Volunteer, Interrupted

These couple weeks really have been an interruption from everything my life normally consists of, in both bad and good ways. First of all, the cement floor is finally being laid in my room, after only a month of the dudes who are working on it fussing over where to get the cheapest gravel. I really wanted them to start on it a week ago, when I was out of town for a week, so that I could come back and voila, have a cement floor, but things rarely work out that well. So, alas, I am living on top of my sitemate Rachel this week. After failed attempts to find somewhere else to stay, my current living situation is a foam mattress on Rachel’s (already cement) floor. I am eternally grateful to her for this. I tried to show my gratitude to her by bringing her gifts of strawberries, corn flakes, and the Holy Grail of Americans living abroad, Velveeta Mac & Cheese (courtesy of Andrew’s aunt’s care package), but she then shared her peanut butter M&Ms with me, thereby balancing the scales. So, normally sweet living situation, interrupted.

A cement floor will be totally worth it, though. Think about how inconvenient everything would be in your life if your floor were made of dirt. No 5-second rule with dropping food on the floor. No stocking feet. The second an article of clothing falls of the floor, it’s as filthy as it would be if you’d dragged it behind a car for a day. Note that I said “inconvenient,” not “miserable” or “impossible,” but I really am excited for that small life improvement, for which I paid up-front six months of rent.

A word on rent, following an epiphany I had this weekend. My rent here is 60 soles a month (about $20), which is pretty standard for a room of that size in the sierra without a cement floor, private bathroom, or indoor plumbing. I was visiting my friend Teryn’s apartment in Piura city, and found out her rent was about $110 a month. Well, it makes sense that her rent would be five times mine, after all, it’s in a nice part of the city, has multiple rooms, an indoor bathroom, etc. I then thought about the fact that my rent in Ann Arbor last year, for half of a two-bedroom apartment, was $550 a month, exactly five times what Teryn pays. That also makes sense, especially given A2’s totally absurd student housing market. But put it all together, and that means my rent last year was twenty-five times higher than my rent now. In three short months, between September and December of last year, my rent dropped 96%.

Other interruptions: the Peace Corps-run Project Design Management workshop. This was a requirement to receive outside funding on any project I undertake in my service, so I went with Roger, an environmental health technician from the health center. I hadn’t worked with him much in the past, but he seemed like a cool guy who could benefit from the workshop. I don’t want to get into it, but he and I did not work together particularly well during the workshop, especially after I got some sort of standard vomiting-and-diarrhea stomach illness (starting to not get surprised at that? Me too), which almost instantly drains me of any cross-cultural patience. I do think he got a lot out of the experience, though.

Immediately following PDM was Camp ALMA (Leadership Activities for Adolescent Women, also an acronym for “soul”), run by all the Volunteers in Piura. Rachel and I sent four girls from Santo Domingo between the ages and 13 and 15. This was a much more positive experience, but I was still tired from PDM and sickness. The fact of the matter is I am no longer used to having to do one thing for 8+ hours a day. That’s just not the way Peace Corps life rolls; there might be work to get done, but it can generally get done in four or fewer hours per day. I’ll have to get re-used that sometime in the next 15 months, though, as I hear there are these things called “jobs” that real people have in which staying in one place for 8 hours is quite encouraged. ALMA really was cool, though. My favorite part was the panel of “successful women” who talked about their life experiences, their relationships with their parents and husbands, etc. The girls got into it and asked a lot of questions. In some ways, it wasn’t so different from being a camp counselor for teenage girls in Michigan four years ago. One girl from my site, in playing the icebreaker “Two Truths and a Lie,” said as her statements:
- I am Peruvian.
- I am from the sierra.
- I am happy.
Clearly, the girls assumed she was not from the sierra. No, no, that was not the case, Santo Domingo is quite Andean. Was she somehow Chilean? Ecuadorian? No, no, Peruvian born and raised. Hm. When prodded by a bewildered Volunteer group leader, she said her dad was leaving, among other things. I will try to make a point to talk to this girl whenever I see her from now on. Another one of our girls was a mildly pathological liar. Unless, of course, she really does have a liver condition which inhibits her from drinking water for which she is soon going to New York for an operation. It was interesting to see the girls first in their hometown and then be their camp counselor. It was a perspective you don’t normally get. I got to see how different girls responded to the “small fish big pond” turnaround once they got to the camp. In the end, though, in reading the evaluations, I got to see how much the girls had enjoyed it. One girl wrote under the question “What was your least favorite part of ALMA,” “just that it had to end.”

