Seder ceremony at our country director´s house in Lima. My good friend Hana (my favorite Jew) had her parents visiting from the states during this time. Her dad, who is a Rabbi, led the ceremony and wanted it to be interfaith, so a few of us ¨chosen people¨ were able to attend. Her father was extremely accommodating and sympathetic to those of us who know very little about Judaism. We read from a very hip and updated religious text, and had a blast doing so. After hanging out with the Schein family for a bit, we met up with a group of 12 to spend our vacation in Ica, which is 3 hours south of Lima on the coast. That region is known for its wineries, but Peruvian wine is grossly sweet, so I didn´t partake in any wine tours. Pisco is also made down there, which is an alcohol used to make the national drink, the Pisco sour, a delicious mix of lime, Pisco, egg whites, and sugar (and other ingredients I am probably forgetting). We stayed in Huacachina, a serene oasis consisting of a lagoon (known to have healing powers) nestled between large sand dunes. The most popular things to do here are to dune buggy and sand board, and take excursions to the famous Nazca lines and Ballestas Islands (often called the poor man´s Galapagos). While the Nazca lines were too expensive to conquer during this trip, we basically did every other excursion possible. Despite damaging some cartilage in my knee and not being able to walk without leaning on someone, Huacachina was way fun. I tell you, you never can be too careful while turning over in bed. Some pretty serious knee injuries can occur in the least likely environments. I was told I couldn’t lie and say I hurt myself while ¨shredding some sand on the dunes¨ or however that expression goes, so here rests the truth. While in Huacachina, we took a boat out to the Islands where we saw every bird imaginable, along with a hefty harem of seals and sea lions. We weren’t able to make it back for our sand boarding appointment, so they stretched the rules a bit and took us out in the dark. It was exhilarating to fly over the dunes in a buggy through the pitch black, and while I wasn’t able to stand on my board, they let us go down on our bellies which ended up being more fun anyway. It ended up being a really satisfying vacation, followed by missing 2 buses in attempting to get home, but that’s another story all together.

March 15th, 2007- Are we all in agreement that this is edible?

2007-03-22T14:13:00.000-07:00

I have been known to be slightly paranoid about meat going bad (after leaving it out of the fridge for a mere 5 minutes), but today´s little fiasco pushed my paranoia to the limit. My host mom awoke to find one of our 8 cows dead in the river. It happened to be our biggest bull which means my host parents lost a considerable amount of money with its death. We were unsure of both the cause and the time of its death, and this uncertainty led me to believe that it had died of madcow disease a looooooong 24 hours before. Hoping that my host parents would jump to the same conclusion, I was positive they would refrain from slicing up its carcass and serving it to me for the next 24 meals (you should have seen the size of its ribs!). My hopes dissipated when my host dad made 10 trips back from the river with various bull body parts slung over his shoulder, leaving them on our kitchen table (where I often cut my vegetables sans cutting board) to bleed onto the floor and eventually be cooked. No refrigeration, no cover, no guarantee that this meat wasnt spoiled from becoming swollen with contaminated water and acid rain. When I was served my first portion of bull at lunch time, I did everything in my mental power to convince myself that cooking at high temperatures destroys everything evil, but this didnt make the meat easier to swallow, especially since his uncooked and hairy legs were resting next to my plate as a reminder of where this meat had come from. Vegetarianism seems like an absolutely awesome idea at this point!

Now, onto my work here, which is just about as grim as eating rotten bull. School just started again after a 3 month summer vacation, which means work is more plentiful for me. Now that I have a steady and purposeful job, I figured everything would be just peachy. I presented my first schoolwide project a couple of days ago, which I have been planning for the last two months. It was going to involve many interactive activities, as well as some pretty spectacular prizes for the most participatory students. As I was presenting the plan, a kid raised his hand and flagrantly announced, ¨I think I speak for all of us when I say we have no interest whatsoever in this.¨ Sweet. So where, exactly, do I go from there? What a tiring job it is, working with kids who dont value education and who dont appreciate me trying to make their lives a little more fun and informative. I guess I just have to take a deep breath and attempt another strategy.

February 23, 2007: After a long while...

2007-03-01T17:08:00.000-08:00

Reporting LIVE from Peru, where I just experienced my first earthquake. I emphasize ¨live¨ because I love being theatrical about things like these AND because earthquakes are the major cause of death amongst PC volunteers in Peru. Not that many have died, but STILL! Fortunately, I remain amongst the living. I´m perturbed though, because all throughout the fuerte 20-second quake I was sure that it was just my sporadic visitor, Mr. Ratface, shaking my bed like the annoyance he is. This means that I didn´t even get to enjoy it for all it was worth because I thought all the ruckus was caused by my arch nemesis, the varmint. In all of the tremors I have felt in my life, I always seem to be sitting or lying down. I am so curious to know what it would feel like if I were standing. Would it be like surfing or maybe being on an elevator? Would I be able to defy the laws of the land and maintain my posture and composure? Probably. I am pretty tough. But what if there were a mild earthquake during a runway modeling show? Those girls look pretty frail. Would they just be propelled off the stage by the forces of Mother Nature? I wonder…

I recently returned from a two week South American tour with my mom. By tour I mean select parts of Peru and Colombia, but still, it was a lot of traveling. My mom got pretty sick in every way possible, but Peru will do that to you. Colombia was a treat and spoiled me in more ways than one, so here I sit in the campo of Peru, trying to nurse myself out of the depression that being back has caused me with nothing more than my Christmas music play list. Some highlights of our trip included visiting the site where the female tattooed mummy was recently excavated (see National Geographic, June 2006), drinking a Starbucks frappucino (vanilla, if anyone cares. I would have gone for chocolate, but I had just scarfed down a few chocolate donuts, Dunkin Donuts-style, obviously), seeing my best friend teach in her very own classroom in Bogotá, and spending some quality time with her family. Colombia is one rad place.

I was fortunate to return to Cajamarca just in time for the Entrada of Carnival. February 17th marked the official start of the festivities. Even though Carnival is celebrated all throughout January and February (mainly by everyone throwing water balloons and beer bottles at my head), Feb. 17th was when the real fun began, initiating a huge party that lasted for about a week. People travel to Cajamarca from all over, and the celebration here is said to be only second or third to Rio´s. It was pretty incredible. The tradition for the 17th is that EVERYONE outside throws paint and water at one another in any way they want (from a bucket, balloon, rag, water gun, etc). Some people choose a more intrusive approach by taking clumps of paint, running up to you and essentially molesting you by rubbing it in every crevice of your body. No matter who you are, or how big your crowd is, you are defenseless. I think I was outside for two minutes before I was cornered by two clans of rowdy Peruvians who attacked immediately when they saw how pristinely untouched I was. My friends and I split our time between hiding on a roof to take people out sniper-style, and running through the streets with our measly collection of water balloons, trying to blend in. Most everyone participated: storeowners, police officers, the elderly (my main target since I was too much of a wimp to hit someone who might retaliate). All weekend, stores and restaurants were closed and people were marching through the streets with their ¨weapons¨ and gathering in the plaza for drinking and drum circles. After the first day, paint is always banned, but water and powder (a lethal combo) are allowed. It occurs to me now, almost a week after being attacked, that not everyone used washable paint. How much longer will I be blue, especially if I can only shower once a week?

Speaking of being blue, I have a bad cold right now that is making my eyes water incessantly like I am a big cry baby or something. It feels weird to cry over nothing, so I have succeeded in making myself sad so I at least have a reason to cry. Below are the reasons I have decided to be sad:

1. Tissues don´t exist in these parts. RAW NOSES make me blue.
2. I just finished a good book that made me laugh lots (Erika Lopez´s ¨Flaming Iguanas¨). I have no more English books here to read. WAHHHHHH!!!
3. I ate all of the caramel Hershey kisses my mom brought me in one sitting. I was standing actually, and they gave me nothing but a royal tummy ache.
4. I can´t remember if 28 days in February is regular or signifies that it´s a leap year, which probably means I am getting dumber.
5. I am all out of reasons to be sad, but boy were the above four depressing enough!

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

2007-01-22T12:48:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-15T13:13:00.000-08:00

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.

December 30th, 2006- Another holiday season ends

2006-12-31T10:07:00.000-08:00

Well, as I sit here listening to Wham´s ¨Last Christmas,¨it becomes clear that once again, I am having trouble letting go of the Christmas season. I spent the last few months dreading a quiet and different holiday, but my friends, host family, and I joined forces rather successfully to combat that preconceived notion of mine. In fact, we succeeded so wholeheartedly that the end of our festivities brought me great sadness, so much so that I am thinking that a more serenely spent holiday may have been easier to recover from. The only things that are keeping me afloat right now are the six Christmas cd´s that my mom mailed to me (which I plan to listen to continuously until next Christmas, or at least until my host family pilfers and burns them. After all, what depression can survive the Chipmunks Christmas Compilation?) and the package of my grandmom´s icebox fruitcake that is lost somewhere in snailmail space, hopefully inching its way towards me. While the lot of you may cringe when thinking of fruitcake (arguably the worlds most loathsome gastronomical entity), let me assure you that Lucy Light defies every fruitcake stereotype with that delectable aforementioned treat. I´ll let you know how it tastes when it arrives stale sometime early next year.

So, Christmas in Peru. Do you want to hear about it? Well, do you? Since it is no skin off my back reliving it, I suppose I´ll tell you ALL of the details. First off, it is worth mentioning that with the start of December came my perpetual desire to transform myself into a Christmas elf. If Peru wasn’t going to paint itself red, white, and green (with gold and silver accents), the responsibility would lay in the hands of no one other than Lindsay Jean Buck. Since it proved impossible to find a stocking that would endure being stuffed with anything heavier than a grain of salt, I made stockings for everyone I know here. Some choice adornments were glitter glue, buttons, Christmas-printed ribbon, you know, the whole sha-bang. My family especially appreciated these, considering the only decoration they brought to the table was an empty cake box that we hung festively on the ceiling. I don´t have too many complaints about this makeshift ornament, considering it was reddish and had a bough of holly painted on it. Christmas is all about improvising, especially when living away from home. By the way, just to keep you updated and in the holiday spirit, I am now listening to Elvis´ ¨Blue Christmas,¨an oldie but goodie.

Many of my friends happened to be celebrating Christmas in my regional city, a mere 15 minutes away from me. This meant that I had access to the best of two worlds. I was able to witness Peruvian traditions while enjoying the company of fellow volunteers, so I had very little to complain about. Preparations began by helping a friend decorate his hotel room with holiday cheer, which this year encompassed red and white musical lights, a colorful array of garland, a huge red bell, and approximately 30 handcrafted snowflakes (I´m sure this was all particularly pleasant for his cleaning lady to walk in to). Perhaps the only disheartening aspect of Christmas was realizing that I, Ms. Crafty herself, am snowflake challenged. Snowflakes are supposed to be uniquely exquisite and pleasing to the eye, but all of mine turned out uniform and choppy. Harumph. Some people involved turned it into a contest, but only after they realized how awful I was at it. I feel like that is comparable to betting money on a game that is already over, so I refuse to accept the title of loser. Better luck next year, suckers.

Peruvians celebrate on Christmas Eve (La noche buena) at midnight with a turkey dinner, paneton (a huge muffin-looking fruitcake) and hot chocolate. Two of my friends joined my family for this celebration, but unfortunately we had to tweak the tradition a bit because the turkey that we raised from an infant and planned to eat was stolen by a family member and sold on the Christmas Eve Turkey Black Market for a large sum of money. This was a big deal, since turkey is super expensive and therefore only enjoyed once a year. And oh, what a handsome turkey he was! This whole debacle resulted in my friends and I picking up a fastfood order of chicken, french fries and wilted salad for my family to enjoy on Christmas Eve. This was supplemented by cookies, paneton, wine, and some deliciously rich hocho (hot chocolate) made with our own cows milk. The highlight of the evening was sharing marshmallow fluff that my friend brought from the states. Most of us chose to put it in our hot chocolate, but my 24 year old host sister, who apparently didn´t get the memo, took a heaping spoonful and motioned to plop it on her chicken and fries. Whoa! Easy there, Maribel!! As if the chicken wasn´t displeasing enough on its own. While it probably would have been the right thing to do to let my host family have the remaining fluff, I surreptitiously shoveled it into my purse after supper. Number of fluffernutter sandwiches enjoyed since that fated moment: 9 ½. You can appreciate that, dad (the only person over 10 years old who regularly purchases marshmallow fluff).

Christmas tune currently playing: ¨Merry Christmas, Baby,¨ by Bruce Springsteen, his only redeeming musical ensemble (Blake, it´s time you learned the truth about him). Well, this next holiday memory is a tad emotional for me. A friend and I went to great lengths to make a Christmas day dinner reservation at the nicest hotel/restaurant in Cajamarca city. Two weeks before the event, they promised us a holiday buffet of hundreds of mouthwatering delicacies, none of which were potatoes or rice, our regular fare. In our excitement, we even encouraged some of our friends to change their holiday plans to join us for what was sure to be a spectacular feast. As the ten of us strolled into the restaurant for our 7pm reservation, I heard some brave and perceptive soul whisper, ¨Where is the buffet?¨ After asking the management that exact question, we were told that we were one day late for the buffet. I am still unsure how this miscommunication occurred, considering the man who took our reservation spoke perfect English and clearly said to us, ¨We´ll be awaiting your arrival on the 25th. Here is the list of all of the delicious foods the buffet will include.¨ Let´s just say that I was more devastated by the lack of buffet and mediocre dinner that followed than I was when I learned that Santa didn´t exist. I guess not all was lost though, because we made a pretty awesome batch of eggnog. It´s funny that some of us managed to convince ourselves that Christmas was not Christmas without making eggnog. I am pretty sure that none of us had ever made it before, but gosh, what is Christmas without making eggnog? I can´t believe that we drank it after seeing what goes in it. It would be more appropriately named Salmonella Cesspool with how many raw eggs are included. But oh what a treat it was!

So here I sit in my bed on the day before the very last day of 2006! 2006 was a year of many big changes, but I remain satisfied with how I rang it in and how I am ending it. I am celebrating tomorrow night with my host family, and am excited about all of the new traditions they are going to introduce me to. At midnight, everyone eats 12 grapes and makes a wish with each, each grape representing a month of the new year. Some families also pack their bags and go traipsing around the neighborhood, but I have yet to figure out what that signifies. I hope we don’t do that because my suitcase has a lot of junk in it and the ground is supremely muddy. Some people make little yellow sachets of rice and lentils and some money to save for next year. The most common tradition is making life-sized dolls out of old clothing and burning them at midnight to symbolize out with the old and in with the new. I hope I don’t have to do this though either because I only have about six outfits here.

Well, one thing that is guaranteed is that I will be thinking about all of you as I ring in the new year and hoping that all of you are in wonderful company and enjoying yourselves. Happy 2007 with much love from me!

December 14, 2006: Is this for real?

2006-12-16T09:51:00.000-08:00

Just as my time in Peru was beginning to exhibit some hint of normalcy, here I surreally sit wondering, ¨Hmmmm…is this really happening?¨ Today I was supposed to meet with my counterpart from 1pm-4pm in the Puesto de Salud, our towns makeshift hospital. Upon my arrival, the secretary told me that she had to leave immediately and that my counterpart may or may not come back in 3 hours. Are jobs optional here in Peru? If this were the case in the states, I have a feeling that ¾ of the population would be infinitely happier, and the world would generally be a better place. It took me a few minutes to calculate that if the secretary left, and my counterpart didn’t come for another three hours, I would be running the hospital BY MYSELF. Well, that is technically a lie. There is a stray tabby cat that hangs out in the Puesto de Salud who probably knows the ropes around here better than I do, so maybe between the two of us, we will be able to tackle any emergency situation that comes our way this afternoon. I have every crossable body part crossed in the naïve hope that no patients come in while I am here alone, because their visit may lead to my town disowning me in response to my sheer incompetence and inability to function in panic situations. I wish that I at least exhibited either the fight or flight reaction when panicked, because while the flight response is rather spineless, at least there is a psychological explanation for it. I, for some unknowable reason, neither fight nor fly when I am startled. Instead, I stay very still hoping that I might just blend in with whatever backdrop envelops me, praying that no witnesses to my cowardice ask, ¨Hey, why isn’t that imbecile helping?¨ This brilliant strategy is going to get me nowhere quickly today, because every wall in here is painted blue and my sweater is pink so camouflaging is an impossibility. Great…and that worked SO well before! ¨Oh, hello sir, I see that you are profusely bleeding from a knife wound. Have a seat. I expect the nurse back in 2 hours, or maybe not at all. Let´s just sit around and play a little game of chance in the meantime.¨

December 3, 2006- My culinary conundrum

2006-12-04T11:40:00.000-08:00

One of the more uncomfortable aspects of the Peace Corps is discussing/negotiating rent with your host family. It seems that in discussing this theme with a few of my fellow volunteers, some common trends have presented themselves. Sometimes a family will refuse payment, only to assume that they have access to whatever they want in your room, whenever it is that they want it. Other times, they will blatantly overcharge you for lodging that doesn’t include a bathroom, hot water, food other than rice, and a bedroom sans rats. For others (the lucky ones), the family expects the bare minimum financially, yet gives you the best room in the house, accepts you as one of the family, and feeds you the most delicious food. My family is most in alignment with the latter scenario, but with a twist. They become squeamish when I talk finances with them, and refuse to name a price for me or let me in on what the past Peace Corps volunteers were contributing. While some people might appreciate this unfixed situation, I hate it because I feel like I could offend them both by giving them too little or too much. While I´d rather them assert themselves by stating a price, I am left to come up with my own plan, which I have decided is going to be a combination of going to the market weekly with them to pay for the food, and helping around the house with the cooking and cleaning. This past Thursday I decided to wow them with my first culinary treat, being eggplant parmesian accompanied by a ginger sprinkled salad. This probably would have been received better if Peruvians in the campo had appreciation for the finer foods in life (anything outside of rice and potatoes).

Allow me to set the scene. So I spend approximately 5 hours preparing the meal (since we only have a wood burning stove that burns my eyes more effectively than it cooks the food). The entire time I am cooking, I have my 24 year old host cousin condescending to me about every move I make. ¨Gringita, we don’t eat that much cheese here, Gringita, you bought too much pasta, Gringita, are you sure you need to use that much salt?, Gringita, this doesn´t seem like it will taste good AT ALL.¨ I gave great thought to throwing myself on the open flame, but I waited with hopes that the rest of my family might be more appreciative. So I serve dinner after a little taste test during which I discovered that I might be able to pass as a gourmet chef. But before I can pat myself on the back too much, I discover that something slightly suspicious is going on. We usually eat as a family around the dining room table, but tonight, everyone took their plate of food and dispersed. Ten minutes later, they call me into the TV room, where I find them eating plates of rice and potatoes that materialized out of NOWHERE. ¨Gringita, your food was muy rica, thank you,¨ they said, but something (maybe the fact that they were presently chowing down on four day old rice over my delectable eggplant) told me that they hadn´t even tried it. This sinking suspicion was confirmed when I sat down only to catch a glimpse of all of their plates in a neat line (still full of food) under my host parents bed. Sweet, I am happy that I slaved over Earth´s most primitive stove only to produce something that probably got fed to the cows.

I had a minor meltdown the next day when my host cousin insinuated that I couldn’t cook instead of recognizing the truth (that some Peruvians are resistant to change). With food in my mouth, I spit out the most heinous run-on sentence that resembled something close to, ¨For your information, I lived with boyfriend before coming here and we cooked delicious food together all the time and we used however much salt we saw fit and my friends say I am a good cook and people always want me to make them cakes and why can´t you understand that food is different in the states and that different doesn’t mean bad and while you may not have been fans of my salad last night my dad thinks I am the best darned salad-maker he knows.¨ This verbal stream of consciousness was problematic for a few reasons. 1. It quickly convinced them that I belong not in their house, but in a psych ward, 2. I highlighted loud and clear for them that I lived with my boyfriend before marriage, which makes me a sinner in their religion. A sinner who is living in their house instead of in a psych ward where she belongs, and 3. I can´t think of a three, but believe me, two is sufficient. Did I want to be a big baby and cry about it? Absolutely. Do I ever want to cook for them again? Absolutely not. I´d rather give them every cent the Peace Corps gives me to ensure that I will never have to step foot in the kitchen again.

In barricading myself in my bedroom out of embarrassment, I came face to face with Peru´s largest spider. In trying to murder it, I hallucinated and saw it propelling itself at me, fangs first, causing me to fall backward, cracking a floorboard and probably my coccyx. My host mom came to the rescue with a broom, but proceeded to crack jokes at the dinner table about how the heck I would conquer Peru´s education and poverty problems if I couldn´t even deal with a small spider in the corner of my bedroom? Right, Graciela, because education and poverty have fangs and eight hairy legs. I can see EXACTLY why you view the three as analogous.

