Alyssa's Peace Corps Megadventure

Shut it down.

2009-05-24T16:48:00.000-07:00

It’s been nearly six months since I landed back in the U.S. with 80 pounds of my nearest and dearest worn-out clothing and cultural memorabilia, and I’ve been feeling like writing, despite my lack of appropriate medium. So this is my turning out the lights at Cheers, my “Yeah, Buffy, what are we going to do now?” slow grin, my sudden cut to black in the middle of “Don’t Stop Believin’” moment. Indulge me. Or not.

I guess that brings me to my first point about not being in the Peace Corps anymore. Not being in the Peace Corps anymore takes away your obvious interestingness, and interestingness is the main reason to keep a blog. That’s more of a personal requirement (clearly, people find a way around it), but the thing you don’t necessarily realize when you’re doing it is that being in the Peace Corps is interesting. All the time. Just going about your daily life is interesting. ESPECIALLY going about your daily life is interesting. You’re keenly aware that you’re interesting to your host country nationals; countless stories of children staring in Volunteer’s windows have proven that. But I took it for granted that whenever I felt like updating my blog, if a month or a few weeks or even a single week had gone by, I would have amassed enough interesting (to my family and friends, to people who read PC blogs habitually, to America at large) life experience to blog about it. That’s not really the case in post-Peace Corps American living. I may find my water cooler interactions totally fascinating, but you probably don’t, and I’m comfortable with that. But it’s an adjustment.

Before I get into the litany of other post-Peace Corps adjustments and whining about reverse culture shock (I’m not even sure if that’s where this is going, but it feels inevitable), a word on this blog. This blog was unwittingly kind of a big deal. I feel creepy and self-aggrandizing even saying that, but it was true in several ways, not all of which are completely self-serving. First, I got occasional messages from people, some I knew, some I didn’t, telling me that this blog had impacted their decision to join the Peace Corps. Since these were all from people who joined the Peace Corps, I can only assume they meant in a good way. This is huge to me, because I never set out to write touchy-feely vignettes about how beautiful living in another culture is and oh how these people go about their lives so happy despite having so little and I feel that just by being here I’m really doing good in the world, which one would assume would be the obvious kind of essays that would serve that purpose. It makes me profoundly happy that some people saw meaning that I didn’t in my musings on peeing in buckets and eating cheese and getting bitten by fleas.

Second, this blog got me my dream job. I am not kidding. The back story: two months ago I got a job in Annapolis, Maryland in land conservation. This job continually blows my mind with its awesomeness. When I got the job, the first thing my now-boss told me was, “Alyssa, I have to be honest with you about how we picked you.” This could have gone a lot of unsatisfying ways, but what he told me was that, during the applicant screening process, he couldn’t sleep one night, and thought, “I just want to know more about who these people are!” Some Googling transpired, and I have a weird name and some online traffic, so this blog came up, and, quote, “…It was hilarious!” He then breathlessly recounted this entry http://alyssaenpaz.blogspot.com/2008/05/answer-was-animals.html and closed with “...it was funny stuff.” This was also totally self-serving, because if I want two things in life, it’s to be considered funny and to have awesome jobs.

Third, this blog got me a date with an interesting dude one time. Two weeks after I got back, I was bringing in 2009 in an appropriately inebriated fashion on a dance floor in Adams Morgan where both really good and really bad nights both begin and end, dancing with a dude who was ostensibly interesting enough for me to invite out to do karaoke on my birthday (two days later). He deemed me ostensibly interesting enough to concede that he was totally about some karaoke, and when he showed up two nights later, I thought little of the fact that he had probably internally debated whether or not I was as cool as I seemed while screaming my basic life facts over the pop music I didn’t recognize due to my two-year absence, falling over in my heels, and ultimately vomiting outside the Jumbo Slice. This is starting to read like my college livejournal, so I’ll cut to the chase and note that he had done his own Googling in those first days of 2009, found this blog, and decided that I was indeed as worthwhile a date as I seemed. (I can’t tell this story without noting that, after the Googling and blog-reading, he simply responded, “Oh, really?” when I mentioned that I’d kept a blog in Peru. To be fair, I would have done the same thing.) So there you go. Join the Peace Corps, keep a blog, influence people’s lives, get a sweet job, go on good dates. It worked for me.

This brings me to my first point about culture shock, etc.: living the dream, or not. I was a totally manageable amount of homesick during my two years in Peru. It never got so bad that I considered quitting, but I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about my mom when I was sick, about the joys of indoor plumbing when I fell in the mud getting to (or worse, from) the shower, about black bean burritos all the freaking time. I’ve realized since then that, more than being homesick, my friends and I were forward-thinking. We thought about and planned our lives post-Peace Corps all the time. We planned a reality that, while being totally feasible in theory, would have been vaguely mid-‘90s sitcom-y in practice. We were all going to live in the big city (DC, for obvious enough reasons), share apartments with each other, work at federal jobs obtained with our post-Peace Corps eligibility, maybe have some pets, and moreover, eat burritos together all the time.

I realized I’m speaking for “we” when I think I’m more speaking of the plan I had for myself and the friends I had cast in this fantasy life. I think these plans were borne of a multitude of factors. An undeniably huge one for me was that I was in a relationship that wasn’t going to withstand the inception of our post-PC lives, and needed to imagine a life I could get excited about. But the fantasy was also the result of general life-transition anxiety, the desire to establish permanence with the people who had just accompanied me on this huge life milestone, and the feeling of total autonomy that being in the Peace Corps gives you.

A word on that sense of autonomy: when you’re actually in the Peace Corps, you feel pretty constrained. And in some senses, you are. You have to project a certain image knowing that you and therefore Peace Corps and America are constantly being judged; having the same conversations over and over with the same people can feel totally mind-numbing; and Peace Corps as an institution of course has its culture of rules and regulations that can feel pretty irrationally oppressive. But take a moment to appreciate the freedoms you DO have as a Peace Corps Volunteer, because they’re pretty amazing. The quote that always pops in my head when I think about this is from MGMT’s “Time To Pretend”: “I miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone.” So you want to make starting a vegetable garden your work for which you get paid? You can do it! Of course, you’ll have to judge whether that’s a good use of your time, if your town actually wants a garden, and all those smart-people theoretical exercises, but the point is, you get paid for doing whatever work you want to get paid for. That is truly incredible. Also, issues with Peace Corps vacation policy notwithstanding, you get a full MONTH of vacation per year. And in Peru, you can up and get on a bus any day and go anywhere in the country that you could ever want to go. And you can afford to do so, because there is no expectation that you’ll spend your $300 a month in a sensible fashion, because there IS no insensible way to spend such a laughably small amount of money! Truly. Incredible.

The point is, being in the Peace Corps makes you feel like you can do anything when you get back. I’m speaking unconsciously from an immediately post-undergrad view, keep in mind. But when you look at your options going back, nothing seems impossible because they’re all so silly and out-of-context and equally inconvenient. My thoughts were basically that I had to move SOMEWHERE, and when you’re in your adobe house without indoor plumbing in rural northern Peru, the difference between suburban Detroit and Washington, DC seems pretty minimal. And after you’ve stretched your limits so ridiculously far outside your comfort zone, does moving from one metropolis in your first-world native land to another seem at all daunting? Of course not.

(Side note, I have no idea why this is all coming out in the second person, but I don’t feel like fighting it. Loren Sanders, who suggested I give this blog some closure, I guess this is for you.)

But the thing is, it IS hard. Peace Corps doesn’t turn you into a superhuman, impervious to transitional difficulties. Sure, it makes you more adaptable within a certain, ridiculous set of circumstances (i.e., “Oh, this meeting is starting 3 hours late? Whatevs, more time to discuss the upcoming corn harvest for the 82374^th time), but life is hard! Being a post-college 20-something and moving and starting your first Job and finding a place to live and making friends: HARD. (Suddenly, it’s like you were speaking to my soul, the Rembrandts.) And that’s saying nothing of the initial process of finding a job, which in case you haven’t heard, is INSANELY HARD these days. Peace Corps is of course hard too, so please don’t read this as total hindsight revisionist bullshit. But in the Peace Corps, you’re kind of operating with a safety net. So many things are up in the air (i.e., what kind of work am I going to do this month? Am I about to systematically expel all the calories in my body?), but so many things aren’t. You know where you live (except when you don’t, but that gets resolved), how much you get paid, where you will acquire your next meal, your general schedule for the next month or so. I think writing about 20-something malaise in the general sense is the tritest move I could make, so I’ll move on.

Back to my friends and our Big Plans. My friend Casey in particular and I would spend hours on her straw mattress in Peru, making Big Plans for DC. And now we’re here (well, she’s there, I’m in what is often referred to as DC’s bedroom community, but we’ll get to that later), living the dream. And now Casey is leaving. Because, as it turns out, Casey hates DC. And I’m sad, because she’s my friend and I won’t be able to see her every weekend and I’ll miss her company, but a part of me is deeply disappointed, because this was NOT the plan. And how creepy of me is that? But it hits at something bigger: our lives post-Peace Corps were initially a logistical checklist. We needed acceptable clothing, to see everyone in our social circle that we dearly missed, to get a job/car/apartment/health insurance/LIFE. Slowly, we got all those things, and each step was a huge victory that made us so inwardly happy and so proud of each other. And then we realized that, well, we had caught up with the rest of America, and like the rest of America, that didn’t necessarily mean we were happy. That’s not to say that we’re not happy, of course, just that we’re working on it. And it’s a process, like everything else.

Of course I set out thinking this would be a list of organized thoughts on life post-Peace Corps, with living the dream being the first point, and something about reverse culture shock would be the second point, and so on, but I don’t think I have much to say about anything else. America: it’s not Peru. Sometimes I eavesdrop on people speaking Spanish on the street and get bummed out that it would be completely inappropriate for me to join their conversation. Sometimes I get sad when people ask dumb questions about Peru, but I usually don’t. Sometimes I tell people I was in the Peace Corps and they say something weird and judgmental and I can’t always figure out what set of stereotypes they’re operating from (British people, I’m mostly looking at you). Sometimes, I feel like having to get in my own car and drive to go most places is its own form of imprisonment, but sometimes I like it. A lot of times, I tell somebody I was in the Peace Corps and they say sad things about how they always wish they’d done something like that when they were younger, and I just don’t know what to say, because though anyone can do it, Peace Corps’s not for everyone. It was a specific confluence of factors, youth quite admittedly top among them, that made it work for me. And it DID work, in a less than spectacular but still meaningful to me way. And that’s about it.

Gourmandizing? Just a taste.

2008-08-25T13:00:00.000-07:00

Since I’m at a loss to write about the significant things going on as of late, including my friend Katie’s visit and my sitemate Rachel’s permanent departure from Santo Domingo, I will just write an entry about what a good food day I had today.

Those who know me know that, though I’m not a picky eater exactly and I do enjoy food immensely, I sort of suck at eating. I accept that there are things I am good at in life and things that I am not. Eating goes on the list with “any sport involving a ball” and “finding my way around a paper bag, let alone a major city.” I just can’t eat much at any given time, unless it’s dessert. And yet I’m usually hungry. If Alyssa ruled the world, there would be approximately eight mealtimes throughout a day.

This, as you might guess, has only been an impediment to me as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Latin America. It’s just expected that we can eat to please, and I simply can’t do it, no matter how fully I comprehend how much it means to people to have someone like their food, and that there’s no other way to express that you like the food other than to clear your plate. I have devoted my nearly two years of service to finding other ways to get people to like me, with mixed results.

So imagine my surprise when I’m sitting with my surrogate mom, Teo, outside our friend Sarela’s house, and I find my eating skills complimented. Some other campo-types were sitting on their stoops watching the donkeys go by, and after the initial “how’s your family (we’re afraid to ask why there’s a white girl sitting next to you)” conversation directed solely at Teo, one of the señoras asked Teo, “So, what does she eat?”

I find this question hilarious because it seems like the kind of thing you ask about someone’s exotic pet, not another human being, i.e. “I see you have an iguana, what does it eat?” At this point, to my great delight, Teo (who has fed me lunch virtually every day since I got here, and has therefore fed her dogs literally hundreds of pounds of my uneaten rice) responds proudly, “She eats everything!” (putting me on par with, say, a raccoon). “Everything?” the señora gasps. “Everything,” Teo answers definitively.

I point out all the ways this is blatantly untrue. I don’t eat liver, heart, or intestines of any animal. This is quickly acknowledged, with the admission that what I’ve said is true, intestines do have a weird texture. Teo maybe slips the point in that, while I eat everything, I don’t eat much of anything. This is also quickly acknowledged, because, the señora says, how else would I have such a hot body? Have I mentioned how great Peru has been for my self esteem? But then the señora begins gushing about how great it is that a girl my age from the U.S. would eat EVERYTHING and oh how it must be so great to have the privilege of feeding me ALL SORTS OF FOOD every day. I personally think the United States needs a lot more señoras like this, in select locations like freshman college dorms and the city of Los Angeles.

Anyway, back to all the rico stuff I ate today.

Breakfast: I woke up early and went for a somewhat unsuccessful run on the highway, came back to my room, and heard the announcement on the loudspeaker that someone had killed a pig this morning and one of the restaurants in town was selling “mote con chancho.” Mote probably has an English translation, given the great amount of corn in the U.S., but I have no clue what it is. Mote is (I think) really young, big kernels of corn boiled with ash to scrape off the harder shell, and then served cold. It doesn’t taste like much, but is a satisfying texture and a really good complement to salty things. Chancho is just the Peruvian word for pig, in this case, chunks of friend pork meat served on the bone. I had never gone out to this restaurant (a.k.a. someone’s house with some tables in the front room) because I used to worry a lot about food hygiene, but after a million IDODOs (Intestinal Disturbances of Dubious Origin) from things like Italian food in guidebook-recommended restaurants and a total lack of IDODOs from things like pig intestines in campo houses that lack running water, I decided that you just never know what will get you, so you might as well eat whatever you want. And mote con chancho just sounded good this morning. So I found the restaurant and was promptly served a plate of mote with about six chunks of greasy pork. Yum. And a good portion for me. But then, just as I was on about chunk number four, an old man who presumably lives at the house walked out of the kitchen with a plate of about four more chunks, grinning adorably, and wordlessly put the plate in front of me. Thank you, sir, don’t mind if I do…force-feed myself.

At this point I have found an easy transition to give a shout out to recently departed (from site, not from this earth) sitemate Rachel Levy. Rachel and I kept it real at this site together for a year and nine months, and I will not say whether or not the following poem was written during this time or long before, but however you take it, it is way more hilarious than anything I could ever write here.

“Meat,” by Rachel Levy

Meat,
Meat,
Meat.
Cow meat,
Track meat,
Red, brown, burnt meat,
Dark meat, white meat,
Those are just a few.
Lean meat,
Fat meat,
Ground, chunky, small meat,
Bacon meat, beef meat,
Jerky meat, too.
Sausage meat,
Pork meat,
Don’t forget pig meat.
Last of all, best of all,
I like fried chicken meat.

Rachel, you will be sorely missed.

So back to my great food day. We’re now to mid-morning, when I always get hungry between the 8 a.m. breakfast and the Teo 2 p.m. lunch (most other people eat lunch around 1, but Teo does what she wants). A couple days ago, my friend Ingeniera Luz brought me a jar of grapefruit jelly she made. The grapefruits here aren’t as good as the ones in the U.S. (I think I say this objectively, not with the bias of someone whose grandpa sent a boxes of citrus fruits from Florida to Michigan in the dead of winter every year of her childhood). They’re more sour and less juicy, and the people here don’t really like them, but nothing can be called a grapefruit and not get my approval. The jelly is particularly sour, but I eat it on soda crackers and thoroughly enjoy it. And then I read some more “East of Eden” and pass out until very nearly lunch time. The electricity was out all day, which really eases the occurrence of naps.

Sometime between breakfast and lunch there is an earthquake and everyone laughs at me for running out of the adobe house in a timely fashion. Oh, silly gringa and her constant desires not to have a house fall on her.

And then it’s lunch, where I get the extremely pleasant surprise of MASHED POTATOES. Potatoes are native to Peru, and there are a ton of native potato species here. I think the number is around 4,000, but I also think the number gets bigger every time I hear it. What there is not a huge variety of, generally speaking, is how the potatoes are prepared. Boiled, sliced, put on the plate. Sigh. Sometimes it’s served in an extremely watery stew form with cilantro, which I have none of, because cilantro tastes like soap. But Teo and Teo alone, as far as I know, has mastered the art of the Peruvian mashed potato. I quickly tell her I don’t want any rice, just mashed potatoes, fried chicken (meat), cabbage and carrot salad, and lemonade. There are tangerines for dessert because it’s Sunday and we always get dessert on Sunday.

An hour or so after lunch I want a sweet snack, so I buy some (Nabisco-produced) chocolate-covered soda crackers, which blow my mind with their awesomeness, as usual. I’m all for the letter-writing campaign proposed by my friend Cynthia to get Nabisco to manufacture ChokoSodas stateside.

Sometime between lunch and dinner I go visit my friend Klepto Maria, who lived in my house when she was pregnant with her now 15-month old son, and steals. She is wearing a shirt that was, at one point, mine. Oh, silly gringa and her desires to dry her clothes on a clothesline. Sometimes people have the power not to surprise you. I still enjoy her company, though.

And then it’s around 5, and Teo and I go up to our friend Sarela’s house, where the aforementioned interaction about my eating skills takes place. When Sarela gets back, we eat “quesillo con miel.” Quesillo is (I think) an extremely fresh incarnation of cheese, eaten before cheese has really developed any strong flavor. It has the texture of cottage cheese, but without discernible curdles. Miel is the Spanish word for honey, but in this is case “miel de caña de azucar,” which I think is molasses. Some genius discovered at some point that these two foods are delicious together, and Teo and I gorge ourselves on this mixture and have to make a concerted effort to leave some for her daughter Maricarmen. I point out that we are eating an analogy for something that moves slowly. I am met with weird looks.

And then I pack for my trip to Lima tomorrow, and then it’s dinner time. This is the only non-Peruvian meal of the day, though I think it was made Peruvian by the fact that I bought all the ingredients here, made it last night in my very bare-bones kitchen, reheated it tonight, and shared it with Teo, who liked it quite a lot. It was eggplant in a homemade red sauce with pasta. Teo, as Rachel can attest, has the funny habit of asking if her food was good, even when it’s, one, something she herself didn’t make, or two, something she makes every day without variation, for example, her mom’s cheese or her white rice, respectively. Don’t think I didn’t enjoy turning it back on her. “Teo, did you like my eggplant? Huh? Wasn’t that good eggplant? Did you eat it all? Wasn’t it delicious?” An interesting fact about the fresh basil I used is that it is grown by the workers of the trash project in a small garden outside the storage room using the compost the project itself makes from the town’s organic waste. Now you know.

And now it’s ten o’clock and time to curl up with Mr. Steinbeck and pray for no fleas.

An aside: about a year and a half ago, a fellow UM alum named Greg sent me a really nice email about how he read this blog and identified with a lot of the things I wrote, and was curious about northern Peruvian cuisine. I never responded, which was sloppy and generally not how I roll, and I’ve felt bad whenever I’ve remembered since, so I hope he still reads this so I can say I’m sorry and doesn’t he wish he had some mote con chancho right now?

Motivation.

2008-07-21T09:56:00.001-07:00

I have not been feeling particularly motivated in the work arena lately. This is probably due to a few ephemeral reasons: my sitemate Rachel is finishing up, which is giving me unjustified almost-done feelings; my work partner Jorge has been super busy with potable water things that don't directly involve me; and I am looking at two solid weeks out of site starting this Friday, for Fiestas Patrias vacation in the central sierra city of Ayacucho, for work in Lima on the Peace Corps environmental newsletter, and for a super-exciting visit from my friend Katie from home.

But I think mostly I'm just kind of pooped. Peace Corps plays a weird game with your natural sense of motivation, your "inner ganas," and Rachel and I call it. I understand that most people in the world go to work in the morning, and stay there pretty much all day, and do that at least five days a week. I understand that work is generally what people do with their lives. So people must have pretty powerful motivation to go to work, no? I'm guessing that, in the real world, your motivations for working are mostly practical: if you don't go to work, you will get fired, and if you get fired, you will not be able to eat, go to movies, furnish your apartment, buy sweaters, etc. I'll concede that there might be some motivation more along the lines of "If I don't go to work, what will I do all day?" But I'll bet that even if you love your job, that's not WHY you go to it every day. That's more a fun bonus.

The thing about Peace Corps work is, if you don't go to it, if you sit in your hammock and read or watch television or hang out with your neighbors all day, you'll still be able to afford food and movies and furnishings and sweaters about the same as if you show up at 9 every day. You're not being paid by the people to whom you are accountable, which is an odd disconnect. So you're not really going to work for anything but the sheer desire to get things done in your community. And, if you're me, this motivation kind of wanes over the course of two years. I'm confronted by my own laziness a lot more often than I thought I might be. A lot of time it feels like things will stay more or less the same whether or not I show up, and I like reading and watching television and hanging out with my neighbors, so why go to the office? I may not even have anything to do when I get there, depending on my counterpart's level of busyness.

I guess this sort of odd to write about, since I feel like PCVs are generally in the position of being the cheerleaders, the sole motivated people, fighting against other people's apathy, grateful for any kind of productive activity. And I'm often in this camp. So maybe what I'm writing about isn't so much my inner ganas running out as much as a slump. We'll see. Stay tuned.

Not another blog post about me itching, I promise.

2008-07-11T09:07:00.000-07:00

It's been a weird morning.

First of all, I slept the sleep of the flea-infested last night, so I did not wake up this morning particularly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Mostly I was just itchy and in need of caffeine. So I sprayed dangerous chemicals on my mattress, hung my comforter out in the sun (supposedly, this kills fleas, I'm not sure it doesn't just put the comforter in the way of more fleas), and made mental plans to wash my sheets FOR REAL THIS TIME.

