Happy day after Friendship Day

Well, I got back to Santo Domingo last Wednesday, when I was met with some ridiculous food poisoning from something in Piura and was forced to spend another night in the Centro de Salud here with a hydration IV, since I couldn’t keep down water. Some people have all the luck! This took another couple days to recover from, but since then, I have been busy busy, and it has felt great.

The main thing I have been working on, and I can’t believe how much it wears me out, is painting a world map with a group of kids. We are painting the map on a wall next to the public park, right in the center of town. We have a lot of people walking by all the time, wondering what we’re doing, asking questions, which in a way is the best part. The map is about 3 meters wide by 1.5 meters tall. I started with six kids, but only five have continued to show up. There’s Ariel and Anaís, who are brother and sister, about 10 and 12 years old, respectively. They are the kids of Ingeniera Luz, one of my favorite women in town. The other three boys are brothers, somewhere between the ages of 8 and 12, named Carlos, David, and Juan. I cannot actually tell them apart and never call them by the right names, but they are adorable and enthusiastic.

We have the first steps down, the initial rectangle measuring, light blue painting, and the grid drawing. If you ever want to bore children to tears, make them draw a 56x28 grid with no more tools than string, pencils, and a yardstick. But it’s done now, and now they can get to the fun drawing step. Or, at least, this is what I hoped, before I realized that a couple of the kids can’t really draw so well, or can’t follow the logic of enlarging from a grid, so they might be the Super Map Tracers or the Super Box Locators. I must have sounded like a crazy art teacher trying to teach them the enlarging exercise that came with the World Map handbook (“Don’t draw the rabbit…draw the lines that make up the rabbit.”). I’m not cut out for art teaching, or really visual things generally, so it’s really been trial and error. The box ended up off in two dimensions the first time we did it, partially due to the fact that the wall on which we are painting is not actually flat (a fact that revealed itself post-painting), but partially because I myself have terrible spatial skills and have always been bad at things that require spatial precision. I have really been the epitome of “those who can’t do, teach” with the world map. But I’m getting really into it. I like working with the kids here. It’s true what they say, a lot of times the kids don’t care how your Spanish is, they’re just glad to have someone to pay attention to them and something fun to do. My Spanish is generally fine, but I catch myself constantly screwing things up grammatically when I’m ordering the kids around with the map, and they still seem to love me. One of the brothers brought me a piece of cake today. I don’t think he knew it was Valentine’s Day, but I sure appreciated the gesture. Cake is good (even when it doesn’t have insults written in frosting on the top, ImissyouReeseHavlatka).

I’m almost positive now that I’m going to plan an environmental education program for the schools this school year. An interesting tidbit: Peru has the second worst educational system in the Western hemisphere, second only to Haiti. Therefore, I would like to do my part to put the kids in a better place educationally, even if it’s just something small. I don’t want to limit what I do to just strictly science-based environmental education, I think it would be all the better if I can find ways to integrate health, self-esteem, geography, current events, etc. They all relate to the environment, or can, in one way or another. I know I’m being lofty, and it will be a lot better when I’ve spent some time bonding with “Como Planificar un Programa de Educación Ambiental” and know exactly what I want my purpose to be.

Today, I went to go buy tomatoes at a store I hadn’t visited yet, and I had something happen that is only notable in its rarity. A woman was sitting in the store with her kids, and when I walked in she gasped and said, “Gringa!” excitedly, how you might say, “Angelina Jolie!” if she suddenly walked into your vegetable store. I don’t know whether Ryan and Lilian just didn’t frequent this particular store (also, the woman was from the campo), but man, I was a big deal there for a minute. She did that thing where she talked loudly about me in front of me, which only annoys me when people aren’t saying nice things (“Doesn’t she speak Spanish?”), but it’s hard to get irritated when someone is just saying, “The white girl! She’s so tall! And look at her hair! She’s BEAUTIFUL.” This is obviously a very Peace Corps thing to occur; I write about it now just because it hasn’t happened often in Santo Domingo, and that is notable. I might get stared or whistled at more often, but really, people just kind of let me be here. I don’t think I live in quite the fishbowl that other PCVs do. It’s nice.

EDIT: Valentine’s Day isn’t such in Peru, but it is sometimes celebrated as ‘Día de la Amistad,’ or '‘Friendship Day.’' I had heard this, but it did not hit me until the following interaction, at 11:30 last night, when I was already all comfy in bed in my long underwear.
Humberto (calling through the nonfunctioning door between the living room and my bedroom): ¡Alyssa!
Me: What?
(long pause, in which neither of us say anything and I contemplate going to sleep and pretending I imagined him calling)
Humberto: ¡Alyssa!
Me: What?
Humberto: Come here a minute.
Me: What do you want? (Like I said, I was already in long underwear)
Humberto: It's Friendship Day!
Me: Oh.
Humberto: We're friends! Come share a cup.

Oh, right. What else but drinking would make a Peruvian urgently get me out of bed at 11:30, when we both have to work the next day. This didn't seem like a bad idea, though, so I got decent and went and shared some wine and cañazo with him (110ish-proof sugar cane liquor, brewed locally). I turned out to enjoy my Friendship Day immensely. Humberto was already happily tipsy and just kept saying things like ''You're new here, but we're going to be friends and you're going to get accustom yourself and Peru will be like your land.'' Then his cousin and neighbor came in and we discussed world politics. I'm always pleasantly surprised when I can have a good conversation along these lines here. We talked about Iraq, North Korea, Clinton and Obama, what September 11th was like, Russian oil, etc. Nothing mind-blowing, but I appreciated it. I wonder what Peruvian news they're watching, because if it were not for Peace Corps-issued Newsweeks, I would have no idea that anything happened in the world except bloody car crashes on the Pan-American.