One great thing about both PDM and ALMA was getting to spend time with Volunteers I don’t normally get to see, including my own boyfriend (at PDM, anyway). Volunteer friendships often get sort of poo-pooed by Peace Corps, under the premise that they are a distraction from building relationships with Peruvians, an excuse to speak English and spend more time in the capital city, etc. I maintain that friendships with other Volunteers are one of the few things that keep me sane and healthy (along with corn flakes with bananas for breakfast), and I know a lot of Volunteers feel this way. It’s rare in your life to have friends that are so in tune with exactly what you are going through in almost every aspect of your life. Or to have friends who will let you live on top of them during construction at your house and respond to your demands of Scrabble games, snacks, or television on DVD. Still grateful, Rachel.

Peru is loud.

I often worry that this blog is just an outlet for me whining about things that frustrate me in Peru, and I think I should make an effort to inject more positivity (is “positivity” really not a word? Spell check has opened my eyes yet again) so that you, the reader, gets a well-rounded impression of what it’s like to be Alyssa in Peru. I can’t guarantee where my mood this particular morning will take this entry, though, so I will at least start with a list of culturally and economically neutral things I enjoy.

Baby goats

Interesting rock formations

Dessert

A reasonable amount of sneezing

Bodies of water

Naps after breakfast

Old people

There. Let it never be said I overindulge my rage ALL the time.

But you know what I really don’t like, as it turns out? Barnyard animals. As American children, we’re taught to have a certain reverence for barnyard animals. After all, they make very mimicable noises, and their names use letters of the alphabet, which are very useful to learn. And since most of America lives in the suburbs, children never have to face certain truths about barnyard animals, such as:

Pigs are terrifying.

The only thing more terrifying than a pig is a cow.

Roosters have no redeeming qualities.

I’m just speaking the truth.

I have a particular wrath for roosters. David Sedaris says one of his favorite ways to break the ice when in a new country is to ask people, “What sound do roosters make in this country?” It’s a great question, because everyone knows the answer, and few have considered the fact that their answer is not the universally correct one. According to Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, in Germany, the answer is “Kik-a-riki,” in Greece, “Kiri-a-kee,” and in France, “Coco-rico.” The U.S. is virtually the only country where the answer is “Cock-a-doodle-doo” or anything like it. I think the answer in Peru is “Ki-kiri-ki-ki.” Or, at least it is for most people. I have come to believe that roosters communicate specifically to me in “I-am GOING-to GET-YOUUUUU”s.

I’ve been living with anywhere between five and ten roosters in my backyard for the past seven months, and I can report having only one mildly pleasant encounter with one. The rooster, like most roosters in rural Peru, was tied with rope by one ankle to a fixed object, in this case, the leg of a wooden bench. It, like most roosters in rural Peru, was displeased with this arrangement. It had apparently been jumping up and down, trying to free itself, when it flew a little too close to the sun, got the rope slung all the way around the arm of the bench, and when I found it, had been helplessly hanging upside-down by one leg for undetermined length of time. The predicament was day-improving for one of us. In case I’m not telling it right, here is an illustration.

I, of course, laughed, told the rooster, “Let it never be said I’ve done nothing for your species,” and grounded him. He then made some threats, told me was going to get me, whatev, I’ve heard that before. I’ve heard that every day starting at 3:30 a.m. for the past seven months, to be exact.

Today’s main rooster-related interaction was much less pleasant. Some kid came to the house after Flor and Humberto had left for the morning at around 8, tied a rooster to the table in the living room (next door to my room), and left. Um, what? One of the very basic, non-negotiable truths of the world is that roosters have no place in enclosed spaces which humans also inhabit. Ever. For any length of time. All joking aside, the noise is absolutely intolerable. Torn from my pleasant morning of lying in bed, reading some Gaiman, and treating these wicked sniffles I seem to have come down with, I searched the house for an explanation. There was none, or at least no one there to provide me with one. Just as I left a scathing post-it on their door and congratulated myself on my conjugation of “MUÉVANLO,” the kid came back. I asked him if it was his rooster, he said yes. I told him to move it, he said he only needed to have it there for “un ratito.” Man, I hate that phrase 98% of the time. I told him it was “volviéndome loca,” reiterated that it was my house, and offered him the entire world, with the exception of the room adjacent to mine, in which to put his rooster. He looked confused and left to tie the rooster to the leg of the bench in the backyard. (Sucker.)

