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.