Countdown to Christmas: 22 days

November 27, 2006- Back to reality

2006-12-04T11:36:00.000-08:00

After a (never long enough) five day vacation, I am back at my site. This is the first time in my Peace Corps experience that I haven´t had a P.C. event/gathering/vacation planned to look forward to and motivate myself with. Over Thanksgiving, my group seemed to be on the same page with this notion of what the heck do we do next? We are all settled in our respective towns (with me as an exception), and no longer have the language barrier excuse, so it seems like the time to buckle down and start some serious projects. Our observation and integration phase has almost come to its end, and while we all have what I consider very good ideas for our towns, it´s overwhelming to think about putting them into motion, especially in areas that seem comfortable with their disadvantages and reluctant to trust change. Above all, it was nice to reunite as a group to discuss possible strategies for overcoming our frustrations.

It was also nice to prepare and feast on food that is not readily available to us here in Peru. Each of us contributed a staple dish to the Thanksgiving table, and some even went as far as having their parents mail them fixings that can´t be found here, such as cranberry sauce and green bean casserole ingredients. Those crispy (and completely necessary) onions to top off that aforementioned delicacy are not in existence here, and clearly, the Peruvians don´t know what they are missing out on. Despite the paranoia that people in our group might get lazy from lounging on the beach, we ended up having an impressive homemade spread including one of the moistest turkeys I have ever tasted. It was an utter success, to be honest, and I demonstrated my thanks by downing about 5 plates chock full of food in a span of about 20 minutes. Now, the countdown begins until our next Acción de Gracias supper. Or maybe I should start planning Christmas, the very best holiday of the entire year!

The name of the beach we stayed at is Huanchaco. It is located in La Libertad, a department that is south of mine. The beach is a mere 15 minutes outside of Trujillo, Peru´s third largest city and one of its driest desert towns. In just a six hour busride from Cajamarca, it was amazing to watch the topography change from rugged vegetation-filled mountains to a dry, flat, brown and cracking desert. We stayed in a really cozy hostel right across from the water that was equipped with hammocks to lounge in, nice airy rooms, a firepit, two kitchens, and an overly accommodating staff. I guess in North American standards, the beach was not that extraordinary nor did Huanchaco offer many entertainment options, but the lack of activity outside our hostel made pure relaxation a distinct possibility. Outside of our big feast and our Turkey Bowl football game the day after Thanksgiving, we had a very unstructured schedule. I am not sure how everyone else in my group spent their time, but my activities included eating most of the leftover food from our feast (by myself), getting a second degree sunburn on my legs and lower back (probably karma from not sharing the leftovers), watching Elf for the fiftieth time, choreographing sophisticated dances to Britney Spears songs, learning how to throw a football and dominate on the field (just TRY me!), and thoroughly enjoying the company of my closest friends here. I´d say it was an extremely successful trip overall.

Now, back to work. The aspect of my town that is the most difficult is its layout. There is no plaza that the townspeople live around and travel through daily, which means that it is a lot harder to introduce myself to people. I am thinking about printing up a little introduction letter about me, the Peace Corps, and my goals here. I really want to include little sketches, like of me with a Te Amo Peru t-shirt on, but Peruvians are fairly formal people, so I am not sure how accepting they are of juvenile doodles a la Buck. If I were still at my other site, I´d be jumping into my project right about now, but being a newbie here, I have to observe for an additional two months (ARGH!!!). I have been filling my mornings with observations at the lower and upper schools, and spending time with my counterpart down the road at the Centro de Salud. My afternoons are spent cooking or going to the market with my host family. Life is pretty slow here in the campo, but I am enjoying the change in pace.

November 19th, 2006- My Homecoming

2006-11-20T10:54:00.000-08:00

After some political tension arose surrounding the most recent elections (which occurred today), it became necessary for me to move sites permanently. I am now residing in a rural town called Huambocancha. Luckily, I did not have to move departments within Peru, so my new site is a mere hour away from my old site and only 20 minutes away from Cajamarca city, arguably the most beautiful city in all of Peru. While the last couple of weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind, what with my supervisor developing a new site for me with very little notice, I am finally settled in with my new family. We live in a modest farmhouse that is very reminiscent of the two I grew up in, except minus all of the amenities. My new host family consists of a couple in their fifties, their niece who is in her mid twenties, and the niece´s baby daughter who can be described as nothing less than cute as a button. They welcomed me immediately, and fortunate for me, they have housed two other Peace Corps volunteers in the past so they understand the organization´s goals and what living with a gringa is all about. While I thought that the other two Peace Corps volunteers might lessen their excitement about me, I was mistaken. They are exceptionally caring and attentive people, demonstrated to me by my host mom holding my hand for about two hours today while we were in the city together. She didn´t do this is an overly protective or belittling way, but instead in a cute, compassionate one, so I gladly accepted the status of hija gringita being led around the city by her new mama peruana. I feel at ease with them already, after only two days, and I am confident that they will help to provide me with the experience that I hoped for down here.

I have to admit that the move (luxury-wise) was a bit of a shock to my system. I moved from a house with a private bathroom, linoleum floors, hot water, and DirecTV to a house with mud floors, an outhouse, roaming and unruly livestock, and no stable source of water. Let´s just say that I used one whole container of hand sanitizer today alone, and unfortunately, I only brought one to Peru and it is not sold here. Let´s also say that I (in a half asleep state at about 2am) pissed in my host mom´s pitcher last night instead of venturing to the outhouse in the pitch blackness of the night. I convinced myself and my pestering bladder that I could just purchase the exact same pitcher for her in the market since that one CLEARLY can no longer be used for jugo, leche, agua, whatever beverage you prefer. In scouring just about every store in the city today, though, my hopes were shattered, so as usual, I have a ridiculous, self-imposed predicament on my hands. Sometimes I wonder how to fit work into the mix when I could easily spend a lifetime learning how to adjust to campo life. Some questions that persist are: How do I shower when water and an enclosed area cease to exist?, How do I stop thinking that every tiny spider that greets me in my bedroom is a venomous brown recluse inching towards me for the kill?, and If I stop drinking water because visits to the outhouse nauseate me, how many weeks will it take me to die of dehydration? So many riddles to solve, eh?

The holiday season is about to begin, which makes me nervous. If I am to ever get depressed here, I anticipate it being over the next few months. I can pretty much bet my bottom dollar, or Nuevo Sol here in Peru, that Peruvians do not get as festive or amped about the holidays as I do which might provide me with a bit of a let down. Since Thanksgiving is obviously not celebrated here, our training group has planned a trip to the coast to celebrate. We will be staying in a quaint hostel adjacent to one of Peru´s nicest surf spots, and we have plans to recreate a Thanksgiving feast to the best of our ability. I am responsible for sweet potato pudding and pineapple stuffing, and since there is no shortage of potatoes here in Peru, I am sure that first dish will be a breeze. I am looking forward to a few days of sheer relaxation and pigging out with people who I have grown very fond of over the last five months. More updates to come!

October 27, 2006: Nothing like I thought

2006-10-28T07:46:00.000-07:00

I have decided that expectations can serve as quite the hindrance. When initially accepted into the Peace Corps, I was given very limited information about my site and job, so naturally, my imagination conjured up all sorts of expectations of what my experience would be like. For some reason, I spent most of my time painting a mental picture of what my living arrangement would look like. I attribute this fixation of mine to the fact that the majority of returned Peace Corps volunteers that I have met have most elaborately described their austere surroundings during service. From their descriptions, I saw myself in an adobe two-roomed hut minus floors, windows or a bathroom, equipped with nothing more than a wood stove. These figments of my imagination couldn´t be any further from how I am actually living, to be honest. I am living in the nicest house of my 12,000-people pueblo, and have the most luxuriously comfortable room that I have inhabited since going away to college. And, if I ever get homesick, I can walk down the hall and watch CSI on DirecTV and pretend I am watching it with my dad. Yes, DirecTV. Is this really third world living? When I discovered these advantages, I was a little sad that I would not have an experience closer to camping for two years (since I LOVE to camp), but ultimately, I was thankful that the challenges I envisioned were nonexistent. However grateful I was though, I forgot to consider that their may be less superficial challenges that I failed to expect or envision, making them that much harder to resolve. When I have expectations about something, I usually find that if those expectations become realized, any wrinkles involved aren´t terribly difficult to iron out considering they aren´t surprises.

There is one main hurdle that I am facing right now, which I really don´t know how to tackle. I am referring to my slow, and seemingly hopeless integration process. While I am trying my darnedest to make myself available to any and all townspeople, I feel that I may be stigmatized by the social status of the family I am living with. I have noticed that many townspeople are self conscious when I enter their homes, perhaps because they know that I am living large up by the plaza. In such a homogenous society, where I already stand out enough, I really don’t want people thinking that I think I am too good for them, too good to live in a house with dirt floors and an outhouse. They probably think that it was my choice to live in what is most doubtlessly considered Jesus´ palace. It´s really uncomfortable because they practically genuflect to me every time they see me, as if they are not worthy of my presence. I really don´t know how to fix something that I didn´t impose upon myself. I am praying that with more time and patience on my part, I can prove myself as different than the people in my town are currently viewing me as. It is just frustrating because my friends who are living more primitively, like the people in their towns, aren´t having the same integration difficulties. I hope that in a couple of months I can look back on this entry and laugh at my present preoccupations. I know I will be a lot happier when the townspeople accept me as one of their own.

I am not missing home too much, but I definitely experience pretty crippling waves of nostalgia that are sparked by the strangest things. The other day, as I was watching a TV show in English, jazz music was on in the background. Much of the music here leaves a lot to be desired, and hearing something so soothing and warm made me really homesick. One thing I have noticed here is that people either don´t care about or can´t afford to create cozy ambiances in their homes or businesses. For a population that is generally so tranquil, they don´t have many things to seek comfort in, or niches in which to act out their tranquility. Things that we use in the states to spruce up our surroundings and make them more snug aren´t very popular here (pillows, rugs, couches, posters, artwork, candles, relaxing music, etc.). So when I do certain things like listen to jazz or classical music or light a candle in my room, I am reminded of how many comforts exist for me in the states (most of which I didn’t even consider comforts before coming here). I don’t think I am comprehensively explaining this. Basically, some things tickle my senses here to the point that they almost transport me back to the states, never for as long as I want, but always for long enough to make me realize that I just miss the feeling of being there and living in a place where I have the power and resources to cheer myself up almost immediately. It makes me wonder if the Peruvians I am working and living with have a really low quality of life, or if my standards are just skewed. Are they happily married? Do they have dreams that they fear they will never accomplish? Are they proud of and comfortable in their homes? I really don´t know.

October 25, 2006- Resurrected

2006-10-27T18:41:00.000-07:00

Finally, after two music-less weeks, I have been reunited with my computer. Now, I am once again able to listen to Maroon 5 over and over and OVER again (while thinking of no one other than the gorgeous Jenn Edington, naturally), which is just about the only CD I burnt onto my computer before coming down here. For such a music lover, you would think that I would have burnt all of my cd´s onto the computer, but apparently I wasn’t envisioning how painful it would be to listen to the same 12 teeny bopper tunes for two years straight. Oh well, it is certainly better than nothing, and believe me, nothing was pretty unbearable. The tech at the computer place took a mighty long time to decipher what the heck happened to my laptop during the power outage, and then once he did figure it out, he told me that he needed to wipe out all of my files entirely, and replace my system with a Spanish system. He was, however, able to salvage my music files. He wasn´t however, able to ensure that all of my keyboard keys maintained their functions. This is real fun. For instance, right now I am going to press the question mark key for you __________. Wait a minute, that´s not a question mark. Where did that dirty rotten scoundrel hide my punctuation marks (insert your own question mark here). I guess I can´t complain too much though. He only charged me 7 American dollars for a job that probably would have cost me over 100 in the states. After declaring the price for his services, he shyly asked me, ¨Is that too much?¨ (Ah ha!!! There´s the question mark!) Anyway, sir, no…that is not too much.

And at last, I can inundate you all once again with the mundane details of my existence here in Jesus, Peru. Actually, things have picked up a bit since last I checked in. I have been spending many of my mornings traveling to caserios (surrounding villages) with my town´s doctor and nurses. They were going to vaccinate people for Rubeola because this month is free Rubeola shot month, and I was going to learn some of the 47 villages that Jesus is comprised of. This Rubeola shot is mandatory for people ages 2 to 39. I really didn´t know what I was getting myself into with this little project, to be honest. Evidently, many people in the countrysides of Peru are not very health-conscious, and are superstitious about the aftereffects of vaccines. This meant that we couldn’t just go to a centralized location in each caserio and expect people to flock to us for their free shots. This meant instead that we had to go door to door, and most times, since people chose to hide from us, this meant trespassing straight into their kitchens to catch them crouching behind whatever furniture piece was large enough to conceal them (I´m being serious, they had no shame). My counterpart actually ended up getting a little fussy with me because I refused to chase a 40 year old woman down the mountain for her shot. Are you kidding, Irma? What the heck am I supposed to do once I catch up to her? Tackle her to the ground and restrain her while you stab her with a syringe? Is this really how healthcare works in Peru? I thought I was asking that last question in my head, but apparently I said it out loud to my counterpart who responded, ¨Doctors don´t have to track people down for their shots in the states?¨ Uh, no, not exactly like this. Maybe with a friendly phone call, or reminder postcard in the mail, but no highspeed chases, that´s for sure. She was genuinely surprised by my response.

The best part of our caserio escapades was the transportation provided to us. Most times, if the caserio was closer than a three hour walk from us, we would hike. I won´t get into how tiresome it was for the six of us (arguably the least fit people in Latin America) to climb up the rugged mountains of Jesus in the fierce Peruvian sun. Other times, we were piled into an antique, out-of-service ambulance that was already piled full of powdered milk bags. And yes, in case you didn’t predict this, as I was laying on top of one powdered milk pile (pretending that I always travel like this, so my coworkers wouldn´t again jump to the conclusion that I am a spoiled American brat), my belt buckle popped one of the bags and left my entire bottom half coated in white powder. Just shake it off, Lindsay. Ha! Easier said than done, my friends. Easier said than done. This meant that everybody that we vaccinated got the story of how Lindsay had miraculously transformed into a sack of flour on the way to vaccinate them. Laughter ensued for all but one person involved, as usual.

Let´s see…what else has been going on here? My 4 year old host sister and I have really mastered the art of communication. While I was standing over the stove cooking myself a sweet potato last weekend, she came in and said in her most bratty voice that she wanted bichi or pichi or something crazy-sounding like that. Since I was in the kitchen, and I was cooking, I assumed that she was addressing me instead of her mom because whatever she wanted was a food product. Okay Victoria, let me find you some pichi, I said as I scoured our shelves. ¨NO!!!!!! Quiero pichi!!!!¨ Yes, you little brat, I understand. I´ll get you a biscuit or whatever the heck you are asking for, just give me a second to access my Spanish-English internal lexicon for crying out loud! This is when I gave her my nastiest sisterly look, only to witness a trickle of urine running down her leg. When her mom came in twenty seconds later, she kindly explained to me that since pichi or bichi meant ¨to urinate¨ in child´s terms, I probably wasn’t going to locate it in our cupboard. Well, now that we have established that, I think I am finally fluent!

I´ll leave you with this anecdote. Last night my host dad´s friend Leo was eating dinner with us. Leo is a distinguished looking man probably in his late 50´s who has actually done a great deal of traveling, and has even published two poetry books, both actions that are not very common in Jesus´ population. Leo and I spend the majority of our time together translating words in English and Japanese (he lived in Japan for four years), and I like him a great deal because he actually acknowledges that I exist. Last night I found out that he has two grown children, and two grandchildren as well. I thought that he had never been married, so this came as a surprise to me. Below, I have translated an excerpt from our conversation about his children.

Leo: ¨Yes, I actually have a son who lives in Chimbote.¨
Lindsay: ¨Oh, wow, what is his name?¨
Leo: ¨Well, it is an interesting story, because I had invented a boy´s name when my wife was pregnant, but we were told that we would have a girl, and I was very upset that we couldn’t use the unique name that I invented. But then, to our surprise, when the baby was born, it was a boy, and I COULD use my invented name!!¨
Lindsay: ¨Wow! So what is this name that you speak so highly of?¨
Leo (looking proud): M-I-K-A-L J-O-R-D-A-N
Lindsay: ¨Michael Jordan?¨
Leo: ¨Exactly. Doesn´t it have a nice ring to it?
Lindsay: ¨Sure, but that might be because it is the name of the world´s most famous basketball player. I don’t know, it´s just a thought.¨

I am serious when I tell you that this man thought that he had invented the name Michael Jordan, and I think I may have crushed his world yesterday, considering he has been living a lie for the last thirty years. That gave me a good chuckle.

October 23, 2006- Guest Entry Numero Dos

2006-10-25T09:26:00.000-07:00

To my dear and loyal audience:

Before you peruse this gem of a guest entry I am about to post, allow me a moment to explain why I have been missing in action, and why I feel compelled to post the following pollution. There is a 95% chance that I fried my laptop during a power outage, meaning that my postings could potentially be less frequent. It has been in the shop for the last two weeks, and while I return almost daily for a verdict, the guy in charge (apparently a typical guy, regardless of nationality), keeps insisting that he is perfectly capable of fixing it, and that he just needs one more day. In the meantime (while I wrestle him for the truth), the below entry is all I have for you. While it is borderline pitiful in content, I leave you with this question to ponder:

Who is losing their mind at a more rapid pace in the Peace Corps: Kevin or Lindsay? I think this entry speaks for itself...

“Why do they call it taking a dump, when you don’t actually take it anywhere, you leave it?” - Ghandi

Hi everyone. How are you all getting along? It’s Kevin (Lindsay’s disgustingly crude alter ego), and I’m here making deposits in the porcelain piggy bank once again. Since it’s been a while since we’ve chatted, I figured it’s about time to share some more of my bathroom insights and queries with you all. Since I’m sure you’re eagerly anticipating what I have to say, and because my 4 year-old host nephew is outside the bathroom door screaming “You watch too much TV” (I taught him that) and generally creeping me out as usual, I won’t waste any time and get right to it.

- Dancing is a funny phenomenon here in Peru (and I’m guessing this applies to a lot of South/Latin America). Dancing is different in a lot of ways than it is in the States, and I’ll point out just a few. For starters, everyone here dances. And I mean everyone. Regardless of age, sex, number of working legs, whatever, if you’re Peruvian, you’re dancing. In the States, many people like to dance, don’t get me wrong. However, there is always the occasional goofy white male standing off to the side refusing to step on the floor. Here, that’s not the case. First off, if you’re a goofy white male at a fiesta here, there will most definitely be 100+ Peruvians dragging you onto the dance floor regardless of your personal feelings on doing the salsa (read: me at any sort of social function I’ve been to). Anyway, everyone dances and everyone loves it. Next big difference, all Peruvians like the same 10 or so songs. There must be a tradition here that at birth everyone is given nineteen names (I still don’t understand that one, either) and the very same CD. It’s pretty bad. All the parties, restaurants, and family gatherings I’ve been to feature the same dozen songs. I realize that the songs are traditional Peruvian tunes and that Peruvians take pride in their culture. I may have even thought the songs were catchy the first few times I heard them. I just don’t understand playing the same songs OVER AND OVER again. When I asked one of the artisans I work with why the same songs are always on at parties, he told me that they aren’t the same songs. When I responded with something like of course they are, he told me that the beats are always the same, but the words are different. Now, if I had learned to speak Spanish by now, I probably would have picked this up for myself, but this is beside the point. Personally, I think this Peruvian version of the remix is sort of stupid. I don’t care if Shakespeare is rewriting these songs, I would still not want to hear the same beat over and over again. Call me crazy. Then again, we do have Puff Daddy in the U.S. making millions of dollars doing the same thing. Whatever. Needless to say, I probably won’t be purchasing any Peruvian dance mixes anytime soon.