And then I ate breakfast (big mistake, as I would soon find out), and went up the hill to the house of a woman, Ester, who's on the environmental commission, to see about some plots of land where we might put a "green area." It's yet unclear what constitutes a "green area," whether it will be ornamental plants or some sort of something edible. Since the land technically belongs to Vaso de Leche (a government program that gives needy children milk and avena), I think we should make an effort to plant something nutritious, radishes maybe, since it sort of jibes with the whole nutrition goal, but of course there's a tendency to just plant things that are pretty, like roses or calla lilies. I don't pretend to know anything about making stuff grow, so I'm bringing in a consultant in the form of my friend Juan. Hopefully we can come up with a compromise.

As I was leaving Ester's house, a woman I don't know beckoned me from her balcony. She invited me in, we had the normal talk about the weather and how much more pleasant it is here than in Lima, and I just kept waiting for the "regálame" shoe to drop, for her to ask me for something, but I think she was just old and lonely and wanted to talk about how miserable she was. She offered me breakfast, which I did not want even a little, but it seemed polite and like a way around participating actively in the conversation, since her accent/thought process was somewhat hard to follow. The conversation sort of reminded me of one I had once with another old campo woman I didn't know, where she was talking about her kids and how miserably ungrateful they are (a common thread among conversations with old campo people, really):
Me: How many children do you have?
Señora: Oh, I've had various.
This could have been interpreted as both a sad statement on infant mortality and a real-life application of the "it takes a village to raise a child" concept. Anyway, this woman today, Clara, served me coffee and tamales and cheese. Tamales are okay in small quantities, but when there are four on the plate looking back at you, it becomes sort of inevitable that they are tube-shaped corn glue. I ate as much as I could, giving my gag reflex a run for its money, while she expounded upon her miserableness. At one point, she started talking about how much she likes "extranjeras," and said something like this: "People who come from other countries are always so nice. Peruvians can be so snobby, some won't even shake a poor man's hand. But people from other countries go hiking and are nice to people." I found this statement somewhat odd, until I remembered that the only "extranjeros" this woman had ever met were Peace Corps Volunteers. And, it's true, we are pleasant. And generally amenable to hiking.

I guess the weirdness of this morning was really only this one moment: as I was walking down the hill, a man, the smell of sugar cane liquor on his breath, ran up to me, shouting "Gringuita! Gringuita!" I normally would have avoided this particular kind of situation, but I was far too full of corn glue to be quick on my feet. He kept welcoming me to Santo Domingo, ignoring my assertions that I have lived here for closing in on two years, and finally said something that sounded like "God Bless You." I demurred, and he persisted, finally saying something like "Do the sign of the cross" with an indicative gesture. Um, okay. So I crossed myself, adding the Latin American hand-kiss at the end. "No," he said, "Bless ME." Um...okay. So I gave him the sign of the cross, something which I feel entirely unqualified to do. Luckily he was too drunk to notice I had done it backwards (I'm guessing that when you cross someone else, you go right-left instead of left-right, but what do I know).

The last time I went to Mass was Easter, when I went to the cathedral in Cusco with my parents, where they were playing a song on the organ that sounded vaguely familiar. I looked around and saw old Cusqueña women reveling, practically in tears, singing this song. I originally thought it must be a song I remembered from going to Mass in the U.S., but then I recognized the tune: Bob Dylan's "Blowin' the Wind." I thought there must be some mistake, until I listened carefully and heard both the words for "blow" and "wind." The last time I had been to Mass before this they had also played something that sounded suspiciously like the Last Supper scene in "Jesus Christ, Superstar" (Always hoped that I'd be an apostle/Knew that I would make it if I tried...) which I now recognize to be just that, and not an old hymn that Andrew Lloyd Webber sampled, as I had originally hoped. So these two instances, along with the drunk man's demands of blessing from a gringa today, are making a lasting impression of the odd relationship between Peruvian Catholic spirituality and unwitting Americans.

Pee buckets, parades, and porcupines

2008-06-09T09:49:00.000-07:00

After another relaxing weekend of “it’s just not a weekend if I have to leave my apartment”-ness, I thought it was time to give this blog some love. Every time I do this, that is, indulge my hermitage for days at a time, I start to feel a little bad. Namely, I start to feel like Nadege, the 23-year-old French teacher who lived with my family for some three months when I was twelve (I suppose now she’s 33). Nadege was moody. She had a Portuguese fiancée whom she was quite fond of, and she seemed to be in a perpetual malaise about getting herself into a situation that required spending three months away from him. She dealt with this malaise primarily by sitting by herself in the rocking chair in the living room, drinking orange juice with ice in it, and watching daytime reruns of “Beverly Hills, 90210.” I know that suburban Detroit might be somewhat disappointing to a 20-something European intent on seeing the United States in all its glory, but what I remember most about her being here was the feeling that my family was trying really hard to reach out to her, to do fun things like take a weekend trip to Chicago, and she just seemed impossible to please. Nadege was in sharp contrast to Yann, the 17-year-old French exchange student who stayed with us some three weeks the previous year, when I was eleven, who was awesome. We made him eat cookie dough (repulsion led quickly to awe) and drink apple cider (Yann loved him some apple cider) and took him to Chicago to buy these extremely specific shoes at Niketown and we were very sad when he left. A lot of conversations with Yann went like this:
Family member: Hey Yann, want to do X (go to the grocery store, for example)
Yann (in an imitable French accent): Why not!

When I left for the Peace Corps, one of the last things my mom said to me was, “I hope you remember to be more like Yann than like Nadege.” And I feel like I have done a lot of Yann-like things here in Santo Domingo. I’ve jumped off branches into the freezing cold swimming hole in my underwear, I’ve judged beauty pageants (yes, pageants, plural), I’ve helped name babies, I’ve stayed out dancing until 5 a.m., I’ve donated volley/soccer balls for high school field days, I’ve gone to church on Christmas, I’ve broken and chewed sugar cane with my bare hands, and I’ve eaten pig intestines all in the name of the cultural experience. But then there are weekends like this where I can’t help but feel decidedly Nadege-like, and then I think about the distinction between her abroad experience and mine, and I can mainly boil it down to two statements:

A, 3 months ≠ 2 years.
B, France (I don’t remember what part): Suburban Detroit ≠ Suburban Detroit: Rural Peru.

In two years, you can’t help but be yourself. Two years is long enough to get into spats with your neighbors and then make up with them, it’s long enough to teach people to high-five in appropriate situations and to use “okay” correctly, it’s long enough to really hone your personal guacamole recipe. You can suck it up and do things for three months that you can’t bring yourself to do for two years. A good example for me is cold showers. I really hate cold showers. In the three months I lived with a host family in Lima, I sucked it up and took cold showers because three months wasn’t long enough to find an alternative. Within three months of getting to my two-year site in Santo Domingo, though, I figured out that it’s pretty great to heat a kettle of water, carry it down the hill to the shower, mix it with the cold water in a tub, and dump buckets of warm water over my head. I’m not saying there aren’t some two-year quality-of-life concessions. A good example for me is my pee bucket. I tend not to discuss my pee bucket with friends and family in the United States, because I think it weirds them out, but now I’m saying it to the internet at large, I pee in a bucket. All the time. Not just when it’s raining, not just when it’s dark, not just when there’s no running water (though that’s how it started). Peeing in a bucket was one concession I really had no problem with, after the first week or so, and I generally forget that peeing in a bucket is unusual. Those two instances, cold showers and my pee bucket, are combination examples of point A and point B, I suppose. I’m sure there were things about living in our house that even Yann wouldn’t have been able to put up with for two years without some give-and-take, but I’m also pretty sure living with us wasn’t much a plunge in quality of life for either of them, so maybe Nadege could have put on a happy face and gone to the supermarket with us every once in a while. I’m sure they were both homesick and occasionally exhausted (from speaking a second language, from working, from culture shock), but you can put homesickness and exhaustion on delay (or at least relegate it to one or two days a week) when you know there’s a definite end to it on the horizon. The homesickness and exhaustion in two years just feels kind of infinite, and that’s why I sit in the hammock for an entire weekend and watch “Weeds” on my laptop (Rocking chair = hammock, “Weeds” > “Beverly Hills, 90210,” and who puts ice in orange juice?).

Things have been pretty busy lately (entire weekends in the hammock are also a manner of pacing myself to ward off exhaustion when it’s a 3-week stretch at site). This past Thursday was World Environment Day, and my environmental commission organized a day of environmental education and awareness. I had planned a more strictly “education” day with one of the colegios, since I think that’s often what lacks in this type of holidays here. All the kids have to make posters and banners and costumes, surely cutting into classroom time, all saying “Save the environment!” without ever learning about what sort of practical steps they can take to do so. So when we brought this up with the commission, their first thoughts were, “Let’s have a parade!” They did this, but only after a two-hour environmental education session in one of the colegios, soon to be replicated in the other one. The younger kids (11-12 years old) stayed in the colegio and did a cleanup day, as well as a contest about guessing decomposition times for different kinds of trash, and the older kids (13-14-15 years old) had a field trip down to the three sites involved in the waste management system in Santo Domingo: the compost piles, the house where all the inorganic waste and recyclables get separated, and the landfill. The events of this day are perhaps best told in pictures, so here:

I had to make three speeches about the environment before lunch, a record.

Cool guayaquil trash cans that the kids in wood shop made!

Jorge explains composting to these kids.

I made worksheets.

Kids dressed up for the parade.

Aw.

I'm still unclear on the practical message here. Noooo indeed.

You can never go wrong with a kid dressed like a tree. And a kid behind him carrying a bag that says "cloud."

The little kids picked up trash in the plaza.

The trash workers led the parade.

The environmentally-minded kids from every school met afterwards to watch end of the world videos. Here they are picking up the trash in the municipal auditorium.

And then, after that exhausting day of activities when all I could think about was a nap, my counterpart Jorge informed me that we were going to eat some celebratory ceviche. When I met him at the restaurant, there were already two large beers on the table, and he immediately and appropriately asked me if I wanted a pop, but I did not. The social situations in Santo Domingo in which I find it is acceptable/safe for a señorita such as myself to drink alcohol are few and far between, and I wanted some cerveza. And there went the afternoon. It looked like this.

I’ve always been pretty fond of Jorge as a work partner, but spending an afternoon drinking with him (along with Wilmer and Juan, who work in our office) established that he and I are really on the same page about a lot of things. We were discussing one teacher, who, at the end-of-the-world video event, told me to tell Jorge he thought we were scaring the kids, and then, as soon as Jorge made a “don’t be scared” speech, made a “no, BE scared” speech. He then continued talking long after his point was made and closed with something like, “I mean, I’m not from here, and neither is Señorita Alyssa, but we can tell you that you guys need to get your act together, environmentally speaking.” Jorge told me that he found it “absurdo” that he needed to put in an “I’m not from here” caveat, since his wife is from here and they now have teenage children who have never lived anywhere else but here. Jorge and I talked for awhile about how I don’t do that, how when it comes to environmental awareness I always put things in the “we” form, somewhat unconsciously, because the goal isn’t self-exclusive environmental shame. Jorge and I established that neither of us was fond of this guy’s beat-you-to-the-punch attitude. Another example of this was before the event, when I told him the kids were going to pick up the trash in the room as an act of “sensibilización.” He grumbled, “The people who should pick up the trash are the people who were here earlier and threw it on the ground!” Another teacher, Ingeniera Luz (ironically, his wife) took the high road, and made a speech about how some people don’t have the “educación” (that word can mean either education or manners, or both, in this case) to clean up their trash, especially people from the campo, and we need to lead by example. Instead of feeding the whole city-campo hate fest, though, she made a point to say “our parents” in reference to the campesinos (which is fair, the vast majority of those kids’ parents are campesinos). I like to think that there are people like Ingeniera Luz teaching the children of Santo Domingo. Her husband remains a mystery to me.

In the vein of odd marital pairings, Jorge was also telling that afternoon about how his mother-in-law was in town. I asked him if that’s why he was drinking. He laughed really hard and gave me high-five. Peruvians don’t, by nature, high-five, that’s my doing right there. He then went on to ask me if, in the United States, people have issues with their mothers-in-law. I have mixed feelings about really general questions about the United States, ones that can be answered, “Yes, we are humans too,” but that one was funny. I just gave him a look, and he said, “That’s universal, huh,” and more hilarity ensued. I only knew he was serious when we left the restaurant and he said, “Here come my wife and mother-in-law! Don’t say anything!...but let’s invite them for a beer.” This was bad news for me, as his wife, I am nearly certain, hates my guts, and has since I got here. As far as I can tell (and I’ve fished town gossip to make sure), her hatred of my guts doesn’t have any deeper source than that I am twenty-two, blonde, not Peruvian, and work with her husband. I can understand that, I guess, I just wish she could spend like thirty seconds in my brain so as to fully comprehend the extent to which I do not want to sleep with her husband. I was mildly inebriated at this point, or else I maybe would have tried to get out of sharing a beer with a woman who hates my guts (douchechill…). Alcohol told me that it would be a good idea to talk incessantly about my boyfriend Andrew, plus, someone had to break the awkward silences. Another phenomenon I discovered that day to be universal is the pathetic nature of a drunken man trying to explain to his lady that he is not, in fact, drunk. They always know, man.

THIS IS WHERE I START TALKING ABOUT ANIMALS. (Yeah, I know what some of you come here for.) So a couple nights ago, around 10 o’clock, Humberto’s buddy Inche came to my door and shouted, “Alyssa! Do you have a banana?” I did have a banana, but I wasn’t willing to give it up without an explanation. The explanation was this: “We caught an ‘osito’ (small bear) in the campo and we need to feed it.” I was pretty excited about this. A small bear! In my house! Imagine the possibilities! I asked to see the small bear, and when I went to Humberto’s part of the house, I found…a porcupine.

Despite his lack of small bear properties, he (or she, who wants to flip over a porcupine to tell) is pretty badass. Humberto loves him (even though he smells like crap and makes the whole back of the house smell like crap). He built him his own two-foot by two-foot cage, and feeds him bananas and sweet potatoes (yes, he boils sweet potatoes specifically for our pet porcupine). Today the porcupine did a little shimmy to shake out his needles and Humberto positively squealed with delight. I get the honor of naming him. SUGGESTIONS ACCEPTED. It has to be something a Spanish speaker could easily say, and could make reference to any of the following qualities possessed by said porcupine:
-he is sharp
-he is small
-he could be mistaken for a small bear if one couldn’t remember the word for “porcupine”
-he smells like crap
-he seems to really like bananas but not apples
This is the interactive part of the blog, go nuts. It’s like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book…but more small bear-tastic.

StuffWhitePeopleLike Count: 7.

2008-05-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-05-02T10:29:00.000-07:00

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.

Mostly, my parents were here.

2008-04-13T13:03:00.000-07:00

After another unfortunate blog lapse, I have to say I have no idea why I let that happen (I certainly haven’t been hurting for spare time, as you will soon read), except for the guilt that mounts about not doing it, and then the overwhelmingness of trying to recap a growing span of time unaccounted for. So I’ll try to focus.

My parents were here! My parents were here! I met my parents in Lima the last week of March, and together we traveled to Cusco, enjoyed the city for a few days while we acclimated to the altitude, did the 4-day Inca Trail hike to Machu Picchu, returned to Cusco by train, and then enjoyed Lima for a couple days before they flew out. Minus a few snags on the trail, it was an awesome trip.

Southern Peru is really a different world from the North, where I live. Even though I technically live in a part of the Peruvian Andes, it’s just nothing like the stereotypical international image. Here there are no llama or alpaca herders, Quechua speakers, or even potato farmers. Obviously, I’ve come to love it here and was genuinely homesick when I couldn’t get back (more on that later), but it’s hard not to see Piura as something of a cultural dead zone. It’s not just me being a whiny essentializing American; there’s a historical precedent. Piura city is one of the oldest Spanish settlements, one of the first (if not the first? Wikipedia?) places in Peru Pizarro landed, and we all know that cultural preservation was hardly a top priority of your average 1500s Spanish settler. Another factor is that unlike, for example, Cajamarca, there is no big city in the mountains in the northernmost four coastal departments (Tumbes, Piura, Lambayeque and La Libertad). As a result, people have always had to move between their small mountain towns and the coast for their basic needs, which would have an obvious mixing effect on the “mountain” culture.

Again, I don’t mean to essentialize. I don’t mean to imply that a culture isn’t valid or interesting if it isn’t constantly talking about what happened 500 years ago, and I know that there’s definite posturing for tourists when women walk their llamas through the Plaza de Armas in Cusco. I guess what I saw in the South that really struck me as different than what I see in the North is a self-awareness about the importance of culture and the active maintenance of traditions that go back hundreds of years.

I really loved Cusco. I had heard complaints from other gringo travelers that it was just too “agringado,” too touristy, a creepy mix of Quechua and America. It was definitely touristy, obviously, but I suppose if you don’t come on a quest for authenticity, you can kind of take it for what it is and enjoy yourself. Having my parents there was a particular kind of awesome, too. It would have been nice, I suppose, if they’d had the time to come up to Piura and see my site, but it was cool to do something that was equally exciting for all of us.

The Inca Trail was really hard, but rewarding. Health was sort of the ever-present factor. When I was feeling good, I could take the hard climbs and steep descents in stride, but when I was brought down by altitude sickness or yet another IDODO (Intestinal Disturbance of Dubious Origin, such a common presence throughout my 19 months in Peru that I assigned it its own acronym), it was pretty miserable. Nonetheless, we made it. Machu Picchu really deserves its newly-minted Wonder of the World status. The pictures just can’t capture the scale of it all. We’d seen a lot of ruins, both around Cusco and along the trail, but Machu Picchu was all of those combined times ten, both in scale and in breathtakingness. The mountain landscape around Machu Picchu, though that’s not what people go there for, is pretty incredible, too.

And then we were back to Lima, which was cool for me because, even though I haven’t spent a ton of time in the capital, I do have my favorite spots that I could share with my parents. They’re mainly in the borough of Barranco, the “Bohemian” part of Lima. We walked down to the beach a couple times, walked through old neighborhoods and admired the architecture, went to my favorite art gallery, and my parents even got to survive their first Peruvian earthquake. Their last morning here, there was a 5.4 earthquake directly off the coast of Lima. My dad, who was out running, didn’t even feel it, but my mom and I, on the third floor of our hotel, certainly did. I think my mom will remember being huddled in the stairwell in our pajamas for a long, long time.

Gorgeous views aside, what was really great about having my parents here was sharing Peru, even an unknown piece of it, with them. We talked about the tacky decoration of the Catholic churches (one church in Cusco was referred to by parents, separately, as “Disco Jesus” and “Elvis Jesus”), the necessity of bargaining with all cab drivers, and the constant battle of wills for small change. It was hard when they left; after all, we had spent nine days constantly together, sharing tents and hotel rooms. I started a blog entry to distract myself immediately after they left, but it turned out to mostly be about me wanting to go eat my feelings at Burger King, so I did it instead of writing about it.

After leaving Burger King, I went immediately to the embassy host family’s house, where I was staying for the next three days to work on the Peace Corps environmental newsletter. That was absolutely wonderful. There are a few families in Lima, not all of who work directly for the embassy (some are with NGOs or other international organizations), who let Peace Corps Volunteers stay at their houses while in Lima. It’s nice for us, because we save on a hotel room and get the comforts of home inside the Lima city limits, and I guess it’s not that awful for them because we are good company and we give them an excuse to drink wine (by…bringing them wine) and they get to feel that they have done something good for their country. I actually have no idea why embassy families let us mooch off them, but I am sure glad they do. The husband in this family is an infectious disease doctor with the Navy working with the embassy, and the wife takes care of their three adorable kids and bakes like a madwoman. She started a bagel business when they got here three years ago, and makes bagels by order in her kitchen. Peru has had a lot of culinary influence from outside, but there are still things I haven’t eaten the entire time I’ve been here that I miss sorely, and bagels are decidedly at the top of the list (followed closely by black bean burritos, blueberries, and tofu hot dogs from Red Hot Lovers in Ann Arbor, which I guess isn’t really fair of me, but the heart wants what the heart wants. I’m pretty sure this is at least the third time I’ve mentioned these hot dogs since I started this blog). She has filled this niche (surprisingly, not entirely with sales to ex-pats) alarming well and always has fresh delicious bagels for the taking in her kitchen. My friend Kate and I feasted like kings the whole time we were at their house. It wasn’t just the food that made the stay wonderful. The whole family really made us feel welcome, like there couldn’t have been a shadow of a possibility that we were an imposition. It was nice in the wake of my parents’ visit to have an American family experience, to feel like I was instantly catapulted into the kind of house I used to babysit in during high school.

And this is where the story gets less fun. I returned to Piura city roughly a week and a half ago, ready to breathe the mountain air and starting to miss my own mediocre cooking, only to find that there were no buses going up because of the effect this year’s unprecedented La Niña rains have had on the unpaved mountain highway that leads back to Santo Domingo. I was told by my boss in Piura that I would just have to wait until conditions got better to return to site. This was Thursday. So Casey, the Volunteer close to me along the same highway, and I waited. We first heard word that there was a bus going back on Sunday-ish. We excitedly reserved tickets, but then I got waylaid by yet another IDODO, which made the prospect of a 6+ hour bus ride unappealing, at best. I woke up early to accompany Casey to the bus station and to change my ticket for the next day, only to find that the bus wasn’t running anyway. So Casey and I hauled her stuff back to the hostel, and woke up early the next day to see if we could leave then. Casey had (it seemed at the time) luckily reserved her ticket with the bus company that goes directly to her site, while I had been waiting for the bus company that goes directly to my site to start their trips up, and on that day only her bus company was running. I couldn’t imagine why that was the case, but Casey went up without me, as I got jealous and crabby in the Piura heat. It turned out the reason my bus company was hesitant was the same reason it took Casey a day and a half to get back to site – the highway was still horrible. It’s important to note that the trip to her site normally takes between five and six hours, and generally does not involve a night in a crowded hut in the campo alongside a broken-down bus. Casey called me and begged me to stay in Piura at least one more day. This made me crabby. But of course she was right. If you asked me how I spent that time in Piura, I wouldn’t really have a good answer for you. I saw movies (“Atonement” was too closely followed by “Material Girls,” starring the Duff sisters). I tried to post a video I made about waste management on YouTube, to no avail. I took naps. I ran errands. I hung out at the bus station. But I still have no idea how that added up to a week.

