June 15th, 2007

(A note to those people who aren't those two people I know have me on RSS feed: a downside of not having internet at site is that sometimes I have to post more than one blog entry at one time. Like now. Please note. An additional downside is the utter futility of trying to remember semi-forgotten information without Google. I nearly destroyed my soul this week trying to remember the name "Medea.")

I maintain that the hands-down most annoying thing about living in Peru (putting aside, of course, anything directly related to its under-developedness. The theme of this post will not be “OMG the water is, like, soooo gross!”) is how people wait in line. Or, to put it clearly, how they don’t. I’m not talking about the formal lines, like the ones for the bank or free Pachamanca, in which people enforce the line like it’s their job, shouting “COLA!” if you step more than an centimeter out of the shadow of the person in front of you seeking some semblance of personal space; no, those are fine. I’m talking about any time when people have to informally wait for some commodity, and the “line” becomes a “bunch,” “COLA!” becomes a suddenly meek gringa mumbling “but I was here first…” and the world goes to hell.

Yesterday I had to wait in line to see the mayor to clear up some funding issue for our girls’ leadership camp, and so I went and sat in his secretary-monitored waiting room. In the middle of me waiting 10 minutes or so, the mayor went to a meeting, so everybody else who was waiting left. I didn’t have anything else to do at the moment, so I just sat and waited the half-hour for him to return, reading a March issue of The Economist. After I’d waited that time, I glanced in the office and realized the mayor had returned, and, recognizing my undeniable first place in line, I stood up and asked the secretary is I could go in.

Bad move. I should have just snuck in and pounced. Some guy who had just entered the office maybe 45 seconds before heard me and apparently thought, “Oh, the mayor’s back? Convenient!” and totally hijacked my spot, not to mention the spots of the three people who were now waiting behind me. I gave him an “AY!” and the meanest glare I could muster, to which he responded with a pout, and aerial finger pinch, and an “Un ratito.” Oh, you just need a couple minutes with the mayor? Perhaps to discuss some urgent budgeting matter? Why, that makes you completely different from me! Because, see, I was going to go into the mayor’s office and read him the entirety of Ulysses in Pig Latin. Go ahead, then. Glad we cleared that up.

Perhaps the worst part was, when I looked incredulously at the secretary, she gave me a “What can you do” look and accompanying shrug. She should be able to do better. She might have learned this from me, in addressing the next guy who tried to cut me in line when I was waiting inside the office. He got a firm “NO,” and quite possibly a pantomimed shove in the chest; rage clouds the memory.

Waiting for things is something people (and therefore, I) have to do a lot here, what with a pretty across-the-board level of inefficiency, and the way in which people do (or…don’t) it blows my mind. It’s not just me, either, I know I’ve seen Peruvians piss each other off in lines. I know this is one thing I will never get used to, because I will never have the basic sense of entitlement required to do what that guy did yesterday. I do, however, need to find a way to contain my rage about it. Thank goodness for blogs with disclaimers.

June 12th, 2007

Deep thoughts for this week: Boredom and bad moods are correlated, as are activity and good moods, but the causation can go either way. I used to think that if I wasn’t feeling well, the cure was activity, but that’s not exactly the case, because I’m not likely to enjoy the activity if I’m in a bad mood. When I’m in a good mood, however, I enjoy pretty much any activity at site. I now find that when I’m in a bad mood, I might just be in the mood to do “boring” things. I put “boring” in quotation marks because I’m referring to the solitary, non-active type activities that are unlikely to appear on any Tri-Annual Report.

Case in point: today I woke up in a good mood and spent the rest of the morning running between the health center and the municipality writing, stamping, and signing (but not delivering, it has come to my attention that there’s someone who does that for me) letters to all the people Roger and I invited to a meeting this Thursday to tell them the meeting has been postponed, and I LOVED it. In contrast, when I had just returned from the U.S. and was in a bad mood (a subtle one that I did not want to admit to myself I was in), all the activities I wrote about before (the barbecue, sports day, parade, French ambassador visit, etc.) amused me, quite a bit sometimes, but did not alleviate my underlying emotional state. As such, I read two books (The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Tipping Point, both outstanding), worked toward the perfection of my homemade hummus and tomato sauce, watched both Buffy Summers and Veronica Mars live out their junior years of high school (thanks to a trip to the bootleg DVD market in Lima, I now have material for all my varied television-watching moods, from “I want to watch a small blonde high school girl fight evil with superpowers” to “I want to watch a small blonde high school girl fight evil without superpowers”), and poco a poco I was doing better.

I need to chill out my parenthetical usage, holy crap.

But anyway, the point is the Peace Corps service is inherently an emotional roller coaster, no matter what you fill it with, so I might as well ride it out when it’s going well but not get too down on myself for the occasional bad mood/period of inactivity. Things are looking on the up and up for me with my soon-to-be main project, GALS (Local Sustainable Environmental Management) Certification, to be discussed later, so daytime boredom is becoming less of an issue.