- Homophobia is a problem down here in Peru. We PCVs discussed this during our training sessions to an extent, and I’ve noticed how prevalent it is now that I’ve been at my site for a month. The main issue is that the people here understand what homophobia is, yet they are unaware that it is a major issue and that it exists in a vast majority of the population here (it’s the same with racism). I’ve often heard Peruvians bad mouth homosexuals for extended periods of time, then turn to me and tell me that Peruvians aren’t racist or anything like that, and that these problems only really exist in the U.S. While I am more than slightly concerned with the glaring contradictions in these sorts of statements, this issue of homophobia does not exactly blow me away. I’ve seen homophobia and gay-bashing in the States, and I don’t see enough of a disparity here to write off all of Peru as a country full of bigots or anything. I do, however, see a major difference between the two countries, and it is in the manifestation of the homophobia that exists. For example, if you happened to be a male Peace Corps Volunteer, and you also happen to be taking dance classes in your site, one would imagine that this would be grounds for unadulterated ball-busting from any and all males that knew about it, right? I mean, this would be just the opportunity for homophobic terms and issues to surface if I’ve ever heard of one. However, this apparently is not the case here. When I (and by I, I mean some other male PCV who told me this story, obviously) was recently caught right in the middle of a private dance class by a few of the most manly of men in all of El Peru, not a derogatory term was heard. I would even go as far as to say that the guys’ interest was peaked and that they were close to joining in the dance class. In the states I would expect nothing short of, “So, did your testicles happen to fall off when you got up this morning, fagboy?” and, “Nice dance moves, queery. Next time you might move better if your boyfriend lays off the old corn hole just a little bit.” Here, however, nothing of the sort. Do they relentlessly harass and bash the effeminate waiter in town beyond belief? Yes, yes they do. But nothing about private dance lessons (in my defense, they’re “marinera” dance lessons, the traditional dance of my area, thank you very much). I guess this goes back to the whole, every Peruvian loves to dance thing, but who really knows.

- I’ve started to watch a good amount of Peruvian television. And by Peruvian television, I mean American shows dubbed over in Spanish. The family favorite here is The Simpsons. We watch a few episodes every night during dinner. My favorite part about watching these horribly dubbed Simpsons episodes (they’re so bad because the actors’ voices sound nothing like their original, American counterparts) is that Homer’s name is translated to “Homero.” Why is this so funny to me? Well, a common technique for struggling Spanish students using English as their native tongue is to simply add the letter “o” to the ends of English words to get the Spanish equivalent. This tactic is effective more times than one would think, too. Believe me, when this method fails, it’s hilariously awkward (i.e. changing the word “meat” to “meato” just sounds ridiculous). However, for words like “product” (producto), it gets the job done. Anyway, the fact that Homer’s name is translated by simply adding an “o” is hilarious to me. It makes watching the dubbed Simpsons worth it, if only for the few times I hear Marge or Bart say “Homero” during an episode. And yes, I would probably enjoy the shows more if I actually understood the language. Buen punto. Now get off my case about it, I’m sensitive.

- I’ve been eating pretty healthily here in Peru. Actually, since I just eat what is put in front of me, I should say that my most family feeds me pretty healthy food. All the food I eat is made fresh that day, with soups and the like usually included. It’s pretty delicious really. I’ve lost something like 15 pounds since I got here, and I didn’t think I had any real weight to lose. So, that’s a sign that I’ve been eating healthily. Another, slightly more frightening sign, is how I react to run of the mill sweets. Por ejemplo, the other night after dinner, my host mom brought out some animal crackers (the Peruvian version, of course). Now, animal crackers are good and all, but the fact that I had visions of stabbing my 4-year-old host nephew’s hand when he grabbed the last one out of the basket might be a sign that I need some more sweets in my life. I mean, for a Butterfinger this may be an appropriate response. But animal crackers? That may be crossing the line. Being healthy and trim is nice, but maiming young children is not a fair trade. That’s just the bottom line.

- Here’s a business proposal for you entrepreneurial types out there. You want to make some easy money, here’s what you got to do. Grab some C-list celebrity, maybe even a decent looking D-list one, and put them in an action movie. The script doesn’t really matter, and the only things I’d say need to be included in the plot are as follows, in no particular order: militant mercenaries, preferably ex-marine generals; a big-breasted, blonde, sword wielding ass kicker; a revenge-driven former samurai soldier searching for the man who killed his father/brother/dog/high-school football coach; a pony-tailed, special-ops vet who may or may not be mute; and ninjas – lots and lots of ninjas. Now, the filming of the movie doesn’t matter, just as long as the big-breasted sword wielding blonde, the pony-tailed mute, and the samurai guy kill 99% of the extras in the film, who are all ninjas. That’s it. Cut corners, save money wherever you can, this is all you need. I promise you that this movie will sell to every single bus company in Peru to be shown on all their fares countrywide. Judging by the enthusiasm and attentiveness of the audience on the buses here, you could bank on selling this film to the vast majority of the general public, too. Now, my market analysis hasn’t come back yet, but I’m betting that this ninja-action-revenge movie phenomenon is found all around South America. Regardless, the market for it in Peru alone makes the production of a movie of this sort worth it. I would put this idea into work for myself, but as a Peace Corps Volunteer I’m unable to make a profit from anything I do here. So, you’re welcome up front. A name drop in the credits is all I’m looking for in return. I look forward to seeing your films on future bus rides.

Well, I’d like to sit here all day and share more mind-blowing insights with you, but it’s possible that my host nephew has passed out outside the bathroom door from screaming for the past half hour. Also, I may or may not have a dance class that starts in ten minutes. I also may or may not be the best marinera dancer ever. My mom always says that I have dancing feet. Anyway, until next time (and judging by the decreasing value of these guest entries, it won’t be anytime soon).

Happy hopping,

- Kevin

October 1, 2006: Mugger or distant relative?

2006-10-04T08:05:00.000-07:00

Don’t leave the decision up to me, because I am bound to knock a guy/girl/child out here before realizing that they either A. live with me, or B. are a some far removed cousin of my host family that I have met at least six times. I have been told by so many volunteers never to let my guard down here, no matter how comfortable I feel in my surroundings, because bad people will prey off of my comfort and my let-down defenses. I have been known to take these sorts of notions to an extreme, and unfortunately, my behavior here is no exception. In my site, I am relaxed, but when it comes to visiting the city (note that Cajamarca is probably the most laid back city in the world), I sometimes transform into a suspicious hyper vigilant hawk. Is that 2 year old adorable child trying to steal my grocery bag? Probably. One can never be too cautious with the plastic bag that is holding a coveted $20 vat of peanut butter. Would I have hit that same child upside the noggin if she had come too close? I will let you answer that one yourself as not to incriminate myself.

Usually my preposterous paranoia does not affect those who know me, because as I hinted at before, I am only out to catch the criminals, not the people who I gladly fill my life with. Sometimes (especially when I am wearing my non-polarized glasses and there is a thick glare), I confuse the above two groups of people. I am not positive that the polarization factor has anything to do with my stupidity. I am trying to make myself feel better, which I am sure you are able to discern without my pointing it out. Anyway, last night, I was waiting outside of my host aunt’s house in Cajamarca city. I was visiting to help my 8 year old host brother with a science experiment, since I have apparently become the go-to girl, the 1 million trick pony, so to speak, of all of Cajamarca. When someone doesn’t know how to do something, I am the first person they consult. More about that later, though. Back to the story, people…focus….it’s scary, like a Halloween tale. So I am patiently waiting to be let in when I see a sketchy character headed right for me. I bent at my knees, positioned myself in a not-so-subtle crouch, and prepared for the pounce. There was absolutely no way this ruffian was getting my bag. I had my best set of doodling markers with me!

Hoodlum: “Hola, Lindsay, como esta usted?”

Yours truly, deep in thought: Nice try, buddy, but good manners aren’t going to fool me out of defending myself. Wait a minute…did you just say my name? A prepared thief! Who would have thought?

Hooligan: “Sabes donde esta mi tia? Porque no esta contestando la puerta? (Do you know where my aunt is and why she isn’t answering the door?)

Me, again in thought (such the intellectual): Interesting. Thank the HEAVENS I wasn’t carrying pepper spray with me because I would have temporarily blinded my COUSIN, who I spent all freaking day with yesterday, and should have readily recognized. Hmmm…fancy meeting you here, Jose. Why do I resemble crouching tiger hidden dragon right now, you ask? Because I am a bumbling MORON!

Whatever. In my defense, I have had a stressful few days punctuated with nothing aside from violence and gore. I would compare it to viewing a traumatizing film that you are unable to turn off because it is your LIFE, which I am going to make your life by telling you all about it. I will begin with a piece that we will entitle The Demise of Peter Rabbit, a tale not meant for the faint at heart. My host sister turned 4 this past weekend, which was celebrated with a lunch at my grandmother’s farmhouse. My grandmother, a wonderfully cute and weathered woman who looks to be about 95, but is probably only 76, is a good cook so I was pumped for whatever dish she was going to surprise us all with. Immediately upon our arrival, I asked if I could help and she told me I could go pick out a rabbit from the cage. How cute, I thought…she is giving one of her prized rabbits to Victoria (my host sister) as a birthday gift. Make sure it is big enough for all 12 of us to eat though, she said to me. Oh shit. Is there anyway I could peel the potatoes instead, I asked her, praying that they weren’t going to kill this rabbit in front of me. Sure enough though, two minutes later, my frail grandmother who I previously couldn’t even imagine killing an earthworm, was ripping a large, fluffy, gorgeously speckled bunny rabbit out of its cage by its ears. Two seconds after that, she was hacking into its throat with a butcher knife as I sat ten feet away from her fighting back the tears of every child I know in the U.S. who would have killed (perhaps this is a poor verb choice?) to have a rabbit of this caliber as a pet. I seriously almost cried, because it is difficult for me to view this as a mere cultural difference, especially since my family was laughing throughout the whole process, getting joy out of this act that looked a lot like animal cruelty to me. While the skinned rabbit flesh was waiting to be cooked on a pan in front of me, I was sickened by the still-pulsating leg muscles and the lifeless eyeballs staring up at me. An hour later, when my plate of rabbit greeted me, I really wanted to politely try a bite of it, and then conscientiously abstain from the rest. However, this was impossible considering it ended up being quite possibly the most delicious piece of meat that my mouth has ever met. Please don’t hate me.

The second piece in this compilation of short stories by Buck is called “Holy Cow”, not to be confused with the Argentine piece “Goodness Grapecious.” There is one dirt road that connects Jesus (my site) to Cajamarca city. I know this road quite well, as I travel it once or twice or maybe sometimes three times per week whenever I visit the city to take care of bizz or get my dairy fix. I know the road’s traffic patterns, namely being that it is only congested on Mondays, when there is a livestock market almost smack dab in the middle of our trip. All practiced combi drivers know that the trip on Mondays has to be taken with more care and caution than other days, because animals and people from every nearby region fill the one and only road that really exists in this area. My combi driver on Monday must have lost track of this obvious idea because instead of slowing down around the livestock market, he sped up and hit a bull. Yes, a bull. I am estimating that the bull’s owner purchased it only five minutes before and was trying to figure out how to get the massive creature home when BAM!!!!!, my combi driver collided with it, cracking our windshield and sending us all flying forward. I couldn’t see, as two Peruvians were sitting on my lap (my idea of traveling in style and comfort), so I was a little concerned that we had just killed a human being, until I saw the confused bull and furious owner fumble to the side of the road to yell every imaginable profanity (all of which I hope to learn by the end of my time here) at our combi driver. The only humorous piece of this story is how the bull looked after we hit it, sort of like it had had one alcoholic beverage too many. It kept moo-ing a lot, and wobbling back and forth, and chasing its tail. After a few seconds though, he seemed as good as new, though his owner probably could have argued that our combi left his bull internally damaged. Instead of this coherent argument though, he chose to scream things at us like, “$#@*%#!!!!” Never an uneventful trip, that’s for sure.

On a sad note, my neighbor and a judge in our town died on Monday night of Cirrosis. She was in her early 40’s and her death was not expected, so it has been a very upsetting few days for my townspeople. My host dad used my camera to take pictures of the open casket at the funeral today, which made the situation really sad and real for me, especially since I couldn’t figure out who she was before from their descriptions. When I saw the photos, I realized that I had spoken with her in my host dad’s pharmacy the day before she died. I probably would have worked closely with her over the next two years because she was one of Jesus’ leaders. A few things bother me that have surfaced with this death. I have heard some people talking about her in the town, focusing on how much she drank, almost implying that she deserved to die. Of course, I could be misinterpreting their words, but I have yet to hear a nice thing about the woman, who must have had some redeeming qualities if she held such a respectable position in the town. And even if she had no such qualities, why must people treat the situation and her with such disrespect? In the states we do this sometimes, too…rate peoples importance after their deaths, insinuating things like their deaths are sadder if they had kids, or aren’t as sad if they were alcoholics. Death is sad in every form, and I believe there should be an understood level of respect associated with it. The morning after this woman’s death, I went in to work, prepared to hand out some letters to town leaders about my job in the Peace Corps. My counterpart, who I previously considered an empathetic person, joyfully announced that one of our letter recipients had died, and therefore we have one less letter to distribute. She followed this with a giggle, which I was confused by. How strange. So many things to adjust to!

September 27, 2006- Living the tranquila vida

2006-09-28T15:29:00.000-07:00

If there is one thing that has repetitively been discussed amongst my friends and I here in Peru, it is the idea that nothing fazes us anymore. Peru has already made us numb to life’s little surprises, an idea that is reinforced, rather unnoticed, every single day. I like to think about this concept every day before I go to bed though, because I don’t like thinking that I am blind to something that used to captivate me so. A general rule of thumb I like to follow in attempting to predict or plan my days here is that those things I expect, will never come to be, and those I never expect will either happen later on today, or tomorrow. Of course, I can’t really think of especially illustrative examples of this personal theory, so instead, I will just relay the details of the day I had today, and hopefully you will be able to extract some major differences between routine happenings in Jesus, and those that occur in the U.S.

My main counterpart, an obstetrician, was really slow to warm up to me. While everyone else in my town greeted me with open arms, she, who was the only person I cared about accepting me, greeted me with reluctance and sideways glances that I interpreted as evil. You can imagine how frightened this made me to come to work, initially. Yesterday, an astonishing turn of events took place, though. I worked side by side with her in her office, like usual, but she actually started asking me questions about my personal life! And then, mid-day, she told me that she wanted to take me up the street to try dulce de higo, a dessert that is typical to this region (figs boiled with cinnamon and sugar, and served with a caramel sauce). I made her repeat herself four times, because having dessert with her was the last thing I envisioned us doing a couple of weeks ago, when she had this strange inclination towards giving me dagger-like stares. So we climbed up the mountain a bit to this woman’s house, who is famous for the dulce de higo she makes. Instead of serving us though, she told us and showed us (for 20 minutes) a painful (to look at) hernia on her belly that she said made it impossible to cook. She suggested that we visit her neighbor’s house, who also on occasion cooks dulce de higo. We later found ourselves in the middle of a barren, dirt-floored living area, waiting for two plates of dulce de higo. It wasn’t a store, nor was it a restaurant. It was a stranger’s house, and we were about to heartily partake in dessert consumption from someone we didn’t even know. Does anyone realize how madcap this scenario is? Let me put it into perspective. You are visiting a friend in an unfamiliar neighborhood in the U.S. You park your car far away from his/her house, because we all know what a hassle parking is in the states. It’s summer time, and while navigating the neighborhood you get a little tickle in your throat. Wouldn’t some icecream, or jello, or even a cold Coca Cola be nice? So you stop at the first house you see, stroll into the living room of this unknown family, and order from them whatever it is you desire. They offer you their couch, and bring you (with a smile) whatever your palate is craving, as though they were born to serve you. Oh wait, this would NEVER happen in the states. Only in Peru, I tell ya, only in Peru. I wonder if it is even worth mentioning how delectable the dulce de higo was. Its flavor made me completely disregard the risk of being poisoned by a stranger.

There are definitely some personal and universal boundaries in the states that just don’t exist here. I have noticed this not only in Peru, but also while I was studying abroad in Argentina. In many restaurants in Argentina (or on the streets, if I was eating and walking), people (I am not talking homeless people, I am talking well-dressed business people), would oftentimes interrupt my meal to ask me if they could try a bite of my pasta, or cake, or whatever delicious entity I might be shoveling into my mouth at that moment. This caught me of guard for a number of reasons. First, I am very territorial over my food. I’ll give you some of mine, but only if you give me some of yours, a tit for tat sort of philosopher I am. Second, do I even know you? Third, I didn’t get to taste my food before ordering it, so isn’t that sort of unfair? The more I thought about it though, the more I liked the idea. With how indecisive I am with sorting through restaurant menus, it would be really helpful for me if I could mingle amidst the tables, tasting what everyone else chose off of the expansive menu. I think it would accelerate my selection process by leaps and bounds. Maybe we should really reevaluate how private and cautious we are in the U.S. There are definitely some pretty awesome things that we are missing out on. I was never really great at establishing boundaries for myself in the states, so maybe I have found my niche here in Peru!

September 17, 2006- A superb weekend with a superbly painful ending

2006-09-26T13:45:00.000-07:00

This weekend, a bunch of my fellow Peace Corps volunteers and chums (including one of my two closest friends here) were in my city for a conference about this adolescent camp we are having in a few months. This meant that in between meeting about our business, we had plenty of time to explore the city, eat the most delicious yogurt (in the world, probably), and break my foot. Only two of the mentioned three activities was planned, of course. The other was an unforeseen exasperation, a rather regrettable way to end a wonderful weekend.

Let us never focus on the negative, though. Instead, I should use this space to relive the pleasurable couple of days I have had. My good friend Kristen lives 4 hours away from me in a city called Bambamarca. Her distance from me makes it so we will probably only be able to see each other every 4-5 weeks when she comes into my city to check her mail. Our unsolicited separation from one another makes each of our visits reason to celebrate, which is precisely what we did this weekend, maybe even excessively. We justified our unearned jamboree (*we have only been in our sites for two weeks) by claiming that we were celebrating Kristen’s birthday, which occurred at the start of this month. In her honor, we paid a visit to one of the nicer spas I have ever visited, set on a beautiful green farmland and outfitted with roaming horses and llamas, thermal baths, two fancy restaurants, and a small travel agency catering to local destinations. Here, along with taking in the picturesque setting, we purchased two neck, head, and back massages. While we thought such a treat would be outside of our budgets, they offered us a Peace Corps discount (probably not realizing that we have barely begun our tasks here) which made our visit pleasantly affordable. Our masseuse asked us in Spanish (obviously, as I am in Peru) as she led us back to the spa whether we wanted it soft or very hard, and I responded that I would like it hard and deep, to work out all of the knots that the week and a half of my Peace Corps stint had caused me. Little did I know, she had actually asked us if we wanted to go in the warm steam room or the sweltering hot death room, and by replying that I wanted it “bien fuerte,” I had given her permission to lead us to our deaths. Immediately (and I mean immediately) upon our arrival in the death room, all fluids were sucked out of our bodies, my glasses fogged up so that I couldn’t lead myself to safety (forget about Kristen at that point, as my life was clearly in grave danger), and two seconds later, thanks to Kristen’s quick and selfless thinking in telling me to remove my glasses, we found ourselves gasping for air and life outside next to a laughing masseuse. Very funny, where again is that warm and more manageable, existence-supporting steam room? Having never visited a steam room, I was a little confused initially about why anyone would subject themselves to a needless bout of heavy perspiration coming from body parts that I didn’t even know contained sweat glands. Much to my amazement, it ended up being really refreshing, and was followed by one of the best massages I have ever had.

Kristen accompanied me back to my site for a short visit, during which she completed a critique of my current living environment. My family made us what they considered a nice dinner (loads of spaghetti with a fleck of chicken), and when we asked for some more meat since we were both craving protein, my host mom gave us each another heaping plate of pasta. Same difference, to them apparently. For about an hour following dinner, we rummaged around my town for food to satisfy our lingering cravings, and in our search, we ended up exploring parts of my town that I didn’t know existed. I wouldn’t go as far to say that Jesus is a limitless locale, but I was definitely surprised by how many new tiendas and new people I was introduced to with Kristen’s assistance. Did I mention previously that my entire town can be covered on foot in ten minutes? I really do love it though, despite its petite nature. It’s actually quite quaint.