Alyssa gets hospitalized in Peru, part 1 of…let’s go for 1.

Well, the title, in context with the last entry, is pretty self-explanatory. The Tuesday after writing that entry, I realized that my skin infection was getting nowhere near better, and caved in and went to Piura. My dermatologist appointment was at 11 a.m., so I’d only had time to go to breakfast and the post office before it, which I thought was fine, since I was pretty sure the doctor was just going to hand me some antibiotic cream and send me on my way. Imagine my surprise when he looks at the wound, and just keeps repeating how incredibly “feo” (ugly) it is, and announces that I’m going to be “internada” for a couple days. I did not take this news well. I’ve never been hospitalized overnight before (that I can remember), and certainly not ever in a developing non-English-speaking country without any friends or family present. So I get checked into a nice room, and with instructions from the PC doctor to think of it as a vacation, I spend the next four nights in that room.

When I get the news, I call Andrew (who is in Chiclayo, half an hour before leaving to go back to his site), and though I attempt to make a joke about it, I immediately burst into tears and ask him to come up and stay with me (“Haha, I win the prize! First Peru 8 hospitalized...bblbblblbblb.” That’s how I’ve decided panicked sobs are spelled.). This is somewhat complicated, as he is in a different department, but I straightforwardly call Dr. Jorge and ask permission, who straightforwardly calls the country director, who says yes. This is stellar news. I will hereby be saved from four days of soul-crushing boredom.

I was on IV antibiotics for three days. The doctor cut off the blisters with a scalpel without any sort of anesthetic, which was absurdly painful. The hospital food was comically bad and I never actually ate a complete meal there (that was where Andrew came in with empanadas and salads). The doctor spoke fluent English, as he lived in Washington D.C. for ten years ten years ago, but only let on to this fact when I was sobbing hysterically during surgery. This seemed at the time like an absurd thing to not let me in on, but I guess I can imagine being in the U.S. ten years after living in Peru, talking to someone whose first language is Spanish but who speaks reasonably fluent English, and omitting from the conversation the fact that I speak their first language. Either way, someone’s got to have the conversation not in their native language, and it’s usually a home field advantage type situation. The only time he showed any difficulty with English connotations was when he tried to say “You’re a big baby” as an affectionate thing cooed during surgery. He didn’t have any trouble understanding, though, when I told him to shut up a second later. We had pretty good rapport by the time the four days were over.

The process of acquiring drugs is also pretty comical in this Peruvian hospital. On the first day, I announced that I was simply not going to allow my wound to be cut apart with a scalpel without any sort of sedative, to which the doctor looked at me curiously, and said, “Xanax?” “Xanax?” I repeated. Is that really what’s prescribed for a one-time surgery here? “Te traigo Xanax,” he decided. I was pleasantly subdued for a day or two.

There also don’t seem to be any sort of privacy laws or anything crazy like that here. I had random doctors and nurses wandering into my room almost every day just to ask, “Hey, whatcha got there?” I was kind of a big deal. Except they all just thought I was a stupid gringa who stayed out too long at the beach and got a second degree sunburn. Which was fair, the wound was literally undistinguishable from a blistered burn at that point, but if they asked me that, I nearly shouted at them that, no, it’s in fact a skin infection from a bug bite because I live in sierra with the llulles (I’ve since learned it’s actually spelled “yulle”) whose urine burns like acid. I told one nurse where I lived, and she made a face and said, “Ugh, I would NOT go up there by myself.” I’ve decided not to tell Santo Domingo this for fear of trashing their tourism dreams. Interestingly, all the nurses used the formal “usted” and all the doctors used the informal “tú.” The nurses were polite but distant initially, but curiosity got the better of them by the third day and they asked all sorts of questions, mostly about Andrew. They asked how many years we’d been dating and when I told them we’d just met in Lima this September (true enough), they squealed, “¡Qué romántico!” This, coupled with Andrew’s host family’s insinuations one he got back to site that he was very nearly widowed by the yulle, was very funny. Dr. Jorge, after eventually seeing pictures of the wound three days into its hospital recovery, told me I absolutely would have been sent to a Lima hospital if they’d seen it from the beginning. While this might have insured me better medical care, I was quite fine with the arrangement as it was, as I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have gotten Andrew to come all the way to Lima (15 hours by bus from Piura) and the constant company was seriously all that kept me sane.

I got out Saturday because I declared I was bored. Seriously. I told the doctor that I was in no particular hurry to get back to my mountain, as I wanted to be absolutely sure I was healed by then, but on Saturday after Andrew left and “Scrubs” for once wasn’t on and I was left to choose between subtitled “Kindergarten Cop” and dubbed-over “Back to the Future,” I told the doctor I was bored and he thought that was reasonable, so I went home. I’m going back to site tomorrow, somewhat against his wishes, as he wants me to stay until Friday, maybe even Monday, but it’s healed enough for me and 9 days out of site is plenty.

What I realized through this experience is how exactly Volunteers end up describing their horrible maladies with ironic detachment. You just kind of figure out early on that you’re not going home, that you’re tough and you’re not going anywhere and it will get better because that’s what things are destined to do, and then it’s just a matter of watching the absurd theater that is life in a developing country unfold. You take yourself out of things and narrate because there’s no other way, because if you will drive yourself insane if you take things too personally. My friend Brian lives somewhere where women, to give birth, are wrapped like mummies and go out into field completely by themselves, squat, and cut the umbilical cord with a rock. I don’t mean to compare anything I’ve experienced at my site to that, but it gives him context when we decided together on the phone that “a tongue-in-cheek blog entry heals all wounds,” including infected yulle bites. I’m sure this doesn’t always work, but I suppose I’m new enough at this that this strategy suits me just fine.

Obviously.