This was sort of strike three with obnoxious things happening in my house as of the past few days. Yesterday morning at 5:40, someone knocked on my door, finding it a perfectly reasonable hour to ask me where Humberto’s brother was. Last night at 11 o’clock (if that doesn’t sound late, consider the fact that every morning between 6 and 6:30, a loudspeaker comes on to inform the town who is selling yucca, having a meeting, or getting a phone call), Flor knocked on my door to ask me to let her in, and then expected me to search for her keys in the living room. I am very fussy about my sleep, especially when I am not at 100% health-wise. I fell apart some this morning, amidst the sound of firecrackers of unexplained origin and very loud huayno music. I went to Rachel’s house under the premise of needing to borrow some Sudafed, and then found myself crying uncontrollably to her host mom over organic coffee and homemade cheese. That’s another one of the absolute truisms in my world: roosters shouldn’t be indoors, cows are terrifying, and sometimes you just need a Mom. And if your Mom is a continent away, I’m sure there are lots of Moms where you live, too. In the case of Teo, she is the entire town’s Mom, and yet, when she moms you, you feel totally, individually, taken care of. It’s amazing. Teo gave me a hug, offered me a room at the house for whenever I needed, and fried me a tortilla, even though she was saving them for her son, who recently moved away for college and can’t find good tortillas in the city.

I have this basic aversion to being in a bad mood, like an immediate guilt that I’m sucking the universe’s energy or something. As soon as I finished crying, I helped a little boy with a sick Mom carry the breakfast Teo made his family back to his house, told Teo her tortillas are the best thing in the world (which is true), and, back at my own house, offered to take a message for Humberto from a woman who was looking to buy…a rooster. Written out, those really look like things I should do all the time, not just when I’m in a self-redeeming tizzy, but you know how these things go. Sometimes that’s just not how the rooster’s hanging.

Dear Gretchen, Sorry I laughed at you that time you got diarrhea at Barnes & Noble.

Hey, know what’s annoying? Democracy.

To qualify that statement, I need to provide a short description of the project I am currently, and probably for the rest of my service, undertaking. Pay attention. The Consejo Nacional del Medio Ambiente (National Environmental Council, more or less the Peruvian equivalent of the EPA) has a program for certification Gestión Ambiental Local para el Desarrollo Sostenible (Local Environmental Management for Sustainable Development). The main idea is to join all the environmental projects that my town currently has (reforestation, latrines, solid waste management, environmental education, making the water not suck, etc.) so that they work together toward a common, long-term environmental management goal. It has various tools to do this, including diagnostics, policies, and agendas. One of the first steps, after presenting the basics of the project to whomsoever might be interested, is form a Municipal Environmental Committee.

So that’s the project.

Why I like this project:
A lot of environmental Volunteers feel generally unsatisfied in the limited scope of their projects. Their environmental youth group might be doing great and taking a lot of hikes, but people are still throwing trash in the river. The reforestation project might be going well, but everyone is still going to the bathroom in their fields. The idea with GALS is that, instead of the Volunteer investing time into only one environmental project, they help the municipality write a long-term management plan so that they themselves can undertake the individual projects. In my town, there’s always a new NGO showing up and offering their services, generally to do a project that they wrote the plan to themselves. But if the municipality could show them the environmental management plan that they’ve formed and the projects they have laid out for the future…then that would be awesome. GALS is only intended for municipalities that are already organized around some environmental themes. It doesn’t work if you’re still explaining the word “sustainable.”

The project is, in a lot of ways, a big leap of faith in the municipality. Sure, they’ve shown themselves to be capable of managing certain individual environmental projects. The trash project is a resounding example, as it has shown to need my help less and less over the past 5 months since the municipality took it over. But there’s no way to guarantee that, for all the planning and policy-making we do in the next 16 months of my service, the management plan won’t just be a nice binder and a certificate from the government with no actual projects in the field.

Why you, the blog reader, might not like this project:
Um, it’s boring. It’s a lot of meetings and documents that hopefully add up to some sort of long-term change of the process of environmental management, but it’s not, you know, teaching children to read or curing AIDS or some other equally tantalizing Peace Corps project. It’s very nearly an “office job.” But I find it interesting and important work, so there.