The majority of Kristen’s friendly criticisms were aimed towards my bedroom, which she said had potential that I was wasting by using my sleeping bag as my sole decoration. I love decorating and color coordinating, don’t get me wrong, but I really thought that if I did too much with my room past making my bed in the morning, that I would never want to leave it to get my work done. This logic didn’t fly with her, and she gave me a challenge of transforming my room into a chic and heavenly haven by the next time she visits. As she was verbalizing this challenge, I felt myself getting dangerously excited, knowing fully that once I started this task, that I would become obsessive about it. The next day, we spent about 5 hours in the sweltering sun of Cajamarca city in search of the perfect furniture and accessories to adorn my room with. I picked up a table, a couple of chairs, a comforter, a shelving unit, some quintessentially Peruvian tapestries, and some pillows, all the while forgetting to consider how I would get all these things back to my site. It was quite the comedy, because I picked up the shelving unit at the start of our shopping spree, realizing afterwards that I would have to carry the bulky larger-than-life thing through the crowded city streets while we looked for other necessities. I sort of felt Kristen and I were the modern day Laurel and Hardy, knocking people over with my shelving unit as I turned to talk to her. Everything is so much more complicated here. Each store specializes in one item, such as lamps, so there is no such thing as a one stop shop. I wanted about 20 things, so we had to pay a visit to twenty stores, carrying around large pieces of furniture with us. Of course the stores weren’t in the same neighborhood, either. If I had been with anyone aside from Kristen, I think I may have had a nervous breakdown. Also, simple things that we take for granted in the states, like pillow cases, cant be bought separately here, so you have to have them specially made. I won’t tell you what a hassle that was, because while they measured my pillows from every which direction during my first visit, they managed to make the cases too big, and then too small, and then I just settled because a fourth visit to the fabric store didn’t appeal to me. Dad, you would appreciate this next thought of mine. While I was busy being pushed around on the street by some people, and knocking out others with all of the stuff I was holding, I really developed a fondness for malls in the U.S. While they used to be the last place you would find me in the states, I think I will do all of my shopping there when I return. What an exceptional idea malls are, when you think about it. Everything you could possibly want in one place, organized in an ordered and eye-catching fashion. Brilliant, I tell you, simply brilliant! As we were headed back to Kristen´s hotel before catching a taxi back to my site, I realized that I forgot to purchase a laundry basket. I asked our taxi driver if he could stop by an outdoor market, and that I would just be a second as I knew exactly where to find the laundry baskets. He agreed, and I left Kristen in the car to guard all of our newly purchased furniture. I ran into the market, pointed at the basket I wanted, and expected a quick transaction to transpire. Instead, the vendor decided he wanted to overcharge me for the crappy piece of plastic I was trying to buy, and he refused to budge on his price. I was, of course, 40 centimos (10 cents) short, and he was not in a giving mood apparently. He told me that a few blocks down there was a cheaper store, but geez, I had a cab waiting! Didn’t he understand??! So, in jogging to the other store (and partaking in my first real exercise since moving to Peru), I rolled my ankle, fell in front of the entire market, and could barely move my foot afterwards. OUCH!

Getting a taxi back to my site with all of my shit was a hoot. The taxi driver tried to tell me I might have to pay for a couple of taxis (not such a cheap expenditure) to cart all of my belongings back to Jesus, but even I, the least spatially talented person I know, could tell that we could somehow fit everything into one. After much experimentation and the threat of an impending rain storm, the taxi driver, half of Cajamarca’s furniture offerings, and myself were squeezed miserably into his taxi and battling to conquer the bumpy ride back to my site. Of course, when I got home to organize my findings, I was disheartened to realize that I had forgotten to pick up five things, and there were another five that I needed that I wasn’t previously aware of. Four days and four trips to the city later, my room looks nice. And not full of clutter, as I am infamous for. Not too shabby of a set-up, if I do say so myself.

September 10th, 2006- Whooooeeee, it´s raining cats and dogs in Cajamarca!

2006-09-13T15:00:00.000-07:00

That is the one downside of living in this region- the rainy season. I asked my host dad just how bad the rainy season is here, and he said it just rains a tiny bit each day for a few months. Today’s rain makes me think he may have been telling me fibs though, because it’s not even rainy season yet, and I would file this rainfall under T for Torrential. I thought I would use this rainy day to address some cultural differences I have noticed here, because I don’t think that any of my entries have really focused on that gem of a topic. Let’s establish ahead of time that I am generalizing, because I have still only been here for a short time. This entry is going to jump around a bit because I have a few subject matters to discuss, so please forgive its disjointed nature.

Let’s first discuss things that are fairly obvious, such as dress. In the cities, people dress as they do in the United States, or maybe a little less formal than in most U.S. cities. Sneakers are not very common here, though. Men wear loafers, dress shoes, or boots, and women wear sandals or dressy boots. It seems that women in the cities prefer wearing dress slacks over skirts. Shirts adorned with English words seem fairly popular and fashionable, but something funny is that the phrases on the shirts don’t usually make sense, and sometimes, they make the person look downright ridiculous. For instance, today, I saw a girl wearing a shirt that said “Fat Birthmark” on it. Personally, I love birthmarks, but prefer when they are small, rather than fat. And doesn’t something have to be three dimensional to be classified as fat, anyway? Weird. Regardless, my clothing doesn’t make me stand out too much in the city, but in the campo, it’s a different story. The majority of the women in my site wear muted neon layered skirts, with different colored neon sweaters. They wear forest green or maroon wool socks pulled up to right under their knees, and typically wear dark laced shoes that resemble orthopedic nursing shoes. They are seriously like little walking Technicolor rainbows, and I might start dressing like them soon. I figure how can I even think about missing home when my clothes are so distracting to me? Color coordination is apparently not practiced here. I wonder if each color they wear is symbolic of something, because there are some interesting color schemes going on here, and I can only think that they must be representative of something.

Communication style. Peruvians love to talk, and interrupt, but one good thing about them is that they don’t mind being interrupted mid-thought, so they are in no way hypocritical. They seem a bit repetitive, almost as if they focus endlessly on small daily details to avoid discussing anything meatier. They have good senses of humors, and are not nearly as conservative in conversation topic as I was expecting them to be. For example, my first night with my host family (a family from the campo, where people are traditionally more reserved and conventional), my host mom spent the evening showing me pictures of she and my host dad making cakes in the shape of penises. What a fabulous ice-breaker that was for us! Generally, I think that Peruvians are not very expressive about their emotions. This bothers me because I feel as though they don’t trust me with certain information, even though I know it is just part of the culture. It took forever (3 weeks) for my host family in training to tell me that their father was really ill and needed surgery. If they had told me sooner, I could have helped them earlier.

Customer service, or lack thereof, has been bothersome to the majority of us (Peace Corps Volunteers). My best piece of advice, restaurant-wise, is to never enter an eatery in a parched state, because it usually takes longer for your drinks to come out than your food. In my favorite eatery in Cajamarca this makes no sense, because the table I frequent is right next to the glass case where the drinks are stored. This means I can see my drink, and imagine how nice it might feel on my desiccated throat, but I can’t have it until my waiter decides that he wants to serve it to me. Also, most restaurants don´t serve a full menu during the week. Instead, they have a different 3-4 course meal chosen for each day, and if you don´t want to eat what the special is for that day, you have to find another restaurant to eat at. Even more confusing is service in stores, pharmacies, or bakeries. While the concept of a line exists, the concept of first come first served does not. Literally, in a line of ten people (the first person obviously deserving service first, since he/she has been waiting the longest), the salesperson very well might help the tenth person. Why? I don’t know. Ask Peru. Onto pharmacies and bakeries. Don’t even get me started on how needlessly complicated buying things in these two places is. Let’s say I want a piece of cake, which I often do. I go to the glass case, point out the cake I want, and the person helping me takes it out of the case. At this point I am usually salivating. But no, I can’t get my cake now. I have to wait for him to fill out a little paper specifying what type of cake I want, and then wait some more as he fumbles around to find some really important stamp. Then, with my official bakery paper, I have to walk to a little box at the front of the bakery, where there’s ALWAYS a huge line. Here, I have to get another stamp on my paper, and take it back to the initial guy that helped me so I can finally retrieve my cake. Usually, by this point, I don’t even want it anymore. Screw Weight Watchers, come to Peru and try to eat junk food! It’s almost too difficult to bear, and much easier to buy fruits and veggies elsewhere. Pharmacies follow the same procedure, so I wouldn’t suggest going there in an emergency.

Peruvians seem to have very different belief systems than us about small things (that can make BIG differences), like refrigeration. Many people here (such as my family, and the families of many other volunteers) think that refrigeration is evil, because to them, cold things make people sick. In hypothetical terms, if my family witnessed me eating a piece of noticeably rancid meat paired with a cold beverage, they would blame my subsequent trip to the toilet on my cold beverage. It’s not worth arguing with them because this, to them, might as well be empirically proven. “Do they at least put eggs, mayonnaise, or milk products in the fridge?,” you ask. No, no, and no. Am I still a little hesitant to eat these products in their unrefrigerated state? Well, I was, up until yesterday that is. I mentioned before that the closest city to me (Cajamarca, which is 45 minutes away) is famous for its dairy products. Knowing this, yet having access to none of these delicacies in my town, is making me crave them like pigs crave truffles. Of course, my cravings nag me most when I am not going into the city, and by some stroke of fate, I stumbled upon some yogurt yesterday in a nearby store. I bought it, and immediately felt that while it was stored in a refrigerated case, the case had not been plugged in. I couldn’t control my hunger, though. I wanted it so bad that I figured I would just give it a try. It was definitely curdled, it had definitely lost its vanilla flavoring, and it definitely didn’t aid in my adopting of the Peruvian philosophy that refrigerators are malevolent. Disregarding all of these things, I definitely ate it. I feel pretty good today, so does this mean that refrigerators are a money making hoax? I am still not entirely convinced. One last food difference that I can remember is that people here have a fear of mixing avocado and dairy, which means that all of you CA fans of chicken, cheese, and avocado sandwiches should be dead by now. Beware!

One heavier cultural theme that seems to permeate all of society here is this subtle (or sometimes not) racism, or classism, as some people refer to it as. I guess if I were to choose an –ism term for it, I would call it colorism, because the people being discriminated against aren’t really a different race, nor are they a minority. Whenever I would invite my host family in training to Lima with me, my host dad would tell me that he doesn’t go into Lima very often, because he is ostracized nearly every time he visits. Oftentimes in stores, store owners react negatively to his darker skin (which isn’t even what I would classify as dark), and won’t serve him because they think he is a thief. Many times they even call him this and force him to leave. He lives about 45 minutes outside of the city, and he has to deal with this every time he goes in for supplies that he needs for his house or job. Lighter skin is glorified here, and this concept is definitely mirrored in mass media. In all advertisements and commercials, the models are Caucasian-looking, even though the majority of Peru’s population has a more indigenous look. In my first week of Spanish class, my teacher told me that one of Peru’s most serious problems is its lack of unity amongst the people. I guess that segregation based on skin color is where this disunity is most marked. It seems as though skin color often coincides with socioeconomic class, because people in the campo with less money typically have darker skin, whereas many of the wealthier people in the cities have whiter skin, and look Northern American or European not just because of their skin, but also their body type. Many people in the campo are tiny and look as though they didn’t receive proper nourishment when they were younger. I have heard that this topic of classism/colorism is being extensively researched here in Peru, and I am curious to know what ideas exist for contending with something that is so engrained in society.

I don´t know what category this next observation should go under, but many people I have driven with here don´t use their seatbelts. Instead, they just drape the seatbelt over them in case a police officer passes (because buckling up is the law). If you are going to go through the trouble of making it look like your seatbelt is on, why not just buckle it?

I suppose that is enough for now…

September 7, 2006- Lunch is served and I want nothing to do with it.

2006-09-08T09:15:00.000-07:00

I almost succeeded in avoiding it for 3 months, but today, much to my chagrin, fried guinea pig (cuy frito) showed up on my plate for lunch. Poor little passive guinea pig- I am sure you did nothing to deserve this! Its smell is what struck me first. It was a bit swampy and amphibian-like in its stench (man, I love when my food reeks of marsh matter!), and to be honest, eating it reminded me of dissecting frogs in junior high. There wasn’t much meat on the bone, which I was grateful for, because it wasn’t too obvious that I only ate a morsel. Every time I peeled its thick skin back to reach the meat, it would come flinging back at me, and I found myself wishing I had little pushpins, such as the ones we were provided in science class, to hold the skin down. The final straw for me was when I picked it up by its foot to start gnawing on its leg, and a toenail fell off into my rice. This is what I have to look forward to every Thursday, because it is our regional dish, and the people of Jesus (minus me) count down the days until their next serving of cuy frito. I consider myself the least finicky eater of all of my friends, and maybe of anyone I know, but something has got to give here. My town does not eat fruit, dairy products, or vegetables, and I don’t want to offend my family by bringing these things back from the city each time I visit. Am I going to have to start a clandestine cornucopia of vitamin-enriched foods in my bedroom? One thing is for sure. I can’t eat chicken noodle soup, rice, and dry white potatoes for the next two years. WHAAAAAAAAA! (I’m crying).

Perhaps you want to hear about how my work is coming along. It’s at a standstill, because I am a coward around my counterpart, Dr. Cesar. I believe I may have mentioned him before in all of his striking beauty. When I finally gain enough courage to go to the Centro de Salud to talk to him, my courage never stretches to cover obstacles (like him being on a home visit), so when I am told by the nurse that he will be back in 20 minutes, my nervously neurotic nature won’t allow for me to wait for him. I scribble an illegible note on a napkin for him, and run out of the office like the socially awkward maniac I am. We have since been communication through writing notes to one another and sliding them under each other’s doors. I hear this is a really effective mode of communication, especially since the majority of his notes to me slid down our basement stairs, only for me to find a stack of them today, all of which were awaiting prompt responses from me. Our official reunion with him and the rest of the Centro de Salud crew is set for Monday. If only we could do it over the phone! If only my town had phones!

On to more exciting topics. The Peace Corps provided us all with some pretty nice cell phones. From what I have heard from past volunteers, we will probably all be robbed of these. I thought that I would only be able to use mine when I went into the city two times a week, but in all of my explorations, I found one pea-sized spot on my roof where I get some mottled reception (yes, this means that my family is the only family in my whole town that gets cell phone reception- a tiny bit). The interesting thing about this spot is that I can’t stand upright in it if I want to have an uninterrupted conversation with someone. What I have to do is bend over 45 degrees, face to the west, straddle this electrical structure we have up there on the roof, and tilt my head rather uncomfortably to the right. Someday soon, I am going to have someone take a picture of me in that exact position so you all can appreciate the lengths I go through to make a phone call.

From 10pm to 2am my first night here, I helped my dad and his posse paint his name and political sign on houses and buildings in our town in anticipation of the November elections, when he is running for mayor. During that time, I acquired a stalker. He is this really jittery fellow, around my age, who is always talking really loudly and laughing when not provoked. Quite a catch, eh? When my dad told him I was from Pennsylvania, you would have thought the guy was in the audience at a stand-up comedy show. For the next hour or so, he repeated “Pennsylvania” innumerable times, and cackled like a hyena about it. What’s so funny? As I was telling another Peace Corps volunteer that I painted like it was my job that night, he reminded me that the Peace Corps told us it was dangerous to express a political affiliation in our towns. In how therapeutic painting is for me, that detail slipped my mind. I think if the townspeople choose to hate me for helping my host dad paint his symbol, they probably aren’t going to like me living with him either, so I guess I shouldn’t worry too much about it. Regarding my stalker though, here is the conversation that ensued yesterday between my host dad and I about him.

Manuel (host dad): “Lindsay, you probably shouldn’t hang out with him that much, he is a little bit outside of reality, and doesn’t have a good reputation in the town.”
Lindsay: “Why is his reputation bad?”
M: “Because he is insane.”
L: “Oh, what is his name?”
M: “Insane.”
L: “No, his name.”
M: “Oh, I see. His name is crazy.”
L: “No, seriously, what is his birthname?”
M: “His name is psycho.”
L: “One more time. What name did his mother give him after he exited her birth canal?”
M: “Ohhhhh….Tito. Tito is his name.”

Isn’t it lovely how mental illness is treated in my little mountain town?

Signing off in Cajamarca for the day. More later.

September 5, 2006: Here at last!

2006-09-08T09:12:00.000-07:00

(Happy Birthday, Ms. Kristen Cummings! I can’t wait to see your sweet self again to celebrate. Throw me a date, and I’ll meet you at Banos del Inca for massages. Let’s live like non-Peace Corps volunteers for a day!)

I reached my permanent site in Jesus, Cajamarca this morning after a 14 hour overnight busride from Lima. I wasn’t nervous during the busride, but I was anxious once I arrived in Cajamarca city about how I would feel pulling up to my actual site. Both of my bags weighed a ton, and I was a bit preoccupied for safety reasons about maneuvering all of my belongings into a taxi to get to Jesus. The transition was smooth, though, and here I sit in my bedroom on the plaza in Jesus. My first minor disappointment occurred as my host dad helped me carry my belongings in. When we reached the top of the stairs, I noticed that he passed by the bedroom (phenomenal master suite) that I had stayed in during my visit here a couple of weeks ago. Instead of a mountain view, I now have a brick wall view. This, to me, means that if ever I feel I am hitting a brick wall with my work here, I can’t even open my window to put myself at ease, because it too is hitting a brick wall. Instead of a cloudlike queen bed, I now have a rockhard twin. On top of these negligible things that I love to bitch about, my room (unlike the other room) has no furniture outside of a bed, and I am laughing just thinking about trying to buy a bureau and desk from the city to transport back here. I can barely handle my luggage, for crying out loud.

Saying goodbye to my family in Santa Eulalia was as sad as I expected it to be. It was way too drawn out, with many farewell dinners, gift exchanges, tearshedding sessions, etc. The prolonged nature of it made it a relief to finally leave, and I definitely sought solace in knowing that I would probably see my family every time I come into Lima. On Friday, we were officially sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers, had a small reception, and then said goodbye to our families one last time. I was really sad to leave my friends’ families as well, all of which made me promise to bring my family and friends from the states to meet them whenever I have visitors. After the swearing in ceremony, we were piled into luggage-packed buses, and taken to Lima for our last evening before heading to our sites. The hotel that the Peace Corps set us up in was really nice, and in the dining/lobby area, visitors are allowed to graffiti the walls, so it was neat not only to leave our mark as Peru 7, but also to see the marks that Peru 1-6 left the night before they went to their sites. I was looking forward to spending time with the whole group one last time, but that is difficult to do with 36 people, so we ended up splitting off and doing our own things. Four of my friends and I attempted to find a good sushi restaurant, but to no avail, so we ended up stumbling upon a Whole Foods type of store that made us as happy as clams after the food that we have been living on for two months. We picked up some whole grain bread, brie, fruit, chocolate, YUM! It’s making me happy just to reminisce! Then, while other people in our group were living it up at bars and discos, we were the nerdy ones in our pajamas by 10pm, watching American movies. The next day, a friend and I explored Lima a bit together, and then the evening was spent giving hugs and seeing people off to their sites. While I didn’t have close friendships with many people in my group, I was truly sad to see them go, and I can’t wait to hear about the incredible things I know they will all do in their towns.

And now, I am here!

Setting small goals for myself has already proven so important. It’s so enticing to lock myself in my bedroom to hide from this environment that is so different than any I may encounter for the rest of my life. It’s easy to convince myself that I don’t have to do anything today, since I have two years here. If anything gets me sad here, I think it’s going to be the avoidant voice in the back of my head, discouraging me from making any progress here. That sounded schizophrenic, I am sure, but it’s the truth. The Peace Corps brings scary things to light, and any qualities a person has can be easily overshadowed by his/her fears of plunging into an untried environment. My first three months is meant to be spent integrating into my town, and if I give into the above urges, I set myself back greatly. Right now, the most stressful obstacle of mine is discussing finances and living arrangements with my host family. In Santa Eulalia during training, the Peace Corps staff pampered us by handling our family business for us. Now, we are left to decide whether we want to prepare our own meals, how much we should pay for rent, and how we should address any other incidentals that may cost us. I think I have decided to prepare breakfast and dinner for myself, and let them prepare lunch for me, which is the largest and most social meal here in Peru. In terms of rent, I have no clue what it should cost to live in the countryside of northern Peru, so I am afraid I might offend them if they ask me to name my own price. We will see how that little chat goes.

Tomorrow, I need to force myself to go to the Centro de Salud, my counterpart, to discuss what my schedule is going to look like. I have about ten townspeople who think they are in charge of planning my days, but in reality, I am in charge of this since I am a community-based volunteer. Warding them off and explaining to them that I am not free labor should be interestingly uncomfortable. I also need to go into the city to buy items like pillows and an alarm clock and food, too. I know it is probably boring for you to read over my laundry list of things I need to do, but I am expecting for at least one of you to hold me accountable for accomplishing these things, instead of hiding under my bed like I sort of want to do. I’ll check back in a few days and let you know what I have actually been doing with my time. I am sure the suspense will kill you!

