Sass.

This post was going to be centered around the theme, “Look at my sweet Piura and Lambayeque pictures!” but, something rather impossible to ignore occurred yesterday.

I found out where I’m going to be for the next two years.

And then I found out it’s one of the communities I visited last week, in Santo Domingo, Piura.

(Disclaimer: Eric tells me there’s a chance the site might fall through, so it’s only 90% sure, but if the site works out, it is mine.)

You might have somehow gleaned the information that we weren’t supposed to get our site assignments until this Friday, and that, my friend, is a funny story. So yesterday after lunch, the environment Trainees who hadn’t gotten their interviews to state their site preferences yet were crowded around our APCD (Associate Peace Corps Director, in this case for the Peruvian environmental program) Eric, setting times for our interviews. Eric’s notebook fell down, and a couple papers fell out. I gazed down, saw a sheet that had all our pictures on it, and immediately thought, “Well, that’s a bad picture of me.” It took another 4 seconds or so for me to think, “And why are the words ‘Santo Domingo’ WRITTEN ACROSS MY FOREHEAD?”

We then had to go to focus groups, also known as group therapy, where we talk about our feelings, our reasons for being here, and diarrhea. I had a small breakdown of impatience waiting to talk to Eric, got a little teary, blamed it on the baby flu I picked up in Lambayeque. Two hours later, he came and got me, we sat down, and while I could recreate the conversation creatively, it’s probably more entertaining and informative in its natural form (according to my memory, where everything is performance).

Act I:
Eric: Hi. How are you feeling?
Alyssa: I...have something to tell you. This might totally change the dynamic of this interview. I saw the piece of paper that said Santo Domingo across my face.
Eric: Oh. That does change the dynamic of this interview. Cheater.
Alyssa: Right.
Eric: Did you see anyone else’s?
Alyssa: No (this is true, I swear. Only 3 more days!).
Eric: Okay. How do you feel about going to Santo Domingo?
Alyssa: I’m terrified of replacing Ryan (the Volunteer who’s there now who started the solid waste management program I’ll be working on).
Eric: Well, there are plenty of other niches in the community to work in to make yourself unique. The schools are wide open, and they’re considering a reforestation program for the forest that’s about an hour away.
Alyssa: Since it’s obvious my preferences didn’t really affect your decision to place me, and it was all about your perceptions of me, I’d like to know what your perceptions of me are. Why did you think Santo Domingo was a good place for me?
Eric: You’re confident and fearless. You’re not easily intimidated by authority figures, and you speak out when you need to. You’ll be working with the municipality, so this is all pretty necessary.
Alyssa: Huh.
Eric: Plus, you studied urban planning.
Alyssa: How does that figure into this?
Eric: The municipalidad wants to create an integral plan for all their natural resources that combines solid waste, forest, and water resource management. It would be a lot of working with planning documents.
Alyssa (soliloquy): I talked up my urban planning experience far, far too much on my CV. Planning documents...in Spanish? Here’s hoping Peru hasn’t discovered zoning.

(intermission)

Eric: Well, now you know your site. Want to talk about something else?
(short conversation about the progress of training, see previous entries for more)
Alyssa: Well, I thought at some point you’d want to address my age. Everyone keeps fussing over me being The Twenty-Year Old Peace Corps Volunteer.
Eric (smirking): No, see, I wouldn’t have brought that up in an interview, because that would be illegal. It’s called age discrimination.
Alyssa: Oh. I thought age discrimination only protected older people.
Eric: No. Remember that, Alyssa.
Alyssa: Okay.
Eric: Since we’re on the topic, how DID you graduate from college that early?
(short conversation about my life story)
Eric: So you’re bright, then.
Alyssa: And, apparently, sassy. (This is probably a lie, I fear the word “sassy” was not in fact used in this interview, but it was totally implied.) Are we done, then?
Eric: Yeah, I guess. You really did change the dynamic of that interview.
Alyssa: Well, that’s a typical Peace Corps experience. You think you’re getting into something small and easy, and then it turns into something else completely (this was verbatim what Eric told us during our pseudo-kidnapping. That sass is going to get me in trouble someday.)

End scene.
I’m overall pretty pleased with this site. As with any site, there are things to be excited about and intimidated by, pleased with and confused by. And I tried to post the pictures AGAIN, but was again let down by Blogger. And it is now time to get home and finish this 80s mermaid (¿?) costume I concocted for Halloween. Options are limited here.

Piura/Lambayeque: Ridiculous Stories

I have just gotten back from an amazing week in the mountains of Piura and the coastal dry forest of Lambayeque, and I tried to upload pictures from my camera on the computers in the PC Office in Lima, but it didn't work. Silly Peace Corps Office and its constant promises of hot showers, free internet, and coffee makers.

