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.