August 23rd, 2006: Closing Time

2006-08-31T11:55:00.000-07:00

Our time in the Santa Eulalia area is drawing near as training is about to end in 10 days. I fear that the majority of us are no longer putting our best feet forward, because after having visited our sites, we are itching to get our projects started. Training at times seems repetitive, and our attention is definitely on other things. I have developed some nervous tendencies such as twitching rather noticeably when I get bored, or writing nonsensicalities on any blank surface I can find in my bag, to the point that I have used all of the ink in the five pens I brought to Peru. While all of our mandatory community projects are completed, we have other time consuming plans to make, such as orchestrating a goodbye and thank you party for our host families, meeting about Peace Corps paraphernalia we might want to design and purchase, and most importantly, deciding what we are going to do our last weekend as a group. It’s finally occurring to us that while Santa Eulalia isn’t the most hopping small city in the world, it definitely has more entertainment options than the countrysides we will be inhabiting for the next two years. I am not sure that I mentioned this before, but the closest thing that my site has to “fun” is sitting with my hostdad in his openfront pharmacy, staring out into the plaza and talking about the day’s weather or the habits of the neighborhood dogs. Luckily I have a great imagination. I do, however, anticipate missing having 35 people at my fingertips to call whenever I want company to speak English with and entertain me. It will surely be a rude awakening for all of us when we are plopped at our sites for good, hundreds of miles away from each other.

In addition to wrapping up training and bidding farewell to one another, we are also struggling with saying goodbye to our families here, which is a great deal harder than I ever expected. In a mere ten weeks, we have all established relationships with these people that I am sure will last forever. They have seen us at our best (collaborating to enhance their communities) and our worst (stumbling home with them drunk and sloppily leaning on them for support after realizing that we are not nearly as tolerant of alcoholic beverages as they are), and despite all cultural differences, they have accepted us in all of our glory. To me, they truly feel like real family members, and it saddens me to think that for the next two years, I won’t be privy to their daily happenings. I can only hope that I build the same relationship with my new family. Attempting to detach from my family here has been difficult, because the closer my departure date gets, the more complicated their lives are getting, which makes me want to stay even more to help them out. Over the last two weeks, my host dad’s dad has become very ill with an enlarged prostate that desperately needs surgery, which my family doesn’t have the money for. A common fundraising tactic here is called a “pollada”, where the family in need cooks a meal of chicken with aji (a spicy pepper sauce), potatoes, and salad, and charges everyone interested 6 soles (2 American dollars) to attend. My host mom and I planned one for my Peace Corps friends and staff members, and in doing so, it occurred to me just how invested I am in this family. Any emotion they experience, I feel as well. We were able to raise around a quarter of what they need for the surgery, which is good considering how slowly money accrues with polladas. The response from the Peace Corps crew was incredible, especially considering that they had the option of getting fed for free by their families, and all of us are financially strapped from how expensive our travels were. Not only did most of them purchase a meal ticket, but most of them also made a generous donation. These are the types of people I hope to fill the rest of my life with.

On an unrelated note, I mentioned in my last entry that I had forgotten to mention two experiences that I have had here in Peru, one that scared and nauseated me, and the other that confirmed exactly what I am here for. Let’s start with the former…

I think I may have mentioned a few weeks ago that my family had invited me to the mountains for a pachamanca over one holiday weekend, which I was ecstatic about, because such invitations are indicative of acceptance within your family and the culture. Before going over the details of this “holiday celebration,” allow me to explain what a pachamanca is (probably one of the most enjoyable components of Peruvian culture, or at least that which is specific to this region). A pachamanca is a barbecue of sorts, where rocks, alfalfa twigs, and the food you desire to cook is buried in the ground in a circular hole to cook for an hour or so. Usually, under the earth and a tarp, you place marinated chicken, cheese, sweet and regular potatoes, whole apples, pineapple, beans, and sweet corn tamales. Man, have the Peruvians mastered grilling! It doesn’t need to be watched carefully, nor do you have to flip the ingredients during cooking. I cannot wait to recreate this idea in the states because the concept, not to mention the FLAVOR is out of this world! Anyway, back to the story. We awoke at 3am, after I had been out until 2am the night before, and while I was a little cranky from the lack of sleep, I was reassured by my host mom that I would be able to sleep in the car during our 6 hour journey. This was a gross exaggeration on her part, considering that unbeknownst to me, my family was playing a little game of “How many family members can we pack into one tiny car for a really long and uncomfortable roadtrip?” Not only was I smooshing together body parts with people I did not yet know, but our body heat was making the raw pachamanca meat cook in the back of our car. The stench was unbearable, and I really considered walking the rest of the way. We were apparently in no rush to get there either, and made an effort to stop at almost every random building we encountered along the way.

After spending two hours getting to the mountain, the remaining four hours was spent battling the upward climb to the top of one of the larger mountains I have seen here, or anywhere, for that matter. Even if our car hadn’t been packed with people, I would have never been able to sleep with how rocky our path was. My host brother had to get out of the car and walk in front of us for most of the ride, clearing big rocks out of the way so that they didn’t kill our car. Wait a second here, is this even a road? I was feeling so sick at this point, because I really felt that if all of us leaned to the left, our car would surely go soaring off the mountain. While we made 35 stops on the flat land we were previously driving on, I don’t think it ever occurred to them to make some stops while driving up the mountain so that we could acclimate to the altitude change. By “we” I think you all know I mean “I,” and boy oh boy oh boy was I feeling the change in altitude. My host mom was dementedly delighting in how many colors in the rainbow my face was changing as we ascended, and at that point, I would have paid my entire life savings to take a private jet back to our house to sleep it off. I kept a smile on my face though by thinking about the delicious pachamanca that awaited us, and the cultural exchange I was about to partake in. Unfortunately, all that truly awaited us four hours later was some drunken Peruvians (at 9am) slicing up a live llama with machetes in the middle of nowhere, no buildings or bathrooms in sight, only sprawling mountains and a very unhappy Lindsay. After being sprayed with llama blood, I decided to use the bathroom to both pee and throw up, but the bathroom was just a half-dollar sized hole in the ground, with no structure blocking you from the rest of the crowd. How in the world are you supposed to aim your pee or anything else towards such a miniscule hole? I didn’t even really try to do so, but instead, I just peed all over my pants. This, in such a frigid setting, froze almost immediately, and I found myself pondering which was worse, being covered in wet or frozen urine, llama blood, and vomit. After being there for 15 minutes, my family decided not to have the pachamanca after all because it was too cold, so essentially, we took a twelve hour roundtrip to see the violent slaughtering of a llama (I wish I was exaggerating, I really, really, do, but it’s the truth, just ask my dad who I called in a bewildered state right after the event, wondering if what I just experienced really happened). Remind me to never, under any circumstances, agree to such a trip again. Also remind me never to complain about a holiday celebration in the states, because nothing compares to my mountain mishap.

Now, onto more uplifting themes. Every Wednesday in training, we have a dia de practica, a day to put our skills to the test. For youth development volunteers, this usually means working with yappy children in a really rowdy setting. A few weeks ago, though, we all took a bus to Lima to spend the day at a boarding school/orphanage for boys. We never really look forward to going into Lima because the air quality is really poor, and the weather always overcast, so usually, we return from our trip feeling pretty shitty. One component of our dias de practica that we are never really stoked about as well is that we never have any concrete details, which we are told is common for Peru. Details and punctuality lack, so usually any activity you plan will not be applicable to the setting, and whatever time you want it to start at will be unrealistic. The Peruvians live by the “hora Peruana,” which means they never start on time, even in professional settings. This can be difficult for Americans (North Americans) to adjust to, since we are so time-obsessed. My mom, however, who is perpetually two hours late, should move down here where she would fit in nicely.

So we get to this school with minimal details about the age group we will be working with, how the day is going to be structured, and whether or not the kids know anything about the topics we prepared for them. Within our group, the volunteers broke up into groups of three and each group planned a charla (interactive discussion) on a different theme, including topics such as values, nutrition, and decision making. We were told upon our arrival that we would be doing a round robin, where we would stay in the same room all day, but the kids would rotate in groups of six to see our charlas, which all lasted for 30 minutes. My group prepared a charla on dental hygiene, which is something that is oftentimes neglected with the population that we are working with. We took the kids outside to play a dynamica (a game related to the topic) in order to get their energy levels up. We chose to do duck, duck, goose, but instead, transform it into tooth, tooth, cavity. If they got tagged, they had to visit the center of the circle, which was labeled the dentist office. We thought this was brilliant, but as I type this, I realize what cheeseballs we are, but whatever, they enjoyed themselves. We returned to the classrooms and made our first focus flossing. Floss is fairly expensive here, so many people overlook that step, and their dental health subsequently suffers. We listed the steps to proper flossing on a piece of cardboard, cut out each step, and had the kids place the steps in the order they thought they belonged in. It was surprising to see how many steps they mixed up, but it made us thankful that we had included the activity. Even after the activity though, they seemed confused about the importance of flossing, so we slyly brought popcorn as a treat for them, after which we caught all of them picking their teeth. AHA! Wouldn’t that be easier to remove with floss? This is when we gave them all a piece of floss and had them demonstrate what we had just shared with them. After this, we did a little toothbrushing activity which we overdramatized a bit. I stood behind one of the guys in my group, hiding my body, and wrapping my arms around his body to serve as his own arms. The other guy in our group read to us the appropriate steps to brushing ones teeth. We started off by eating oreos, to show how much sugar can stick to your teeth and cause cavities. I couldn’t see what I was doing obviously, so as much as I tried to get the oreos into Josh’s mouth, they were actually being smeared all over his face. When I tried to floss his teeth from behind, I inadvertently flossed his nose and chin, and when I brushed his teeth, it was even more of a mess. The kids were losing it with laughter, and so was I to the point that tears were running down my face. It was such a fun activity, and when we quizzed the kids at the end, they seemed to really get something out of it. On the way home to Santa Eulalia, I thought about how when I used to babysit when I was younger, I would always try to plan fun and educational activities for the kids I babysat, and none of them would be receptive. I would spend hours cutting out materials and planning interactive learning games, and instead, all they would want to do was play video games and watch t.v. I can’t explain to you how rewarding it was to be around kids who gave us their undivided attention and took something away from what we had planned for them. This is the first time since being here that I was absolutely sure that I was exactly where I belong. As many ups and downs there are here, there is nowhere in the world I’d rather be. While the business group of volunteers makes fun of us because they think all we do is play really simpleminded games with the kids, I can truly say that I think the kids are learning important skills and lessons from our interactions.

In the spirit of sappiness, below I would like to list the things I will miss most about Santa Eulalia.

1. My dear friends Hana and Kristen, the first people I have found in the world who are as dorky as me. I will miss our cooking, dancing, and slumber parties, talking about snacks and/or our bowel movements constantly, and how honestly we communicate with one another.
2. My host mom’s shy and embarrassed smile and how well humor translates without words.
3. Having tickle fights with my host sister, which we are entirely too old for, making it even more fun than it would normally be.
4. The confused roosters that live in our town who never rise with the sun, and cockadoodledoo whenever their hearts desire, which is usually every five minutes ALL DAY LONG.
5. The makeshift motorcycles with huge rickety carts attached to their fronts, whose drivers scream with purpose into their megaphones about nothing other than oranges and apples in their best auctioneer voices. “NARANJAS, NARANJAS, 1 SOL PER KILO, NARANJAS!”
6. The training staff here, and how at peace they seem to be with their lives and jobs. I hope that all of us absorbed some of their tranquility to take to our sites with us.
7. My Spanish teacher Isabel, who I may or may not have written a love letter to.
8. Waking up early enough to greet the people on the hill who have to wet down their land so people like me don’t go flying down it with the dirt. These people alone are responsible for my well being here.
9. The incredible view of the city from my room on the mountain.
10. Being so close to Lima. It’s been good for my peace of mind.
11. People blasting Huayno music all day long, which sounds like a weird combination of Indian music and something else really weird and bad. Somehow though, it has quickly become my favorite. If you are wondering why you have never heard of it, it is because its utter awfulness has made it so it has not been able to transcend country borders.

August 22, 2006: Guest entry

2006-08-22T16:55:00.000-07:00

“I do my best thinking on the can.”
--Aristotle

Hi. My name is Kevin, and I’m writing this blog entry for all of you trusty Lindsay followers straight from the comfortable confines of my porcelain throne. I would prefer to be in my bedroom, or even the living room, but my stomach has had other ideas. I had the idea for a guest spot on Lindsay’s blog a little while back when I realized that she’s been feeding you all boring, mindless drivel on a regular basis. The only problem was that I was unsure of what to discuss with you. Since I have nothing really substantive or useful to say, and since I’ve spent something like 50 hours in the bathroom in the last week, I figured I’d share with you some of the thoughts that have crossed my mind during that time. Anyways, without further ado…

I have a cousin named Billy Rabbit who is a phenomenal pooper. He has no qualms going anywhere at anytime. He could be visiting the house of a girlfriend for the first time and he’d have no problem blowing up the can within the first ten minutes of being there. If he has to go, he’s going. It’s inspirational, really. With that said, Billy does have one phobia related to his dumping dynamics: he’s really afraid he’ll clog the toilet. What he does to counteract this is he throws out the toilet paper instead of flushing it down the toilet. I used to think this, although a rather intelligent response to his fear, was a pretty fucking gross alternative. Well, I no longer feel this way. You see, everyone in Peru does this. I haven’t done much traveling before now, and this non-TP flushing is probably a more common practice than I had previously thought. It is still pretty nasty seeing a garbage can full of used TP, but I don’t think it’s nearly as strange and gross as I used to. Anyways, I think of Billy every time I use the john for this very reason.

Is there a diet out there where people abuse laxatives? If not, there should be. I think I’ve lost ten pounds or so via the bathroom over the last week. I also think this would be a better means of losing weight, as opposed to bulimia and anorexia. Shit your way to a sexier you. I really think this could work.

You know those potato chips that have no fat which girls have sick addictions to? The ones that supposedly taste the same (I don’t recall ever having them, so I can’t tell you if they do) as regular chips, yet aren’t unhealthy? Well, the ingredient in them that allows them to keep the taste without the bad health factors is this thing called olestera. You may have heard of it. Well, on the bag of chips is a disclaimer that says that olestera causes loose stool. Yah, and girls eat these things like they’re laced with heroin. There was nothing worse than sitting in line at the cafeteria in college behind a hot girl, only to then see that she was buying nine bags or so of these chips. Pretty gross.

I’m a pretty bad Spanish speaker. I’m getting better every day, but I was really horrible at the start. Because of this, I missed and continue to miss a lot of crucial information that my host family is trying to tell me. One thing that I did not miss, was that my host family’s house has a funny rule about their bathrooms. There are two bathrooms, but one of them is used solely for pissing purposes. How did I pick up this information on my first day, you ask? Well, it seems that the terms “number 1” and “number 2” are somewhat universal. When my host mom pointed at the first bathroom and said “solo numero uno” and then at the other saying “uno y dos,” even a big dumb animal like me could understand that. I’m not sure if these terms span the globe, but I’m sure glad they’ve made their way down to South America. To the inventor of these terms, I tip my cap. Oh, and I have yet to figure out why only one bathroom is for dumps. My Spanish is still pretty fucking bad.

While we’re on the subject of bathroom lingo that transcends language barriers, let’s talk about T.P. Toilet paper is called papel higienico down here in Peru (and probably other Spanish speaking countries as well). If you want some good old-fashioned papel higienico, guess how you ask for it: P.H. (pronounced “pay achay” for you non Spanish speakers like myself). Again, I’m not sure if it’s a worldwide phenomenon to acronymize (what?) the words for toilet paper, but it would be cool if it was.

Diarrhea is a facilitator of change. Seriously, it is. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a nail biter. It was pretty bad, too (not in terms of technique, mind you, since my form was rather exemplary…I’m just saying I did it a lot). Well, ever since I’ve been spending the better part of the working day in the loo, I’ve begun examining my living habits in order to extract the exact cause of my stomach woes. In doing this, I thought a lot about nail biting. I always knew that it was a bad habit and pretty fucking gross, but that was never enough to stop me from chomping away. Well, since the runs have entered my life I’ve been pretty conscious of everything that enters my mouth (insert joke about male reproductive organs here). Because of this, I no longer can shrug off the unhealthy aspects of biting off one’s fingernails, and I have since stopped this horribly disgusting habit. So, I just want to say thank you, diarrhea. You’ve changed my life for the better.

Well, it seems that my stomach is going to give me a few minutes of downtime, so I will no longer provide you with mind-blowing thoughts such as the ones featured above. Actually, I’ll probably be back in a few minutes, and I’m sure to have more useless crap (pun intended) to share. In the meantime, I’m going to Billy Rabbit, wash up, and see what the host family is up to. I’ve been in the bano with a computer for the last half hour, so I’m sure that they are more than just a little freaked out. Happy hopping everybody, and remember, there’s no such thing as a one wiper.

- Kevin

p.s. This is actually Lindsay. I just didn’t want to freak anybody out with my nauseating bathroom routines. Please, don’t judge me.

August 14-17, 2006- My first site visit

2006-08-15T13:42:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Cajamarca, a province in the Northern highlands that has stolen my heart. Fortunately for me, this is where I will live and volunteer for the next two years, and right now I am in the midst of a four day visit before I return to Lima for my final two weeks of training. My entire group just completed an eight day field based training, during which we traveled all around Peru visiting current volunteers at their sites. My small group went to the coast, where we stayed for a bit in Piura and Chiclayo, two towns by the beach. While I had a great time with some really good company, it became immediately clear to me that I could never live in either place because the heat was sticky and stifling (and it`s WINTER!). I´ll spare you all of the gross details, but let´s just say that the climate affected me so much one day that I ended up throwing up on myself in front of some Peruvian teens that I was about to lead a workshop with (maybe that wasn´t sparing the details, sorry) Aside from the heat and the brown desert-like surroundings, there was very little to complain about during our visit. The ceviche was out of this world, which is something I will surely miss in the mountains of Cajamarca.

So now, after visiting some volunteers, we are all at our individual sites spread out amidst the vast Peruvian landscape. I am spending some time with my new host family, and my counterpart, which is the Centro de Salud (health clinic, my town does not yet have a hospital). The town I live in is called Jesus, which is comedic considering my lack of religious affiliation. I have been here two days, and I have already been asked about my religion 16 times. I might need to start going to church on Sundays just to get them off of my back (Adriana, I am sure that the image of me in church is making you giggle like a schoolgirl. Thanks for your support). My host family is a lot less conservative than most people who live in the mountains, because they are originally from the beach. My family consists of a 50-something year old dad, a 28 year old mom, and two kids (a four and eight year old). At first I thought the age difference between the parents was a little scandalous, but now, after seeing how vivacious the dad is, it is not so strange to me. He is a popular guy in the town, and is actually running for mayor in November. I do not get to meet the kids this visit (which doesn´t bother me at all since I don´t really like many kids) because they go to school in a different town and stay there during the week. The parents have been super accomodating, and they are so excited to learn about my culture and share their ideas for the town with me. Since my hostdad is running for mayor, he has many visions for the town, and I believe he will serve as one of my best resources here. In terms of my living arrangements, my house is huge and nothing like I envisioned Peace Corps provisions being like. I have a large room with two beds and a balcony overlooking the main plaza gardens and the lush mountains. I also have hot water and a toilet seat, which are luxuries that I don´t think many of us will be able to boast about. I can´t imagine it getting much better than this. While I was sort of looking forward to roughing it, I don´t think I would have been able to do my best work under such conditions.

Yesterday, my host family took me to visit my grandparents down the road, who own the most beautiful farm estate with every animal and fruit tree imaginable, not to mention a hot springs pool right beneath the mountain range. Their land stretches out over five hills right under the mountains, and I can honestly say that it is the most gorgeous place I have been in my life. I imagine that this land will serve as my escape over the next two years if (or when) ever I get stressed out. I guess I should mention here that my grandparents raise guinea pigs to eat, which is the most common dish in this region (cuy frito- which is a still semi-hairy guinea pig fried and served spread eagle on a plate...YUM!). I have yet to try it (though I hear from everyone that it is bien rico) mostly because I promised my former boss that I would refrain since she has one as a pet, but I don´t know how much longer I will be able to decline (EEEKKKK, sorry Leslie and Apollo!), considering there is not much more to eat here. There are no grocery stores in my town, and my hostmom seems against cooking, so we have been visiting a neighbor´s house for all of our meals. Most people in my town do not have cars, so they use mules and horses to transport themselves and their belongings. The roads are all dirt, and the houses are simple block-like structures made out of cement. The townspeople wear mostly traditional garb, which consists of skirts or slacks, colorful sweaters, and tall white tightly-woven straw tophats, as the sun is incredibly potent here. They carry their children in colorful wool blankets wrapped around their shoulders, and boy oh boy are the babies cute! My town does not have phonelines or internet, so I will need to visit Cajamarca city probably twice a week for those amenities. I thought this was no big deal, since it is only a half hour away, but today, I was trapped in a bus with 30 other Peruvians when it was brought to our attention (when we nearly drove off a cliff) that our busdriver was incredibly drunk. When we yelled at him to let us out of the bus, he refused, and continued speeding towards the city. I kid you not that we made it there in 15 minutes, instead of the 30-45 it usually takes. It was a pretty harrowing experience, and apparently, one that I will come to know well.

