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.