StuffWhitePeopleLike Count: 7.

It’s 9 a.m., I’m sitting in my hammock, and hell has frozen over.

As an American in Peru, I was actually late to something.

Here is some background on Peruvian culture to explain why this is certainly a sign of the apocalypse: in Peru, nothing starts on time. I don’t feel bad making this broad cultural generalization, because it is just inexorably true, and all attributable to what Peruvians refer to as “hora peruana” (Peruvian time). But to merely say that nothing starts on time doesn’t really hit upon the utter detachment between what a clock might say (least inventive $100,000 Pyramid category ever) and a day’s events that pervades this country. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a variation of this conversation: Peruvian: “Is it two o’clock already?” Alyssa: “It’s actually four-thirty.” This complete ignorance of clock-time gets more pronounced the further you get away from urban centers. I have waited for meetings in the campo to start for upwards of three hours before. Hora peruana is, as you can imagine, consistently one of the biggest challenges for Americans in Peru. Even if we’re not always on time to things in the U.S., there is the recognition that this is a good thing to be. When we walk into meetings late (and, really, how late are we talking, 15, 20 minutes?), we do not reveal the full height of our bodies and hope for shoes that don’t squeak and a seat in the back. Not so here in Peru. It is considered rude to walk into a meeting at any point in its duration and not say in your normal speaking voice, “Good (insert time of day)” to either the audience at large or (again, especially true in the campo) every attendee individually, including the speaker his/herself, with a handshake. It is really a totally different conception of time and our obligation to it than we have in the U.S. It seems hora peruana is something Peru is starting to recognize as a detriment to its role in the international arena, and at the beginning of President Alan García’s term, his administration threw a parade in Lima to celebrate the kickoff of their “Punctual Peru” campaign. The parade started at exactly 12 noon. Granted, the parade, if not the campaign in general, was widely interpreted to be a jab toward García’s predecessor, Alejandro Toledo, who was a notorious aficionado of hora peruana, but whatever.

So, as always, back to me. Today rounds off my 20th month in Peru, and hora peruana and I were on pretty good terms. And this was a big step for me, because I LOVE time. The only time I take my watch off is to bathe. I check my watch unconsciously and generally without regard to social appropriateness. I set alarm clocks mostly out of formality, because I can wake myself up at whatever hour, usually with creepy exaction. This isn’t to say I’m never late to things, but it’s usually a calculated, minimal lateness, almost never owing to me losing track of time. But I’d gotten into the mentality of the hora peruana. Mostly, you just have to emotionally detach yourself from any expectations you have for an event and relish in the alternatives, i.e. “My friend Miguel was supposed to meet me at my house to take me to the campo at 8, and it’s 10:30, oh well, isn’t this issue of Newsweek I’ve been reading for 3 hours fascinating and not at all sensationalist?”

This morning, I had assigned myself the task of walking around with the trash workers with a map of Santo Domingo and marking which houses don’t participate in the trash collection, with the eventual hopes of doing some sort of survey and finding out why. Though this was going to be tedious, I was excited about it, because the idea of families not taking out their trash and imagining what they do with it instead keeps me up at night (no, seriously). Daniel, the head of the trash workers (who had originally written the report to the municipality reporting that a fair number of people don’t participate, simultaneously confirming my darkest suspicions and impressing me with the rare treat of correct spelling and grammar), told me that they start at 8 a.m. near the recycling storage center. So, at 8:05, 8:10 maybe, I was waiting by the storage center, Newsweek in hand. After 45 minutes of finding out that Barack Obama probably IS too international to get elected and that Somalia practically IS Iraq, I slowly realized there was probably no way the workers waited until 9 to even show up to work. So I headed up the hill to where they would have been collecting, where I found Daniel and the other workers, nearly halfway through their route. I said good morning and told him I had been waiting for him at 8 o’clock. “Oh yeah,” he responded didactically, “We’re on hora exacta here.” My mind was summarily blown. I couldn’t tell whether I was more insulted at the insinuation that I had kept hora peruana inappropriately or gleeful that something so important had started on time. I didn’t know whether to apologize or congratulate. I think I sort of did both, and then went home. Luckily, the trash route for tomorrow begins at my house, so that’s kind of hard to miss, and I can catch the first half of today’s route on Monday.