The center of the city, which is 45 minutes away from us, has delicious dairy products, which I crave all of the time, but I guess they are too expensive for my family to purchase because all we have been eating is rice and chicken and potatoes, the typical Peruvian fare. I have spent some time in the Centro de Salud, my counterpart, and today I went to the town school to introduce myself to the adolescents I will be working with. The town doctor, who is intimidating in his handsomeness (more so than Dr. Baumgartner, this is AWFUL!), accompanied me to the school and assisted in my introduction. This is embarrassing to admit, but he made me so nervous that I forgot what the heck I was doing in Peru, as well as what the Peace Corps stands for, and those who know me know that I rarely get flustered. My first two introductions were rocky, until I convinced the Doctor that he could go attend to his patients, and that I could do this myself. Luckily, I had 11 other classrooms to visit, so I hope I was able to redeem myself. The one and only good thing about working closely with someone so handsome is that my immune system has probably been scared into never becoming ill, because if it does, it will be that doctor who will have to poke and prod at my body (since he is the only one who works in my town). Me and my immune system will have none of that! I plan on being the personification of health over the next two years for that reason alone.

Back to the adolescents I will be working with (see how distracted that doctor makes me?). The kids I met were incredibly welcoming and polite. They all stood up as I entered the classroom and in sync said ¨Buenos dias señorita.¨ They refused to sit down until I gave them permission to, and then they provided me with their undivided attention as I floundered in front of them speaking some kind of jibberish. There were just so many of them (approximately 300), that it is going to be difficult to establish an all-inclusive program. Some issues that were obvious during my first visit in the school and town were teen pregnancy, poor hygiene, and alcoholism, which are some fairly simple topics that I can tackle first. During my first three months of service here in Jesus, I am not supposed to start working, but instead, I am supposed to learn the town and establish confianza (trust) with the townspeople. My plan for doing this is to spend a day or two with people who have different positions within the town. So far, I have an interest in spending some time with the town judge/mediator, the garden keeper, the restaurant owner, and the seamstress. I will work with them and informally interview them to gain their perspective and see what they feel the true needs of Jesus are. It is an incredible and slightly scary feeling to have the freedom to do whatever I see fit in this town. The townspeople have never had a volunteer work or live here, so all seem incredibly eager to have me and put me to work. Hopefully my first three months with them will make it easier for me to prioritize my goals. I get to design my own schedule, which is nice, because I feel I will be able to accomplish more that way, provided that the hotsprings and dairy products do not tempt me away from my work too often. One funny aspect of my stay here is that the entire town is convinced that I am a doctor (a Dr. of psychology and sociology) and no matter what I say against that, they refuse to believe me. They think I am just being modest. So...if anyone is fearing getting their PhD, just come down to Peru. You certainly don't need one here. I feel guilty because it seems like I am living a lie, but at the same time, I was told that they will view me as more competent if they think I have an advanced degree in whatever I studied at my university. You can just call me Dr. Buck, it's no big deal.

Well, that's enough for now. Right now I am in the city waiting for my friends (some of whom, including one of my two closest friends here, were also placed close to Cajamarca city) so that we can take the 13 hour busride back to Lima. I will write more soon, because it just occurred to me that I forgot to write an entry about my best day yet in Peru.

July 25th, 2006- An answer to your requests

2006-07-26T16:37:00.000-07:00

It seems that some people in my life are bothered by my lack of detail on this here blog when I describe my days here. This entry is designated to addressing that concern. Let’s start at the top. Typically, I wake up on weekdays at around 6am and wrestle with the gas stove for a while, which I use to boil water to take a bucket bath with. This usually takes FOREVER since my hair is long like Rupunzel’s (sp?). At 7:15, I sit down to breakfast with my host mom and sometimes my sister. My 16 year old brother is slightly antisocial, to the point of his mom ridiculing him constantly for being so timid. He never really comes out of his room when I am around, and when he does, our interactions are awkward enough to make us both want to crawl into a hole and die. After breakfast (which is usually something deliciously soupy like oatmeal or a cream of wheat look-alike, accompanied by a spinach omelet or fried sweet potatoes), I meet the volunteers who live in my neighborhood (there are 8 of us) and we walk down the mountain together to the center, where training begins at 8am. Here, the 36 of us split up into our 8 Spanish classes, and we have approximately 4 hours of class per day, which sometimes takes place in the center, and sometimes in one of our houses (in order to better integrate us into the community). These classes usually involve some sort of highly interactive experience such as taking a combi (crowded bus) to a nearby town to interview store/restaurant owners, or in my case, to chow down on any snack within sight. When we are not in Spanish class, we are having presentations at the center, given by a staff member, or a current volunteer. Some topics have been non-formal education/hidden curriculum, how to handle discrimination as a volunteer, and common illnesses and treatments within our region. Our staff is HUGE on having us play really entertaining team building games within each training session, which works nicely for me, a person with a 35 minute maximum attention span. Such short attention spans wouldn’t normally fly in 4 hour presentations, but I think the way they pattern training is really keeping my antsyness under wraps.

At 12pm on weekdays, our parents walk to the training center with our lunches, and we sit around for an hour comparing meals and chit-chatting (in English, of course). Typically I am the envy of our lunch dates because I have the only family (probably in all of Peru) who does not agree with serving rice and potatoes, because somehow they figured out that neither of these things contains nutritional value. I am extremely grateful for this realization of theirs, and everyone else in my group is jealous. Usually, my mom packs me homemade juice of pineapple, orange, or guava, along with some sort of stir-fry, soup, or salad mixed with meat. After lunch, sometimes my so-called volleyball team has practice on the volleyball court in our center. Not only are Peruvian women volleyball pros, but they also get all dolled up for the tournaments- clad in make-up and cute work-out gear. This puts our team at an extreme disadvantage, because not only can we not play volleyball, but we don’t have the capacity here with our limited resources to get all pizzazzed out with make-up and other such accessories. The Peruvians keep challenging us to a tournament, and I keep having an awful mental image of getting spiked in the face by some South American Barbie. Thankfully, my team was stood up this past weekend at a tournament, which hopefully means we will never be challenged again. I can’t really get the hang of this volleyball thing. My hands don’t seem to want to work together, so instead, I just swat at the ball with one flaccid hand, hoping that this will magically propel the ball over the net (I am sure that those of you who know me well can completely imagine the stupidity of my appearance on the court). About 25% of the time, this works during practice, but I am pretty sure during a tournament, I might not have such luck.

After school, I sometimes take the combi into Chosica, the closest town to us. I like this town, even though it has a bad reputation safety-wise. Chosica is where all the restaurants are, which are mostly chicken places, Chinese eateries, and pizzerias. The town is centered around a park with permanent amusement park rides for children, and at night time, it resembles a carnival with a bunch of food booths lining the sidewalks. A river runs next to the town, and underneath the main bridge is a cool fruit, veggie, cheese, and meat market that I frequent for treats. Across the river against a wall are these beautiful mosaics that the local universities and colegios designed. I try to pass them every time I am in Chosica, because they might be some of the nicest murals I have ever seen. In addition to the mosaics, there is a giant white Jesus statue looking over the town from the mountain, and when it’s lit up at night, it is really quite majestic.

While our families are being paid by the Peace Corps to feed us, I typically try to cook one meal a week for them, because they appreciate the cultural exchange. So far, I have cooked banana bread, tres-leches cake, pizza, chicken parmesian/cordon bleu, French toast, various stir-fries and omelettes. Tomorrow, we are having a taco party. It has been difficult to find ingredients here, so improvising has been a blast. As was expected, I am spending my entire living stipend on food, but I am okay with that. At night time, we eat dinner around 7pm, and then, I usually do some h.w., or hang out with the people in my neighborhood. It’s a pretty humbling experience to sit on the top of our mountain at night, looking down at the lit city below, so I do that with a friend quite a bit. Sometimes we watch d.v.d’s as well, because some people were a little smarter than me and packed entertainment options for themselves. On weekends, we usually have training on Saturdays, and then spend the rest of the weekend at bbq’s or parties with our families and friends, and sometimes we sing karaoke at a local bar or dance at the discotecas. This upcoming weekend is a big deal and holiday in Peru because their new president is starting his term. Many of us are going to the mountains with our families, where I am told we will get very sick and our cheeks will burn for some reason from the altitude. I have not heard anything good about this trip, but it has to be fun if we are making the 6 hour trek (starting at 3am), right? I hope I don’t fall ill during the holiday, because this weekend is the first time I will meet my host dad, because he has been away at the mines for my entire stay here. I don’t want to be lurching over a cliff during our first encounter, you know?

July 24th, 2006- Stop, drop, and roll...respectively, or it won´t work

2006-07-26T16:34:00.000-07:00

It would be unfair for me to fail to dedicate at least one entry to parties in Peru, and how they continue to surprise and delight me so. Sometimes, like last weekend, the parties get so out of hand that people, such as myself, catch on fire. While I previously thought that our endless elementary school lessons on what to do if your body is engulfed in flames were a bit overkill, last weekend, I was quite thankful to have such lessons drilled into me. Let me preface the details of my combustion though by describing the stylistic details of the parties here. First off, community parties typically take place in outdoor enclosed soccer fields equipped with cement turfs. There is usually a live band that plays through the night, local provisions cooked by the area’s community members, and some form of additional entertainment (which last week, came in the form of homemade firework displays). Personally, I think one of the most enjoyable aspects of fireworks in the U.S. is the distance that exists between the display and its audience. In my opinion, this space is needed to fully appreciate the beauty of these dangerous entities, but strangely, no such space existed between last week’s fireworks and us partygoers. Instead of shooting them into the sky, the party organizers thought it might be fun to strap large plastic contraptions onto their bodies with which to shoot fireworks off from in every direction out into the party. To the Peace Corps volunteers that attended the event, this obviously seemed a little troubling, but considering none of the Peruvians seemed uneasy about this, we chalked our frantic shrieking and limb-flailing initial reaction up to inexperience, and finally decided to silently observe the display with the best of them. It was during this time that one of the organizers came charging at us, still spewing out fireworks. When I turned to run and seek refuge from the flames, I found myself up against a fence. It seems pretty obvious that when you shoot fire at a person, especially one who is wearing synthetic materials, that she will catch on fire, but hey, what’s the harm in that? I suppose it was all done in the name of fun, and even after a few burn holes in my fleece and a small dose of post traumatic stress disorder from the event, I can still say it was one of my best nights spent here so far.

Moving on. We are approximately half way through our training and things in that respect are going well. I am worried because I have grown quite attached to my Spanish teacher, who I spend a considerable amount of time with, and I am really wishing that I could take her to my site with me in five weeks. Last week during class, she was explaining to us how she has had thyroid cancer and how she needs to have a check-up soon to make sure that no more operations are needed. She is so young, and she is fine at the moment, but I became so filled with sadness at the thought of her suffering. The strength of my reaction really surprised me because I have never formed relationships with people so quickly. I think I may have similarly touched her as well though, because today she told me in Spanish that I had the heart of a melon. She said this with affection in her voice, so I guess it was a compliment, but I am not a big fan of the melon (particularly the watermelon), so I feel conflicted about that compliment. It’s better than comparing any part of me to the papaya though, because seriously, what a poor excuse for a fruit that one is. I digress. I feel like everything here- emotions, experiences, thoughts, are so intensified and a bit more difficult to process. I have also grown very close with two girls in my group, and since it is painful for us to go for 6 hours without venting to and laughing with one another in English, I am wondering how two years without them will be. While training is necessary, it is giving us all a false sense of what life at our sites will be like.

Speaking of our site placements, we had our second and most important interviews last week with our placement officers. In these interviews, we further articulated what we would like to have and do within our respective communities. I expressed that I would like to be in a rural community in the Andes or foothills, that I’d like to be surrounded by greenery, and that it would be cool if I had a toilet, but that I guessed that such amenities weren’t completely necessary. I don’t really remember my other requests, but I do remember how difficult it was to specify exacts, considering I still have a very limited understanding of this country and its needs. In about a week, we should all know exactly where we are going, and then we will be able to visit our sites for about a week to meet our new families and the communities we will be working with for the next two years. I suppose this will be the culmination point of our entire training- the scariest but most exciting time for all of us during these ten weeks. I look forward to it. Right now in training, we are continuing our language training, and doing practice projects within the neighborhoods we currently live in. My group is collecting information from community members (predominantly those who are parents) for young mothers, and creating an informational pamphlet that can be distributed at local clinics. During our first community meeting, I almost murdered four children who thought that it would be fun throw rocks at one another, and make an unmanageable ruckus during our discussion. Their parents didn’t seem fazed by this, which made me think that these distractions might be a constant within our presentations and projects here. That’ll surely take some getting used to. Is now a bad time to ask myself if I actually like children?

I don’t think I have described my new family here, who I can’t get enough of. They are far more liberal than the majority of the families here, and they are always encouraging me to drink and party with them, to stay out late to explore (as long as I am being safe), and to invite my friends over for dinner and sleepovers. Many volunteers are having trouble with their families because they feel as though their families are treating them like children, not letting them stay out past a certain time, and not really allowing them the same freedoms they had in the U.S. That is how my first family was, but this family is far more flexible and understanding of my situation. One thing that is considerably different here is the conclusions that people jump to when they see you with someone of the opposite sex (we are living in such a fishbowl here, and gossip is RAMPANT). They almost refuse to believe that this person is just your friend, and they continue teasing you about it for ages after the sighting. Typically, people of the opposite sex are not allowed in your bedroom, and it can even sometimes be weird to have them enter your house. My family is pretty relaxed with this, but I still get nervous about inadvertently offending them.

Yesterday provided some comic relief in our household. First, my host mom, who is small and always smiling (she reminds me of a carebear for some reason, and because of this, I naturally have the continuous urge to tickle and hug her…which is sort of strange, come to think of it) came home from work completely exhausted. She had been up all night the night before dancing at a party, and then had to put in a twelve hour work day cooking at a retreat for priests. I told her to go straight to bed and that I could prepare myself dinner, but she insisted on taking me out for pizza in the closest town, and then watching her favorite program on television. While she was viewing that program, I was talking to my dad on the phone while witnessing her eyes flicker shut and her head bob as she sat at our dining room table. Ten minutes into my conversation, she fell to the ground, knocking our entire table over with her, and landing with our placemats sprawled all over her body. “SARA! Estas bien? Que paso?!!!???,” I exclaimed. This woman leaped to her feet and stared quizzically at me as though she had never seen me before, probably wondering what the hell I was doing in her house and why the hell I was using her phone. When she finally came to, she explained to me that she had been having a nightmare that we were having an earthquake, and in her panic, I suppose she sort of created her own earthquake. Right, as I said before Sara, you should go to bed, in your bed, not at the dining room table.

The night gets even more hysterical. At around 1:30 am, I awake with a rumbling in my tummy. For some reason, people do not stock their refrigerators here, but instead, they shop everyday for food, which doesn’t seem efficient since the closest supermarket is an annoying bus ride away. This means that when I am hungry at ungodly hours of the night, the lone ketchup packet and pineapple rinds that are in the fridge probably aren’t going to satiate me. I had this brilliant idea of taking some cheese curls off of a display in my mom’s store, which is situated at the front of our living room. “I’ll just pay her tomorrow at breakfast,” I thought to myself. But before I could work out those logistics in my head, I knocked over the entire display, breaking the display, and two glass bottles beneath it. This startled me so much that I ran into my room, and reemerged (as a pathological liar, apparently) to find my sleepy host mom in our tienda, wondering what the heck had happened. “Gee Wiz, Sara! What in the world happened out here? Did Tom (our diabolical cat) wreak havoc out here, or what?” This is when she explained to me in her bewildered voice that Tom had been sleeping with her the whole night. “Oh,” I mumbled, “Well, it must have been an earthquake then,” and I ran abashedly into my room, without the cheese curls, by the way. You might think I am a bad person for lying (and I do too), but I can’t even explain how much pressure we are under to make a good impression with our families. One of the volunteers already fell through his neighbor’s roof, and that was quite a debacle, so anything I can do to keep my family viewing me in a favorable light, I will do (and that includes telling white lies, as established last night).

More lies and deception, a la Lindsay Buck. Shortly after my single-handed destruction of my host mom’s tienda, I came out to use the bathroom only to find our precious Tom batting around what looked to be a bird. But no, it couldn’t be a bird, because Tom had not been outside all day. Must be a toy, but how strange if it is a toy, because people don’t care enough about their pets here, nor do they have enough money to splurge on cat toys. All I can say for sure about the thing that was being batted around was that it was not moving. The next morning at breakfast I was informed by my host sister that Tom had gotten into our parrot cage (the cage of the parrot I didn’t know we had), and had gotten hold of their prized pet parrot. My host mom, with tears in her eyes, insisted that the bird was not dead, but instead, that it had escaped Tom’s wrath and had flown to find freedom. “Did you see anything last night, Lynchee? (oh yeah, that’s what they call me. It’s not so offensive here, as it might be in the south of the United States). “Umm….nope, nothing is coming to mind, Sara (as I sat there with the dead parrot’s image burnt into my mind). Are lies okay, sometimes? I sure as heck hope so, because just last night for me was a little out of control.

July 14th, 2006- Drama Galore!

2006-07-14T15:50:00.000-07:00

¨Today is just a good day in disguise¨ --Paul Venghaus

On Tuesday night, my house was robbed. This came a night after my neighbor’s house was robbed of every single belonging while the inhabitants were sleeping at only 10:30pm. I was definitely awake during that time and didn’t hear a thing. I asked my host mom how it was possible that nobody on our block saw or heard anything suspicious, and she said that even if they had, it wasn’t a good idea to try to intervene because the robbers more than likely had knives or guns. I knew that our house had been burglarized two times in the past, and that our neighborhood had a peppered reputation, and I also thought that it was slightly unsettling how my family, in addition to three padlocks, would push all of the living room furniture up against the door before we turned in each night. However, it never occurred to me to report these occurrences to my Peace Corps staff because I thought there was no sense in getting paranoid about what seemed to be the inevitable. I had come to terms with most likely being robbed in Peru, but I certainly wasn’t expecting it to happen in my home stay. I thought maybe it would occur on my way home from training one day, or maybe during a visit to Lima. Just in case though, I locked my bedroom door pretty religiously, even while I was inside of the room. Somehow, on Tuesday night, I either forgot to do that, or the intruder got hold of my bedroom key, because he/she definitely came through my bedroom door without a forced entry and nearly scared the living daylights out of me.

That night I was already having trouble sleeping as was, because I had stayed home from training to sleep all day because I was sick, and therefore, I could not get any rest throughout the night. At around 2am, I finally started dozing off until I was awoken by an abnormally bright light shining through my bedroom window. Before I could figure out why this annoyance was occurring, someone walked furtively into my room, ventured straight over to my desk, and began going through my compartmentalized bag that was holding all of my valuables. I was wrapped in my covers, facing the wall in the opposite direction, and praying to all things holy that the person, whoever it was, would spare me my life. He/she spent about 3 minutes going through my stuff, turning my digital camera on, and moving things around (creating quite the ruckus, if I do say so myself. After all, I was trying to sleep, and he/she was presumably trying NOT to wake me up, a detail that good criminals are heedful of). I kept thinking to myself, “Sheesh, what an amateur, does this person actually believe that he/she is not waking me up?”) After experimenting a bit with my belongings, he came to the end of my bed and slowly pulled my sleeping bag off of my body. For the first time since coming to Peru, I was not inside my sleeping bag because I had a fever and was trying to stay cool. This is when I started freaking out a bit, because there was a little too much contact for comfort between me and this starkly mad thief. I would be lying if I didn’t say that I urinated a little bit on myself. As soon as my sleeping bag was completely off of me, the dogs outside started barking (good job guarding the house when the thief was breaking and entering, guys), and a baby in my house started crying), so the thief freaked out and left my room. I sat up slowly, only to see that he had left a pile with my camera, my laptop, and my sleeping bag, so I figured that he was definitely coming back for those goodies. I stayed still in my bed for the next hour, scared out of my mind, waiting until I heard no movement downstairs, and then I ran to my host parents bedroom and did a horrific job explaining to them in Spanish what had just happened. We investigated the house, and found that the only thing that was missing was my wallet with my money, credit cards, and identification, which meant that the person had been watching me for a while, knew exactly which room I was in, and where I kept my valuables. We have no clue how he got in, because none of our doors or windows were ajar. We are thinking that he may have climbed through the roof, which has a part that is exposed to the outside, but honestly, that would make the thief comparable to spider man, or some superhero of that agile sort. A little bit alarming, to say the least.

