Cañete is hot.

So I'm back in Santo Domingo after what was in the end a pretty long sojourn to Lima and immediately south, a very hot place called Cañete.

Before I get to Cañete, I really want to make public the suffering involved in me getting back to Santo Domingo. Following the 17 hours of buses involved just to getting to Piura city, I got on the ancient bus with the creepy oversexed mermaid painted on the side and about 2 inches too little legroom for me (I'm only 5'6). The trip normally takes 4 hours, maybe up to 5 in the rainy season (December-April, so, now), but my boss had told me in Lima that when he visited a couple weeks ago the highway was unusually bad, and that if I thought it was bad enough, I should tell our safety and security director. When I asked what on earth Enrique (despite his years in the Peruvian army, admissions of eating bushmeat when the necessity arose, and general badassness) would do about the perennially frightening unpaved mountain passes, he told me, completely deadpan, that in case of an emergency, if a car couldn't get through, Peace Corps would need to tell the Armed Forces in advance that Rachel and I would need a helicopter to get out. I started laughing, as I usually do anytime the Peace Corps and the Armed Forces are mentioned in the same sentence (the only other times this happens is with fee waivers, including grad school application and cell phone cancellation), but his continued deadpan made me stop.

So after the 5 hours (including 5 times the bus stopped in the mud and asked at least the men to get out to lessen the weight, how very Oregon Trail) it took just to get to the town at the fork in the road 20 minutes from Santo Domingo, I thought the journey was almost over. I'd forgotten that the Ministry of Transportation had started a project to "improve" this leg of the "highway," which remained unfinished at the beginning of the rainy season with dirt piles all along the side of the road; I'll let you imagine what three months of constant rain had done to those piles. So the road is looking particularly bad, but I was busy gazing out the window at the mountains that are quite pretty this time of year. My friend Aaron described the region as "green as an emerald," which is true, but it's also as green as Christmas trees, limes, moss, and Ed Begley Jr., depending where you look. Suddenly, everyone (including women and children this time) is getting off the bus, shouting only somewhat disgruntedly "No hay pasa!" Apparently, we all had to walk the rest of the way to the city, which would be about 20 minutes of walking on a good road day, which this was not. This was okay for most people, as they did not have a hiking backpack, a computer bag, an over-the-shoulder purse, and a large bag of groceries to transport. When I was dejectedly receiving these parcels from the back of the bus, a man looked at me dubiously and asked, "Sí avanza?" ("You'll make it?") to which I frankly responded, "Claro que no," ("Of course not") and continued on. I don't know how I made it even as far as I did, especially with my knees in pain from being forced into the seat in front of me for 5 hours and my back in pain from a spill I'd taken with my hiking backpack on that morning. I'd like to think it was one of those mothers-lifting-cars adrenaline rushes, but it was probably more of a serenely hopeless march to the certain death. I've never been plunged into such a deep pit of self-loathing than, when lamenting the weight on my back, I remembered the singular Corona in a glass bottle wrapped in a towel, near the top of the bag, following an especially self-indulgent trip to the Piura grocery store. After about five minutes of walking, in which two campesinas had graciously taken two of my bags and everything seemed like it might be okay, I saw the reason there was no "pasa:" a foot-wide trench where there simply was no road, just sandy mud eroding away along a newly formed minuscule river. In retrospect, I probably should have thrown all my stuff over and taken a wild leap across, but for some reason, I thought I could just sort of ease my way across, step by step. Naturally, the sandy mud gave out underneath me and I was soon very much a part of the trench. The same two campesinas pulled me out, shouting, "No tenga miedo! No tenga miedo!" ("Don't be afraid!") I then sat tearfully by the side of the road until someone's brother came in the car to rescue us. They didn't even charge me for the ride back to site, which I thought was very classy.

Things weren't really improved when I got back to my house to discover mildew and a very clever rat had taken over in my absence, but I'm getting by. There is enough rat poison in random points around my apartment in various delectable forms that it can only be a matter of time.