As an homage to time and to any future Peru 11/12 Volunteers that may have sought out internet guidance as to what they’re about to get themselves into AND to my friend Loren who just got her invitation to serve in the Philippines, the rest of this entry will deal with the oft-posed question, “What is a Volunteer’s daily life like?” I remember this exact curiosity from training, feeling like Peace Corps trainers were always bringing up extreme circumstances, like having to move out of your host family’s house, or over-arching activities, like a latrine project, or Peace Corps theory, like always emphasizing sustainability, but not seeing how this could add up to a day’s work. So yesterday was a pretty “typical” day. Okay, yesterday was a pretty good day, but no harm in making myself look good in my own blog. If you want to see a typical “bad” day, just take out any segments where I’m doing something productive and replace it with “Television on DVD/books/Scrabble.” So this was my yesterday, in painstaking detail:

6 a.m.: I wake up, somewhat unnecessarily, since I have no obligation to get to work before 11. I lie in bed, ice my hurting knee, and read “The Count of Monte Cristo” until I fall back asleep.
7:30 a.m.: I wake up for real, get out of bed, eat some bread and peanut butter (which is accessible but expensive at the grocery stores here), put my workout clothes on, brush my teeth, etc.
8:20 a.m.: I work out to a dubbed-into-Spanish Billy Blanks Tae-Bo DVD, obtained at the pirated-stuff market in Lima. My knee has been hurting, so I go for the basic workout instead of the advanced.
9:00 a.m.: I realize I am out of coffee and go up to store to buy some of the amazing pseudo-organic locally grown (on my friend Juan’s farm) coffee.
9:30 a.m.: I make myself breakfast (raisin bran in rehydrated milk), eat it, and then separately, afterwards, drink my coffee (French-pressed). I love coffee but dislike drinking it while I’m eating, so the fact that I have pretty much unlimited time for breakfast is ideal. While I’m eating, I watch some second season Arrested Development (obtained from the same market in Lima) on my laptop. I laugh really, really hard at Ron Howard’s delivery of, “In fact, Lindsay had the engagement ring on her middle toe. Roast beef.”
10:30 a.m.: I decide that the basic workout doesn’t make me sweaty enough to face the frigidly cold shower in the corral, nor do I have time to heat up my own hot water, so I accept the fact that I am repulsive, change into acceptable work clothes (corduroy pants, a t-shirt with a picture of a poodle saying “Oui! Oui!” turned a full 180 degrees, courtesy of the store in Lima where factory rejects go to die, and a hoodie).
11 a.m.: I head one block uphill to the Municipality office, where I hang out with my counterpart Jorge and discuss work stuff: the status of the public trash can installation, the environmental commission meeting we’re having next week and whether or not he can write the invitations, the fact that International Environment Day is June 5th and we should coordinate something for it with the schools, my plan to accompany the trash workers, etc. I also perform my weekly task of skimming the documents on the tops of piles to see if there’s anything interesting to me. I sneak onto Jorge’s computer and check my email until he needs his computer back. I then leave to go visit the schools and see when their teacher meetings are so we can plan environmental activities for this school year.
12 p.m.: I visit the primary school, and while I have a nice visit, they don’t have regular enough teacher meetings to tell me when it is, but they promise to tell me the next time they do. I visit one of the high schools, the San Juan, where they tell me that their meeting is today at 3:30 and I have little option but to go to it if I want to reach the teachers.
12:30 p.m. I go back to the municipality office to tell Jorge about the San Juan meeting, but he can’t go, so I make the big sheet with my points about environmental education planning for the meeting and hunt down an environmental education book that the municipality educational office has been holding hostage for some time now.
1:00 p.m.: Jorge goes to lunch, so I steal the internet again and start the Peace Corps biennial survey, which turns out to be quite the task, and I’m only about half done before it’s lunch time.
2:00 p.m.: Lunch! The Peruvian day revolves around lunch. I eat lunch at Rachel’s host mom’s house. She has a business of cooking for people who are too busy or unequipped to cook for themselves (health center staff, mostly). Lunch is pretty delicious, as it turns out: some sort of squash-corn stew-type thing, well-seasoned (it tastes cinnamon) chicken, white rice, raw cabbage salad in lemon juice, and papaya-banana juice. I haven’t really seen Rachel in over a week, so we sit talking about her trip to Lima for her Close of Service conference (among other things) until it’s time for the meeting at the San Juan.
3:30 p.m.: I go to the San Juan. The meeting actually starts around 3:45, impressively. I get to be the first presenter, so I talk about my goal to have 2-3 teacher-facilitated environmental activity days in each of the schools before the end of the school year. We toss around some ideas for International Environment Day. Mostly, the teachers want to deal with trash. I’m okay with it.
4:30 p.m.: I go vegetable shopping at various stores along the main commercial street, possibly my favorite activity in Santo Domingo.
5:15 p.m.: I get back to my house, carry my dishes back to the corral (the only place in the house where there’s running water) in a big tub, and wash dishes in the spigot water while listening to my iPod. I’ve forgotten to take off my tennis shoes before doing this and when I head back to my room my socks are really, really wet.
6 p.m.: I consider starting dinner, since Rachel’s coming over at 7, but play Scrabble by myself instead. It’s a good game, no impressive words or 7-letter bonuses, but good use of the board makes the final scores average to 335.
7 p.m.: Rachel comes over. I make guacamole and squash & red pepper fajitas (Mexican-style tortillas bought at the grocery store in Piura, everything else from my vegetable shopping trip).
8 p.m.: It’s pretty delicious, if I do say so myself. Rachel and I watch Friends on my laptop. We eat some Hershey Kisses Rachel got sent from home, which are a total treat.
9:15 p.m.: Rachel goes home, I find myself hungry again and eat a bowl of raisin bran. I keep watching Friends.
10:15 p.m.: I change into my pajamas, brush and floss, vacuum my bed (probably the most absurd part of my life, but you try getting hospitalized because of a bug bite you got in bed, see if it changes your outlook toward Being Hardcore)
10:45 p.m.: I go to bed.