So democracy and why it’s annoying. The purpose of today’s meeting, as well as a previous meeting which not enough people attended, was to form the Municipal Environmental Commission. Their purpose is generally to oversee the GALS process. The meeting basically went like this:

Alyssa (demonstrating useful powerpoint presentation): “Here are the 7 exact purposes of the Commission.”
(20 minutes later)
Man, previously on my shit list for head-nuzzling my chest during a community dance: “I’m sorry. The information you’re not giving me is what exactly the Commission does. For the love of God, we’re just going to have another Commission that does nothing if you don’t tell us what this one does.”
My counterpart rereads, though from a different sheet, word for word, the 7 exact purposes I presented in the powerpoint.
Nuzzler looks satisfied.

A lot of people: “Don’t we already have one of these commissions under the Department of Health and Sanitation?”
Alyssa: “Well, there are municipal commissions that do environmental work, but the idea with this one that we’re forming today is that it has representatives from all sectors, including teachers, representatives from the Ministry of Agriculture and ALL departments of the municipality, as well as representatives of civil society, so that everyone who does environmental work works together.”
A lot of people: So…let’s just go with Department of Health and Sanitation Commission. This municipality really forms too many commissions. Let’s just have the one.
Other people: We’re not going to form the commission? Then why am I here? I can’t believe you said we’re not going to form a commission, Alyssa!

Somebody 1: What about Somebody 2? They should get to be on the commission.
Alyssa: Well, they didn’t come to this meeting, nor the last one, despite being invited. We can’t really expect them to come to future commission meetings if they can’t come to the introductory ones.
Somebody 3: What about Somebody 4? They should get to be on the commission.

Even as I’m writing this, I’m realizing how benign this all sounds. Annoying, certainly, but not diabolically evil. The meeting was stressful, but sort of productive. Volunteers say this all the time, but it’s really true, I wish I could just run everything myself. I know who “gets it” and who will actually do work into the future on this project and it can’t help but annoy me that, for the sake of transparency and not maybe insulting people, we have to let all these other people on my commission, people who won’t even show up to the meetings. I have to remember, though, that these issues aren’t endemic to my town or Peru or the developing world generally. I remember writing in my blog a strongly worded account of attending an Ann Arbor Planning Commission meeting two summers ago, and then seeing the link on annarborisoverrated.com. I am apparently just not a very peaceable meeting-goer.

STUFF NOT RELATED TO GALS CERTIFICATION BEGINS HERE.

So I just enjoyed a patriotic squash and red pepper stir fry over pasta. It’s patriotic because I ate it on the Fourth of July, which is unsurprisingly a day that came and went without much notice in Peru, and because it defies stereotypes about Americans that run rampant in Peru. By far, the most bewilderingly consistent and incorrect thing I hear about America here is, “So, you eat all canned food in the U.S., right?”

And it’s not just here, not just me. I’ve discussed with Volunteers all over Peru, and everyone says people in their community inform/ask them this all the time. And I really no have idea how the hell this idea got out. It’s mind-boggling. My friend Tessa’s theory is that people here think it is currently The Future in the U.S., and therefore we eat all processed, canned, nutrition nuggets, only one step away from evolving past eating at all. My less entertaining theory is canned soup is to blame, that since homemade soup is a pretty big part of the diet here, people hear that we eat canned soup, and think, “What? They eat canned soup in the U.S.? Canned SOUP? Why, you might as well can EVERYTHING if you can SOUP!”

The thing that is so confusing about it is how consistent the rumor is. There are so many unflattering things you could say about the typical American diet.
“So, you eat a lot of processed foods in the U.S., right?”
“So, you’ve got a big obesity problem in the U.S., right?” (if anything, I hear the opposite about the typical American body, thanks to television and movies. It’s usually “So, everyone in the U.S. is pretty and skinny and white like you, right?”)
“So, food is pretty expensive in the U.S., right?”
But NO. It is ALWAYS “pura comida enlatada.” Pure canned food. Please feel free to share your alternative theories regarding the origin of this rumor.

So, happy Fourth of July. Rachel and I did little to celebrate today, except watch some Arrested Development, which is, by my standards, America At Its Finest. We were going to make apple pie but then Rachel got diarrhea, which is sort of symbolic about the Peace Corps life, if you think about it. Or if you’d rather not think about it, that’s cool too. Hopefully she does not repeat my 7-pound weight loss within the span of a week, last week, in fact. Bacteria living in your intestines are a hoot. Pancakes tomorrow? I think so.