So the day I finally made the ascent was Thursday, a full week after I arrived in Piura. The highway was fine, as it hadn’t been raining for a couple days, but the bus driver misjudged once and drove us into the mud off the side of the road (thank God, on the wall side, not the cliff side). This was scary enough for me to think the bus was going to tip and crush me and I casually pick out on my iPod the song I thought I might like to die to (I went with Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So,” gotta keep with the classics). The bus did not tip, but it was stuck in the mud for the next TWO AND A HALF HOURS. The thing is, when I tell these stories in retrospect, it probably doesn’t sound that bad to you, I mean, two and a half hours sitting on a pretty mountain road, that’s not so bad. But it’s the infiniteness of time that makes it bad news. I had no idea when I got out of the bus, or for the next two hours and twenty-nine minutes, when or if the bus was going to get out and how the hell I was going to get all my crap home if it didn’t. A week in Piura doesn’t sound bad, but when you don’t know how long it’s going to be and every night you’re going to bed not sure if you’re leaving in the morning, it’s pretty hellish. I hadn’t gotten my stuff out of the bus when we all had to get out (not that I could have, my side of the bus was only about a person’s width from the side of the mountain anyway), so I didn’t have a book or anything. I did have Jenna, the Volunteer traveling back with me (we’re a clustered bunch on my mountain) and the aforementioned iPod, so that helped. I spent awhile listening to NPR and throwing mudballs at trees. We watched the guys try to work together to get the bus out. The funny thing about this was, if you watched very carefully, and what else was there to do in two and a half hours but watch carefully, they don’t actually work together. Each dude gave the distinct impression that he believed himself to be in charge, and that everyone else was just following his orders. Men doing the most menial tasks, like putting rocks under the tires to create a makeshift road that the bus might drive out of the ditch on, frantically gestured their will at the driver. Everyone was constantly shouting different orders that were obviously impossible to follow. It occurred to my estrogen-addled and therefore invalid mind that it might have helped to take the cargo out of the back of the bus to cut down on the weight, but I kept this insight to myself. It was really a two-and-a-half-hour macho shitshow, sort of like watching 14 lost dudes refuse to pull over to a gas station and get directions at the exact same time. And then, suddenly and without much warning, the bus escaped from its muddy prison, and for no reason that I could see, barreled on far beyond where the mud stopped. This was unfortunate for those of us who had been waiting in front of the bus, who, after two and a half hours of waiting for a bus to move more than a foot, suddenly found ourselves sprinting, trying not to get run over by the same bus.

This wasn’t quite the end of it, as the bus dropped me off at a town in a fork in the road about an hour’s walk from Santo Domingo (I had too much stuff with me to walk), and there were no cars at that late hour. I waited for another hour and a half before a guy came to drop people off, and then I learned a valuable lesson in the economics of desperation. The four men who had been dropped off also needed a ride to SD, but the driver didn’t want to go all that way, since it was already raining. Two of the men had no real urgency to get back. The other two men did. One of these two men informed me of the deal he had struck with the driver: the driver would accept 30 soles (which is already kind of too much) from us. It seemed clear to me we would each pay six, but I was told that one man would pay 15, I would pay 10, the other man would pay 5, and the two who had no real urgency (or really good poker faces?) would pay nothing. I accepted this almost immediately and pondered the economics of it the whole way home. As it turned out, the two other paying customers were father and son, so it was really a 10-10-10-0-0 split, and he had just presented it as 15-10-5-0-0 to make me feel better. I barely cared at that point. I made it home only nine hours after starting the trip, so I couldn’t really complain.

And now I’m back and content and eating broccoli and spending too much time writing in my blog. Can’t complain.

Cañete is hot.

2008-02-20T07:04:00.000-08:00

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.

“Regístrese, publíquese, y cúmplase.”

2008-01-14T11:03:00.000-08:00

After all that time out of site (in Lima, the United States, and finally Piura for New Year’s and my 22nd birthday), I decided it was time for some quality time (3+ weeks) in Santo Domingo. Time at site is usually pretty broken up, with trips to the city every other weekend or so. This is for a variety of practical reasons: the need to go to the bank and the post office, the need to buy supplies that cannot be found in my town, and the need for phone contact; as well as some more frivolous ones: the need to share success and/or commiserate with other Piura PCVs, the need to eat a turkey-and-salami sandwich, the need for a socially acceptable cold beer, the need to see how long Andrew’s hair has gotten.

The type of extended time at site I’m currently undertaking is a lot easier and more satisfying when I’m busy at work, as I am right now, and when there’s contact with the outside world, in the form of functioning internet. As I mentioned before, the municipality got high-speed internet within the last couple months, but the newest wonderful addition to this is a wireless router. I only live a block from the municipality, for the couple hours a day that they turn the internet on (I mean that pretty literally, someone has to climb a hill to go turn on and off the antennae), I can have high-speed internet in my house. This is only absurd given the other traits of my house: it is made of (crumbling) adobe, half of the rooms still have dirt floors, no rooms have indoor plumbing, and no rooms have an actual ceiling beyond sheet plastic hung to catch the bugs and rain as they fall through the bamboo-and-tin roof. Anyone want to play leapfrog?

The work thing is going pretty well, though. I think I’m reaching a tipping point in my environmental management “project” in which the people I work with aren’t just placating me and patting me on the head, saying “Okay, gringa, you just go ahead and hold a meeting, aren’t you precious,” and actually taking some initiative to get the coordination efforts going. The way in which I realized this was happening was pretty unfortunate: I held a meeting of the Municipal Environmental Commission (which is, despite the name, highly multi-sectoral) to which exactly four people showed up. Not even my counterpart in the municipality, who had signed the invitations to the meeting, showed up, as he was in the provincial capital on business. Well, crap. The good that came out of this was the four dedicated people there (a high school secretary, a representative of the regional government, an engineer/teacher at the tech institute, and an engineer with the Ministry of Agriculture) started an open discussion about what we’re doing well and what we are not, and what we need to improve. The main argument was that the Commission is supposed to be a coordination between all local institutions, and while there are members from all sectors of society, there’s no recognition among the institutions themselves. I had naively assumed that just having people from all different organizations would get the word out that the Commission exists and is the go-to organization for environmental concerns, but of course it takes a more active approach than that. So we are looking into when the meetings of all the local organizations are, starting with the Association of Women, the church-led Committee of Development and Fight Against Poverty, and the Association of Weavers (Peace Corps-formed, my sitemate’s counterpart organization), taking a small amount of time at their meetings, and explaining who we are, what our goals are, and what they can do to participate.

So we rescheduled the meeting, this time putting a boldface clause in the invitation rather indelicately reminding people of the commitment they signed as members of the Commission promising attendance of the monthly meetings, and just in case that wasn’t clear enough, attached said commitment. The day this invitation was written was a great day for Alyssa and Peace Corps generally, as I, for the first time, didn’t write the document. I was, in fact, just sitting in my hammock drinking my morning coffee when my counterpart’s gopher boy knocked on my door and handed me the invitations so I could sign them. Jorge had even already added my “Alyssa Domzal, Voluntaria de Cuerpo de Paz” stamp to the bottom. I was deeply happy with this small victory.

We also attached the municipal ordinance that formally creates the Commission (I have no idea why I keep capitalizing that, but it’s starting to look Orwellian, so maybe I should stop) that was approved in a meeting with the mayor and the five city council members last Friday. My counterpart Jorge asked to attend that meeting and express to the mayor why we are starting this commission. Even though it was Friday afternoon after a busy week and I was exhausted, I went, planning a speech in my head about institutional coordination, priority-setting, and goal completion, but then it turned out what they wanted me to do was in fact to read the entire ordinance, all five pages of it, aloud. Why they asked the one person in the room who was not a native Spanish speaker to read a five-page technical document aloud is slightly beyond me, but, like a lot of things I do in Peru, I thought it would make for a good story, so I did it. The two city councilmen who knew what was up gave kind words about the commission’s goals of environmental protection and cross-sectoral coordination, and the mayor agreed, sent me to make some minor changes, and there we were, a formalized group.

Stuff like municipal ordinances didn’t initially mean much to me, they mostly seemed like bureaucratic trappings of a system that may or may not function, but my counterparts have expressed to me how important they really are, how they make people feel that they are part of something and give them “ganas de trabajar.” This is a continuing part of my learning about Peruvian paperwork, and in a way, Peruvian values. At the same time, I know that I could give the ol’ stamp-and-sign to a million documents and have it not add up to anything real, so I try to keep an eye out for actual signs of progress.

So let me conclude by noting that I am aware that my job is not interesting. This was never clearer than when Andrew and I were in the U.S. together, and people would ask us, “What kind of work do you do?” You can imagine that “I help people build improved wood-burning stoves to improve their respiratory health and keep their small children from burning themselves” gets a far different reaction than “I help people coordinate with each other to create and implement an environmental management plan.” But, as I say now more for my continued self-assurance than for your edification, that I believe in what I’m doing. Santo Domingo doesn’t need help managing short-term rural projects, they need help seeing the big picture and figuring out how, step by step, month by month, they can get to where they want to be. So, like it says at the end of all municipal ordinances, I’ll help them register it, publish it, and complete it.

The man from the press said, “We wish you success, it’s good to have the both of you back.”

2007-12-27T14:35:00.000-08:00

Though Andrew’s and my international travels were not as harrowing as those of the namesake couple of the song quoted in the title, after a little over a week of customs lines, delayed planes, too much Dramamine, and the general suckage that is Spirit Air, I have to say getting back to Santo Domingo, Piura, Perú feels pretty good. High five, Santo Domingo. It’s Christmas Eve, too, so I’m winning some brownie points with Dominicanos for being here for the holiday after being absent the past twenty-two days (the week in the U.S. was preceded by a week and a half in Lima, more on that later). The first time I went to the U.S., in May (six months into service), I told anyone who would listen that I was going to the U.S. for my brother’s wedding but would certainly be back in two weeks. When I returned, to my great frustration, I still got a ton of “Oh, I thought you weren’t coming back.” This time, I guess because I was on Thanksgiving vacation right before I left, and because “my boyfriend’s brother’s college graduation” is not as fun to talk about as “my brother’s wedding,” I hardly told anyone I was leaving. Everyone figured it out, I guess, and all I’ve gotten since I’ve been back is, “Bienvenida! Feliz Navidad!” This, along with the observations of people’s disbelief that Ryan was leaving a year ago, leads me to believe the following about host country nationals’ sense of a PCV’s two years of service: during your first year, they think you’ll never stay; during your second year, they think you’ll never leave.

All 31 remaining members of Peru 8 spent at least a week in Lima for medical and dental checks, plus two days of mid-service meetings with our bosses. Though I got deathly ill for the first few days and couldn’t go half an hour without vomiting, it was a good time. I have neither cavities nor intestinal parasites. The environment group’s meetings went really well, I think everyone walked out of them feeling more proud of themselves and inspired to work in the coming year. We also had a meeting with CARE, the NGO, about the post-earthquake relief work we’ll be doing with them in Ica in the next couple months. From January 30th to February 13th, I’ll be in the town of Cerro Candela, Ica, working on sanitation projects, most likely latrine building/training and handwashing. I’m really excited to go and see what relief work is like on the ground, and to get to know another totally different part of Peru than the one I live in.

In the weekend between the environment group and the health group’s meetings, the whole group had permission to hang out in Lima together. We threw a big party at the backpacker hostel/drug den where we were staying. It was super fun, even though we lost the right to play our own music when we put on the traditional huayno music of the Peruvian sierra, and began to dance in the traditional huayno manner, which I can only describe as skipping in place, stomping, and putting in the occasional spin. My friend Casey exclaimed, “We never dance huayno together!” as if that is something that should, out of ethics or circumstance, happen more often. My friend Melissa gave an impassioned speech when the DJ abruptly turned the music off saying that if these backpackers couldn’t handle the huayno, then they had no business in Peru at all. I can say now, sober and not surrounded by 30 of my closest friends, that I completely understand the DJ’s decision. Huayno is pretty annoying to the untrained ear. I spent most of the rest of the party trying to convince two wilderness firefighters who were there to admit that saying the sentence “I’m a wilderness firefighter” gets them ladies all the time, to no avail.

And then we were in the Bahamas to visit Andrew’s dad, which was certainly cool, but would have been cooler had there not been a tropical depression passing through the Caribbean. The weather was mediocre and the waves were huge when we tried to go out on the boat. And then we were in North Carolina for the graduation, where I was the lone Michigan Wolverine behind Appalachian State lines, which would have been fine if the graduation speaker who mentioned the “incident” referred to it as happening at the Big House at Michigan STATE, which infuriated me just a tad. You would think Carolinians, who have their own mess of distinctive state schools, would be more sensitive. I mean, really.

And then my parents came to North Carolina! I would like to publicly give them mad props for waiting out the snowstorm for a solid seven hours in the Detroit airport, then getting a flight to an entirely different NC city, driving two and a half hours, and getting lost looking for their ridiculously hard to find hotel, all just to see ME for a day and a half. Parents are the coolest. It was snowing in North Carolina, too, which, despite twenty Michigan winters, I am no longer accustomed to, and found quite unpleasant. Every Peruvian I’ve told this too has laughed out loud at how Peruvian (Piuran, really) I have become when it comes to weather. Ay, it’s only 65 degrees out? Qué frío.

And now I’m back in Santo Domingo, where I belong for the time being. I’d missed it more than I realized. The rickety bus ride, the fresh mountain air, saying hi to everyone on the street, the endless conversations about the weather, the cheese, my neighbor’s flower garden, the view from my balcony, the Newsweek sitting on my floor open exactly to the article I was reading when I left, the donkeys, the early morning loudspeaker announcements about who’s selling beef, my hammock...it’s coming back to me piece by piece. And tonight we stay up until midnight and eat panetón and drink hot chocolate. It’s all good.

The second year begins, first ever real-time post

2007-11-28T07:18:00.000-08:00

First of all, the municipality got internet, fast internet, which means I have ridiculously convenient access to the world a mere block from my adobe, non-indoor plumbed house. Every single other post in this blog has been pre-written, given me absurdly long to elaborate my puns, etc. Until now. A new age, indeed.

Second, my one-year anniversary in Santo Domingo was yesterday. A year ago yesterday, I was unloading my new mattress from the regional coordinator's car, playing volleyball with a neighbor-girl named Elsa, and feeling generally overwhelmed. Yesterday, to come full circle, Elsa dropped off her cat at my house for a fun, rat-killing sleepover. Before I left for Thanksgiving vacation, I noticed suspiciously rodent-y traits in my kitchen (popcorn spread all over the shelves with the inside kernel missing, etc.) but I assumed it was just a cute little mouse, which I could deal with. Within a couple hours of being back, though, I realized (with much screaming) that it was in fact a large rat. As in, I've seen smaller squirrels. (Not on the Michigan campus, where the squirrels more resemble overfed baby bears, but in life generally.) I immediately decided that the best course of action was to run up and down my street begging my neighbors for their cats. One neighbor told me their cat was too pregnant. Another told me theirs was too small. I felt like some sort of hellish Goldilocks. After setting a trap that was probably also too small for this job, I found myself unable to actually sleep in my infested apartment, and showed up to Charo's house, where she gave me the bed of the Volunteer I replaced. The next night, after a repeat appearance of the rat, I more or less demanded the neighbor's cat despite their absence, and let everyone on the street know that if the cat were to show up, that it was to go to my house. The cat was cute and very cuddly, but sort of dumb and drooly. I did not know cats could drool until last night. She did not kill the rat but did knock over my sink water and barf twice all over my floor. Uncool, but the rat didn't seem to eat any of my food, so...cool. I'll keep you posted.

I also marked my one-year anniversary at site by throwing a hissy fit at a high school teacher for burning an entire field of grass in the middle of the town. He responded by saying it was impossible that they could ever compost the grass (even though my project has entirely adequate compost piles a ten-minute walk from where he was burning), and that it was pretty silly that I would come yell at him for endangering the respiratory systems of an entire street when I come from the United States, where we have nuclear waste and other "real" environmental problems. I ran to Teo's house in tears after this interaction, and she gave me the dirt on the teacher. This is what I love about a small town: if you are ever upset with someone, you can always find someone to tell you all the horrible things that guy has ever done. "This teacher made me really upset today." "Yeah, he's been reported to the school district for an unhealthy interest in teenage girls." Or, "I'm sort of mad at my friend." "Yeah, he had to leave Lima because he was evading taxes." Sure, gossip is generally destructive and doesn't help anyone, but it can make you feel really good at the time. To show the up-and-down nature of Peace Corps, that very night a guy from Rotary Club showed up to my door (literally), and offered to present the trash project to seek additional funding. Sometimes, it's just that easy.

Thanksgiving in Cajamarca was awesome, in other news. Cheese, low-security zoos with cute Andean anteojo bears, hot springs, beautiful mountain views? Go there. It was incredible. Thanksgiving involved no turkey, but it did involve an amazing fusion restaurant, where I ate both trout and duck. As part of my resolutions for next year, here are some pictures:

OMG bears

Andrew and I at Cumbe Mayo

Hey look, rocks.

This is what Cajamarca looks like.

So my resolutions for year 2 are as follows:

1. Kick more ass

2. Do cooler stuff with my spare time

3. Be less oblivious to what goes on in my town

4. Be less angry with Peru absurdities

5. Get stuff DONE

6. Add more visual interest to this blog

And that's about it.

Aniversario Dominicano

2007-11-12T07:42:00.000-08:00

Santo Domingo’s anniversary party was last week, and in case the grammar of that clause leaves this unclear, I mean to say the party lasted all week. There was a program listing the week’s events handed out in the cracks underneath doors the previous week, and upon reading it, I realized that if I had wanted to celebrate Santo Domingo’s 120 years of independent reign 24 hours a day for an entire week, I could have. Here is a summary:

October 31st: When I could have been sharing our own tradition of costumes and candy, I was instead on the judging panel of the annual beauty pageant to crown “Señorita Santo Domingo” and “Señorita Feria.” This is the second beauty pageant I’ve judged this year (the first was one of the high school’s). So, that makes the breakdown of beauty pageants judged in my lifetime: first 21 years of life, 0; 22nd year of life, 2. The first beauty pageant was more stressful for me, as there were only two judges and four contestants, so when the “wrong” girl was chosen, it was clear for whom the resulting boos were intended. This time, there were five judges and twelve contestants, and (thank God) no clear fan favorite for the crown. There were three rounds: traditional dress, formal dress, and “interview.” The interview questions were given to us, as well as the contestants, ahead of time. Unfortunately, the person writing the questions failed to decide if they were going to be “regurgitation” or “thinking” questions, so while some were along the lines of, “When was the earthquake this year and what region of Peru did it affect?” and some were, “What should be done to combat domestic violence in Santo Domingo?” It did not exactly make for a level playing field. The pageant part of the event was actually pretty fun, what was not fun was the two-hour break the girls took to change one outfit. I finally went upstairs to the dressing room to hurry things along, not accepting the emcee’s explanation of, “Así son las chicas.” I was actually thanked by Flor on behalf of the audience later, which made me laugh, because Peruvians often consider a disregard for time something of a cultural value. Anyway, it all turned out okay, the girls who appeared most poised and confident did win, there was no booing, and I was home by midnight.

November 2nd: There was a dance party that I was only somewhat committed to going to, although it did have a rather pleasant Spanish guitar-type band that I thoroughly enjoyed. This was the night my friend Cynthia, in town from Piura, introduced me to “calentado,” or hot cañazo (sugar cane liquor) with cinnamon. Cañazo by itself is pretty rough to take, but for some reason, heat it up and add cinnamon, and it is delicious. So there’s the answer to the “What do I do with this bottle of cañazo I have lying around my house” problem, a dilemma I know I have inflicted on some of my friends in the past.

November 3rd: This time, I was ready to go out, thanks to late naps and coffee. The night started with the presentation of traditional Peruvian dances, which I always love, especially when they are performed my impossible-to-embarrass preschoolers and consist of little more than running in place in elaborate costumes. After the dances was the burning of the castillo, which may be the COOLEST PERUVIAN TRADITION EVER. Some professional on the coast builds a two-story elaborate structure of bendable guayaquil (bamboo), complete with spinning wheels and ridiculous pyrotechnics. The castillo burns from the bottom up, each fire setting off the fuse to burn the level above it. Each level (there are about five) has fireworks and sparklers that set off the wheels to spin. Some levels had bonuses, like the words “Feliz Aniversario” written out in sparkler, or a model of the saint that is the town’s namesake that floats down on a rig toward the audience. I was awed into a general silence punctuated with frequent, uncontrollable, “Yay!”s. Seriously, this is the tradition I would bring back to the U.S. with me, if it weren’t for those pesky fire codes. Something tells me the frequency with which I was told, “Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter when firework chunks fall on you, they don’t continue to burn” that night tells me this is not the easiest tradition to transfer to the developed world.

The castillo was followed by a dance party, at which I stayed until a remarkable 4 a.m. The reason I stayed that late was even more remarkable: I was just having fun. If that sounds to you like an incredibly obvious thing to say, you have never been a Peace Corps Volunteer in Latin America. More obvious reasons to stay at parties include blatant peer pressure, fear of missing out on social integration, fear of missing out on the only thing people are getting done that week, etc. But I went out with Cynthia and some other girls my age who were in town from the University of Piura (which is on indefinite strike. Bad for education levels, good for my social life) and we danced and drank all night and it was just good fun. I had forgotten how fun it is to “go out with the girls.” I also realized that I still have some to learn about small-town dynamics the next day, when Cynthia informed me her dad grounded her for staying out that late…a block away from her house.

November 4th: The day of the actual anniversary. I did little that day, except attend a parade that turned out to be a lot of schoolchildren goose-stepping, so I tactfully bowed out. This was also the day I pseudo-moved into Rachel’s room due to painful noise levels in my part of town. At the time of writing this, Rachel is still in Argentina following the Buenos Aires marathon, so it will be really pretty creepy if reading this is how she finds out I blatantly invaded her personal space in order to avoid total sleep deprivation. Then again, I did find a note to me on her desk wishing me luck at the pageant, so it can’t be totally unexpected.

November 5th: I found myself exhausted and sick of party. Besides what I wrote about here, I had attended two barbecues and one saint procession. So I retired up the mountain to Chalaco (ironically, the city from whom we were celebrating our independence), and hung out with my good friend Casey for a couple days. It turned out to be a lot of party at her house, too, with a pig slaughter and birthday celebrations for her host dad, but it was on a scale (both of people involved and decibels) that I could handle. I returned to Santo Domingo rested and ready to work, something that had been impossible at that point for about two weeks.