I had some good moments:
-We led a satisfactory meeting of a group of male volunteer forest guards in Lambayeque. I came up with an analogy about neighbors stealing guinea pigs that actually seemed to make sense.
-The knitting projects of the women's group in Piura were also awesome. It's so gratifying to see successful PC projects, especially in the small business sector.
-Spending plenty of hours on the bus, actually seeing the countryside, finally feeling like we're in Peru.

Some bad ones:
-I had an uncomfortable homestay in a compound house with 60 inhabitants where the only thing separating my bed from the main living room was a potato sack curtain. Having 30 kids watch you put on deodorant, being woken up at 4 by Christian radio blasting through the house, and then being asked 12 times in the morning how you slept = not that cool.
-The baby in the last house I stayed at was "con gripe," and it's entirely possibly I now I have baby flu.
-Patrick and I brought about an unintentional emotional breakdown in a woman who was kind enough to show her around her house and tell us about her animals. We were asking pretty standard questions, or so we thought, about how long she'd been living in the pueblo, when she met her husband, where she was from, but when we asked the question of how she felt about her pueblo, she burst into tears. She then started telling us about how her whole family in Cajamarca, she doesn't like where she's living now, she really misses her family but it's too expensive and difficult to visit them. I felt so bad, and my Spanish was inadequate to convey sympathy. Nor could I empathize completely; I miss my family too, but I can keep in touch with them easily and it was completely my decision to leave in the first place.

And now, I present to you probably the most ridiculous thing to ever happen to me in my entire life:

We were leaving the meeting with the men's forest group, and Liz and I went back to use the bathroom at a Volunteer's house. On our way back to the meeting place, the Volunteer's counterpart from INRENA (Instituto Nacional de Recursos Naturales = National Institute of Natural Resources) drove by with three other trainees and told us to get in the car, there had been a change of plans. We said okay, and they told us we were going to a mayoral debate about the environment and that our boss was following with the other trainees. This seemed like an interesting enough prospect, even though it was already 5:30, we hadn't yet met our host families for the night, and it was absolutely ridiculous to fit 7 people in a truck of that size. Patrick asked them where it was, and they said "Illimo." Ten seconds later, we saw "Welcome to Illimo" signs, and thought "Well, that was easy, we're there."

Fifteen minutes later, we were in a new town, and Patrick once again asked where we were going. They said "Tucume," and sure enough, we were already in Tucume. After ten more minutes, Patrick apologized and asked again, and they again told us the name of the town we were already in. At this point, we figured out that Patrick was in fact asking "Where are we?" instead of "Where are we going?" Once that crucial detail was cleared up, they told us we were going to Fereñafe, and we laughed at the name for awhile. They told us it would 5 more minutes.

Ten minutes later, I said half-jokingly to the rest of the car (in Spanish), "I feel a little bit...kidnapped." I don't know I remembered the word for "kidnapped," but everyone laughed, including our potential kidnappers. Our boss was nowhere to be seen behind us, and I asked them if he was in fact coming, to which they laughed and said, "No. You are kidnapped. Ha, ha." The longer we spent in the car, though, the less funny that joke became.

We eventually got to the holy haven of Fereñafe, where they dropped us off at the INRENA office, and told us, "Here. Check your email." and left. The free internet subdued our concerns for about 5 minutes (Would kidnappers let you check your email? Probably not), but then the fact remained that it was 7:30, we were an hour away from the community we were staying in (and eating dinner in), our boss was nowhere to be found and there was no landline to call him, and we were under the custody of some Peruvian men who seemed to show concern for any of these facts.

Eventually, our boss called the INRENA guys and told us to take them home. We did not, in fact, attend the debate. Our chaperone stopped three times to call someone on a public phone for no apparent reason, which at that point, was pretty okay with us. By the time we got back, my family had already gone to bed and felt very bad about feeding me lukewarm chicken and rice. I'm told that this is a typical Peace Corps experience, that you get invited to something that doesn't seem like it's going to be a big deal, and then immediately transforms into a Science Fair Project.

HUH.

I just realized I had this set to not allow non-Blogger comments, and that was silly. So you can comment now, if you feel so inclined. I would appreciate the love.

I might also remind you that I can still receive letters and packages (padded envelopes) of up to a pound. Postage does not seem particularly expensive. Email me, check facebook, or ask my parents for the address. (Desired items include any American candy that could withstand the trip, hand sanitizer, and, most importantly, pictures from home! Particularly those of trees changing colors, Ann Arbor, or...anything at all, now that I think about it.)