Atomic power makes me, Molly Howard, proud to be an Asian-American.

Man. If you were for some reason on a South American scavenger hunt and there was an item on a list (presumably between “Stray dog” and “T-shirt in English that says something absurd”) that read “Bored Peace Corps Volunteer,” look no further than Santo Domingo, my friend. There is just nothing to do these days. Yesterday I showed up to the office unsolicited and finished my final report, which kept me amused from, say, 10-11 a.m., at which point I returned to my house and read for the rest of the afternoon, as I had been doing until I left my house at 10 a.m.

This, I suppose, the problem with working in an office where only about 10% of the work done actually has anything to do with you and your project. The rest of the non-trash project work in the Department of Health and Sanitation pertains to things like cleaning the health center, fumigation against bugs whose bites result in flesh-eating wounds, and visiting the campo for various administrative purposes. I’m generally only invited to campo trips when the guys in my office are feeling particularly charitable or I particularly pushy, as I hike at a rate approximately half theirs, which is mildly frustrating for all involved.

Just as I am complaining about the lack of activity around here, a parade, THE VERY QUINTESSENCE OF FUN, passed by outside my window. It appeared to be kids playing poorly- or perhaps not-at-all-tuned brass instruments parading in front of kids holding a Virgin Mary statue. Well, nothing out of the ordinary there.

(several hours later)

I could not have been more wrong about that parade. Except that I am still pretty certain no one has ever tuned those instruments. It turned out to be a parade of one of the high schools celebrating International Environment Day (Earth Day? Was that not in March/April?), complete with costuming of all varieties. What I assumed to be a Mary statue being carried around was in fact two children dressed as Incan royalty, here to give the authorities the what-for for degrading their land. Several kids were dressed as trees, generally with signs that said “Help! Don’t cut me down!” One kid was coated in green body paint and had a fake snake wrapped around his neck; he was representing “The Nature of Santo Domingo.” One kid came just dressed as Spider-Man. I think he missed the second half of the memo. (It was vaguely reminiscent of that scene in Drop Dead Gorgeous with the girl with the large ball of twine on her head. “I think I kinda misunderstood the assignment.”)

The signs the kids carried were pretty cute, too. They mostly read things like, “Don’t contaminate the water!” or “Don’t cut down the trees!” but my favorite read, “If you mistreat nature, she will avenge.” Ooo. It might have in reality read, “If you mistreat nature, it will avenge,” but no matter. The “ella” could have really gone either way. So every authority figure there made a speech, including this girl. I had just kind of wandered downstairs from my office to see what was going on, and was immediately swooped up and put in front of 200 high school kids to make a speech about the environment. I think I said something to the effect of all environmental problems begin small, and everyone can do something, carry your trash in your pockets until you see a trash can, etc. It was inspiring. I think only 100 of the kids either started giggling, covering their faces, or rolling their eyes.

But the most notable thing about that event was that I did nothing to organize it. The high school organized an entire environmental-themed event, and I, the environmental Volunteer, did nothing more than show up. I’m not saying that a parade is an indicator of the community’s level of environmental stewardship, but at least it’s on some people’s minds.

Since things have been dull around here, I will describe two phenomena that show just how “acostumbrada” I am that would ordinarily be insignificant and go unmentioned.
First, the two-year-old who lives next door, Erica, is no longer afraid of me. Quite the opposite, now. She runs into the street whenever she sees me (which is a lot) and sings “Señorita!” and gives me a hug. It’s cute. It’s a little four-time-a-day upper, especially when most of the other kids younger than, say, 14, just stare at me and don’t saludar back.

The background on this second point is that everyone is REALLY formal with each other in the sierra. You can work with someone for months and still be on the formal “usted” terms, depending on how proper they want to be. No one calls you the informal “tú” without getting to know you pretty well first, and sometimes not even then. As of late, I’ve seen people that look only vaguely familiar in the street who answer my “Hola” with a “Cómo estás.” Lo and behold, unexpected tú form, with people I didn’t even know I was friends with!

So I think I’m going to try to rest today, sleep off this cold I’m coming down with, and try to drown out both the TV coming from one adjacent room and radio from the other. I am so tired of the bulla, that is for sure.

A peanut is neither a pea nor a nut, it's a legume.

So, I went to the United States. And then, as I feared I might find really difficult to do, I came back to Santo Domingo. I don’t really feel like writing about the U.S. because it was a really good visit and I’d rather just remember it poco a poco instead of rehashing it all in one entry.