And pretty soon it’s time for my own kind of fun, Thanksgiving vacation. After about three failed plans, Andrew and I are going to city of Cajamarca, in the sierra about six hours southeast of his capital city, Chiclayo. Cajamarca is famous for its cheese, wool, and being the historical site of a bloody battle between Pizarro’s army and the Incans (detailed in “Guns, Germs, and Steel”), so the irony of choosing Cajamarca to celebrate a holiday about harmony between European settlers and Native Americans is not lost on me. Nonetheless, I cannot wait.

In which Alyssa maybe circumvents Peruvian property laws?

2007-10-23T08:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the national Peruvian census. I don’t know how the census works in the United States, but in Peru, this means the country basically shuts down so that everyone can be in their house between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. I’m not sure how strict those rules are, but I did not want to get on the bad side of the census-takers, and I literally did not open the door of my apartment during those ten hours. This was remarkably easy to do, since I had just gotten back from a pretty stressful trip to Lima that ended in:

a) an uncomfortable night on the 15-hour semi-cama bus
b) a yellow fever vaccine that I had been missing since training
c) a not serious, but still scary, car accident on Javier Prado in Lima
d) some weird illness that made me throw up totally undigested food every so often
e) an apparent Dramamine overdose

So overall, my body was up for a day in bed, doing some nothing. I watched finished The Namesake, which might be my new favorite book.

Around 6 p.m., right when the census mandate would have lifted, I am still lying in bed, when suddenly, the television next door, in Humberto and Flor’s living room, turns on at the highest volume possible. They have apparently turned on an alarm (why for 6 p.m., I have no idea), left the house, and forgotten to turn it off. Both the doors into their part of the house are locked with padlocks. I am told by neighbors, also disturbed by the painfully loud noise, that they both have gone off to some far-away caseríos to do census-taking and will probably not be back that night.
Well, crap. My first move is to go to my sitemate and whine, which helps for a little bit, until she wants to go make phone calls and I still cannot comfortably return to my apartment. My second move is to go the police. I generally have good rapport with officers of the law (just ask the University of Michigan Department of Public Safety about “iPod girl,” you’ll hear all about it), so it seems reasonable to me that they will understand my predicament and let me watch them use wire cutters on the padlock. They say that while they did not have the right to just cut the padlock off the door, I can go find the guy who’s in charge of the electricity and he can cut their power. Hm. Is it just me, or does it seem less intrusive to cut something totally replaceable off someone’s door than to cut their power for an entire night? How can you have the right to do one and not the other? I’ll bet they forgot to sharpen the wire cutters and were too embarrassed to tell me. Or maybe I just think the twisted metal of the mangled padlock would best symbolize my anger over the alarm being left on in the first place. So I go off in search of “Daniel, el encargado de la luz.” I go first to the house that people pointed to, am met by confused parents, and then sent further up the hill, where I am met by a señora adamant that she is only in charge of electric billing, and promptly sent back to the house of the confused parents. The man who led me there says some magic words to the parents, and the dad looks at me with sudden apprehension, and says something I choose to translate as, “Oh, DANIEL. Yeah, he has the tools. And the know-how.” The legal right? Unmentioned.

So I wait for awhile for tools-and-know-how to come back and meanwhile I strike up a conversation with his dad, who excitedly lists for me every American he’s ever met (he’s met exactly 26 Americans in his life, he tells me), and stares at me patiently until I show some recognition. The worst part is, all the Americans he knows are either nuns or priests who Spanish-ized their names for the Peruvians’ convenience, and let me tell you, the likelihood of me knowing someone called nothing more than “Padre Juan” is pretty slim. I do offer the mention of the one American whom I think we might have in common, the PCV in Santo Domingo in the ‘70s, and he seems briefly to remember him, but then he realizes what he must have been putting me through and says, “The United States is huge, isn’t it.” I agree. I patch up the next moment of disappointed awkwardness by praising the cultural exchanges he must have had with those 26 Americans. He responds, “Yes, Americans! You have great culture! Peruvians? NO CULTURE WHATSOEVER!” This is when I realize he is using “culture” to mean “manners,” and I am relieved when tools-and-know-how walks in so I don’t have to respond to that allegation.

The light wizard tells me to wait half an hour, so I do. I write Andrew a letter by streetlight. Eventually some other guy finds me and says, “Señorita? I’m supposed to come help you because Daniel’s busy.” He, however, cannot grasp his purpose in this phase of the dilemma, and reiterates my initial suggestion of wire cutters. He even bangs half-heartedly at the padlock with the Phillip’s head he’s brought, bless his heart. Just when I am exasperated enough to send him on his way, he silently unscrews the cover to the electric meter and switches off Humberto’s power. I thank him profusely, and once I realize that this magically has not turned off my power, I throw my arms around him in gratitude. He smiles and says, “Qué tranquilidad.” My sentiments exactly.

Flor returns within ten minutes of the power shutoff, and is rather displeased with my course of action. She is upset because she also lacks a key to the padlock (another mystery of Calle Libertad 130), and cannot get into her dark house, where she fears I have done irreparable damage to the television by shutting off the power. (As my sudden wakeup two hours later can assure you, I haven’t.)

And then, at 8:35 p.m., I got censused! It’s weird to me that the Peruvian government expected me to stay in the confines of my apartment for twelve and a half hours, although I apparently obliged. Rachel and I agreed that the funniest census question was definitely, “What is your religion, Catholic or Evangelical?”

And of course there’s more to say, about Lima, about project development, about the rain, but I’m going to respect the theme of this entry and go try to figure out if I have plagiarized “Ghostbusters” or not.

My goings-on, as told through the three goals of Peace Corps

2007-10-10T08:09:00.000-07:00

Well, I am back after a considerable blog absence. The absence was due, at least at first, to an incredibly boring lull in activity. A good amount of time was spent in my room, absorbing books, TV shows on DVD, and movies at an alarming rate. I tried to write an entry about two weeks ago about how bored I was, but then thought better of inflicting my boredom on my blog readership. But this brings up a good point: I’ve gotten a fair amount of comments from people about to join the Peace Corps, saying they read my blog to prepare for what’s coming, so let me note that I only write about the most interesting, say, 4% of my life. Just so you know. Peace Corps = lots of spare time. Get ready to have the time to learn a language or an instrument, get in shape, knit a lot of sweaters, or if you are like me, watch the same 22 episodes of “Arrested Development” over and over and talk to yourself a lot.

In summary of that really boring month or so, let me just say that I now consider myself conversation-ready on the following pop culture topics:
Seasons one through five of “The Sopranos,” “Dog Day Afternoon” specifically, Al Pacino’s hair generally, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, “Guess Who” (starring Ashton Kutcher and Bernie Mack), Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father: A story of race and inheritance, “The U.S. vs. John Lennon,” Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and why Adriana was the best Sopranos character ever.

And then salvation came in the form of Amy, a Volunteer in Ica. Amy successfully did the environmental certification project in her own community, and since traveling there was impossible for us following the earthquake, she visited Santo Domingo to lead the workshop that led members of the Municipal Environmental Commission through the steps of doing an environmental diagnostic, plan (20 years), and agenda (two years). Moreover, she kind of led me through what the next year and change of my service is going to be like with the task of setting up an effective, sustainable, and transparent environmental management system in Santo Domingo. It’s interesting to note that, since the community members will establish their own environmental priorities, I have no idea what projects I will actually be taking the first steps on in the next year. It could be reforestation, organic agriculture, preparing a trail map of the campo, setting up an interpretation center for all the archaeological artifacts sitting around in the schools’ libraries, improved wood-burning stoves, anything people see as a priority, really.
Somehow, with Amy’s visit, it’s sort of like time snapped, and suddenly I’m done counting months into service and thinking “will it never end,” and I’ve started thinking, “how can I possibly do all these things with the extremely limited time I have left?” I’m sure this won’t be the end of me having spare time, but probably the end of me not being able to think of a single productive thing I could do for days on end. I will be “helping the people of interested countries in meeting their needs for trained men and women,” indeed.

Right before Amy’s visit, there was a town party for the high school’s anniversary with a questionably famous live cumbia band. I gulped down organic coffee before leaving and beat my record for how late I’ve stayed at a Peruvian party. At exactly 3 a.m., I became a huayno rockstar. I heard some gossip afterwards (it actually reached another Volunteer’s site) that I am an excellent dancer. I wouldn’t be unhappy if, at the end of my service, the vast majority of the population cannot remember what I actually accomplished in my work, but they know for certain that I am a great dancer. (It would also be great if they did not remember the massive quantities of beer required before I show off my mad skills.) At least, I think that’s what’s meant by “to help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.”

And then, just five days ago, one Andrew Cornelius finally made his way up to Santo Domingo for three days. It was good to have him here, if somewhat anticlimactic. I think other people’s sites are hard to get excited about on any given day. “Look! Look! It’s that teenage couple that always makes out on the stoop outside my window, like I told you about!” is not exactly something to write home about. The mountains are also not at their prettiest right now; four months into the dry season, the dominant landscape is mostly dried fields with some scrubby trees separating one person’s field from another’s. It’s a far cry from the rainy season, when it seems incredible that the English language only has one word for the concept “green.”

But Andrew’s visit was good. We hiked, waded in a currently quite shallow river, made eggplant parmesan (quite a feat if you’ve seen my "kitchen"), watched some movies, and did the requisite introductions to the big players in SD. Mostly I think the value of visiting someone’s site is not in the visit itself, but in the frame of reference for every future conversation. It was pretty weird to be dating someone who had never seen the place where I spend, on average, 11 days of every 14.

It is probably time to stop putting off actual work with extensive blog entries. Unless you consider blog entries work. I think “to help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of all Americans” leaves that open.

Kind Of Playing It Fast and Loose With the Word “Interesting”

2007-09-13T15:49:00.000-07:00

I have since had two meetings of the environmental club, with the following results:

- In total, nine teenagers showed up to the first meetings. Not bad.
- The catch: they are all girls. So we rolled with it, and declared it a no-boys-allowed-except-for-when-heavy-lifting-is-require club.
- It’s probably pretty good that no boys came, given that the name of the club was declared, as of the first meeting, to be “Club Pachamama,” after the Quechua word for Mother Earth. I should note that “Mother Earth” is one of five Quechua words I know, along with “five,” “eight,” “sun,” and “totally delicious meal cooked underground (rough translation).” So far, any attempts to form whole sentences with those words have been…a matter of creativity.
- For all the creative, fun activities that I presented on the first day as things we might do, the votes all went to hikes and cleanup campaigns. Fair enough, I like hiking, even though the place they decided they want to go to is an hour’s hike away…along the main road. Also, the first river cleanup was fun, it will be even cooler (and dare I say, sustainable) to have teenagers organizing it.
- Our club might as well be called “The Mother Earth and Apples to Apples Club.” On the second meeting, I brought the copy of “Apples to Apples” that Brett translated into Spanish awhile ago, not sure it was going to work out, given the creative thinking involved. For those of you who have never played “Apples to Apples,” first of all, why the hell not, and second, here is a summary: there are adjective cards and noun cards. Everyone holds a hand of seven noun cards, and each round, an adjective is played in the center. Everyone but the judge puts a card in the middle that they think best matches (ironically or not) the adjective card, and the judge determines whose was the best match. The person wins a point, and the judge changes. I just like any game where you have to compare “Helen Keller” and “Elephant Stampede” along the metric of “Smelly.” Brett sent me the Junior’s edition, so there wouldn’t be many cultural clashes, but just to make sure, I had them sort through the cards first to see which words didn’t make sense to them. Interestingly, the words that did not translate to rural Peruvian teenagers included rocking chairs, mustard, canoes, garages, bacon, poison ivy, beach balls, attics, and (of all things) piñatas. De todas maneras, the game went awesomely. The girls loved it. The three things I loved most about it were: one, it made people think creatively (something sorely lacking here); two, it made the girls value everyone’s opinion, not just their friends’; and three, it made everyone speak up, not just the outgoing girls. They agreed to the terms of the hike only when I offered to bring the game to the waterfall destination.
I kid you not, that game of “Apples” was the most interesting thing that has happened to me in weeks.

Other than that, Rachel and I have been graced with the company of Daisy, a Piuran woman who works in Santo Domingo from time to time with an NGO that works in gender equity. She’s definitely a breath of fresh air, but sometimes the clashes we have with her about being in SD and doing development work get interesting. To be fair, any other country’s poverty is more glamorous than one’s own. I’m perfectly comfortable here, in the rural Andes, but if you told me I had to spend two years in rural Appalachia, my nose might crinkle. She’ll say disparaging things about having to come up here from the city, and how sometimes she’ll pay S/.80 for a motorcycle ride to Piura (the bus is S/.10) just so she can get out of here faster. Rachel and I were trying to figure out what bothers us about this, since we certainly do our fair share of complaining about this place, and I think we realized that when it comes down to it, we like it here, and we’re really happy that the U.S. government pays us (albeit not a whole lot) for the opportunity to work here. I also sort of resent more cosmopolitan Peruvians assuming we, as Americans, share their views about life in the sierra. Just because we’re used to more creature comforts doesn’t mean we’re dying to get out of here.

The other source of excitement in SD was Rachel’s weaving association’s inauguration party for the new building they acquired, soon to be the workshop/store. Hurray for them. Also, hurray for me actually enjoying myself at a Peruvian party. The basic structure for Peruvian parties, as I know them, is
Chairs are arranged bordering the outside of the room.
Music is played excruciatingly loud, so there are no conversations.
The men (and the occasionally lady) quickly get themselves drunk.
Eventually, people start dancing, strictly in couples, but no eye contact is made, and no one smiles.
People stay until 4 a.m., seemingly against their will.

The parties are, in a word, joyless.

But this party was cool. Almost none of the husbands showed up, so it was just wholesome girls-dancing-with-girls fun. It was also held mid-day, so there wasn’t that tension of people knowing they need to pace their fun because they’re going to be there for 6 straight hours. Rachel gave an excellent speech in a special-made purple silk campo dress, which really cannot be recreated without photographs.

And then I took a nap.

Earthquakes, etc.

2007-08-31T14:49:00.000-07:00

I woke up at 5 a.m. today to a (minor) earthquake, which, due to recent events, inspired a certain amount of terror. Unfortunately, my current reaction to earthquake terror is to freeze and stay exactly where I am, as if playing dead will fool the adobe house into not falling on me. I will have to work on that. Or I can be like Tori in those episodes of “Saved by the Bell” and carry a helmet with me everywhere I go. I woke up again at 6:30 a.m. to a loudspeaker announcement that the women’s association was selling a delicious intestine dish for breakfast. Somehow, I resisted the temptation. I woke up again at 7:30 (for the record, the latest I have ever slept at site is 8:00) to Humberto and his buddies shouting “GOOOOOOOLLLLLLL!!!!!!” at the televised Peru-Costa Rica soccer game, which I am told was being held at a reasonable time in Korea. Overall, a very Peru morning.

Last night was a late one (midnight, if you can believe it) because of the goodbye party for Carla, the dental intern from Lima who was on her mandatory rural service here for four months. I have now seen three Limeña dental interns come and go, and I’m about to see the departure of my favorite doctor friend Otilia, whose rural service kept her here for a year. I’m beginning to feel like I’ve been here awhile.

I was supposed to just be returning from a technical exchange trip to the department of Ica to learn about the GALS environmental certification project fellow PCV Amy is working on, but as many of you know, Ica was the epicenter of an 8.0 earthquake on August 15^th that killed over 500 people. If you feel like helping, Peruvian television channels have been asking nonstop for donations for “our brothers of the south.” Donations can be made through USAID, the lead group for all the relief groups currently here.

In an inconvenience that only ranks at about #578430 on the list of post-earthquake inconveniences, my project is currently at a standstill, as we had been looking to the trip to Ica to kick-start the certification process. We don’t have any more knowledge resources to start the project than a 40-page technical manual and my vague memory of a two-hour lesson on the certification during training, when neither my Spanish nor my attention span were doing so hot. The Peace Corps highers-up are looking to send Amy to Santo Domingo to run a workshop, which would be awesome on many levels. Last I heard, Amy’s site was flooded, and it was up in the air whether she’d be able to return to it before her close-of-service in November.

I’ve been trying to camp out in the office to get some time in with my counterpart, but he’s been off doing important things all week, which has been frustrating. To give myself something to do, as well as address what I see as an impediment toward efficient computation, I installed keyboarding software on some of the computers in the municipality. The people to whom I gave the software seemed more or less enthusiastic about it, but it’s hard to tell, because people here have the habit of wanting to please gringos and be non-confrontational, so you almost never hear if your ideas are unfeasible. I thought that if even one person learns to type using more than their two index fingers, it would be worth it; the software is Peace Corps-issued and therefore free, anyway. The second I walked into the muni today, though, the president of Vaso de Leche (the governmentally-supported women’s organization to fight childhood malnutrition) came up to me and said, “So, I heard you installed typing software on the secretary’s computer. Can I get in on that?” This made me so happy. Outsiders and Peruvians alike are often bemoaning the Peruvian education system (for those of you just tuning in, it is the second worst in the Western Hemisphere, second only to Haiti’s), which is a whole lot of rote repetition and a whole lack of creative thinking. For once, though, this works out of me, because keyboarding is a totally uncreative, repetitive, and yet important, skill. Alas, we’ll see how it works out in the long run, when people realize that typing (much like, ahem, speaking English) is a skill that takes a good long while to acquire.

I’ve been working to organize a youth environmental group, which I think would be both fun and functional. There are about a million things I want to do with the kids, including:

- Radio shows with environmental themes, especially once we get trash cans in public areas. Radio is a good way to get out a message like “Put your trash in your pocket until you happen upon a trash can.”

- Hikes to visit the sites in Santo Domingo, possibly with a tie-in to promoting tourism, we shall see.

- Painting a mural with an environmental theme. What I think would be the coolest is a map of Peru highlighting the different ecosystems. I just like maps, what can I say.

- Plays with environmental themes to perform for the pre- and elementary-schoolers. These would probably also involve trash, as I am narrow-minded.

The possibilities are really endless, it all depends on what the kids decide they want to do at the first meeting next week. According to the teachers, there’s a lot of enthusiasm among the kids for the club. I think it will be good for me, too, partially as a way to unite parts of my projects, and partially as a way to improve my working-with-youth skills.

Pop! Goes My Heart

2007-08-12T15:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was outside my room and I realized someone had anonymously written “ALISA” on my wall. I didn’t see it as particularly malicious, just mildly helpful, in case I ever forget where I live or how to phonetically spell my name in Spanish.

This week has convinced me that I am at an age in between being mothered and being a mother in which I settle for just mothering myself. I went to the office yesterday morning only to realize that my counterpart was in the campo for the day (something that happens maybe half the times I try to go to the office). The second I completed the thought, “Man, there is NOTHING to do today,” I could literally HEAR in my own brain a voice saying, “There’s never NOTHING to do.” It was creepy, because it was my own voice saying this, and I am not a particularly motivated person when it comes to self-maintenance. So I reorganized my kitchen. I put plastic on my wire shelf so my fruits and veggies don’t fall down, designated drawers for spices and other things in packets, and bought a little bucket for all the bottles that need to be upright so they don’t take up room on my counter. It was incredibly satisfying.

And then it was afternoon and I’d already taken my nap, so I painted the exterior of my house. It needed to be done. There’s a Peruvian custom of political supporters painting the exterior of their house for an election, with the name of the political party, the candidates’ names, the basic tagline, and the party’s symbol with an X through it. The X used to confuse me, because it really looks like the house is saying “This political party? BOO! Put an X through that,” but it is actually showing you how to vote. “Mark an X through this political party’s symbol, like this.” The day I figured that out was probably the greatest epiphany about Peru I’ve ever had, next to the day I figured out that the people in vests on the street in the city sticking calculators in my face were not actually trying to sell me calculators, but trying to get me to exchange American dollars with them.

It was not just that the house was painted for the local election (that happened last November) that necessitated the fresh coat of paint, it was also that sometime between the election and now, I put a window in the front wall of my room. So the window was unintentionally busting through the propaganda, seemingly making a political statement. It was sort of awkward, but no one said anything about the fact that the house no longer read, “UNIDAD POPULAR SANTO DOMINGO,” but instead, “UNID------LAR SAN-----INGO.” So anyway, I took it upon myself to paint the house yesterday. The woman who sold me the paint asked if I knew how to paint, and when I asked, “Houses?” she said “Yes.” I thought that might just be something everyone kind of knows how to do, but a little girl who walked past the house told me that I paint pretty. Some old campo man just laughed like a crazy person at the site of me painting, but old campo men tend to do that.

(the rest of this entry is written a week later, at which point I realized I never finished/posted the entry)

My point about the kitchen organizing and house painting is just that Peace Corps life is (theoretically) a lot of looking at how things are done, thinking, “There’s a better way,” figuring out what the better way is, and implementing it. This is usually done toward other people’s way of doing things, but it’s a good feeling to turn it inward and fix your own life, too, even if it’s in small ways.

In other ramblings, I generally find that I can separate in my mind life in the U.S. with life here, and likewise, Spanish from English. It didn’t feel weird to be in the U.S. in May, because it was sort of like I turned on the part of my brain that expects all food to come out at the same time at a restaurant and partakes of public drinking fountains and off the part that boils tap water for five minutes and thinks nothing of streets drenched in animal poop. I also find that I can generally turn off the Spanish when I’m speaking English, unless it’s one of the following scenarios:

1. Spanish just does a phrase more efficiently than English does (i.e. “aprovechar” instead of “to take advantage of,” “demorar” instead of “to take a long time.”)

2. There isn’t a good English word for the concept (i.e. “campo”)

3. There is an English word for the concept, but I’ve had way more conversations about the concept in Spanish than in English, and therefore the Spanish word comes to mind first (i.e. “chacra” instead of “field,” “charla” instead of “informal lesson.”)