And that’s it. I talk about the environment, I eat, I hang out with Rachel, and then I do it all over it again. And that’s what being a PCV is like if you’re me.

The answer was animals.

So it's the tranquilo life in Santo Domingo right now, partially because it's Day of the Worker (or, it was yesterday, and everyone's still hungover) and partially because my project is failing and I don't have that much to do as it is. Ohhh, burn. I really don't know what to do about the failing environmental certification project, except to regroup with my counterpart once he gets over his hangover and see how I might compromise continuing work with it and doing something that has a chance of being satisfying over the course of the next six months. I'm thinking promotion of compost sales in nearby caserios, maybe some gardening with the Association of Women, and of course, more trash education as soon as I get my 12 public trash cans in. The time is coming when I need to assess the progress I've made and whether or not I've built enough for a replacement Volunteer to work from. I'm currently feeling very detached from the whole deal and, if I had to make the decision right now, I would cut SD off of environmental Volunteers for good. But this is the Peace Corps, and things have the amazing ability to turn around faster than you can say "Volunteer malaise," so I guess I'll refrain from snap judgments.

The general "meh"-ness of things around here has been broken up by a couple amusing events as of late, mostly involving animals. I have been bored enough lately that I actually illustrated some of this in Paint:

This is my house. You may notice that it is two stories but has no staircase. This is a topic of perennial frustration to me.