Due to absurd travel difficulties that ended finally in the theft of my digital camera from my checked luggage and our day-late arrival in Lima instead of Guayaquil, Andrew and I spent some tourist time in Lima before heading back. It was really nice; for as long as we all spent living just 45 minutes outside of downtown Lima, we never really spent a lot of time there. Our short jaunts in the city after organic gardening class were generally spent at Pizza Hut, which is something of a gourmet restaurant in these parts. I want to plug the photography exhibit on Sendero Luminoso at Museo de la Nación for anyone who might be in Lima at some point and wouldn’t mind trudging through a mildly depressing all-Spanish exhibit. The ancient art in the rest of the museum in okay, but the Sendero exhibit is really powerful.

I was in a little funk when I first got back to site, as I expected to be (other Volunteers had warned be it would take about a week to feel right again at site). I felt better, though, when I called Andrew today and he said he went through the same thing. Phone calls with Andrew are always a reminder of the fact that we live in a developing country. Both our phones are rural, and therefore the delay between us talking is a full five seconds. There’s a lot of “No, you go first,” and “What were you going to say?” It also costs a sol a minute. Therefore, I only do it once every week and a half or so, but it’s always worth it.

Luckily, there were enough special events at site this week to force me to get out of my room and put on a good face. Monday was a town barbecue, in which I think I accidentally went on a date with a guy old enough to be my father (hence me not noticing it was perhaps a date) who works at the bank. When Rachel informed me that I may or may not be facing a date, though, I ameliorated the situation by walking into the bank and announcing that I had just had a wonderful visit introducing my fiancée to my parents. This was highly effective. (Once again, Andrew and I are not actually engaged except in situations where it is convenient for me.)

So I went to the dance that followed the barbecue, drank some beer, and danced some huayno with the teachers. Huayno is a traditional dance of the Peruvian sierra that is, luckily for me, incredibly easy to perform. It involves, well, skipping in place, and yet people are always amazed that I can do it. It is also a good calf workout.

I laid low Tuesday, and then Wednesday the first counselor of the French Embassy in Lima came to visit, along with two other important people who had had a hand in financing a livestock project in Santo Domingo’s centro poblado (like a caserío, but bigger). He was fun. He was born in Spain and understandably impatient with Rachel’s and my Spanish (we think) and therefore spoke nothing but English with us all day. This was on some level rude to Peruvians, since we do all speak Spanish, albeit in our case lisplessly, but it was mildly amusing for us. We were sampling manjar blanco, a delicious Peruvian buttery sweet dessert spread, when he said to us, “This isn’t going to be on Weight Watcher’s anytime soon!” All the high school kids performed dances in a welcoming ceremony, which was really cool to watch. One part was like half dance half silent theater, and almost all dances involved teenage boys swinging machetes. The teacher explained that the machete dances do not signify violence, but I didn’t listen to the end of the sentence that would have explained what else machetes signify, so I imagine they are just a way to give high school boys an incentive to dance in public.

It was a wake-up call that I was no longer in a country that overly concerns itself with children’s self-esteem, however, when all the rest of the afternoon the ambassadors complained that the dances went too long.

Thursday was my visit from my friend Ella and a big group of people from her site. This was fun for me. I’m never a bigger fan of my site than when other people visit. We had a big meeting to present the trash project to them. The people I work with drove me insane with their overuse of the “we,” as in “when we started this project two years ago,” as none of the people who were at the meeting were anywhere near the project two years ago. It was entirely in the hands of my Volunteer predecessor and his friend who was let go when the Municipality took over the project just FOUR MONTHS AGO. Ugh, I get so mad at the politics here. I mean, squibble all you want around election time, but don’t take credit for a Volunteer’s work. Don’t say it was the “voluntad political” of the mayor that got the project started. It was the voluntad de Ryan. Such is government work, I suppose.

Friday I was invited to the godmother of volleyball for the female half of a class of high school juniors. Bring my godchildren count up to 9, thank you. “Godmother” is a nice way of saying “sponsor” or “person who buys us a volleyball,” but that was okay, since I figured out beforehand that this was expected of me. I did not figure out this from the girl who asked me to be the godmother, however, as her explanation of my responsibilities was, “Don’t worry about it, you can dress normal.” Oh, to be fifteen. The ceremony was a shitshow, complete with the running and lighting of an Olympic torch, a hanging of the Olympic flag in the plaza, and a parade up the hill to the rival high school and back. A lot of Volunteers think it is entirely strange that my town has two high schools that are located on the same street, quite close to one another, that still manage to be rivals. This mirrors my own high school experience remarkably, so I understand. The colors of the schools are even the same, green vs. maroon. Then we took pictures with the queens of each of the grades, as well as the girl that represented the entire school in a dress I would have worn to a Bat Mitzvah in 1997, obviously uncomfortable 3-inch heels, and a sash that read “Miss Deportes.”

So yeah, an action-packed week, not something I can usually expect. This week will probably be a lot more sitting around in the office, looking for something to do, after tomorrow, in which I am attempting homemade hummus at Ingeniera Luz’s house. This week I successfully made some sort of cheesy onion tomato lentil dish, so things are on the up and up for me in the legume family.