4. The Spanish word is just cool sounding (i.e. “bacán” instead of “great,” “fufurufu” instead of “person who talks a lot”)

5. I say the word so incredibly often in Spanish that I sort of forget that it’s not a word in English, too (i.e. “derepente” instead of “maybe,” “algo así” instead of “something like that”)

However, I recently had an experience in which all my mind-separation was blown to shreds. I was reading the back of a packet of apple cider mix my mom sent me, and it said, “Just add hot water. No need to boil, straight from the tap is fine!” or something like that. I stared at that packet of hot apple cider mix for a good three minutes trying to figure it out. It was like I understood that you don’t have to boil your tap water for health reasons in the U.S., but what did they mean by hot tap water? Did they mean you could mix the tap water with the mix first, and then find a way to heat it? It took me those three minutes of pure concentration to remember that in some parts of the world, you can obtain both cold and hot water from a sink.

I shared my hot apple cider with Humberto, and he enjoyed it, but not nearly as much as he enjoyed last week’s gastronomical cultural exchange. I strongly recommend that if you are ever bored in a Third World country, you find some Pop Rocks and share them with your friends. It is endless amusement for all parties involved. Jaime had sent me two installments of Pop Rocks that I had sort of forgotten about, and then I thought, “Man, if you’d never had Pop Rocks before, they would blow your mind.” So I told Humberto and his brother that I wanted to share my American candy with them to thank them for all the work they’d done on my room, but that they were supposed to put them on their tongue and not swallow them immediately. Confusion gave way to surprise, which gave way to nervous giggling, which gave way to stating the obvious (“¡Explota!”), which gave way to appreciation (“Bacán”), which gave way to scientific exploration (“¿Qué tiene?”), which gave way to lament (“No tenemos algo así acá.”) I’m considering producing a video montage of Peruvians trying Pop Rocks for the first time. I have a lot of spare time.

Volunteer, Interrupted

2007-07-20T08:06:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-07-12T16:34:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-07-05T08:14:00.000-07:00

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.

June 15th, 2007

2007-06-22T16:16:00.000-07:00

(A note to those people who aren't those two people I know have me on RSS feed: a downside of not having internet at site is that sometimes I have to post more than one blog entry at one time. Like now. Please note. An additional downside is the utter futility of trying to remember semi-forgotten information without Google. I nearly destroyed my soul this week trying to remember the name "Medea.")

I maintain that the hands-down most annoying thing about living in Peru (putting aside, of course, anything directly related to its under-developedness. The theme of this post will not be “OMG the water is, like, soooo gross!”) is how people wait in line. Or, to put it clearly, how they don’t. I’m not talking about the formal lines, like the ones for the bank or free Pachamanca, in which people enforce the line like it’s their job, shouting “COLA!” if you step more than an centimeter out of the shadow of the person in front of you seeking some semblance of personal space; no, those are fine. I’m talking about any time when people have to informally wait for some commodity, and the “line” becomes a “bunch,” “COLA!” becomes a suddenly meek gringa mumbling “but I was here first…” and the world goes to hell.

Yesterday I had to wait in line to see the mayor to clear up some funding issue for our girls’ leadership camp, and so I went and sat in his secretary-monitored waiting room. In the middle of me waiting 10 minutes or so, the mayor went to a meeting, so everybody else who was waiting left. I didn’t have anything else to do at the moment, so I just sat and waited the half-hour for him to return, reading a March issue of The Economist. After I’d waited that time, I glanced in the office and realized the mayor had returned, and, recognizing my undeniable first place in line, I stood up and asked the secretary is I could go in.

Bad move. I should have just snuck in and pounced. Some guy who had just entered the office maybe 45 seconds before heard me and apparently thought, “Oh, the mayor’s back? Convenient!” and totally hijacked my spot, not to mention the spots of the three people who were now waiting behind me. I gave him an “AY!” and the meanest glare I could muster, to which he responded with a pout, and aerial finger pinch, and an “Un ratito.” Oh, you just need a couple minutes with the mayor? Perhaps to discuss some urgent budgeting matter? Why, that makes you completely different from me! Because, see, I was going to go into the mayor’s office and read him the entirety of Ulysses in Pig Latin. Go ahead, then. Glad we cleared that up.

Perhaps the worst part was, when I looked incredulously at the secretary, she gave me a “What can you do” look and accompanying shrug. She should be able to do better. She might have learned this from me, in addressing the next guy who tried to cut me in line when I was waiting inside the office. He got a firm “NO,” and quite possibly a pantomimed shove in the chest; rage clouds the memory.

Waiting for things is something people (and therefore, I) have to do a lot here, what with a pretty across-the-board level of inefficiency, and the way in which people do (or…don’t) it blows my mind. It’s not just me, either, I know I’ve seen Peruvians piss each other off in lines. I know this is one thing I will never get used to, because I will never have the basic sense of entitlement required to do what that guy did yesterday. I do, however, need to find a way to contain my rage about it. Thank goodness for blogs with disclaimers.

June 12th, 2007

2007-06-22T15:07:00.000-07:00

Deep thoughts for this week: Boredom and bad moods are correlated, as are activity and good moods, but the causation can go either way. I used to think that if I wasn’t feeling well, the cure was activity, but that’s not exactly the case, because I’m not likely to enjoy the activity if I’m in a bad mood. When I’m in a good mood, however, I enjoy pretty much any activity at site. I now find that when I’m in a bad mood, I might just be in the mood to do “boring” things. I put “boring” in quotation marks because I’m referring to the solitary, non-active type activities that are unlikely to appear on any Tri-Annual Report.

Case in point: today I woke up in a good mood and spent the rest of the morning running between the health center and the municipality writing, stamping, and signing (but not delivering, it has come to my attention that there’s someone who does that for me) letters to all the people Roger and I invited to a meeting this Thursday to tell them the meeting has been postponed, and I LOVED it. In contrast, when I had just returned from the U.S. and was in a bad mood (a subtle one that I did not want to admit to myself I was in), all the activities I wrote about before (the barbecue, sports day, parade, French ambassador visit, etc.) amused me, quite a bit sometimes, but did not alleviate my underlying emotional state. As such, I read two books (The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Tipping Point, both outstanding), worked toward the perfection of my homemade hummus and tomato sauce, watched both Buffy Summers and Veronica Mars live out their junior years of high school (thanks to a trip to the bootleg DVD market in Lima, I now have material for all my varied television-watching moods, from “I want to watch a small blonde high school girl fight evil with superpowers” to “I want to watch a small blonde high school girl fight evil without superpowers”), and poco a poco I was doing better.

I need to chill out my parenthetical usage, holy crap.

But anyway, the point is the Peace Corps service is inherently an emotional roller coaster, no matter what you fill it with, so I might as well ride it out when it’s going well but not get too down on myself for the occasional bad mood/period of inactivity. Things are looking on the up and up for me with my soon-to-be main project, GALS (Local Sustainable Environmental Management) Certification, to be discussed later, so daytime boredom is becoming less of an issue.

Atomic power makes me, Molly Howard, proud to be an Asian-American.

2007-06-08T15:51:00.000-07:00

Man. If you were for some reason on a South American scavenger hunt and there was an item on a list (presumably between “Stray dog” and “T-shirt in English that says something absurd”) that read “Bored Peace Corps Volunteer,” look no further than Santo Domingo, my friend. There is just nothing to do these days. Yesterday I showed up to the office unsolicited and finished my final report, which kept me amused from, say, 10-11 a.m., at which point I returned to my house and read for the rest of the afternoon, as I had been doing until I left my house at 10 a.m.

This, I suppose, the problem with working in an office where only about 10% of the work done actually has anything to do with you and your project. The rest of the non-trash project work in the Department of Health and Sanitation pertains to things like cleaning the health center, fumigation against bugs whose bites result in flesh-eating wounds, and visiting the campo for various administrative purposes. I’m generally only invited to campo trips when the guys in my office are feeling particularly charitable or I particularly pushy, as I hike at a rate approximately half theirs, which is mildly frustrating for all involved.

Just as I am complaining about the lack of activity around here, a parade, THE VERY QUINTESSENCE OF FUN, passed by outside my window. It appeared to be kids playing poorly- or perhaps not-at-all-tuned brass instruments parading in front of kids holding a Virgin Mary statue. Well, nothing out of the ordinary there.

(several hours later)

I could not have been more wrong about that parade. Except that I am still pretty certain no one has ever tuned those instruments. It turned out to be a parade of one of the high schools celebrating International Environment Day (Earth Day? Was that not in March/April?), complete with costuming of all varieties. What I assumed to be a Mary statue being carried around was in fact two children dressed as Incan royalty, here to give the authorities the what-for for degrading their land. Several kids were dressed as trees, generally with signs that said “Help! Don’t cut me down!” One kid was coated in green body paint and had a fake snake wrapped around his neck; he was representing “The Nature of Santo Domingo.” One kid came just dressed as Spider-Man. I think he missed the second half of the memo. (It was vaguely reminiscent of that scene in Drop Dead Gorgeous with the girl with the large ball of twine on her head. “I think I kinda misunderstood the assignment.”)

The signs the kids carried were pretty cute, too. They mostly read things like, “Don’t contaminate the water!” or “Don’t cut down the trees!” but my favorite read, “If you mistreat nature, she will avenge.” Ooo. It might have in reality read, “If you mistreat nature, it will avenge,” but no matter. The “ella” could have really gone either way. So every authority figure there made a speech, including this girl. I had just kind of wandered downstairs from my office to see what was going on, and was immediately swooped up and put in front of 200 high school kids to make a speech about the environment. I think I said something to the effect of all environmental problems begin small, and everyone can do something, carry your trash in your pockets until you see a trash can, etc. It was inspiring. I think only 100 of the kids either started giggling, covering their faces, or rolling their eyes.

But the most notable thing about that event was that I did nothing to organize it. The high school organized an entire environmental-themed event, and I, the environmental Volunteer, did nothing more than show up. I’m not saying that a parade is an indicator of the community’s level of environmental stewardship, but at least it’s on some people’s minds.

Since things have been dull around here, I will describe two phenomena that show just how “acostumbrada” I am that would ordinarily be insignificant and go unmentioned.
First, the two-year-old who lives next door, Erica, is no longer afraid of me. Quite the opposite, now. She runs into the street whenever she sees me (which is a lot) and sings “Señorita!” and gives me a hug. It’s cute. It’s a little four-time-a-day upper, especially when most of the other kids younger than, say, 14, just stare at me and don’t saludar back.

The background on this second point is that everyone is REALLY formal with each other in the sierra. You can work with someone for months and still be on the formal “usted” terms, depending on how proper they want to be. No one calls you the informal “tú” without getting to know you pretty well first, and sometimes not even then. As of late, I’ve seen people that look only vaguely familiar in the street who answer my “Hola” with a “Cómo estás.” Lo and behold, unexpected tú form, with people I didn’t even know I was friends with!

So I think I’m going to try to rest today, sleep off this cold I’m coming down with, and try to drown out both the TV coming from one adjacent room and radio from the other. I am so tired of the bulla, that is for sure.

A peanut is neither a pea nor a nut, it's a legume.

2007-06-08T15:48:00.000-07:00

So, I went to the United States. And then, as I feared I might find really difficult to do, I came back to Santo Domingo. I don’t really feel like writing about the U.S. because it was a really good visit and I’d rather just remember it poco a poco instead of rehashing it all in one entry.

Due to absurd travel difficulties that ended finally in the theft of my digital camera from my checked luggage and our day-late arrival in Lima instead of Guayaquil, Andrew and I spent some tourist time in Lima before heading back. It was really nice; for as long as we all spent living just 45 minutes outside of downtown Lima, we never really spent a lot of time there. Our short jaunts in the city after organic gardening class were generally spent at Pizza Hut, which is something of a gourmet restaurant in these parts. I want to plug the photography exhibit on Sendero Luminoso at Museo de la Nación for anyone who might be in Lima at some point and wouldn’t mind trudging through a mildly depressing all-Spanish exhibit. The ancient art in the rest of the museum in okay, but the Sendero exhibit is really powerful.

I was in a little funk when I first got back to site, as I expected to be (other Volunteers had warned be it would take about a week to feel right again at site). I felt better, though, when I called Andrew today and he said he went through the same thing. Phone calls with Andrew are always a reminder of the fact that we live in a developing country. Both our phones are rural, and therefore the delay between us talking is a full five seconds. There’s a lot of “No, you go first,” and “What were you going to say?” It also costs a sol a minute. Therefore, I only do it once every week and a half or so, but it’s always worth it.

Luckily, there were enough special events at site this week to force me to get out of my room and put on a good face. Monday was a town barbecue, in which I think I accidentally went on a date with a guy old enough to be my father (hence me not noticing it was perhaps a date) who works at the bank. When Rachel informed me that I may or may not be facing a date, though, I ameliorated the situation by walking into the bank and announcing that I had just had a wonderful visit introducing my fiancée to my parents. This was highly effective. (Once again, Andrew and I are not actually engaged except in situations where it is convenient for me.)

So I went to the dance that followed the barbecue, drank some beer, and danced some huayno with the teachers. Huayno is a traditional dance of the Peruvian sierra that is, luckily for me, incredibly easy to perform. It involves, well, skipping in place, and yet people are always amazed that I can do it. It is also a good calf workout.

I laid low Tuesday, and then Wednesday the first counselor of the French Embassy in Lima came to visit, along with two other important people who had had a hand in financing a livestock project in Santo Domingo’s centro poblado (like a caserío, but bigger). He was fun. He was born in Spain and understandably impatient with Rachel’s and my Spanish (we think) and therefore spoke nothing but English with us all day. This was on some level rude to Peruvians, since we do all speak Spanish, albeit in our case lisplessly, but it was mildly amusing for us. We were sampling manjar blanco, a delicious Peruvian buttery sweet dessert spread, when he said to us, “This isn’t going to be on Weight Watcher’s anytime soon!” All the high school kids performed dances in a welcoming ceremony, which was really cool to watch. One part was like half dance half silent theater, and almost all dances involved teenage boys swinging machetes. The teacher explained that the machete dances do not signify violence, but I didn’t listen to the end of the sentence that would have explained what else machetes signify, so I imagine they are just a way to give high school boys an incentive to dance in public.

It was a wake-up call that I was no longer in a country that overly concerns itself with children’s self-esteem, however, when all the rest of the afternoon the ambassadors complained that the dances went too long.

Thursday was my visit from my friend Ella and a big group of people from her site. This was fun for me. I’m never a bigger fan of my site than when other people visit. We had a big meeting to present the trash project to them. The people I work with drove me insane with their overuse of the “we,” as in “when we started this project two years ago,” as none of the people who were at the meeting were anywhere near the project two years ago. It was entirely in the hands of my Volunteer predecessor and his friend who was let go when the Municipality took over the project just FOUR MONTHS AGO. Ugh, I get so mad at the politics here. I mean, squibble all you want around election time, but don’t take credit for a Volunteer’s work. Don’t say it was the “voluntad political” of the mayor that got the project started. It was the voluntad de Ryan. Such is government work, I suppose.

Friday I was invited to the godmother of volleyball for the female half of a class of high school juniors. Bring my godchildren count up to 9, thank you. “Godmother” is a nice way of saying “sponsor” or “person who buys us a volleyball,” but that was okay, since I figured out beforehand that this was expected of me. I did not figure out this from the girl who asked me to be the godmother, however, as her explanation of my responsibilities was, “Don’t worry about it, you can dress normal.” Oh, to be fifteen. The ceremony was a shitshow, complete with the running and lighting of an Olympic torch, a hanging of the Olympic flag in the plaza, and a parade up the hill to the rival high school and back. A lot of Volunteers think it is entirely strange that my town has two high schools that are located on the same street, quite close to one another, that still manage to be rivals. This mirrors my own high school experience remarkably, so I understand. The colors of the schools are even the same, green vs. maroon. Then we took pictures with the queens of each of the grades, as well as the girl that represented the entire school in a dress I would have worn to a Bat Mitzvah in 1997, obviously uncomfortable 3-inch heels, and a sash that read “Miss Deportes.”

So yeah, an action-packed week, not something I can usually expect. This week will probably be a lot more sitting around in the office, looking for something to do, after tomorrow, in which I am attempting homemade hummus at Ingeniera Luz’s house. This week I successfully made some sort of cheesy onion tomato lentil dish, so things are on the up and up for me in the legume family.

Vaccination-giving Mormon miners who can get you to Iraq

2007-05-12T17:51:00.000-07:00

Well, I leave Friday for Piura; Monday for Guayaquil, Ecuador; the wee hours of Tuesday for the United States; and will be in Detroit Tuesday afternoon. My brother is getting married, and Andrew and I are going on a quick jaunt home to wish Mark and Kristin well, see our families and friends, and eat the food that we have so sorely been missing for the past eight months. Peruvian food and I get along fine generally, but there are some things that are just not easily approximated by anything in northern Peru (that I can afford, anyway). They include:
- bagels and cream cheese
- sushi
- tofu, particularly a Red Hot Lovers tofu pop, which this blog indicates I have been craving since last October
- waffles/pancakes/French toast and maple syrup (they had this at Semana Santa in Máncora, I ate it every morning)
- chocolate chip cookies
- really good pizza
- hamburgers that don’t sort of taste like meatballs
- meatloaf

Not that I intend to eat every single thing off that list in my 7 days in the Midwest. I would settle for the top five. I will be back at site at the latest on the 26th, as there is a party to attend here that night.

It’s Humberto’s birthday today! The chicken has already been killed and everything. Happy birthday, host brother with whom I am on permanent usted terms!

If I haven’t mentioned the trip home, I think it is because I have been trying not to think about it too much so that I wouldn’t get incapacitatingly excited too soon before the trip. I did indeed prevent this from happening. The thing I was most nervous about, the reason I didn’t decide to go to the wedding before leaving in September, was the fear that I would get on the plane thinking, “Whatever happens, it’s okay, it’s only for eight months.” I wanted to at least start the journey not knowing how long I would be gone. The last week or two at site have been rough sometimes, but I think Santo Domingo and I are going to leave on good terms. I think two weeks away, in which I am constantly explaining what I do and what I like about it, will be good for my ganas upon returning.

I broke up these 15 days at site with a quick trip 2,000 feet up the mountain to my friend Casey’s site in Chalaco. Peruvians generally, by my standards, overstate the coldness of climates, but Chalaco really was a lot colder than here, as I have been told a million times. It blew my mind to see my breath; it has been over a year since that happened. Chalaco is a lot like Sto. Domingo, but slightly more campo, if you will. They have kind of the same chaotic scene of development projects and two replacement Volunteers as well, though. It was wonderful to spend some time with Casey before heading out. We were almost at the same level of excitement, as her parents come into Peru the same day I get to the U.S.

I started asking my Peruvian friends what they want from the U.S. As the U.S. is in their minds a wonderland of any consumer good they could possibly dream of, their eyes usually get wide and they can’t come up with anything when I ask. In that case, Michigan t-shirts, all around!

I met a guy on the bus back from Chalaco who desperately wanted to immigrate to the U.S. so he could go to Iraq. It was a weird conversation. He initially didn’t talk to me because he thought I was a Mormon missionary, which I thought was legitimate. Once he did start talking, though, he was convinced I could help him in his mission to get to Iraq (and then back to the U.S., where the benefits of citizenship would be much more available to him as a veteran). I tried to explain that I really don’t have anything to do with the army, and I only know one person who’s ever gone to Iraq, and he’s already back and, so I have heard, embittered. I did mention, before I understood where the conversation was going, that I had heard there were a large number of non-citizens in the armed forces in the U.S., to which he widened his eyes, nodded vigorously, and pointed to himself. Not helpful, Alyssa.

Today I gave a charla with Juan, the leader of the trash collectors, to the preschoolers about how to separate the trash. That wasn’t supposed to be the only goal of the charla, they were supposed to come out of it caring about the environment and understanding on a deeper level why they separate the organic from the inorganic trash, but YOU try getting four-year-olds to care about anything but snacks (the charla came with a snack, it was the best part). Nonetheless, it went well. Maybe the cutest part was at the end, we did a non-competitive relay race (YOU try getting four-year-olds to care which line finishes throwing away their trash first) where they ran, each with both a piece of inorganic and organic trash, and had to throw it away in the right place before they came back. The whole charla almost had a horrible beginning, as I went in to the preschool and several kids began crying or hiding behind their teachers. I heard the teacher tell one of the kids, “She’s not going to vaccinate you! She just wants to talk!” I responded with an impassioned speech to each class about how I could not think of a thing I would rather do less than stick children with needles and that I hate needles more than anything on earth (with the exception of poorly-sorted trash). This is true. I estimate that I have the fear of needles of no fewer than 7 whiny four-year-olds combined.

At least the children didn’t think we were miners, which has also recently happened, or so I hear. Casey’s host mom was in Santo Domingo for a meeting and heard a campesino say as Rachel and I walked by, “There are the gringos who are here to steal the riches of Peru.” I have to laugh at this, first because being mistaken for a miner in South America is sort of an “if you don’t laugh you cry” scenario, and second because the conversation Rachel and I were probably having was much less,
“Hey, want to steal the riches of Peru today?”
“Yeah, I’m down,”
and much more,
“Hey, want to watch ‘Friends’ later? I’ll make popcorn on the stove!”
“Neat! I hope we have enough money for orange soda!”

Oh, white people. We do it all.

April 28th

2007-05-06T08:02:00.000-07:00

Today was a stellar day, in the gastronomical sense, but other senses too, I suppose. It started out okay, I went to go teach my last English class, for which I had prepared nothing (intending to call it a “review”), only to discover the school door was locked, decided to do nothing to remedy the situation, left a note apologizing to the, oh, 3 students who might have shown up that day, and called my mom to wish her happy birthday. Then I hung out in the weavers’ office until I got up the ganas to go down to Juan’s chacra, where I was promised lettuce awaited me. When I walked past his house on the way, he was standing there with his horse Espártaco. Horses are rare here; since you can only make horses carry so much crap, donkeys are much preferred. I told him I was on my way down to his farm to get lettuce (I am allowed to go whenever I want to pick vegetables, it is beyond fantastic), when he pointed to the horse, a cute chubby gray creature, and asked if I wanted to ride him down to the farm. I couldn’t remember the last time I rode a horse, but it was definitely no later than the dude ranch swim team trip sophomore year of high school. I thought the prospect of riding a horse through town, and moreover, through the ankle-deep mud on the way down to the farm, was a pretty sweet idea, so Spartacus I rode.

