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.