On Wednesday, I spent half of the day in the police station, filing an official report and trying to wrap my brain around what had occurred. The Peace Corps staff was amazing in their support and in how quickly they issued a response to the situation. Our security specialist immediately came in from Lima and helped me to translate the specifics of the robbery, and to boot, he brought me caramels, which clearly indicates that he knows the way to my heart. We spent the better half of the day making light of the situation, so when the severity of the situation did finally hit me, I was in jovial spirits. In addition to the Peace Corps staff, my friends here have been quite possibly the best support system I could ever dream of, and I don’t really know what I would do without them here with me. Even the police officers were fairly friendly. I was laughing (inside) quite a bit, because we went to investigate the “crime scene” and I was standing on the curb waiting for a police car to come around, only to realize that when something happens here, you need to give the police officer a ride in your car. Hmmmm…what sense does that make? “Officer, I am being held at gunpoint, but let me go get the car and bring it around for you.” Weird. Then, we get to my house, and the officer nearly blows me away by telling me that they have a fingerprinting machine at the office, and that they were going to run my belongings for prints. After telling me that, he just stared at me for a bit, before I said, “Awesome, I hope you catch the guy.” His response, after he almost contaminated the evidence by grabbing it with his bare hands, was loosely, “I guess I should bag this, do you have a bag I could use?” It looks like this whole fingerprinting procedure is fine-tuned and effective. As if I wasn’t getting enough of a kick out of all of this, we accompanied the officer back to the station so he could slowly type up the report on the biggest and loudest typewriter I have ever seen. “You say your name is Winny Book, right?” Surrrrree, that’ll work, officer.

Needless to say, I was moved out of that house immediately, and am now residing up the mountain in a neighborhood called “Buenos Aires.” I now live with a young mother named Sarah, and her two kids, Jessica (19 years old) and Jonathan (16 years old). Sarah’s husband is a miner who is very rarely in town, and Sarah runs a little tienda out of the house that happens to sell my favorite beer and chocolate. Great. That should really help to reinforce my healthy lifestyle that I adopted a couple of days ago. Sarah and her family seem a lot less formal than my last family, and I feel considerably more safe and welcomed here. I even have a queen sized bed! No toilet seat or hot water though- you can only hope for so much here in Peru. The unfortunate thing about my move is that I am taking the place of another volunteer, who decided to leave the Peace Corps today. She was quite possibly the sweetest girl out of our group of 37, and I was incredibly sad to see her go. It seems as though she is confident in her decision though, and we all know that she will make quite the impact wherever she ends up. (Sabra- come and visit us. We will miss you, and so will Peru!!)

July 9th, 2006- Where to begin...

2006-07-14T15:41:00.000-07:00

Things that I am still struggling to figure out:

 Spanish- and to think I have been learning it for ten years.
 How my host mom gets my clothes cleaner by scrubbing them with her hands for a few minutes, as opposed to using a washing machine. Question to ponder: do washing machines actually work?
 Why when I am only making $2 a day, I insist on spending it on chocolate or Inca Kola, which tastes like fermented toothpaste.
 Why no one drinks plain water here, and why Peruvians make fun of me for
keeping hydrated with a water bottle.
 Why we only eat potatoes upon potatoes upon potatoes when Peru seems to
have the most diverse fruit and vegetable selection I’ve ever witnessed. If they are not exporting these things, what use do they go towards?
 Why I am only fully experiencing two emotions/states of being: hunger and
exhaustion.
 How this new fruit we discovered looks like snot but tastes really delicious. Is it passion fruit, or a greenish relative of the pomegranate? Who knows!
 Why people here blast music and participate in marching bands right outside of my window at 5am (regularly, even on week nights).
 Why my host sister lets the babies play on cement stairs unsupervised.
 Why, when we all smell something a little funky, that it is invariably me, who has stepped in dogshit.

The curse

The other day our medical director gave us quite the comprehensive presentation on diarrhea, and a day later, it seems that half of us have it worse than anyone can imagine. Did he curse us by overinforming us, or is this just what life as a Peace Corps volunteer is all about? Here, there is no such thing as normal diarrhea, it only really exists in an acute form. Statistics collected over the last few years indicate that volunteers serving in my region have a 122% chance of contracting acute diarrhea. That number is so large that my brain was having trouble processing it, until, of course, I got it (acute diarrhea, not the concept). In the states, bowel movements are considered a private entity, but here, they are a hot conversation topic, so excuse me for being what some people in the states might consider crude and inappropriate. In order to get a clear picture of what my experience here is like, though, it is necessary for me to write about this at least once. And believe me you, hearing about it is nowhere near as painful as experiencing it. If you are wondering what the difference between acute and regular diarrhea is, here is the one difference that I noticed. When you have regular diarrhea, it really sucks, but you can at least envision how good life will be when it’s over. With acute diarrhea, you don’t have the energy or optimism to even value life, and death feels like a more comfortable and appealing option. I know that I have a slight knack for exaggeration, but this is no embellishment.

So…how exactly can this acute form be prevented? There are a few ways. One is to wash your hands a lot. This seems simple enough, but soap in public bathrooms is hit or miss (by that, I mean just miss), and nobody really emphasizes hand washing before cooking or after using the restroom. Do you know how we think it is such a big deal when we are in a public bathroom in the states, and from the stall, we hear someone leave the bathroom without washing their hands? If you are anything like me, you run out of the bathroom to get a good look at the dirty culprit, and then proceed to tell whoever you are with that it is simply despicable how many people fail to wash their hands after bathroom usage, such as the person you just witnessed doing so in the bathroom. Well, if I were to run to my friends after each time I encountered that circumstance here in Peru, there would be no time left to discuss anything else. We learned in training that hand washing reduces the risk of diarrhea by 40%. If I were wealthy, I would put a large chunk of my savings towards having that fact advertised all around Peru, if not just to keep Peace Corps volunteers from getting sick. Another way of preventing diarrhea is to not consume tap water or anything that has touched it. That, for us, is impossible to monitor since our host families are cooking for us. To reduce your risk further, we were advised not to eat food off the street (from street vendors, not literally off the road). One kid in my group got really ill because he insisted on eating ceviche (raw fish) from the street, when we were specifically told not to since we are not near the coast. I fooled myself into thinking that if I was just really careful about eating food outside the house, that I would be fine. So naïve I am. Thank goodness Cipro is included in our medical kits.

Anyway, onto more pleasant topics…Well actually, forget about the pleasantries for the time being. This illness has put me in a pessimistic frame of mind, and I’d rather just vent for this entire entry. Last night, my family had a huge party starting at 5pm and ending at 4am for my host grandson’s first birthday and baptism. I, of course, felt like death at around 11pm, and went upstairs and collapsed. Any progress that I had formerly made with my family was wiped out by my being a “party pooper.” If I could have come downstairs, I really would have, but dancing in the fetal position did not seem feasible, so instead, I formed a tiny ball with my body and slept. Today, I awoke to my family raving about how great some of the other Peace Corps volunteers were for staying and dancing until 4:30am, asking questions such as, “Lindsay, what is the name of that friend of yours, the one we nicknamed ‘the dancing queen’,” and “what about your other friend who was the life of the party after you disappeared?” What I am trying to say is that I have been unfairly pegged as the lamest person in all of Santa Eulalia, so now on top of all of my other projects, I have to attempt to prove that I am the real dancing queen of this town (because I am), and that I am the life of the party, not whoever else they were referring to. What a mess. I have noticed that people are very judgmental in this town. We are expected to come here and be culturally sensitive, but I feel like this sensitivity is not reciprocated at all, at least not in my case with my family. It’s hard functioning under the scrutiny of other people’s judgment, especially when it is nearly impossible to explain away any misunderstandings that inevitably occur when you are living within the confines of another culture. I have never put so much energy towards something, only to have the progress be so minute, and so easy to negate. ARGHHHHH!!!!!

Additionally, I am having trouble finding outlets here, because while I am superb at comforting myself in the states, not many comforts exist here. Most times, my family does not allow me to go out because they say that the town we live in is too dangerous. This is giving me cabin fever like you wouldn’t believe. When they do agree to me going out, there is nothing really appealing to do. There are 3 discotecas, but they are only open on weekends. There are no cafes, cool areas to explore, movie theaters, book stores, NOTHING, not even restaurants really. And the saddest thing about it is that this is technically considered a city, so imagine my actual site placement! I am going to have to take up basket weaving, or something else that takes a lot of time and attention. Sometimes when I am tense I ask myself, “Why don’t you take a warm shower and relax,” but then I remember that showers have become my most dreaded activity here. The water is so icy cold that my scalp and brain can only handle about 2 minutes of shower time, meaning that I never get all of the shampoo out. Forget about conditioner when I can’t even bear rinsing the shampoo out. That’s right, major buildup. Please, please, PLEASE, if you have any suggestions about how I can relax on bad days (don’t say reading, because depressingly enough, I couldn’t fit any books into my suitcase), send them in my direction. If you want to write your creative ideas in a letter to me, below is my address…
Lindsay Buck
Suffering Lane
Hell, Peru

I’m kidding, but today was a seriously bad day. Luckily, I have found a friend (who thank my lucky stars, is my neighbor as well) named Kristen who is just as neurotic as me, and we have come up with a plan to combat our ¨Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Days¨ (What a good book that is, no? Ah...memories!). Since single days here can sometimes be difficult, we are micromanaging one day at a time, in order to not dwell too much on the fact that we will be here for more than TWO FULL YEARS. Some of our goals are to not call family on our bad days (as to avoid having them buy us one way tickets back to the states), not to consistently eat the nearby tiendas out of chocolate bars or beer, exercising daily, and planning at least 3 things per week that excite us. These goals all sound much simpler than they are, trust me. This week, we have our first trip to Lima planned, and it just so happens that Lima has a Pizza Hut, a Starbucks and….drumroll puhlease….a DUNKIN DONUTS!!!! What luck, and yes, I plan on paying each of those places a visit, along with any other eatery that strikes my fancy along the way. I hope we can catch a movie while we are there, too. I hope we don’t get “jacked up” while we are there, though. “Jacked up” is a phrase that our staff uses to encapsulate the dangers of Lima. I haven’t listened to what this means, because I am frightened enough as is. I guess we just shouldn’t wear jewels or bring our cameras, which bums me out, because I have already missed out on so many good pics because we are discouraged from bringing our cameras out too much.

July 5, 2006: Harassment and embarrassment

2006-07-06T08:42:00.000-07:00

¨I think young people ought to seek an experience that is going to knock them off center¨ --James A. Michener...Oh James, you would be so proud of me...

Regarding the title of this entry, it’s either one or the other for me here in Peru, I swear. In my particular case though, it’s thankfully more of the latter. From all of all the negative things I have heard about safety in Peru, though, I am gratefully surprised that my group has not encountered more issues. I have to remember to keep my optimism in check though, because after all, it’s only week two here. In terms of harassment, I have only had two encounters, both of which I can already laugh about. A few nights ago, a friend and I were attempting to do a good deed by returning our beer bottles to the vendor for recycling purposes. This vendor has a small store attached to her kiosk where people can sit to drink, and when we got there that day, we were greeted by a bunch of drunken men who in their inebriated states, thought that we were the most gorgeous creatures ever, and proceeded to yell some pretty vulgar things at us. Obviously, this is to be expected since we look so different, but it hadn’t happened so overtly up until that point, so it threw me off a bit. I didn’t really know what to do, so out of nervousness I yelled something at them like “Have some respect, don’t be gross” (wow, how sharp-tongued and elaborate, eh?). But I think the words may have gotten mixed up a bit (because I was still thinking about returning the bottles and how much money we would receive back), that I may have said “You can’t afford us”, which in retrospect, probably made us look like prostitutes. My friends weren’t too pleased with my approach, and we later decided that it might be best just to ignore such annoyances. It’s hard though, because it is a pretty major cultural adjustment to make. All comes with time though, I suppose. My next encounter with danger happened today when the same friend and I were in a nearby town and trying to take pictures of this river from a bridge. This guy came up to us while I had both cameras in my hand and essentially tried to knock us out or distract us with a fistful of coughdrops. Interesting…Luckily my friend is much more observant than I am, and was able to slyly save us from potentially losing our most valuable possessions here in Peru. Coughdrops smoughdrops, that’s all I have to say to that guy.

Onto embarrassing moments…Where oh where should I start? Coincidentally, most of these moments occurred in the kitchen. After a few friends and I cooked a delicious dinner for ourselves one night, we convinced each other that we were practically professional chefs, and with our leftover ingredients, that we should cook my friend’s host family dinner the next evening. We looked up a Thai recipe online to really knock their socks off, and went into town to get the ingredients for spicy eggplant and tofu. We improvised a bit because we couldn’t find everything we needed, but we knew that we at least had one ingredient that we needed, and that was red chili pepper. The woman that we bought it from kept saying something about it being too hot, and that we shouldn’t buy it (because it’s essentially inedible), but the recipe called for it, so we bought three. As we were cooking everything, some suspicion was arising about the peppers, because the mere scent of them coming from the pan was sending us into coughing and crying fits, but we figured that if we added sugar and every other vegetable we had in the house to the mix, that it would play down the spiciness. We were slightly panicked about what we were going to feed the family that was anxiously awaiting our concoction, but instead of coming up with a “Plan B,” we just got giggly and giddy and made lots of jokes like, “Do you wanna give Dominoes a call and let them know that we will be needing two pizzas pronto?” The more the ingredients cooked, and the more our eyes watered from the stench, the less funny the Dominoes jokes were. We were screwed. I didn’t think the family would mind the disaster too much until my friend’s host mom came home and shouted some common Peruvian hyperbole at us about how she was so hungry that she could eat all of Peru’s people, or something like that. Did that mean that she would also eat something that would instantaneously burn her tongue off? As I was wondering that, I noticed that my face and hands started burning in the worst of ways, and truly, you don’t notice how much you touch your face in the span of a half hour until you have chili pepper juice burning your skin off. After explaining to my friend’s host family the mistake we had made, they seemed very worried and not too perturbed with us, because evidently, there is a “true story” circulating in Peru about these peppers that we cooked with. The story goes…one time two friends ate that specific type of pepper and one swelled up like a balloon and turned bright red, and the other died of a heart attack. Very uplifting, don’t you think? The moral that we took from that story is that nobody in Peru eats those peppers, and that they are mainly decorative, or to be used in very small amounts (about 1/100th of the amount we used). After my host mom giving me a lemon bath to soothe my skin, I am happy to say that I am still alive.

As if my red chili-induced puffiness wasn’t enough for one week, the next day, as I was baking a cake for my host sister’s birthday, I told my host family that I am accustomed to mixing batters with my hands, and if it was alright with them, my hands were clean and I’d like to follow my trend. They gave me a bewildered look, but said sure, and off I went mixing eggs and sugar and butter by squishing it between my fingers. Considering I had not yet recovered from the burns the chili pepper juice had given me, this did not feel too good on my hands, but it was getting the job done so I didn’t complain. Twenty minutes later, when all was mixed, I went to wash my hands, but to my amazement, the butter would not, and I repeat WOULD NOT, wash off my hands. I soon noticed that my host family was staring a hole through the back of my head, so I decided to sneak upstairs to struggle with this in peace. Ten minutes later, after using everything in sight to scrape this sticky goo off my hands, my host mom knocked at the door and said something that taunted me, like, “Lindsay, how’s that butter coming?” “What butter, what are you talking about Yolanda? I haven’t thought about or touched butter in ages. What are you mentioning butter for?” At this she burst into hysterics. Oh yes, how funny that the gringa gave herself permanent butter fingers. She made me come out of my room so she could display my idiocy to the entire family, before she introduced me to something she called sandpaper soap which took the butter, along with my first layer of skin, right off. I am taking a wild guess that butter is different here, and of a higher concentration, and therefore, is not really great to wipe on your skin. Week 2, lesson #754 learned here in Peru.

While we are on the topic of food, let me mention that I am in a perpetual state of starvation, and that it is impossible to satiate my hunger here. While the food is beyond delicious here in Peru, it has little to no nutritional value, so it’s not really staying in my system for longer than, say, 15 minutes. We eat mostly starches, such as rice and papas (potatoes), and while I thought for a second that at least the vegetable sauces served over the rice and potatoes might fill me up, I soon discovered in watching my host mom cook, that the sauces are made predominantly of liquefied white bread. Lord have mercy, give me some roughage! I’m famished. One thing that is keeping my outlook shiny though is the avocadoes that my town produces. I think everyone in the world is in agreement that avocadoes are the best invention next to sliced bread or cheese or however that adage goes, but let me tell you, the world of avocadoes just got so much better. The avocadoes in my town are 5 times the size of the avocadoes in the states, and they are rounder and easier to peel and enjoy. This way I can eat five in the time in usually takes me to eat one, so I hope that my family here is not onto the fact that I am consuming enough avocadoes for our 8 person family. I wonder if my skin will turn green?

July 2, 2006- Acting a fool

2006-07-02T15:03:00.000-07:00

It has been exactly a week since I moved in with my host family in Santa Eulalia, and it has honestly been one of the longest weeks I have had in a really long time. I can barely believe that I was in Pennslyvania two weeks ago, enjoying all that my home state has to offer right before coming here. I have had a few rough days, made better by coming home and smelling all of my laundry, which still retains the smell of home. I was even able to call home, only to have my mom ask, “Are you in Washington D.C. still?” No, mom, I am in Peru doing the Peace Corps. Apparently you don’t miss me enough to even keep track of where I am. Thanks for that. Geez Louise.

Our days, including Saturdays, have been full of training sessions and language courses. I think some of the more competent people in my group might be bothered by how many trainings we have, but they have been really useful for me. Yesterday was my favorite training so far: an interactive lesson on composting and organic gardening. The Peace Corps is really making me put more thought into the activities that I might want to implement in my future community. Each activity that we have had within training has had about 5 objectives. Gardening will be useful in our communities because it can be a source of income, it can provide a way for us to teach our communities about proper nutrition, and it can help to integrate us into our respective communities. I have always had an uncultivated interest in gardening, and after this training, I think that it might become very dear to me, maybe one of the only activities within my service to help me alleviate stress. I am excited to start practicing with my current host family. Some of the volunteers, including myself, have plans to start urban gardens in empty bottles for practice. This way while we are in Santa Eulalia, we can grow herbs and small plants that may be of use to our families here.

When we are not in training, we are encouraged to spend time with our host families, and work on the many community-involvement projects that we have been given. Because I am in such an unfamiliar environment, I am expecting things to be comfortable way too early on, and I was struggling with this a lot this week. My host family is full of very warm people, but they are not the most inclusive crowd, which leaves me feeling very lonely sometimes, especially when I have difficult days at the training center. I feel a bit like I have lost parts of my personality that make me unique, because those parts don’t shine through when I am struggling to communicate in this different dialect. I have been trying my hardest not to compare my experience to other peoples in my group, because the majority of them are having experiences that I would probably enjoy more. I spent the better half of this week trying to repair a communication glitch that occurred early on. One night, I was sleeping over a friend’s house, and thought that I had appropriately communicated this to my host mom. Unfortunately, I actually hadn’t, and she and my host dad spent almost 6 hours the next day worrying about me and asking people in the neighborhood if they had seen me. I arrived home to an angry host dad who lectured me about effective communication, addressing me as though I was a child. I really wanted to cry, or at least scream really loudly. He made me so nervous that throughout the rest of the week, I clumsily continued doing idiotic things. For instance, I misplaced my host mom’s lucky towel that she wraps around my lunch everyday before she brings it to school for me. I spent about an hour and a half searching for that, praying to the Saint of lost objects, hoping that just this time I could find what I was looking for. No such luck. I’m a hopeless case!

I am making progress, though. It is tiring how much effort I have to put into this whole integration process though. I am being forced to ignore my exhaustion in order to fit in with my family. I have not been the best at establishing boundaries because I would rather overexert myself so that my family sees that I am trying my hardest. Today I helped my hostsister cook a traditional Peruvian meal (Aji de Gallina, which incidentally, is listed in Lonely Planet as the most unique Peruvian dish. Ask me for the recipe!) for lunch. I had just stumbled home in the morning after my first weekend night out here, and all I wanted to do was lay down, but instead, I was sort of pressured into cooking for four hours with her. We slaved over the stove only to produce something that looked like a porridge that could have been thrown together in 15 minutes. It was delicious though, and totally worth spending the time with her. Tomorrow, I have plans to teach my family how to bake my favorite cake for my middle host sister’s birthday (and her son’s too, which is on the same day). I don’t know that we will be able to locate all of the ingredients here, but I suppose we will improvise. Improvising seems to be an art here, and cooking does as well.