People stared at me on my horse, but honestly, people are always staring at me, so who really knows if the horse had anything to do with it at all. I fear this type of insensitivity will follow me to the U.S. for some reason, like I’ll walk through a mall naked and think people are staring at me because I’m white. Señora Teo, for one, shouted at me that I looked guapa on the horse. Anyway, there weren’t stirrups, which was just sort of confusing. Luckily, Juan told to lean back when we went downhill, or else disaster might have occurred. So I got down to the farm, dismounted in a not graceful fashion (again. No stirrups), and picked vegetables. I then walked back into town, finished vegetable shopping, and ran to the weavers’ office to tell Rachel it was salad day.

If my last entry read like a book report, this one will read like a cookbook.

So Rachel and I had a rice-less lunch (which are few and far between in Santo Domingo), a salad with lettuce, spinach, radish, tomato, red pepper, cucumber, oil and vinegar, and sprinkled cheese. It was delicious.

But the real triumph was dinner. After I spent the afternoon working more or less diligently on my final report, I got up to make fajitas with squash, red pepper, and onion. I even made homemade salsa with tomato, onion, a very small amount of a very spicy Peruvian pepper called rocoto, corn, garlic, lime, and salt. I had no idea making salsa was so easy. Juan came over and ate the fruits of his (farming) and my (cooking) labor with us. I was proud of myself for entertaining. I don’t even own three plates. Rachel ate off a Tupperware lid. It was so satisfying, partially because I managed to make a delicious dinner in my kitchen (which is really just a 6-foot table with a stove, three shelves, and a dish drying rack), but also because almost all of the ingredients were bought, and potentially grown, locally (except, admittedly, the tortillas. Whatever, it could have been over rice and still been delicious).

I don’t feel like I’m cheating myself out of some level of authenticity of living in Peru by making myself semi-American meals when I feel like I’m using the same ingredients that are available to people in town. I also don’t feel bad when I share what I make with Peruvians, though this can be heartbreaking, because a lot of people just won’t try new food. When I made scrambled eggs with green pepper, tomato, onion, and cheese, Humberto’s cousin refused to eat it, despite the fact that Peruvians eat four of those five ingredients ALL THE TIME. It just looked new, and that is unappetizing to a lot of people. He tried to disguise the fact that he was refusing to eat it by taking small bites of it, and then immediately taking large bites of boiled green banana. He couldn’t fool me, though. I’ve employed that tactic too many times, often, ironically enough, to force down boiled green banana. It is definitely not going to be one of my priorities to change people’s vegetable consumption patterns; though it’s a worthwhile goal, I just don’t have the ganas. Cooking vegetable-based dishes more of a personal pleasure for me, one I didn’t know I would enjoy so much before I got here and vegetable-based dishes seemed to be in short supply. Rachel declared the fajita “like the best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth,” so I think I did okay. We’ll ascertain this when we have identical fajitas for dinner tomorrow night.

In which I have a half-hour one-sided conversation entirely about the weather

2007-04-23T08:40:00.000-07:00

The rainy season, which has been going on since I arrived in Santo Domingo five months ago, is at last letting up. This is good in a lot of ways; first and foremost, it makes hiking and exploring the campo a pleasant and less rushed undertaking. Second, I have been told again and again that this is a totally different town when the rain lets up. There are more parties, as people are generally in better spirits. Third, transportation out is more dependable, quick, frequent, and inexpensive when it’s not raining. I have to admit, though, that I will miss the rain. For one, it was the one stable thing about my first months here. No matter what kind of work I was doing, who I was working with, how my living situation was, what I was eating, or how I felt, there was always rain starting at about 2 pm, going till about 5 pm, and then starting up again around 7 pm, ending at some point during the night, and then I would wake up to a sunny, warm 7 am. This has been the pattern, with little variation, since December. Sometimes the rain would just last all afternoon, without relent. Those were my favorite afternoons.

I’ve been told that I got lucky, that this was a particularly easy winter, that sometimes, it rains all day and all night the entire season. I haven’t really looked into the veracity of this statement, nor have I figured out the El Niño mechanics in this part of Peru. I was pretty sure this was an El Niño year, which would have meant heavier rains and possible evacuation, but that was not the case. People in town have told me that “el fenómeno” only happened in the jungle and central sierra this year, not in this part of the Andes. I realized quickly that when you discuss El Niño here, you have to say “el fenómeno,” or else it sounds like you’re saying something like, “Was the boy in the jungle this year?”

The great thing about those rainy afternoons in particular was I felt like I had nature’s permission to sit in my room and do whatever I felt like from 2 pm on. If I ever started to feel guilty about this, I would just take on a more Peruvian way of considering it. “Well, I can’t go out. I’ll catch the frío.” Which was silly of me, because the “cold” weather that everyone complains about here, I put in quotation marks, as I lived in Michigan my entire life.
One of my favorite conversations here is the “How cold is Michigan?” one. My general way to describe it is, “The winters last from November to April and it’s rarely above 0 degrees. There is ice everywhere.” (A lot of campo people use “ice” to mean “snow,” as both are rare. It’s like the first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Usually the distinction is “ice that falls.” I roll with it.) One time a man from the campo looked awed, as they often do, and said, “Wow, you must live at about 4,000 meters for it to be that cold.” I was really confused for a minute, and then I realized I hadn’t explained that I didn’t live in the mountains, that it was along the latitude, not temperature, gradient that Michigan gets its frío.

Onto other topics that are not universally signs of bad conversation. I think one of the things that people appreciate about the “simpler life” that Peace Corps provides is the possibility to really develop a hobby or two that might otherwise remain latent, and reading has been mine. It’s nice not to consider myself among the majority of Americans who say like they would read for pleasure, if only they had the time and/or energy. I made a list of everything I’ve read since I got to Peru today, and realized that if I’ve read an average of very nearly 2 books for every month I’ve been here. (It wouldn’t be “very nearly,” but rather “exactly,” if I counted the Mary Higgins Clark book I read when I was sick and there are nothing else around. I refuse to do so.) They are as follows:

- Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking
- Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
- Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato
- Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony (The irony of counting this but not Mary Higgins Clark has not escaped me.)
- Koren Zailckas, Smashed
- E.M. Forster, Howards End
- Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
- Yann Martel, The Life of Pi
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird
- Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains
- Levitt and Dubner, Freakonomics
- Mario Vargas Llosa, Death in the Andes

It’s a good list. I find it rare to read that many consecutive books and not think, “Well that one wasn’t worth the effort,” but that’s how this list is. To be fair, I felt that way through 85% of A Farewell to Arms, but I came around at the end. (Not “in the end” but “at the end.” I just liked the tragic ending, and not really the rest of the book.) If I had to pick three that I thought everyone should read, I guess it would be The Undertaking, Kavalier & Clay, and Jailbird. And if you’re not feeling Vonnegut at this point in your life, then replace Jailbird with One Hundred Years of Solitude, which you should have read already anyway.

Books started but not completed as of yet:
- William Gibson, Neuromancer. As Dan put it, “You’re either in a cyberpunk phase or you’re not.” Or, as Brett put it in the letter which accompanied the book, “Though reading about megalopolises and the future in the campo might be jarring.” Either way, it seemed like it would be something I would enjoy in a different state of mind. (I really, really appreciate that spell check thinks nothing of “megalopolises.”)
- Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel. I started this, and then I lost it in a cab 60 pages later. I got through the part about Peru, though, so I feel moderately satisfied. I probably won’t bother to revisit it.
- Edward Rutherford, London. I started it with Andrew in the hospital (if that sounds pathetic, consider the fact that I had an IV in one hand and wasn’t much for holding a 1,000-page paperback), and then the day I got out of the hospital, I got four books in the mail (Howards End, Ragtime, Smashed, and Artemis Fowl). I started on the four books, as I wanted to be able to thank the people who sent them. I’ll be revisiting this after I finish Ragtime.

Books on my list to purchase and then read:
- A biography of Ché Guevara. I could use some context for all the bereted tattoos and variable fluorescent memorabilia in this country.
- A history of the Sendero Luminoso guerilla movement.
- A heavily footnoted study Bible. Hey, I’ve got the time.

My last point about books is just that I really like reading books that people have sent, especially if they’re on their favorites list. It’s a good way of trans-equatorial bonding. And if the idea of getting other people to catch on to your favorite books is appealing, the Volunteer book-passing tradition is strong here in PC-Peru. Email me if you want to take part in this apparent pledge drive.

Highlights of this week:
- Giving an ad-libbed speech about the importance of nutrition and eating local foods in front of 200 people, including the PTA-type organism and NGO leaders from Lima.
- Realizing the ladies in my town will defend my and/or Andrew’s honor, possibly not to the death, but certainly to the point of awkward, abrupt conversation endings. As it happened, a guy who was talking to Sra. Charo and me asked, in a loaded fashion if you ask me, if I was “single or married.” I couldn’t get a word out past “single but” before Charo shouted, “Single with a fiancée! AND YOU’RE MARRIED.” (It’s a rough translation, but I think Sra. Charo thinks I am engaged, and situations like this constantly prove to me there is no need to correct her.)
- Working on my initial baseline report really hard, as I should have been doing for awhile. I have nothing witty to say about that.
- How many of the initial 25 kids I did the river cleanup with attended my second and third English class? Yeah, 5. And one of them was Sra. Charo’s daughter, who I know was parentally forced to go. The good news about this is I can officially say that English classes aren’t successful in Santo Domingo and are not a good use of my time, and I’m off the hook for the rest of my service. And if I ever get sucked into doing them again, I’ll know that “The Hokey-Pokey” is a tad too complicated for most kids to catch on to, and maybe “Heads Shoulders Knees and Toes” is the way to go. “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” worked like a charm, though.

It's the circle of life...blog entry.

2007-04-23T08:39:00.000-07:00

I have just returned to my room from the back of the house, where there are new residents, a mother with her 2-day-old baby. The prospect of living with, but not within audible range of, a baby this adorable is pretty exciting in my world. The mother, Flor’s friend Maria who lives in the campo and came into town last week to “give light” at the Centro de Salud in Santo Domingo, says she will stay up to a week. My life perpetually needs more babies (that I only have to deal with for short periods of time), so I am happy.

In some sort of trite, oft-cited cycle, this week was also my first experience with Peruvian funerals. It is probably inevitable that all Volunteers end up going to a funeral or two in town (we are here two years, after all), but it came as a surprise that the first one I would attend would be so early in my service, of a woman I knew fairly well, and under incredibly tragic circumstances. The city councilwoman in charge of education, Madeleyne, was out hiking with some friends and fell off a cliff on Saturday. She was only 28. I’d known her through work; we’d attended a lot of the same meetings, including the meeting I had with my bosses here. My APCD had even suggested that I bring her to the Peace Corps project design workshop later this year to start work on an environmental education program in the schools. I’d looked up to her, as was young, female, unmarried, and in a position of authority in the municipality. So that was intense.

Funerals are decidedly one on those things that differ culture to culture, and I’m not sure it occurred to any of my friends that I simply had no idea what to do. Flor told me I should go out to her parents’ house in the campo and “acompañar” the family for awhile. That struck me initially as a very personal thing to do, but as it turned out, that’s what everyone in town does. There were literally 500 people over the course of a day in and around their house. When we walked in (I went with some guys from the municipality, including Humberto, with whom I’d been working that day), we greeted her father. I think the only reason people know what to say to grieving parents is they’ve heard it before as a matter of custom, but it occurred to me the second I walked in the door that I had absolutely no idea what to say to him in Spanish, which struck me as appropriate. I settled for a silent hug, mostly afraid “I’m sorry” would translate too literally, etc.

Yesterday was the big to-do. The procession started at her high school, where the principal and a couple professors did eulogies, walked down the street to the mayor’s house, and then into the Municipality for more eulogies, to the church for Mass, and then up to the cemetery. The thing that still amazes me about rural Peru is all of these places were within 5 minutes walking of each other. Luckily, I found one of my friends, a elementary school teacher about my age, who told me to just follow her and do whatever she did. The Mass was nice, although I had the distinct impression the priest was saying her name “Magdelene” with a g, no one said anything. I said all the prayers in English. People seemed to find this acceptable.

I really have nothing profound to say about Madeleyne’s death, but in the interests of a not particularly morbid transition (i.e. “funeral” to “iPod” in two sentences), I note at this point that I will not be discussing it for the rest of the entry.

The one great thing for me that came of the last couple days was the reunion with my favorite campo woman, who once sat next to me on the bus and asked for half my iPod headphones so she could listen to “the music of my land.” Let it be noted that she found the opening chords of Fruit Bats’ “Canyon Girl” acceptable. The day of the funeral she brought a bag of fruit (bananas, oranges, and chirimoyas, delicious native Peruvian fruits that have the somewhat apt English translation of “custard apples”) from her chacra just for me! I was profoundly appreciative. I also determined from her, as she was looking through my pictures, that the word “simpático,” taught since 6th grade Spanish to mean “kind,” might in fact mean “handsome.” Unless, of course, it is just terribly obvious that Andrew Cornelius is a nice person just by the looks of him, I stand corrected.

I have started working on putting together the pieces of my final report on Santo Domingo for Peace Corps. It is turning into more work than I initially thought it would be. Santo Domingo is a complicated place. Just the history of development efforts in town is a 6-page chart in the municipality’s strategic plan for development. The history begins in 1985, so sadly, Peace Corps’s brief presence in the ‘70s goes unaccounted for. I think the report will turn out well and will be something I’ll be glad to have in my portfolio, as well as a good resource for a replacement Volunteer, should one follow in my place. Two interesting facts I learned in working on the report today were that, one, Santo Domingo did not have phone service until 1996 (other notable dates: a highway that could be crossed by non-donkey vehicles came in 1969, bus service with a permanent station in Santo Domingo on that highway in 1992, 24-hour electricity sometime during Ryan and Lilian’s service...so within the last two years), and two, that the library of the agropecuario high school has an awesome collection of stone and ceramic artifacts from the region.

In other news, I have come upon a feeling toward Santo Domingo best described as “cozy.” Even this weekend, when I wasn’t feeling well due to some antibiotic side effects, I still felt just fine to be here. I have those flashes when I wake up and open my eyes to see my room of, “Oh, I’m in My Bedroom” (/kitchen/office/library/bathroom/living room/laundromat). I’m starting to feel more or less (sometimes more, sometimes less) at home here.

Actually March 29th

2007-04-04T09:05:00.000-07:00

Well. Easter vacation starts in six days, when we (Andrew, Tessa, Melissa, and I) will be headed to the beach in Piura for a few days. Some of you may have noticed that I did, in fact, just return from the beach a mere two weeks ago. That is just how this month is. I am having trouble getting my ganas to do a lot of things I could be doing at site right now, I think because I’m only ending up with a little over a week in site; it’s hard to even catch my breath before it’s time to leave again. I have my river cleanup and my first English class scheduled for this Saturday and Sunday. I need to plan the charla for water appreciation (which should not be that hard, World Water Day was not long ago and can be easily mushed thematically), and I just can’t inspire myself to do it. I also need to plan my first English class, which doesn’t include more than teaching greetings, numbers, and “One Little, Two Little, Three Little Indians.” Unfortunately, I cannot, for the life of me, remember the words to “One Little, Two Little, Three Little Indians.” Seriously. If that sounds silly, try to sing it in your head right now. I’ll bet well over half of you won’t get past the title lyrics. I guess I will have to pay the sol-per-minute for a five-second-delay phone call to Tessa to have her sing it for me. It was her idea to begin with.

Every morning (except Sundays) that I’m in Piura, when I walk past the bank, there is a mind-boggling number of people in line. It is truly mind-blowing, if only because I can never figure out for the life of me what they are all doing there. All government employees (including teachers, I think) are on direct deposit. There are ATMs. What are all these people doing in 50-yard line outside the bank every single morning? Well, Tessa and I became two of those people Monday morning. So I guess that answers about .02% of my question for that day. We were in the final stages of the stressful project of planning Easter vacation, which involved depositing money in the hotel’s bank account. Because that is apparently how things work here. The line actually wasn’t that bad (beyond the normal stress I have waiting in lines in this country. I swear, one of the greatest things about developed countries, most of them anyway, is the concept of personal space. That and free ice water at restaurants), plus there was this sweet bonus at the end where we walked past the “special needs” line, which turned out to be just mothers with babies and old people who wanted to sit in line. Just to give you an image of how vicious Peruvian lines are, we witnessed one old person accuse another of being “not special needs enough.” It’s like a freaking episode of South Park. But anyway, it was quite the home stretch, as Peruvian babies are generally adorable, and we got to stare at a differing set of them, unabashedly, for a good twenty minutes. In that home stretch, Tessa and I came to quite the realization: we like to stare at babies because they’re cute. Peruvians like to stare at us because we’re white, and moreover, Tessa has red hair. So when we walk past a mom with a cute baby, we stare at her, she stares at us, and EVERYONE’S HAPPY. Greatest symbiosis ever.

This weekend in Piura made me realize that there are some things about Peru that will probably always drive me insane. I’ve been good at having a thick skin to the catcalls in Piura, but I fear that the 1,000th Piuran to say “Ooo, mi amor!” or, the creepiest yet, “Ooo, que rico!” is just going to get smacked in the face, and I will be powerless to stop myself. I expect it when I wear something low-cut, and that is just the price I pay to be comfortable in the 95-degree Piura heat, but really, there is no excuse when I am in a button-down blouse and below-the-knee skirt. I wonder what Peace Corps’s policy is on face-smacking. It is probably not favorable, but then, who would denunciar me?

Also on the list of things that will always drive me insane is, as Brett put it when I told him this story, an over-emphasis on ends over means. As I mentioned, it is hot as hell in Piura (look on a map, and you will find me not far from the equator), especially on the second floor of our hostel. At 3 a.m. one night this weekend, our fan shut off. I didn’t notice, but I woke up to Tessa playing with the fan, eventually carrying it downstairs to exchange it for a working one. However, upon arriving downstairs, Tessa discovered that there was nothing wrong with the fan, it was that the electricity on our entire floor had been shut off. Why, you might ask? Because someone down the hall had their TV up too loud and would not answer the door when the manager knocked. So their solution to this problem was to indefinitely shut off the electricity on the entire second floor. Now, I know little about the hotel managing game, but I’m pretty sure there are about 14 solutions more reasonable than shutting off an entire floor’s electricity. To be fair, however, it did get that TV to shut up.

So it goes. Next entry, 30 kids learn why they shouldn’t throw trash in the river and how to say “Good morning.”

That's not a paint splatter! That's Angorra!

2007-03-23T16:32:00.000-07:00

(written March 18th, stuck on my computer until now due to losing of USB)

Stuff I have thought about recently:

-I was sitting in my room today, thinking, man, I could really go for some candy. I think this thought with a frequency that might surprise you, or not, if you know how much esteem I have for candy. But this time, I really thought I had some candy sitting around the room. I was convinced. I thought to myself, “I know there’s something delicious and wonderful that I got sent from home that I’ve been hoarding and trying to save for a time when I really needed it.” And then I realized that something was not in fact candy, but “This American Life” podcasts. This probably says something about my general level of intellectual stimulation.

-That said, I did finish “Death in the Andes” today, which was a fantastic book, though I wonder what I would think of it if I weren’t living in Peru. Mostly the whole book was me thinking, “Oh man, I know EXACTLY what they’re talking about!” despite the fact that it was written about a totally different part of the sierra than the part I know. There are a lot of references to Piura in it, but mostly to the city. The only reference to the sierra piurana explains that the serranos who live here don’t have the same indigenous superstitions as those the book centers around, in the central sierra. Which is true,

-as evidenced by a conversation I had with Juan’s dad in his kitchen the other day. He was asking me about religion and telling me he was “Catholic to the judge,” yep, that’s what he always says. It gives him “pena” to see people who aren’t Catholic, like that Ryan I replaced. I was going along with it, as I often do during conversations about religion here, when he said, “One really suffers to be Catholic here.” I thought initially that this was a very odd thing to say if he was referring to religious persecution, because Catholics have over a 90% majority in Peru generally, and quite near 100% in Santo Domingo. But then I thought I should give him the benefit of the doubt; there are certainly other ways he could find he suffered because of his religion, like if he meant to say that seeing people suffering through poverty was a test to his faith, for example. I guess I’ll never know what he did mean, because when I asked him, “How do they suffer?” he misunderstood (perhaps on purpose) my intonation, and thought I was saying, “Oh, how they suffer!” I figured this out when his answer was, “Sí.”

-A word on Santo Domingo generally. I haven’t really described it here, probably because I’m just now feeling qualified to do so after almost four months of living here. Basics: town in the Piuran sierra, 4 hours from the capital city by terrifying bus ride on unpaved Andean highway. There are about 1,000 residents in the town proper, and 10,000 residents including all the caseríos (rural communities that surround it). By ecoregion, Santo Domingo is in the high jungle, which is quite rare on a global level, I think. Right now we’re nearing the end of the rainy season, and everything is a brilliant color of green that I’ve never seen before. It’s in a valley, at a little under 5,000 feet, but people tell me the caseríos get up to about 10,000 feet. This is believable, but I have yet to ascertain it for myself. As far as the town character goes...well. This is something I think about a lot. Santo Domingo has neither the very closed, uninviting to outsiders character that is associated with other parts of the sierra, nor the warm, iniviting character often associated with rural communities generally. The people here more or less let me do my own thing as they do theirs. I don’t hear outrageous gossip about myself (though I have heard that I’m skinny and a good cook. The gossip chain is working out for me), nor do I get invited into people’s homes all the time just to hang out. There are ups and downs to this type of town, like any town, I suppose. Santo Domingo has also been a center of NGO development of alto Piura for some time, so it doesn’t really blow people’s mind when you say you’re there to do development work. The upside of that coin is I don’t have to explain what I’m doing there all the time, the downside is I don’t feel particularly novel. There’s a certain level of education that you can expect from people in the urban zone, which is nice, though at the same time, Juan pointed to Russia on the world map today and said, “Canada, right?”