In news unrelated to me soliciting affection, we had an awesome nutrition charla with the chiquititos (1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade) at the elementary school yesterday. This might have been partially because or expectations were low. Andrew's and my activity was a relay race in which kids picked up food from a bag, ran to the other side of the patio, and put it in the bucket corresponding to what food group it belonged to, and returned. There are only three food groups in Peru, growth, energy, and protection, so that made it considerably easier. We also included a segment, perhaps 90% for our own entertainment, in which we taught the kids the English words for the foods. It went something like this:

Us: La palabra para ''carne'' en ingles es ''MEAT.'' ¡Repiten todos!
Kids: ¡MAY-AHT!
Us: Mas o menos. Y la palabra para ''queso'' es ''CHEESE.''
Kids: ¡CHAY-AY-SAY!
Us: Excelente.

And last night, Andrew and I made chicken parmesan, menos the parmesan, for my family. They thought it was muy rico, or so they said. We then went out with Melissa for Coke floats. Not all American traditions are for others to understand.

Leaving tomorrow, back next Sunday, excited to get out of the Santa E.

Tomorrow we make chicken parmesan.

I'm leaving Saturday for field-based training in Piura and Lambayeque, so this may be my last post for awhile.

This week, two things happened. One, I had one of the longest days of my life. Two, Valentín Paniagua, the ex-president of Peru who held down the fort between Fujimori and Toledo, died. People here LOVED him; he was president for less than a year, but his approval rating then was something like 80%. This was a very big deal, with all-day news coverage, flags at half-mast, and yesterday afternoon (and in some places today) being a don't-go-to-work holiday.

For me, however, Paniagua's death only meant one thing: logical fallacies.

Let me explain: yesterday we had technical training all day in the dreary building of the Municipalidad de Santa Eulalia. The session had its ups and downs, but by 5:00, the appointed time for leaving, we were all ready to go. Imagine our surprise when at 5:15, they announced that we would begin to prepare a presentation, give a presentation, and receive individual criticism about it, all before leaving. It was expected to take, if we were good Trainees, 40 minutes.

An hour and a half later, our boss got in front of everyone and said something to the effect of, ''I know you're tired, but our guests are here and they want to finish the session. After all, they came in on their day off to speak to you.''

At the time I accepted this, because it was in fact their day off. It was only until later, after knitting class, when Libby pointed out that this session was probably planned months ago, when they had no inkling the ex-president was going to die, thereby more or less negating that logic.

We did not leave the Municipalidad until 7:15, making for an eleven-hour day. I seriously entertained thoughts at some point that we were unknowingly participating in a psych experiment about captivity.

Alas. It was just a hard day all around, with blame to go around, or at least to a couple people. We're all tired of training, and this week is particularly strenuous. My family and I had a good laugh about it when we got home, but maybe they were laughing at my conjugation of the sentence ''They didn't know the president was going to die.''

HAPPY EPILOGUE

My mom made Pachamanca today. And it was all I could have hoped for and more. It also contributed to the confusion in my house, because my friends came over to work on a project on the patio, and when I came back into the house, the furniture was being reupholstered by my cousin and there was Pachamanca on the stove, neither of which I had any previous information about. My family must just not tell me things sometimes to avoid me being confused in the same way I sometimes avoid situations that require me to explain things (that then confuse them). Maybe it's a symbiosis. Maybe it's a communication gap. Definitely it involved me eating Pachamanca today.

I think this blog entry shall be organized into lists:

Things I’m Happy About This Week, in an American Way:

1. Getting the stabilizer for my laptop, thereby not having to write emails/entries in the internet cabinas for a whopping S/.1 per hour. Also, reclaiming my music. I am listening to Jesus Christ Superstar as I write this, and it’s putting me in an incredibly good mood.
2. Sort of getting used to cold showers. The key is to close your eyes and pretend it’s a pristine mountain waterfall. Or, if that fails, just acknowledge that you only have to be under the water for three minutes and start the countdown.
3. Realizing my house has ESPN, consequently watching the Tigers games (that is, when Peru wasn’t losing to Chile in soccer on another channel).

Things I’m Happy About This Week, in a Peace Corps Way:

1. Finally scheduling our community development activity: three nutrition workshops with elementary school kids. We have two tomorrow with some of the older kids during their gym class, which should be fine. The slightly more daunting task comes Thursday, which is one big workshop with 80 first-, second-, and third-graders. Good Lord. This project has also provided me with one of my favorite moments of training, when fellow Trainee Kevin and I walked through the elementary school and were met with hundreds of small Peruvian stares.
Kevin: God, you’d think they’d never seen a gringo before.
Me: Maybe they haven’t.
Kevin: I was here yesterday.
Me: Oh.
2. Having a stellar workshop in how to hold a community meeting.
3. Composting.