Last night was one of my better nights spent in Santa Eulalia. Already, everyone in my group is craving foods that are not popular here. 7 of us got together for a dinner party to cook vegetable stirfry with soymeat. Vegetables other than potatoes are actually sold here, but for some reason, are not popular items amongst the people. Our bodies are definitely feeling this veggie deficiency, and our dinner was well appreciated. Unfortunately, we practically counteracted the healthy meal though by eating brownie sundaes a la mode and lots of chocolate in every form sold here. Then we hit the discotecas in Chosica to dance our worries away. Both discotecas that we visited were really neat in appearance and style, and were much more fun than any club I have been to in the states. All in all, it was a nice weekend spent in great company.

June 26th, 2006- Settling in some

2006-07-02T14:55:00.000-07:00

Here I sit at my laptop in my very own bedroom in Santa Eulalia, a small city 45 minutes away from Lima. We arrived here yesterday morning, had a few hours of safety training, and then met our families, who we will stay with for the next 10 weeks (not three months like I thought before). Santa Eulalia is gorgeous, and is situated in a valley surrounded by the foothills of the Andes. Don’t let the term “foothills” fool you though- these things are massive. Sprinkled all up and down the mountains and through the valley are small shacks and cement houses. It really does remind me of a third world Greece, minus the water. It is around 70 degrees during the day, and 40 at night. Even though it is generally cool, there is this permanent haze that covers Santa Eulalia. It makes the mountains look fake, and more like something projected on a movie screen. We were told that the haze is not from smog, but instead from dust that gets trapped in the valley.

Our training center has major personality. It is a simple cement building with many levels and hallways, an empty inground pool, a basketball/tennis/volleyball court, and balconies that overlook the entire city. Not many of the rooms are enclosed, so our sessions are very airy and sun-filled. For meeting our families, we gathered in the basketball court, which has a balcony overlooking it. The staff stood on the balcony staring at us and waiting for our families to come in, and I honesty felt like I was a puppy waiting to be adopted, or a middle-schooler waiting to be chosen for a kickball team. It was a rocky few minutes, but it was actually really well organized on the part of the Peace Corps staff members. Our families found us right away, and mine was one of the first to come, and therefore I was not the “last one to be chosen for the kickball team,” which never stops feeling good. I was greeted by Yolanda and Valentin, my host parents. They took me home (a 15 minute walk down the mountain from the training center) and introduced me to the entire family, which had way too many people in it for me to remember names right away. Yolanda and Valentin have 7 children and 3 grandchildren. Out of those family members, 4 children and two grandchildren live in the house with the three of us. I have one host brother, Moises (16 years), three host sisters, Virginia (28 years), Patricia (20 years), Marisol (18 years), and two host nephews, Imanol (1yr), who is the son of Virginia, and Valentino (11 months), who is the son of Patricia. My house is down a dirt hill, and is the biggest on the block, which is reminiscent of a cul-de-sac in the U.S. It is square with a flat roof, and is made out of smooth grayish cement with a few textured accents near the front door. The inside is minimally decorated and has mostly cement and linoleum floors. My family has lived here for 12 years, but the house does not look lived in to that extent. I am suspecting that it may be because my family has been robbed twice recently, perhaps because they have the most fancy-looking house on the block. We have a T.V. and a computer, but most exciting is our top floor, which is a huge balcony with different levels from which to view the city. This is also where the laundry hangs to dry. We don’t have a washer, but our host moms are responsible for washing our clothes. It’s a shame, because I took a detailed lesson on clothes-washing from my grandmother before moving down here.

My host dad is especially engaging, and seems to know more about the Peace Corps than I do. He has a fantastic memory, and during our conversations, he always relates things back to what I previously told him. My host mom is a woman of few words, and so far there have already been more comfortable silences than conversations between the two of us. My host sisters are quiet and hard to get a sense from, but I have a feeling that the way to their hearts are through the two babies. I have been crawling around on the floor chasing those little rugrats quite a bit. Hopefully soon I will connect with my host sisters. My host brother, on the other hand, has taken a liking to me (I think, at least). We spent a lot of time yesterday comparing our cultures and embarrassing each other by trying our hardest to speak the other one’s language. We have both proven ourselves as language-manglers. He, like his father, seems to be gentle and polite. We shared a few laughs last night when we accompanied my hostmom to a fruit market in Chosica, a nearby city. She literally bought about 45 lbs of fruit, and we were standing behind her wondering, “How will we ever carry this all home?” When she finally finished her fruit bargaining, my host brother and I leaned down to help her, and she said, “No, I still have 10lbs of potatoes to buy. Just leave that stuff here until I am done.” WHAT THE…?

My host mom has already presented herself as a good cook. It seems we are going to be eating a lot of chicken, rice, and potatoes here, but she seasons them well so I don’t think I will mind the monotony. Ask me how I feel about those ingredients in a month, though- I really shouldn’t speak so soon. She asked me what I like to eat, but I figured I would just go with the flow in order to enjoy the local flavor instead of specifying anything. I spent an hour trying to explain the differences between North American food and Peruvian food, particularly breakfast foods, but we weren’t really connecting linguistically. With just about every household object, I tried to explain oatmeal, my favorite breakfast food, and she insisted that oatmeal did not exist, in any form, in Peru. Guess what showed up in my bowl this morning, though? That’s right, a big scoop of oatmeal, which they call Quacker, like a duck, even though we all know its Quaker, like an earth quake. Great, I thought, I need this nourishment after the exhausting conversation I had last night with her. Apparently oatmeal is alive and well in Peru. I wonder how many other familiar things exist here for me to seek comfort in? The bad news is that I have a feeling that weight gain will be unavoidable here. We seem to be consuming only starches and whole milk. And then, all we do is sit in training for 8 hours a day.

In addition to my anticipated weight gain, I have to say that I feel really hideous here in Peru, because I packed according to my expectations, which were unfounded. I didn’t bring my hairdryer and straightener (not that I am ¨that kind of girl¨, because you know I am not) so my hair is resembling something big and knotty, like an ostrich nest, if ostriches even make them. And, I didn’t bring ANY jewelry or nice clothing because I thought I might be living in a remote bat cave somewhere for the next two years. That might end up being the case, but for now, when all of Santa Eulalia seems to be fashionable and well-groomed, I look like a personified trainwreck. I need to think of a creative resolution fast, whether it be making myself some jewelry out of toilet paper, or sleeping with my hair squished between two books to straighten it.

Things that have surprised and enlightened me so far:
1. My host brother insisting that I could probably dance like Shakira. In your dreams, buddy. She’s from your continent, not mine.
2. Here, dogs are not kept as housepets. Families name them, but they are purely functional and are supposed to viciously guard the house. Mine just sleeps all day long on our doorstep, or that of our neighbor’s. What a slacker. Many dogs in the town bite, so we were told to always carry rocks with us to throw at the flesh-eating ones.
3. Gender roles are not as firm as they were made out to be during our first couple days of training. I caught my host brother ironing this morning! And women in this town seem to be quite athletically involved in the community with soccer and volleyball.
4. Here there are 10 classes of potatoes, encompassing over 100 different types. I even recently read that over 4,000 types are grown in Peru. Crazy, eh? My host family didn’t believe me when I told them we only use 3 or 4 types in the states. My favorite so far is small and yellow, with beautiful purple speckles on it.
5. The majority of our bathrooms have no toilet seats, shower curtains, or warm
water. Showers are a frigid hell (and it’s winter here right now), and toilets will be unbearable when we start getting GI (an advanced form of diarrhea), which is common here from the contaminated water. We can’t consume the water here, or anything that has touched water, like raw vegetables. We have to boil the water before drinking it, at least until our bodies get acclimated to this change.
6. Peruvians are very neat in appearance. We were told that even homeless people, who may have only one outfit, always look cleanshaven, spotless, and unwrinkled. This unfortunately means no pajamas or flipflops for me. It is a sign of respect for others to always have your shoes shined. This is difficult in a town chock full of dust.
7. In Peru, bee sting therapy is common to relieve pain in patients (OUCH!). Is this an acupuncture alternative?
8. People do not use ice in their beverages here. Today my host family bought some Inka Cola for us to share, and I downed my glass because I was mad thirsty. It had been refrigerated at the store, and so my host dad said to me, ¨Drinks that are cold like that will burn a hole in your throat. You should wait until it´s warm to drink.¨ I am happy that what he was saying is not true, for I would have a very leaky throat.

June 23, 2006 Lima or Bust

2006-07-02T14:52:00.000-07:00

Our departure day has finally arrived. Some volunteers have waited over two years for their departure date, so I feel happy for them that this is all finally coming to fruition. I also feel happy for myself, because I am not so good at living out of a suitcase or being in limbo like this. I can’t wait to be settled in my new home! I thought that we were headed to a dormitory outside of Lima for the first three months of in-country training, but I found out yesterday that I was misinformed (probably by my imagination, and not another person). We are actually being placed with one family for training, and a different one for our 2 years of service. While it might be interesting to compare the two families, it might also be stressful to have to readjust in a few months, especially if we are entirely comfortable where we are.

Our plane conversations have been comedic, because the reality of our move is setting in even more, and we are becoming preoccupied with ridiculous details again, knowing fully that in a few months we will look back on our concerns and laugh. An even bigger joke is this whole business casual attire rule we have to follow. I understand that we are building a reputation for ourselves, but I also understand that it is IMPOSSIBLE to keep business attire from getting wrinkled during travel. We look like well-dressed bums, if there is such a thing.

Before I end here for the day, I have to say that my execution of “Group Leader” today was positively brilliant. I am not sure if its brilliance had anything to do with me, or the fact that the leader I thought might outshine me ditched us all at the airport to have a secret breakfast with his parents. He was so late that we had to have him paged. If this were a competition (which I kind of made it, just to challenge myself), I am the champion. Lindsay Leadership Buck. I am completely kidding- I just think that how the morning unfolded is hysterical. Anything in the world that makes me appear to be organized is pretty darned funny.

June 22, 2006- Hold on a second, did you say we are leaving for Peru TOMORROW?

2006-07-02T14:48:00.000-07:00

Today my paranoia about Peru decreased, and I owe this relief mostly to the volunteers I am training with. Today during training, safety and health issues were prominently discussed, and there were about 15 issues that I hadn’t even thought to consider, two major ones being malaria and dengue fever. While this downer of a discussion would typically have freaked all of us out, we somehow made light of it. In fact, we laughed the whole day away as we partook in many interactive exercises, such as skits, songs, and role-playing. It really wasn’t as campy as it sounds, I promise. I had this irrational notion during some of our activities that if we pretended to have malaria during our skits, none of us would actually contract it. This seems to be a notion that many people have about bad things happening in their lives, a sort of superstition I guess. If you talk about bad things happening to you, and even better, if you laugh about them, they will never occur. One of my fellow Peace Corps volunteers, while we were discussing this idea, shared with me a quote from a book he is currently reading. It was this comical paragraph about how the Gods are too proud and innovative to let something happen to you that you already suspect might happen. I certainly hope this is the case.

I actually learned a great deal from each training activity today. Even more important than what was learned though was the respect that I began to build for the other volunteers today. While I continue to think that they are very different than me, I also am intrigued and amazed by each one of them. Introductions are still occurring, and as I talk to more people, my excitement grows. There are a few people in the group that have really gained my admiration, because they are leaving so much behind, and coming down with very limited language skills and travel experience. Their lightheartedness about the situation, but also their empathetic natures and honesty about their fears, have really helped to calm me down. In such an intense environment, friendships are fast-forming, but at the same time, they seem very real. I can’t say for sure, but I think that the majority of the volunteers here with me are in their mid- to late twenties, while two are older. One man is in his fifties, and is a father of three. As I interacted with him today, I couldn’t help thinking what a joy it would be to do a project like this with one of my parents. I wish that was an option in the Peace Corps.

Regardless, I think it is so neat that the Peace Corps accepts such a wide variety of people. I am excited to learn from the people in my training class, and I can’t even imagine what will become of all of us during the next three months of training while we are all still together near Lima. For the first time in my life, I actually have a genuine interest in interacting with and getting to know each person in a rather large group. I also have to mention that I am extremely impressed by the men in my group. I have not had many males in my life that have been into volunteerism, so it’s really nice to interact with these guys and learn what motivated them towards the Peace Corps. Alone, they are helping to change some gender stereotypes that I formed and subconsciously sought to reinforce over the years. Being around them is refreshing.

Training ended at around 5pm today, and we were given the rest of the evening to relax and do last minute shopping before flying to Lima tomorrow. Before training ended though, I, for some God forsaken reason, volunteered myself to be a group leader for our entire day of travel. This means that I am responsible for collecting large sums of money to tip people at our hotel, keeping track of everyone’s passports, visas, and plane tickets, and making sure no one misses either of our planes. I felt my arm floating up when the staff asked for volunteers, and my brain was fighting the idea, but it was too late to pull my arm down. I always think that opportunities like these will help to make me more organized, but they actually just aid in stressing everyone else out. I think I might spend the entire day tomorrow faking it to make it. Wait a minute….where is that manila envelope with our passports????

A few of us spent a surprisingly stress-free and casual evening together preparing for our departure and packing our suitcases that had all exploded in our hotel rooms. We had our last supper at a Lebanese restaurant in D.C., and then discovered this bar at the top of our hotel with a 360 degree view of the nation’s capitol (what better place to spend our final night in the states?). As the floor of the restaurant rotated, we enjoyed a breathtaking view, a few drinks, and a gorgeous summer lightening storm over the city. One by one, the realization of what we are getting ourselves into hit us as we sipped on our drinks. There’s no turning back now! The biggest concerns within the group right now seem to be getting ill from the water/ new foods (such as roasted guinea pig) just as we are meeting our host families, getting altitude sickness, and not knowing the language well enough. A few of us were previously concerned about theft, but I think this training has reinforced what we are actually in Peru for. While thefts are extremely common in Peru (even in churches!), we are not in Peru to take pictures with our fancy digital cameras or even to write blogs. Therefore, if our computers or cameras get stolen, our projects will not necessarily be affected. I guess I truly am my most precious resource in this case, which I don’t often consider true in the U.S. I feel as though there is an aspect of technology that has really taken away from the development of personal talent. Peru will give me a chance to get back to the basics.

On a lighter note, I consumed about 12,000 calories today trying to fit in all of my favorite foods before going abroad. Auntie Anne’s pretzels, milkshakes, baba ghanoush (sp?), kiwis, strawberries, just to name a few. What I couldn’t find, I just fantasized about. Imagine how colorful my food fantasies will be when I have been removed from my favorites for a year or so?

June 21st, 2006- Let the games begin!

2006-06-24T18:40:00.000-07:00

“If you wait for the perfect moment when all is safe and assured, it may never arrive. Mountains will not be climbed, races won, or lasting happiness achieved.”
--Maurice Chevalier

The summer of 2006 has officially begun, along with my Peace Corps career. The above quote was shared with us today during training, and it happens to perfectly capture how I am presently feeling about moving to Peru. My nerves have gotten the best of me, my imagination has become my worst enemy, and backing out of my commitment has seemed so very tempting over the last couple of weeks. It has been a struggle to convince myself that there is no better time than now, and that my time in South America will be well worth the risk of possibly encountering an unsafe situation while I am down there. While Peru is probably one of the safer Peace Corps placements, the ambiguity of my living arrangement and project have left room for me to envision things as much worse than they will most likely be. I am anxious to get down to Peru to see what it is actually all about. Right now, I feel as though I have a lingering and stifling case of stage fright. I have often suffered from performance anxiety, but typically, the performance lasts no longer than an hour, which comforts me because the end is always in sight. What am I to do when this particular performance of mine is going to span an entire 2 years? The end is nowhere near in sight. This is merely the beginning. It makes me sleepy just thinking about it!

My mom drove me to D.C. today for my first day of training. We thought that we would have a surplus of time to mosey to my hotel, have a leisurely lunch, and share a drawn-out emotional goodbye. Oh, how unrealistic those assumptions were! What actually happened was that Mapquest once again deceived us, and we basically made it to D.C. one minute (literally) before my training began. Lunch consisted of me feeding my mom sushi and seaweed salad in the car with chopsticks, all the while navigating downtown streets and contemplating why Mapquest was consistently such an evil beast to us. Then, after getting to the hotel, our goodbye was so rushed that I barely remember it. Maybe quick goodbyes are the best kind, though.

At training, I was greeted by 36 other Peace Corps Peru volunteers: 1/2 assigned to youth development and the rest to business development. While all of the volunteers seem like very good people, 35 of them seem significantly different from me, leaving one (who is thankfully my roommate during training) who is alarmingly similar to me. Reannon, my roommate, is from Madison, WI, and seems to be even less prepared for this whole journey than I am. She unknowingly strolled into training with none of the necessary paperwork filled out, was publicly ridiculed by Peace Corps administration for her outfit being too informal for training (business casual attire is more important than we initially assessed), and managed to misplace our room key four times in the first hour. I love her already. Unlike our counterparts, neither of us conducted extensive research about all of the insect types that inhabit Peru’s earth. Does this make us unprepared, or normal? I guess only time will tell.

Training was not as tedious or repetitive as I thought it would be. I learned many interesting tidbits about the Peace Corps and Peru, some of which are outlined below. I am typing all of these things from memory, so they are probably all wrong (joking…kind of).

1. As part of his presidential campaign, JFK first publicly introduced his idea for the Peace Corps to 10,000 college students in the courtyard of the University of Michigan. Their enthusiastic response to living in underdeveloped countries in order to spread skills and promote peace fueled the solidification of his Peace Corps proposal. Can you even imagine if a president/presidential candidate today would invent such an inspiring idea?
2. The Peace Corps currently has 7800 volunteers placed in 70 countries across the world, and the applicant pool continues to increase. Since its founding in 1961, the Peace Corps has had 182,000 returned volunteers who have served over 138 countries. Isn’t that a powerful thing?
3. Belching is considered insulting in Peru, while relieving yourself in public (male or female) is acceptable. I have already rehearsed hiking up my skirt as to avoid any accidents.
4. Peru contains of 87 of the 118 known ecological zones.
5. We will be in Peru for a presidential change, so some tension could easily be present. Sadly, the only thing I know about the new president is that he wants quechua to be taught in Peru’s schools, because a divide exists between those who speak castellano and those who speak quechua.
6. In honor of my short stint in Southern CA, I suppose I should mention that Peru is considered a surfers paradise, and has the longest lefthander in the world. I don’t know what a lefthander is. Peru is also 3 times the size of California.
7. My entire group is part of Peru 7, the 7th group of volunteers since the Peace Corps reentry into the country in 2001, after 26 years of being removed from the country because of political and economic instability.
8. My project (youth development) is only in its 3rd year. Only 3% of the 7,800 Peace Corps volunteers serve in this sector. The sites that we will be placed in are brand new, as opposed to already up and running as are those that other Peace Corps volunteers encounter. This means that the people in our communities have most likely never interacted at all, or for an extended period of time, with anyone from the United States. Youth development is especially important in Peru since 60% of Peru’s population is under 24 years of age. The target group of my project will be people who are between 12 and 24 years old.
9. It costs tax payers $40,000 per year to support one Peace Corps Volunteer in another country. I would feel badly about this if I were actually making any money down here.

June 21, 2006- A caveat to any readers...

2006-06-24T18:32:00.000-07:00

If at any point throughout these entries, you find yourself wondering why they are so painfully boring to read, allow me to defend myself. Apparently, blogs are considered a sticky issue within the Peace Corps because while serving, there is certain information that is considered sensitive. Therefore blogs are not considered the most appropriate forum to share such information. For example, one Peace Corps volunteer who was serving a couple of years ago wrote a letter home to his mother which contained a simple statement against the president of the country he was serving in, such as “The president here is a jerk.” His mother, only considering the beauty of the rest of his letter, decided that she would send it in to her local newspaper in order to share it with the surrounding community. This local newspaper slowly made its way back to the country this volunteer was serving in, and the president was terribly offended, especially considering that badmouthing the president is illegal in this specific country. Subsequently, this Peace Corps volunteer’s service was terminated.

For this reason, we are encouraged to exercise caution with what we post online, and even what we share in private, keeping in mind the previous example. I thought about this for a while, and hesitated to start a blog for that reason, but have ultimately decided that I would start one, and just make a continuous effort to be conscious of what may need to be censored. What possessed me to stick to my plan of starting one is that the third and final mission of the Peace Corps is to help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of American (North American) people. This blog is my first step towards that goal. However, because of the trouble it could get me into, I have decided not to express my opinions in detail on this blog. I am sticking more to objective description than opinion expression. While this sort of takes the joy out of journaling, I hope this blog can still be meaningful. For clarification, the information on this blog is written solely from my perspective, and is independent of the Peace Corps.