If I am going to make these statements about a town at large, I suppose I should provide evidence:

-When I went to visit Casey and Mike’s site (Chalaco), an hour and some up the mountain, I was talking to a man who asked me, “Which is easier for you to speak, English or Spanish?” I explained that English was of course EASIER, because it’s my first language, the one I’ve been speaking since I was little. “Oh,” he answered. “For me, Spanish is easier. English is hard.” This man did not have enough education to understand the concept of first versus second languages, just “easy” and “hard.” He didn’t speak any English whatsoever, and didn’t understand that the only reason he can’t speak it is it has never been taught to him. Casey and Mike tell me they’ve had to explain this many times. So has Tessa, who’s about 3 hours away (by car, when it’s not raining) in Tamboya. People there can’t believe she grew up speaking a language other than Spanish. I have never actually had this conversation in Santo Domingo.

-I was sitting next to a man on a bus, who asked me if I worked for an NGO. I answered, “Sort of, but it’s not an NGO, because it’s actually an agency of the U.S. government that does development work.” He looked confused, and said, “So...it’s an NGO?” The term “NGO” has been tossed around so much over the years that people only know that it’s associated with outsiders, especially gringos, who do development work. It’s been so overused that this man didn’t know what it stood for, that in order to be an NGO, by definition, it would have to be not of the government.

So basically, the town is gorgeous, there’s tons of hiking that I am just starting to get into because the trails are confusing and ankle-deep in mud, there’s good work to be done, people are willing to work with you, and you have to make your own friends, though there definitely are cool people to be found.

-The world map is almost done, the next step is touching up where there are smudges, missing countries that certainly exist, countries that don’t exist yet, etc. Currently, according to our map, the Bahamas are a conglomeration of blobs that amount to the size of Texas, and Sri Lanka is a peninsula. If my instinct is right about projects like this, the touching-up will be the most time-consuming part. Then, I need to recruit kids to label the map with the country names, cover it with a clear enamel, and I am done. This project has been good for me, as a test of my patience with children, more than anything. One kid INSISTED on calling me “Alicia” and I would constantly correct him, to the point where if he called me it I would shout, “What is my NAME?!” or just not answer until he said it how he already knew was correct. This kid tended to ask a lot of questions, usually “Alicia? Is this good?” in response to work he already knew was fine, so I would be annoyed with him daily within 20 minutes or so. I thought my reaction was more or less justified. No one likes to have their name constantly mispronounced, right? And then I realized I was being a pronunciation Nazi despite the fact that the pronunciation I was demanding was also not correct. I was demanding that he say “A-LEE-sa,” which is the closest I ever expect Peruvians to get my name, though I would totally correct it in the U.S. I am quite often terrible with children. Something to work on in the next year and eight months, I suppose.

-On the topic of time, we passed by the six-month in-country mark on the 15th, which is a good milestone to have under our belts. In Spanish, “How long have you been here?” translates more to, “How much time do you have here?” which is quite appropriate given the way I think about Peace Corps. Time, more now than at any other point in my life, is a commodity, a possession that once obtained, can never be taken away. I have six months here, no matter what I filled them with, no matter what happens in the future, they’re my six months.

An entry to placate but not satisfy by any means

2007-03-14T08:42:00.000-07:00

I have not updated in far too long, and this weighs heavily on me, but I have just 9 minutes left on my internet time.

The highlights!
-Reconnect was last week on the beach in Huanchaco, Trujillo. It was amazing to see everyone from Peru 8 and hear their experiences and ideas. I came back a level of inspired that I hadn't previously felt. I am ready to get moving on stuff here in Santo Domingo.
-I have improved my quality of life by a frightening amount with one simple purchase: a stamp with the Peace Corps Peru insignia, "Alyssa Domzal, Voluntaria de Cuerpo de Paz," and a line for my signature. I have taken to stamping everything with it, not just the official municipality papers that semi-require it. I am so important, suddenly.
-I am planning a river cleanup for the 31st with kids from the colegio. The 30 lucky kids that clean the river get to go to 4 English classes in March that I will be teaching. Teachers that want to attend the English class get to help me run the cleanup and control the class. A fair trade, all around.

To the RPCV who commented on my last entry about Santo Domingo and Piura in the 70s: I am fascinated by this. Please email me at ajdomzal at gmail dot com so I can tell you all about everything.

More soon, yo prometo.

Happy day after Friendship Day

2007-02-15T07:10:00.000-08:00

Well, I got back to Santo Domingo last Wednesday, when I was met with some ridiculous food poisoning from something in Piura and was forced to spend another night in the Centro de Salud here with a hydration IV, since I couldn’t keep down water. Some people have all the luck! This took another couple days to recover from, but since then, I have been busy busy, and it has felt great.

The main thing I have been working on, and I can’t believe how much it wears me out, is painting a world map with a group of kids. We are painting the map on a wall next to the public park, right in the center of town. We have a lot of people walking by all the time, wondering what we’re doing, asking questions, which in a way is the best part. The map is about 3 meters wide by 1.5 meters tall. I started with six kids, but only five have continued to show up. There’s Ariel and Anaís, who are brother and sister, about 10 and 12 years old, respectively. They are the kids of Ingeniera Luz, one of my favorite women in town. The other three boys are brothers, somewhere between the ages of 8 and 12, named Carlos, David, and Juan. I cannot actually tell them apart and never call them by the right names, but they are adorable and enthusiastic.

We have the first steps down, the initial rectangle measuring, light blue painting, and the grid drawing. If you ever want to bore children to tears, make them draw a 56x28 grid with no more tools than string, pencils, and a yardstick. But it’s done now, and now they can get to the fun drawing step. Or, at least, this is what I hoped, before I realized that a couple of the kids can’t really draw so well, or can’t follow the logic of enlarging from a grid, so they might be the Super Map Tracers or the Super Box Locators. I must have sounded like a crazy art teacher trying to teach them the enlarging exercise that came with the World Map handbook (“Don’t draw the rabbit…draw the lines that make up the rabbit.”). I’m not cut out for art teaching, or really visual things generally, so it’s really been trial and error. The box ended up off in two dimensions the first time we did it, partially due to the fact that the wall on which we are painting is not actually flat (a fact that revealed itself post-painting), but partially because I myself have terrible spatial skills and have always been bad at things that require spatial precision. I have really been the epitome of “those who can’t do, teach” with the world map. But I’m getting really into it. I like working with the kids here. It’s true what they say, a lot of times the kids don’t care how your Spanish is, they’re just glad to have someone to pay attention to them and something fun to do. My Spanish is generally fine, but I catch myself constantly screwing things up grammatically when I’m ordering the kids around with the map, and they still seem to love me. One of the brothers brought me a piece of cake today. I don’t think he knew it was Valentine’s Day, but I sure appreciated the gesture. Cake is good (even when it doesn’t have insults written in frosting on the top, ImissyouReeseHavlatka).

I’m almost positive now that I’m going to plan an environmental education program for the schools this school year. An interesting tidbit: Peru has the second worst educational system in the Western hemisphere, second only to Haiti. Therefore, I would like to do my part to put the kids in a better place educationally, even if it’s just something small. I don’t want to limit what I do to just strictly science-based environmental education, I think it would be all the better if I can find ways to integrate health, self-esteem, geography, current events, etc. They all relate to the environment, or can, in one way or another. I know I’m being lofty, and it will be a lot better when I’ve spent some time bonding with “Como Planificar un Programa de Educación Ambiental” and know exactly what I want my purpose to be.

Today, I went to go buy tomatoes at a store I hadn’t visited yet, and I had something happen that is only notable in its rarity. A woman was sitting in the store with her kids, and when I walked in she gasped and said, “Gringa!” excitedly, how you might say, “Angelina Jolie!” if she suddenly walked into your vegetable store. I don’t know whether Ryan and Lilian just didn’t frequent this particular store (also, the woman was from the campo), but man, I was a big deal there for a minute. She did that thing where she talked loudly about me in front of me, which only annoys me when people aren’t saying nice things (“Doesn’t she speak Spanish?”), but it’s hard to get irritated when someone is just saying, “The white girl! She’s so tall! And look at her hair! She’s BEAUTIFUL.” This is obviously a very Peace Corps thing to occur; I write about it now just because it hasn’t happened often in Santo Domingo, and that is notable. I might get stared or whistled at more often, but really, people just kind of let me be here. I don’t think I live in quite the fishbowl that other PCVs do. It’s nice.

EDIT: Valentine’s Day isn’t such in Peru, but it is sometimes celebrated as ‘Día de la Amistad,’ or '‘Friendship Day.’' I had heard this, but it did not hit me until the following interaction, at 11:30 last night, when I was already all comfy in bed in my long underwear.
Humberto (calling through the nonfunctioning door between the living room and my bedroom): ¡Alyssa!
Me: What?
(long pause, in which neither of us say anything and I contemplate going to sleep and pretending I imagined him calling)
Humberto: ¡Alyssa!
Me: What?
Humberto: Come here a minute.
Me: What do you want? (Like I said, I was already in long underwear)
Humberto: It's Friendship Day!
Me: Oh.
Humberto: We're friends! Come share a cup.

Oh, right. What else but drinking would make a Peruvian urgently get me out of bed at 11:30, when we both have to work the next day. This didn't seem like a bad idea, though, so I got decent and went and shared some wine and cañazo with him (110ish-proof sugar cane liquor, brewed locally). I turned out to enjoy my Friendship Day immensely. Humberto was already happily tipsy and just kept saying things like ''You're new here, but we're going to be friends and you're going to get accustom yourself and Peru will be like your land.'' Then his cousin and neighbor came in and we discussed world politics. I'm always pleasantly surprised when I can have a good conversation along these lines here. We talked about Iraq, North Korea, Clinton and Obama, what September 11th was like, Russian oil, etc. Nothing mind-blowing, but I appreciated it. I wonder what Peruvian news they're watching, because if it were not for Peace Corps-issued Newsweeks, I would have no idea that anything happened in the world except bloody car crashes on the Pan-American.

Alyssa gets hospitalized in Peru, part 1 of…let’s go for 1.

2007-02-06T11:19:00.000-08:00

Well, the title, in context with the last entry, is pretty self-explanatory. The Tuesday after writing that entry, I realized that my skin infection was getting nowhere near better, and caved in and went to Piura. My dermatologist appointment was at 11 a.m., so I’d only had time to go to breakfast and the post office before it, which I thought was fine, since I was pretty sure the doctor was just going to hand me some antibiotic cream and send me on my way. Imagine my surprise when he looks at the wound, and just keeps repeating how incredibly “feo” (ugly) it is, and announces that I’m going to be “internada” for a couple days. I did not take this news well. I’ve never been hospitalized overnight before (that I can remember), and certainly not ever in a developing non-English-speaking country without any friends or family present. So I get checked into a nice room, and with instructions from the PC doctor to think of it as a vacation, I spend the next four nights in that room.

When I get the news, I call Andrew (who is in Chiclayo, half an hour before leaving to go back to his site), and though I attempt to make a joke about it, I immediately burst into tears and ask him to come up and stay with me (“Haha, I win the prize! First Peru 8 hospitalized...bblbblblbblb.” That’s how I’ve decided panicked sobs are spelled.). This is somewhat complicated, as he is in a different department, but I straightforwardly call Dr. Jorge and ask permission, who straightforwardly calls the country director, who says yes. This is stellar news. I will hereby be saved from four days of soul-crushing boredom.

I was on IV antibiotics for three days. The doctor cut off the blisters with a scalpel without any sort of anesthetic, which was absurdly painful. The hospital food was comically bad and I never actually ate a complete meal there (that was where Andrew came in with empanadas and salads). The doctor spoke fluent English, as he lived in Washington D.C. for ten years ten years ago, but only let on to this fact when I was sobbing hysterically during surgery. This seemed at the time like an absurd thing to not let me in on, but I guess I can imagine being in the U.S. ten years after living in Peru, talking to someone whose first language is Spanish but who speaks reasonably fluent English, and omitting from the conversation the fact that I speak their first language. Either way, someone’s got to have the conversation not in their native language, and it’s usually a home field advantage type situation. The only time he showed any difficulty with English connotations was when he tried to say “You’re a big baby” as an affectionate thing cooed during surgery. He didn’t have any trouble understanding, though, when I told him to shut up a second later. We had pretty good rapport by the time the four days were over.

The process of acquiring drugs is also pretty comical in this Peruvian hospital. On the first day, I announced that I was simply not going to allow my wound to be cut apart with a scalpel without any sort of sedative, to which the doctor looked at me curiously, and said, “Xanax?” “Xanax?” I repeated. Is that really what’s prescribed for a one-time surgery here? “Te traigo Xanax,” he decided. I was pleasantly subdued for a day or two.

There also don’t seem to be any sort of privacy laws or anything crazy like that here. I had random doctors and nurses wandering into my room almost every day just to ask, “Hey, whatcha got there?” I was kind of a big deal. Except they all just thought I was a stupid gringa who stayed out too long at the beach and got a second degree sunburn. Which was fair, the wound was literally undistinguishable from a blistered burn at that point, but if they asked me that, I nearly shouted at them that, no, it’s in fact a skin infection from a bug bite because I live in sierra with the llulles (I’ve since learned it’s actually spelled “yulle”) whose urine burns like acid. I told one nurse where I lived, and she made a face and said, “Ugh, I would NOT go up there by myself.” I’ve decided not to tell Santo Domingo this for fear of trashing their tourism dreams. Interestingly, all the nurses used the formal “usted” and all the doctors used the informal “tú.” The nurses were polite but distant initially, but curiosity got the better of them by the third day and they asked all sorts of questions, mostly about Andrew. They asked how many years we’d been dating and when I told them we’d just met in Lima this September (true enough), they squealed, “¡Qué romántico!” This, coupled with Andrew’s host family’s insinuations one he got back to site that he was very nearly widowed by the yulle, was very funny. Dr. Jorge, after eventually seeing pictures of the wound three days into its hospital recovery, told me I absolutely would have been sent to a Lima hospital if they’d seen it from the beginning. While this might have insured me better medical care, I was quite fine with the arrangement as it was, as I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have gotten Andrew to come all the way to Lima (15 hours by bus from Piura) and the constant company was seriously all that kept me sane.

I got out Saturday because I declared I was bored. Seriously. I told the doctor that I was in no particular hurry to get back to my mountain, as I wanted to be absolutely sure I was healed by then, but on Saturday after Andrew left and “Scrubs” for once wasn’t on and I was left to choose between subtitled “Kindergarten Cop” and dubbed-over “Back to the Future,” I told the doctor I was bored and he thought that was reasonable, so I went home. I’m going back to site tomorrow, somewhat against his wishes, as he wants me to stay until Friday, maybe even Monday, but it’s healed enough for me and 9 days out of site is plenty.

What I realized through this experience is how exactly Volunteers end up describing their horrible maladies with ironic detachment. You just kind of figure out early on that you’re not going home, that you’re tough and you’re not going anywhere and it will get better because that’s what things are destined to do, and then it’s just a matter of watching the absurd theater that is life in a developing country unfold. You take yourself out of things and narrate because there’s no other way, because if you will drive yourself insane if you take things too personally. My friend Brian lives somewhere where women, to give birth, are wrapped like mummies and go out into field completely by themselves, squat, and cut the umbilical cord with a rock. I don’t mean to compare anything I’ve experienced at my site to that, but it gives him context when we decided together on the phone that “a tongue-in-cheek blog entry heals all wounds,” including infected yulle bites. I’m sure this doesn’t always work, but I suppose I’m new enough at this that this strategy suits me just fine.

Obviously.

Alyssa gets strange medical ailment in Peru, part 1 of I am sure many

2007-01-29T12:47:00.000-08:00

So I have a veritable rainforest of bugs that call my bed their home, so I am getting quite used to waking up with bug bites in all sorts of awkward places. I usually try to brush my bed out before I get in it; sometimes I just spray Raid directly into sheets, which will probably cut several years off my life, but is often worth it, in my opinion. A couple days ago, I had a bug bite on my sternum…ish. Two days ago, I woke up to a huge red rash covering the entire area. I assumed I was just scratching it in my sleep and it was irritated, until the next morning, when there were blisters all over it and I could no longer do anything but lie very still on my back without causing myself a large amount of pain. Rachel came over coincidentally, and I told her to fetch our Cusqueña doctor friend, Otilia. Otilia came over, was properly dismayed, and informed me that this was the work of the llulle (pronounced yoo-yay), an insect native only to the high jungle of northern Peru.

Cool, I love endemism.

Otilia first offered to inject me with something, this time, an anti-inflammatory (some of you may remember the time another Peruvian doctor offered to inject me with Penicillin to see if I was allergic). I called Suni, one of our Peace Corps doctors, who (bless her Limeña heart), told Otilia that Volunteers aren’t allowed to receive injections at site, and supposedly tried to call PC Washington to see if anyone there had heard of this bug. At least that’s what Otilia said (“La doctora está llamando por otro lado…Washington?”). As far as the injection thing goes, for anyone who has seen me get a shot, or had to be pulled out of Spanish class on a weekly basis to hold my hand during one, this was obviously good news. Otilia then told me that people have tried to cure llulle rashes through traditional methods, but the only thing that cures llulle is the application of the leaves a llulle plant. She told me this gravely, and put in as an aside that she didn’t believe in that sort of stuff, but it was true. She even put finger quotes around the word “believe.” She also told me that I needed to apply lemon. Okay, whatever. So this very sweet woman I don’t know, Gloria, is in my bedroom suddenly, pouring lemon on my chest. Rachel is watching this debacle and says, “Um, Alyssa, you’re kind of…falling out…there.” I responded, “Rachel, a woman I don’t know if making ceviche out of my cleavage, do I look like my dignity is high on my list of priorities?” Gloria then went looking for the llulle plant, which she found and brought back. She heated it and applied the juice, and then left. Otilia brought me some antihistamine and a tranquilizer. The latter was a very good idea, for it is quite boring to lie motionless on one’s back for long periods of time. Unfortunately, I have an unexplainable resistance to tranquilizers (Benadryl, Dramamine, and Tylenol 3 all fail to knock me out), but I had a pleasant three hours or so.

I wake up today, and the wound is worse. Far more blisters and pain. Excellent. Otilia comes by, looks, and said, “Yeah…it’s what I thought. Gloria brought the wrong plant.”
(An aside: I did not realize until that moment that the word “equivocado” could be used for inanimate objects to mean “wrong” and not necessarily “mistaken.” So at the time it sounded like “the plant was mistaken!” which made me laugh for 12 seconds or so.) So I lived with sticky plant goo on me and all over my sheets for a day for nothing. Humberto brought the correct plant today, or so I hope, and showed me how to heat it, but left in a hurry due to the delicateness of the rash’s placement. This time, Señora Teo applied the plant goo. Rachel ran into Juan, whom I was supposed to meet with today, in the street. The gossip is getting around town that I’m out with the llulle. Juan informed her that the only proven way to cure llulle is the application of breast milk. He assumed that for some reason she would not understand the phrase “leche maternal,” and gave her some sort of charade that I would pay money to see. Rachel then came over, told me about her encounter with Juan, and announced, “I brought you chocolate, pasta for dinner if you want it, some cake, a ‘Friends’ DVD, and a book, you know, if you want me to read aloud to you. And you know I would lactate on you if I could. All over.” For my very adorably Southern sitemate, who cannot say the word “nipple,” this was a very amusing announcement.

Otilia also has this funny habit of very suddenly assuming you (actually, I think she only does it to me and Rachel) lack the most basic knowledge and patiently correcting you. She said today about the wound, “It resembles first-degree burn,” and I said, “No, second-degree burn, first-degree burns don’t blister.” She smiled and said, “No no, sweetie, you didn’t get burnt. You got bit by a bug.”

Teo thinks I will be suffering from the llulle for another week. That is the worst news I have heard in a long time. I hurt quite a lot and am very useless and have shed a lot of tears in just these two days. I want lots of things I can’t have, American medicine (or at least being within 19 hours of the PC doctors in Lima) being at the top of the list. It makes me want to go on medical leave in Piura right now, and go to the clinic, and live somewhere where the bathroom is fewer than a hill away and there’s no rain, but at the same time I know I might as well stick it out here, where people fuss over me and make sure I get meals and tranquilizers. The only thing I risk here is more llulle, which it seems I already have on my arm. Good Lord.

One thing I do when I feel bad here, other than listen to my “Cheer up, you’re in the Peace Corps” playlist, is read Close of Service profiles from Peru 4, who just left. We got issued the twice-annual PC-Peru magazine when we got here, and in it, all of the exiting Volunteers reflect on their service, and talk about all the horrible experiences with a certain “it’s all over now, so it’s funny” detachment. I have read and re-read the COS Profiles a creepy number of times, given the number of Peru 4 Volunteers I actually met. It just makes me feel so good to think, “Someday, a very very very long time from now, this will all be over, and I will laugh at the fact that someone put the wrong homeopathic remedy on my blistering wound,” and COS profiles are physical evidence that the day is out there…somewhere.

To end this on a good note, the señora at the store closest to me started selling bananas for eating straight and not for frying, and they are some of the most delicious bananas I’ve ever had.

If you're bored, then you must be boring too

2007-01-25T14:44:00.000-08:00

Well. I’m realizing reading this blog over that it does little to explain what I actually do with my life on a day-to-day basis, and I now have time to delve into this, because my computer is working! With the help of an external keyboard, but still. The point is I can now lie in my hammock, muse about my existence, listen to Phish, count how many Peace Corps stereotypes I am following at the exact same time, AND write blog entries.

The past two days at site (I got back from Piura Monday) have been uncharacteristically busy. Monday night was spent setting things up in my room (lightbulb, hammock, and clothesline, and bookcase). I’ve been doing a lot more independent living in my room than I was my first month here. The primary reason for this is that Flor is finishing her studies in Piura and Humberto is generally pretty busy, so there is no one to eat or hang out with at my house. I’d started eating my own breakfasts (the first day I ate cornflakes with milk in Peru was a great, great day), but it has now expanded to cooking my own dinners as well. This is just fine. It’s a little lonelier, but it’s nice to be in control of my own schedule as well as my own diet. Several times, Flor and Humberto didn’t eat dinner until 9:30, and that drove me nuts. Breakfast is usually cereal or oatmeal, purchased in Piura, and a mango, purchased down the street.