Things I’m Happy About This Week, in a Bilingual Way:
1. Correctly saying, off the top of my head, the sentence, “If I know who she was, I would talk to her.”
2. Having a good enough language interview to get moved into the next higher language level. Hurrah.

Things I’m Marginally Homesick For:
1. (Ye Olde) Franklin Cider Mill specifically, Michigan apple season generally.
2. Trees changing colors.
3. Soy products generally, a tofu pop from Red Hot Lovers specifically.
4. My yet nonexistent diploma. Did I graduate?

In other news, it’s one month in-country today, and every day is one day closer to finally knowing our sites. We’ll know those in about three weeks, and in the meantime, we’re writing our site preferences, so hey, another list:

Alyssa’s Site Priorities:
1. A project in protected area management and/or income generation.
2. Mountains (versus coast).
3. Semi-rural, but not so remote as to make a trip to the department capital an insurmountable inconvenience.

But like they say, every site has its advantages and disadvantages. If I ended up on a recycling project in an urban coastal community, I would embrace it. Almost none of the decision is in my hands, so Peace Corps flexibility is a necessary strategy.

From the sounds of it, my 4-year-old brother is having a dance party in the living room, so I am going to investigate.

No Pachamanca for you.

I finished One Hundred Years of Solitude this morning, which was the kind of book that finishing left me feeling kind of dazed, but I tried my best to give the day some direction

Today Melissa and I ventured to the park in Santa Eulalia, where there was a festival of Pachamanca and free plates for 2,000 people. It was absolute madness. I'm still unclear on exactly what defines a food as Pachamanca, but it involves cooking things (potato, sweet potato, meat, tamale) in a hole in the ground. I wasn't even hungry initially, but I certainly was after an hour of waiting in line and seeing deliciously large portions pass by. There were five people before the line ended and they ran out. Melissa and I consoled ourselves with some picarones (fried donut-type desserts doused in anise honey) and then found every Peace Corps Volunteer in the madness and mooched some of their food. It was almost worth standing in line with people who have a vastly different idea of personal space than we do and having ''COLA! COLA!'' shouted at us every time it appeared we veered away from the line by half an inch or so.

This week has been filled with entertaining ''cultural exchanges'' with my family.

Exchange 1 (with my host sister, who has a 5-year-old daughter):
Angela: ''Do you know the movie Shrek? What does 'Shrek' mean in Spanish?''
Me: ''Oh, nothing, it's just the ogre's name.''
Angela: ''No, it sounds exactly like another English word you taught us.''
Me: ''Um, 'shriek' is a shout?''
Angela: ''No, no. Something the kids say on Halloween. A travesura.''
Me: ''Oh. TRICK.''

To be fair, in a Spanish accent, those words do sound exactly the same. And I was pleased that my lecture on the customs of Halloween stuck with them.

Exchange 2 (with my host dad, a history teacher):
Me: English speakers have trouble learning to say dates in Spanish. Because in English, we don't say one thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven, we say nineteen ninety-seven.''
Everd (laughing uproariously): Haha, English speakers, you have to separate it because you don't like to count to two thousand.

This honestly seemed like as reasonable an explanation for why we separate our numbers as any.

Exchange 3 (with Melissa's 13-year-old brother, watching professional wrestling)
Julio Cesar: ESMACKDOWN is on! What does ESMACKDOWN mean in Spanish?


Yesterday was also another successful day at the Agrarian Institute, with transplanting broccoli, learning about living fences, techniques for breaking up hard soil without water, etc. If getting up on Saturdays weren't so hard, those would easily be some of the best educational days of my life.

Perceptions thus far

This morning's technical activities were a vast improvement on the ones of the past couple weeks of training, as they involved...actually studying the environment. All the environment Trainees got dropped off at different altitudes on mountain farms and had to explore, make a map, and figure out from the owner some information about the farm owner. Some people had some trespassing issues, but our farmer told us our instructor had talked to him ahead of time and he was glad to talk to us. He had inherited the farm from his great-grandparents and was growing, depending on the season, broccoli and cauliflower, or green pepper, tomatoes, and zucchini. We came in the middle of a pesticide spraying, and were aghast at the lack of face mask on the pesticide applier, but so it goes. We romped around the farm for a couple hours, and then came home for Spanish class.

Spanish class is sort of unsatisfying and I'm hoping I can get placed into a higher level next week when we have interviews again. We're starting to study the vocabulary of farming concepts, so that's good.

