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.