But anyway, Lima slash Cañete. I spent a couple days in Lima, hanging out with Andrew, his dad, his dad's girlfriend, and separately, my friend from college Katie who was coincidentally in Lima in a great South American journey beginning in Santiago, Chile. Both visits were delightful. We were sent down south originally to help the NGO CARE with their post-earthquake rural sanitation projects. Mostly, they were installing latrines in places thought to be affected by the earthquake, but that had received less relief attention than well-publicized places like Pisco. The site I was in, Cerro Candela, in the province of Cañete (which is actually the southernmost province in Lima, not in Ica as I originally thought), did not seem to be particularly damaged by the earthquake, but the fact of the matter was most houses were made of straw to begin with, and even if their extreme poverty wasn't brought about swiftly on August 15th, 2007, they were still in need of aid. The residents of Cerro Candela, generally, are either themselves or the sons and daughters of refugees of terrorism from the central sierra in the '80s. My CARE work partner was a woman named Gladis also from the central sierra. She had a curious disdain for the people she was working with, considering them not "paisanos" when I asked her. I eventually understood her frustration; after a week of following her around listening to people tell her "no seas mala" and "regalame una letrina" ("Don't be mean, give me a latrine." I didn't notice until just now that that rhymes in English), I could see why she had trouble with the people of Cerro Candela.

That was the problem with me working there, though. I was just following her around. I had a certain respect for Gladis; she was smart, on top of things, had (despite her personal issues) a way with people and the cultural freedom to call whiny women "mamita" while putting them in their place. Most of all, she had a deadline, and had apparently done a cost-benefit analysis of delegating some of the work to me versus doing it all herself, and come out solidly for the latter. When I realized I was never going to actually take part in her work, I took some other Volunteers' advice and started doing SODIS charlas to the inevitable crowd of people around Gladis. SODIS is a form of water sanitation (sodis.ch) involving nothing more than a 2-liter bottle, relatively un-murky water, and the sun (of which there is plenty is Cañete; as I have pointed out, it is very, very hot there). SODIS seemed to take off, but I was still kind of unsatisfied, as there are really so many times in a day you can give the exact same charla, and 2-liter bottles are not convenient for all-day carrying. Plus, it was really, really hot.

The solution to my feelings of uselessness came in the form of my boyfriend Andrew, who was working a couple towns over, in a town called La Florida, on a mural detailing the steps of latrine maintenance. The steps are as follows: add donkey or horse poop to the latrine before using it and every week thereafter (how poop + poop = something that doesn't smell is seriously beyond my scientific capacities. Kudos, science), add the used paper to the latrine itself (not as obvious as it seems to American sensibilities), clean the toilet with a damp rag (and NOT water), and keep the lid down when the latrine is not in use. After some drama, including a completely failed attempt to put plaster on an adobe wall, Andrew had found the perfect wall and was at least a little bit in need of an extra pair of hands to help. The wall was perfect except for the fact that it was east-facing, which made me cranky in the mornings, as it was very, very hot, but it was a sheer joy in the afternoon shade. We did it in two days; the first day, we painted the wall white together, and then I went home and took a nap while Andrew did all the preliminary drawing (as my mom says, "Sometimes, us non-artistic people need to know when to go home and take a nap"), and then rejoined him in the afternoon for the first round of painting. The second day, we finished everything up, including the technicolor backgrounds, the Peace Corps and CARE logos (using my and Andrew's actual handprints), and a coat of clear protector/Elmer's glue stuff. Andrew and I are pretty sure we spent the majority, if not all, of our S/.15 per diem on cold beverages at the closest store. It was really, really hot.

The trip down south was punctuated by the visit of Jody Olsen, the deputy director of the Peace Corps (like, the whole thing) from Washington, D.C. She was just delightful and encouraging and full of wonder at every little thing about the project. I mean, The Peace Corps Experience is not exactly hurting for pats on the back, but I thoroughly enjoyed her visit.

The two weeks were not without their touristy fun. One day we went down to Pisco, which was when it really hit me that Peru did live through a national tragedy six months ago. One out of every four or so lots are vacant, the standing buildings have a lot of damage still, and on the coastal stretch of highway down to Paracas, there is a line of piles of debris miles long. I didn't really take any pictures of Pisco, not that I would have found it tasteless if someone else had, but it's not my style. We were there to visit the very touristy Islas Ballestas, or as they are commonly called, "The Poor Man's Galapagos," where we were treated to island upon island of sea lions (and penguins, and pelicans, and some bird called the "boobie," the mention of which Melissa and I never failed to giggle uncontrollably at). It's absurd the way sea lions (in absence of a natural predator, I suppose) just live on top of each other, seemingly unable to do anything but create cacophony. We spent another day in the wine-growing region of Lunahuana, where the Peace Corps doctor was treated to a Monday 11:30 a.m. phone call from me asking if I could safely drink on the medication I was on. One of my finest moments. We found some delicious fruity white wine and nothing catastrophic befell me.

And that's about it. I've been weirdly avoiding the municipality office since I got back, and it's time to face that fear, if not that one of clever rats that causes me to sleep in a clothespinned-shut mosquito net under the influence of one of several sleep-inducing drugs. Here's to the toxins in rat poisoning not being airborne.