I am getting more into the groove of training as it becomes less theoretical and more technical, and soon enough I will know my assignment. At that point, tech training will become a lot more useful, because it will be site-specific. In a way, I appreciated the theoretical training, because it really defined a paradigm from which Peace Corps works that you have to apply to every project you work on. Essentially, you are there as a facilitator of community development, you will not have a specific project assigned to you so it is your job to talk to the residents and figure out what problems exist that you can help with, and then it is your job to develop the capacity within the community to address the concern, and lastly, find ways to make the project sustainable after you leave. In that way, all Volunteers seem to do the same basic work, with slightly different technical knowledge to offer. It's entirely likely that I'll end up teaching English or nutrition charlas, despite being neither a TEFL nor a health Volunteer. It's all very lofty, but it seems important to get the approach to development down before you get thrown into a site. I laughed this week when I remembered talking to an SNRE grad student at Michigan who said, ''I thought about Peace Corps, but I'd want to do agroforestry and not environmental education. I can't imagine a worse assignment than environmental education,'' because really there's not a single PC assignment in which the Volunteer isn't an educator. No Volunteer gets to solitarily plant things in tree canopies for two years.

I'm trying not to mentally fuss over what kind of site I want, because it's really entirely out of my hands. I want to do protected area management ideally, but I'll have to work with whatever I get.

The Amish story made the afternoon news in Perú yesterday. Very surreal.

Yesterday was the first day of celebration for the anniversary of Neyda's school today, marked the Paseo de Antorchas, in which all the kids design something out of tissue paper, put it on a post, put a candle inside, and march around. I would like to have a word with whoever thought it was a great idea to combine small children, fire, and tissue paper into a single night of mayhem. The kids were cute, though, and there seemed to be minimal damage to life and limb, even when someone shot fireworks off a gigantic tissue paper caterpillar. One girl got to be the queen, and another, her maid. Peruvian girls love their hoop skirts, I tell you.

Well.

Well, it seems I am in Perú.

The basic information:

I am in Santa Eulalia, 45 minutes northeast of Lima, during training. Training takes place at this crazy enclosed plaza 10 minutes from my house that used to be a rehab center for the Peruvian Army. We have classes in language and culture, technical learning (in either environment or health), medical information (you really haven't lived until you've had a 45-minute lecture entirely about diarrhea), and other miscellaneous topics (like Peruvian history and government). Training is pretty intense: 8 hours a day Monday through Friday, and on Saturdays we go to the National Agrarian Institute on the outskirts of Lima in the morning for vegetable gardening training.

A PSA:
Coincidentally, Santa Eulalia is currently in the national news for having a man die of bartonellosis, a mosquito-transferred disease. The Ministry of Health has responded with a huge campaign. The citizens are displeased with this negative portrayal in the news, and are going to Lima to protest tomorrow. It's generally the impression that this has gotten way too hyped up, bartonellosis has been around forever, and it's quite easy to diagnose and treat. So, for those of you who may worry: I do not plan on dropping dead from a mosquito bite tomorrow.

I live with an adorable family, and even after two weeks of living there, I'm not 100% clear on who lives there and who just passes through a lot. My host mom, Neyda, definitely lives there with her husband, Everd, and three of her four kids. Sigrid is 26-ish and has 2 kids who also live there: Amir is 4 and Alisa is 9 months. The first week was filled with much laughter at the idea of the Volunteer having the same name as the baby. One of the other daughters, Angela, who is in her 20s, has a 5-year-old girl, Kenya. The son, Gary, is 28 and intends to teach me to dance at the discoteca. I got really lucky, my family is so nice and supportive and always tries to make me understand what they're saying, even though my Spanish is...mediocre. I think the best moment I've had with them yet is when I came home and told them a story at dinner about another Trainee whose eyes are different colors, a fact he did not notice until he was 9 years old, and my host mom laughed and said, ''Oh, Alyssa. She always comes home with a joke.'' I took this to be a sign of success, because it really is hard to be funny, and thereby win people over, in another language.

My health may be kind of up and down (mostly up!), but one thing I am not suffering from is seasonal affective disorder. Santa Eulalia is where people come from Lima to get sun, because it is sunny literally every day and almost never rains. Another thing I am not suffering from in out-and-out culture shock, as living in the city during Training is a little cushier than working in the campo. We have running, albeit cold, water, and cable TV. The kids watch Powerpuff Girls dubbed in Spanish and we discuss the finer points of Ghostbusters over dinner. Ask me about the presence of American culture in 2 months, and I feel quite certain I'll have a different answer for you.

More later, now it is time to go home and eat (more) potatoes.