Recently, a rat started coming into my room at night. This was upsetting for obvious reasons, not the least of which was that he didn't seem to be eating any of my food. Why wouldn't a rat be eating my food? It's delicious! Finally, after much frustration and untouched traps, I realized that the rat, like any reasonable being, was annoyed at the lack of staircase in my house, and was using my room toward those ends, like this:



So I'd come to the conclusion that there was no choice but to borrow my neighbor's cat. She's a good cat caretaker, so she informed me that her cat "does his necessities" in sand. Accordingly, I filled up a little bucket of sand and put it in my room. Her cat, however, ran away en route to my house, and I guess putting a cat somewhere he doesn't want to be isn't something you try twice, so that was that. I was so frustrated at this point that I was about to tie a knife to end of my broom and spear the rat myself at 3 a.m. As cool as I would be if I could make that plan work, I soon realized my smarts and not my latent spearing abilities were the only thing that was going to get me out of this. I thought hard and realized that there must be a hole in the storage room through which the rat was climbing, or else he wouldn't be running up the hammock strings and not (as far as I could tell) down them. And hey, I had that sand still. I knew at the time that cement, plaster, or even play-doh was more up for the task of filling a hole than sand, but I was desperate, and the sand was there. So I went nuts on every hole in the backroom floorboard (there are a lot of them). Eventually I found one that must have been it. This is what I thought I was doing, for some reason.



Yes, just pouring sand into some sort of inexplicable wall-hole. When the sand just kept pouring, however, I used some part of my brain that has remained unused since the SAT and thought about where that sand was actually going, and realized it was probably more like this.



Yes, just pouring sand into my roommates' room. I should note here that my roommates, Ada and Carlo, are new, they just moved in while I was in Cusco to study at the tech institute in Santo Domingo. They're brother and sister, from the campo, probably about 19 years old, and while Ada is nice to me and keeps me company while I wash dishes (the supreme form of female friendship here, I think), Carlo generally doesn't look me in the eye.

After I realize that I have just been pouring sand into my roommates' domicile, I sort of pack sand around the top of the hole as best I can and weigh it down with a brick. Get in now, rats, I dare you. Following this small, hopeful satisfaction, I head down (downstairs would obviously be a misnomer, I followed the dirt trail along the side of the house) to the corral and the entrance to their room. The interaction goes something like this:
Me: Hi Carlo, good afternoon.
Carlo (not meeting my eye): Good afternoon.
Me: Say, did I just pour some sand in your room? Like up in that corner? I had this rat and I was filling and hole and I...(trailing off due to apparent nonrecognition)
(long pause)
Carlo (meeting my eye for the first time ever): Yeah, some sand fell. But just a little, miss, don't worry.
Me: Yeah, I really want to apologize for that.
Carlo: Just a little sand, miss. Don't worry.

In other animal news: So when campo people come to the house, they generally tie up their donkeys right outside my door. I mean, right outside, like if I leave my door open, a donkey nose will generally occupy that space. I don't mind, I've got a soft spot for donkeys. They are nice and gentle and funny-looking when they eat and they don't make a lot of noise (except, of course, when they do). My sitemate Rachel was over one day last week, and when she opened the door to my room to leave, she abruptly said, "Alyssa, come here, you've got to see this."

What she saw, of course, was a donkey eating a cardboard box.

I mean, eating the crap out of it, not just munching: hungrily tearing off pieces of this cardboard box, quickly chewing, and contentedly swallowing.

The funniest part of this whole occurrence, however, was what followed, when we saw my host brother Cesar sitting on a stoop across the street, clearly overseeing the donkey's consumption of the cardboard box.

Rachel: Why is that donkey eating a cardboard box?
Cesar (without missing a beat, or any traces of sarcasm): Because he's hungry.
Rachel: Of course.

Can't argue with logic like that. You can, however, start your own line of "why did the chicken cross the road"-type jokes.

And the last animal-related hilarity can be told in a sentence, without dramatic paragraph breaks or Microsoft Paint: a flock of chicks visited my room yesterday. I had my iPod on and my back turned, and when I turned to walk out, there were 8 chicks and a mama hen, just cheep cheep cheeping all over my floor. Cutest surprise ever. Brett points out that with the time a cat fell through my roof, the rats using my room like a staircase, hungry dogs coming in whenever they want, and the occasional flock of chicks, I am well on my way to a Chinese calendar. If you need me for the next six months, I'll be warding off the dragons and oxen.