Before I continue with mundane details of my diet, I think I need to take a moment to try to convey the wonder that is the Santo Domingo mangos. They are by far my favorite thing about this town. This will probably change, either when I have more friends or when it’s not mango season anymore, but as of now...there are no words. Sometimes I try to make eating a mango, which is essentially a personal pleasure, into a social activity by eating them with a Swiss Army knife on the stoop. This is particularly fun when it’s raining, so...every afternoon. People walk by, I say hola, they smile at my obvious mango-induced grin, they either say hola or a very heartfelt “Provecho!”

Okay. Dinner is pasta and some sort of vegetable. I don’t have a fridge, so I tried to buy enough vegetables in Piura to last me just the week. Next week, I’m left to the challenges of the Santo Domingo vegetable market, which exists, but is unpredictable. So we’ll see how it goes. It’s weird how being here and living on the Peruvian diet, which is generally pretty vegetable-deprived (in addition, all raw vegetables are, by some sort of rule no one consulted me about, doused in lemon. It seems like a better idea than it is), makes me cherish vegetables I really couldn’t have cared less about in the States. Living alone has brought about the unfortunate habit of talking to myself, and I think last night I delivered an entire love monologue to my broccoli.

Lunch is my only social meal. I eat it at the house of Senora Teo, Lilian’s old house mom. She cooks for people in town who lack the resources, time, or ganas to cook for themselves, especially all the doctors and nurses who work at the health center. The food is pretty good, there’s a decent variety and even vegetables sometimes. We watch telenovelas and make her day if we clean our plates, her week if we ask for seconds on rice.

Back to the time by myself thing. I spend a lot of time by myself right now, and I love it more than I foresaw myself loving it. I partake of the obvious, reading (I average 3 books a week, therefore, seeking new reading material has become its own activity) and writing (I think I wrote Andrew 25 pages in the two weeks before I went to Piura). I also tend to find ways to make daily activities last a really long time. Granted, some activities just do take a long time at this house. The only running water is in the backyard, which is a solid 40-second walk from my room. But some activities, like putting on pants, should really take no longer in Peru than they do anywhere else, but somehow I manage to make them take ten minutes if I want it to. The iPod and the rain help with this.

Peace Corps has had the strange effect on me of making me really look forward to daily, life-managing tasks. Basically, it’s not a great feeling when you wake up and realize you have absolutely nothing to do that day, or that you have one thing, and it’s a great Peace Corps thing to be doing, but it’s only going to take like 45 seconds. For example, holding a meeting with our kids with whom we’re doing the World Map. It sounds like a great day’s activity, “On Thursday we had a meeting about the World Map,” but really, that meeting was one sentence: “We’re painting a World Map on Mondays and Tuesdays and 10 a.m., see you then.” But if you wake up and there’s something obvious to do, like something to clean , well then, you’ve won the game. There isn’t running water past 7 pm, so there are always dinner dishes to do in the morning. For some reason, it’s incredibly satisfying to wake up and think, “Dishes! I have to do something! My presence is required here!” I have to clean and organize my room this afternoon to account for my new kitchen table and bookcase. I can’t wait! I cannot imagine what would happen if someone had told 8-year-old me that 21-year-old me’s favorite activities would include eating broccoli and cleaning my room.

Anyway, yesterday Rachel and I plastered the wall we’re going to use for our World Map. This started off sort of shaky, but it looks great now, especially given that it covers some old election propaganda. Covering election propaganda is an immensely satisfying activity, as it is EVERYWHERE and pretty feo if you ask me. My new window busts through some propaganda as well, maybe I will continue and paint the outside of my room as well. But anyway, neither Rachel nor I had worked with plaster before, and we didn’t realize you can only mix a couple handfuls of it at a time to get it on the wall before it dries. A couple guys came over and offered us advice in this regard (we were, after all, white, female, young, and attempting to do construction in a public arena), but the advice was like, “You have to get the plaster on the wall before it dries!” “The dry plaster is useless!” Uh, thanks. So finally, I said to the guy who was most lingering, “Are you going to help or are you going to criticize?” He liked that. He repeated this comment to passersby approximately 7 times throughout the following 4 hours in which he lent us his support. We would have figured it out, but it was nice to have his help. The only really hard part was when some guy came up after I had been mixing plaster for like 3 hours and just started doing it for me. This did not sit well with me. I took a walk around the block, and when I returned, I explained that I had mixed probably 40 bowls of plaster that morning, and I certainly could have handled it, and if he was going to take over he needed to ask my permission. Like often happens when women show any assertiveness, he laughed at me, but whatever. I am here to act in ways appropriate to Peruvian culture, but I am not here to let machismo define what I can and cannot do. We are, after all, here to set an example. I mixed my own plaster in peace for the rest of the afternoon. My hands are dry but my soul is happy.

Today I held a meeting with everyone involved on the trash project. This was actually a bold move, as the project is switching hands from Juan, my counterpart, to the department of sanitation in the municipality, a decision that has caused no small amount of disagreement. I made them do a FODA (SWOT in English: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of the project. I should have known this would not go well after I had brightly explained that we were there to analyze the project that is now in a state of transition and figure out our goals, explained the four categories, and asked for strengths of the project, to which Juan raised his hand and asked, “Yeah, what’s the point of this?” Just when you think someone’s on your side. At some point, Juan and Jorge, the guy in charge of the department, started interrupting and yelling at each other about some land rights issues, and I just sort of let them go at it, as part of the point of the meeting was just to get them all in the same room, regardless of the results, something that wouldn’t happen otherwise.

If Ryan reads this, I do not want him to have a heart attack, so I will say that at least the trash is still being collected 4 days a week and the river looks...not worse. I will keep on capacitating.

Sunday, January 7th

2007-01-08T07:26:00.000-08:00

Today was a stellar day. I woke up disoriented because my bed was away from its usual spot, due to yesterday’s epic window installation (it still lacks glass, which comes tomorrow), got up, and made myself a bowl of corn flakes. Eating cereal here has been one of my greatest victories; sure, the milk was warm from having come from recently boiled water and dehydrated milk powder, but I enjoyed it all the same. The weavers got booted from their office in the municipality (into an office without electricity, after they just bought sewing machines. Poor Rachel), so I got out and helped some with the move.

Then the day got interesting: I wanted to start walking around Santo Domingo and collecting information for my community map before it was to start raining. There was something on the map that said “a hidroelectrico,” and, my curiosity piqued, I went to ask Humberto (conveniently, the go-to infrastructure guy in the municipality) what that could mean. He described the hydroelectric plant to me, and when he decided his description was insufficient to explain to the gringa what exactly this plant entailed, he offered to take me up there. So we went on a hike. I showed him all the stuff I needed to put on the map, including infrastructure, natural attractions, and plants.

What he and Flor failed to mention to me before starting is that, between the two of them, they could identify every single plant and tree on the 45-minute walk, and for most of them, they could also identify some sort of use. My map quickly became a mess of about 50 common names of plants, which made me happy in a way I can’t even describe, in any way except “snerdy.” (I know at least one person will get that. Brie, I am counting on you.) My favorite notation that I have found so far, in going through my notes, is “Mosquero: planta. Herpes.” According to Humberto, this plant heals cold sores. Thank goodness for cognates.

On the way, we ran into a sort of crazy older woman from the campo who babbled a lot and tried to sell us her bananas. Flor gave her a sol and told her to cook and eat the bananas herself. They then explained to me that some people in the campo are so poor that they can’t justify eating their own crops, something I already knew, but I found the act of charity refreshing.

Humberto giddily showed me all the hydroelectric infrastructure. My Spanish hydroelectric infrastructure vocabulary is, you know, a little rusty, but I more or less got it and took pictures to ask him about later. I thought we were done, but they insisted we had to go up to the caracoles and take pictures. I didn’t know what caracoles were, and if there is an English word for them other than the exact cognate I still don’t know it, but I assumed, given the theme of the hike, that they had something to do with hydroelectricity. They turned out to be deep, naturally-formed pools in the granite formation. They were pretty cool-looking, and some of them were about 6 feet deep. I tried to describe how identify granite, but again, lacking Spanish geology vocabulary, it was an inadequate lesson. So it turned out the caracoles were part of the “natural attractions” section of the map. I finally got it when they started talking about the tourism potential.

Then we came back, went to a sketchy street restaurant for lunch. A 78-year-old man was sitting there already, and after he started doing what is absolutely my pet peeve in this country, asking Flor about me in front of me in the third person (‘Where is she from? Does she speak Spanish?’), I gave him my best ‘I am positively killing you with my gringa kindness’ smile and said loudly, ‘I speak Spanish. You can talk to me.’ For once, someone actually accepted this and continued the conversation with me, in the second person. He then gave us a lecture about the evils of domestic violence, reiterating that he has been married to his wife for 56 years, “tranquila, sin golpes.” His wife cooked pork behind him and showed no signs of acknowledgement. She was, I suppose, tranquila. Sin golpes.

I got back to my room, finished off the last of the gummi bears I received in the mail (incidentally, I received “my brand” of gummi bears from three separate people, working independently. Fantastic.), and also finished off The Life of Pi, which was a pretty stellar book. Then it started to rain, and I took the greatest nap ever. And then I went to Rachel’s new house and wrote this on her laptop, as mine is still cranky.

I’m aware that Christmas, New Years, and my 21st birthday passed since the last time I wrote in this. Let it be noted that they were each, for highly individual reasons, quite wonderful.

The only one I reflected on in any sort of meaningful way was my birthday. I handwrote this the night before I left for Piura (I can never sleep when I know I have to get up at 3), and it’s sloppy, but more or less says what was on my mind.

So it’s very nearly my 21st birthday, a fact that I am excited about for obvious reasons, namely, legal brewskies! Woo! Oh wait, too bad I myself was forced to share a beer with an 8-year-old at a school party in this country. 21 doesn’t mean a whole lot.

What it does mean, however, is that I am of a less absurd age to be a Peace Corps Volunteer, which is great. I have no evidence to indicate that I am not the youngest PCV in the world (I preemptively apologize to the hypothetical 19-year-old agricultural Volunteer who reads this and knows this title is actually his/hers). This title doesn’t mean a lot, as evidenced by the Peace Corps website only providing statistics on the oldest PCV and not the lower end of the range. However, it’s a big job, representing the left side of the end of the sentence, “Peace Corps Volunteers come from all different stages in life, from…” but I consider myself pretty qualified for it. Since first-turned-into-second grade, I’ve gotten used to being a year younger than everyone “my age,” so all of my birthdays have been met with a little of “FINALLY, I’m the same age as everyone else.” Logically, of course, I wasn’t, so the feeling was short-lived. Peace Corps, where no one is even close to my age (the next one up turned 22 in November), has had the pleasantly unexpected result of making me subconsciously think, “Well, since no one is my age, everyone is ageless to me.” This has been good for my friend-making, not so good for my age self-identity issues, as “ageless” quickly turns into “basically-more-or-less my age.” This happens most often with Andrew, who I totally forget has two and a half-ish years on me, and I will say things to him like, “Oh man, this song is so High School,” to which he will respond, “Seriously? I didn’t even hear it until sophomore year of college.” Which makes sense, because not everyone was in high school from 1999 to 2003, during which, at some point, the song came out. The song in question was Dispatch’s “The General,” if anyone is terribly curious. It also happens when I think about my service, that I will be 22 when I’m done, and that seems like no time from now, because all my friends are already 23. And hey, if they can not die for 23 years, so can I.

None of this would seem terribly important if I didn’t constantly have to explain my age to new people, generally PCVs from Peru 5-7, since everyone in my training group has heard the spiel and is Over It. Still, it probably warrants contemplation. Rachel just launched into an intense contemplation about her headlamp, so I feel justified.

Nice...duck.

2006-12-20T14:32:00.000-08:00

This entry is dedicated to my immediate family, who will probably find this story considerably funnier than the general population.

It rains about 5 months a year in Santo Domingo, beginning right about now. Unsurprisingly, it was raining really hard yesterday, and when I looked outside and thought to myself that I didn’t really mind it, I thought about something my dad always said when it rained in Michigan: ‘it’s a good day to be a duck.’ This saying always made me feel pretty amicable toward rain, because hey, how can you hate something that makes ducks so happy.

Yesterday, I related this saying to Flor during dinner. I told her that I didn’t mind the rain, because like my dad always said, ‘es un buen día para ser un pato.’ She laughed, and then Humberto came in and asked what she was laughing about.

Flor: Alyssa’s dad always cooks a duck when it rains in the United States!
Me: Wait, what? No.
Flor: Isn’t that what you just said? ‘Es un buen día para hacer un pato.’
(Ser = to be. Hacer = to make.)
Me: No…SER un pato. It’s a good day to BE a duck…you know, ducks like the rain. They’re happy…when it rains. So it’s a good day…for ducks…when it rains.
(Blank looks)

The conversation was saved by a discussion of the deliciousness of duck and in what parts of Peru they prepare duck the best, allowing Flor and Humberto to stop wondering why I would care so much about the emotional wellbeing of a duck.

Nice…language misunderstanding.

Success?

2006-12-19T13:39:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, in my continuing war against the bedbugs, I rehung my mosquito net, as I hung it backwards the first time, and with unwaxed dental floss...not exactly reliable. I also decided it would be a good idea, though no one who deals with bedbugs regularly has ever suggested this, to clean my mattress and sleeping bag with rubbing alcohol. The problem is that even the rubbing alcohol here is somehow grape-based, so my bed sort of smells like a Pisco hangover. I committed to sleeping naked, so as not to carry any questionable insects into my bed. (This actually started as a joke, and then Flor said that ''the doctors'' here actually recommend it.) One night this week, I attempted to sleep naked and covered in Deet, but the bedbugs still found a way, the bottoms of my feet or something.

So while I admit that bedbugs have turned me into a crazy person, I have to say, I only got one bite last night. Success, I think.

That little children's good-night saying will never, ever be cute again.

I itch more.

2006-12-15T14:26:00.000-08:00

I am in a losing war with bedbugs and am running out of ideas. I am confused as to how everyone else who lives in the sierra just deals with this problem, but that is true of many things.

It's been an up-and-down couple days here at site, and this will be a shorter blog entry due to the first down: my keyboard going absolutely haywire and pretty much rendering my laptop useless for things unrelated to iPod charging and use of Microsoft Paint. I blame the dust and the culture shock. My keyboard is unacostumbrado to all the Ñs and Ás.

My laptop has, however, proven quite useful in providing me with an outlet for my mad Microsoft Paint skills in designing a flyer for the upcoming compost sales in the campo. I lack an adequate design program on my computer and Juan wanted it done for next week, so Paint it was. One black-and-white, oversimplified diagram of a functioning compost pile, coming up. The part of me that remembers all the hours I spent in the 3D lab last winter on the virtual reality project is dying a slow death.

There are two roosters running around the computer lab right now.

Humberto's cousins painted my room yesterday and today, and I am now the proud inhabitant of a light blue adobe dungeon. Granted, everything I own is a little bit splattered with paint (note to self: when you come back from work to find the dudes painting your room passing around cervezas, take action), but it probably vale la pena. That room will improve poco a poco. Someday, maybe rats won't fall through the roof, but hey, I'm not holding my breath.

Amidst all these issues, I had perhaps the greatest conversation I have had in Peru with Juan today, second only to perhaps when my host dad in Sta. E. acted out Ghostbusters.
Me: Juan, how are we getting all this compost up the hill?
Juan: Oh, a burro will carry it.
Me: Whose burro?
Juan: Our burro.
Me: WE HAVE A BURRO?!
Juan: (sudden, uncontrolable laughter)

Seriously, whose idea was it to NOT tell the Volunteer that her new project comes with its own donkey. And that the donkey is named after a nearby mountain.

It has come to my attention that this blog insufficiently explains what my project actually is. We collect trash. Before, the people of Santo Domingo had no choice but to throw their trash in the river, which is pretty rank as it is. Now, the people separate it into organics (for the compost, to be sold in the campo starting in February-ish), and inorganics. What can be sold for recyclables of the inorganics is, and the rest of it...well. Juan has the plans and is applying for a sanitary landfill to put on his farm. Currently, they are still burning the trash. We added a new neighborhood to the collection this week, so I have been walking around with Juan, handing out buckets and bags, and instructing people on how to separate their trash. Oh, me and landfills. Destined since every Take Your Daughter To Work Day of my childhood. Thanks, Dad.

Me acostumbro.

2006-12-02T07:49:00.000-08:00

After my first five days in Santo Domingo, I feel surprisingly relaxed. My big preoccupation during training was what to do with my time, and, as I somewhat expected, that all just sort of sorts itself out. Something to do presents itself everyday. With the combination of a continuing project and a sitemate (actually, two, Lillian has about a week before she moves to Lima), I don’t think I’ve had quite the site-arrival shock that other Volunteers have.

A favorite question of people here is, “¿Te acostumbras?” or, quite literally, “Do you accustom yourself?” During my site visit, I found it sort of off-putting. “Yes, I’ve been in your small town in the sierra of Perú approximately two hours, and now there are no mysteries. You all make perfect sense. I accustom myself! (cue jazz hands)” Then I realized people were still asking it about Ryan...after two years. “¿Ryan, él se acostumbra?” Two years!! They then sometimes follow it with an explanation that sometimes, people come and they don’t acostumbrarse, and then they have to go home, and it is sad. I have no idea who these un-acostumbrados people could possibly be. My stock answer for this question is now a patient smile and a “Poco a poco.” (Bit by bit? Day by day? I just noticed I don’t actually know how to translate that. Regardless, they accept it.)

I have had, if anything, almost TOO much presented to me to do on the project during the first week, and I’ve been trying to slow down and explain to Juan that I have other stuff I need to do during these first few months. Namely, acostumbrarme. I went to the campo this morning with Rachel, Lillian, and the president of their weaver’s association. I played non-competitive volleyball with some 11-year-olds outside the Municipality. The resulting bruises on my forearm indicate that I am not ready for competitive volleyball here (with girls of any age), because they are insane about it. And, also, I knit. They love me for it. Yesterday I was knitting with Flor on the front stoop, and an old woman came by and starting positively glowing in my direction. “Oh, her white skin is so beautiful...and she KNITS!” (with the latter part clearly being the more valued, as it should be).

The other thing I have been doing with my time is solving the small proyectos that come up in a developing country. For example, I had been dreading taking a shower here because there was no door on the shower, and you have to pass by the shower to get to the toilet. This made me apprehensive, for perhaps obvious reasons. Today, though, Lillian informed me that they sell plastic by the meter, so I went to a tienda, bought two meters of plastic and some packaging tape, and ta da! My dignity, for only S/.5.

My living situation is unreal, it’s so good. I can’t believe it happened by coincidence (Ryan knew Humberto from the municipality, and he happened to mention he had a room), and not through some sort of rigorous interviewing process. I started eating all my meals here, unexpectedly. I thought I would be treated more or less like the other tenants, but Flor has somewhat taken me under her wing, and part of that involves feeding me...a lot of food. She’s super-sensitive to my tastes, though, and to what she imagines an American would find disagreeable about Peruvian cuisine. Yesterday she gave me a plate of potatoes, and said, “I gave you rice last night, and I don’t want you to get bored of it.” What? I didn’t think the idea of the possibility of being sick of rice existed in this country. Amazing. Also, yesterday she casually asked me if Americans put lemon on all raw vegetables like they do here, and I said that in fact they don’t, and possibly even mentioned that I’m not fond of the habit. Today, she gave me a plate of spinach (picked from Juan’s farm), and said, “Here, I put less lemon on it for you.” A compromise, if you will. Also, phase one in my secret side project, Get Peru to Export Less of Their Abundant Spinach and Asparagus So I Can Eat It. Humberto and Flor are awesome in many, many ways unrelated to food, but I’m writing this post hungry, which is a bad idea. Like grocery shopping hungry. Also, food is something of a constant battleground between Volunteers and their families, so a good food situation is something to write home about...literally.

Upon coming back to this well-fed, I can share one adorable story about Flor. When I first got here this time, she ran up to me and immediately said, “Alyssa! I had a dream about you! I was waiting for you to come, but then you didn’t come. Some other gringa came, a bajita with black hair. And I cried because it wasn’t you.” Adorable, no?

I was sick my first couple days here, with an inexplicably painful sore throat. It was really the ultimate irony, as all Peace Corps Volunteers have to do during their first few months is talk, and that was the one thing I couldn’t do. I don’t remember if that’s actually irony. Sorry, language usage precisionists. But by the time it went away, I felt so relieved to be able to talk to people and thereby unreasonably confident in my Spanish, a good boost for the first week. Going to the Puesto de Salud here was also some sort of adventure. I didn’t actually need to see the doctor to get the amoxicillin that Dr. Jorge told me I needed, but I feel so guilty about the fact that antibiotics are non-prescription that I waited for the doctor to look at my throat with only the examination lamp in the room, offer to inject me with penicillin to see if I was allergic, and tell me that my throat was, indeed, bien rojo. As Rachel put it, sometimes we feel like we live in a reenactment: there’s an internet cafe in town, a TV and DVD player in my house, and everyone knows American movies, but the most basic things, like a flashlight to look down someone’s throat, are lacking. Poco a poco.

Santo Domingo, parte dos

2006-11-17T15:19:00.000-08:00

I have returned from my second visit to Santo Domingo, this time lasting three days. It was successful, as far as site visits go. I think I will be happy there.

Perceptions:

1. Peace Corps does a really good job preparing you to be a big deal in the community. They gave us hundreds of hypothetical site visit scenarios in which our community throws a parade for us, we have to sing the American national anthem and make speeches, they maybe slaughter some animal, everyone invites us over for dinner, and everyone wants to talk to us and know our business. They didn’t, however, prepare us for the opposite. I got to my community and caused no stir whatsoever. The people were polite and seemingly interested in working with me, but the world did not explode because (another) gringo came to town. I also have the unique situation of being both a replacement Volunteer and one of two Volunteers in the site. Everyone who knows what’s going on seems to have mixed feelings, because they love Ryan terribly and don’t want him to leave, but are trying to be welcoming. The common way of expressing this was “¡Qué pena que Ryan se vaya!.....y bienvenidos, Alyssa.” I met some great people, though, and I’m sure I’ll be able to carve out my own niche.

2. My living situation is pretty ideal. I live with a couple, Flor and Humberto. Flor’s 22, and I think Humberto is 30-ish. They’re both from nearby caseríos, but live in the city, where Flor teaches preschool and Humberto works for the municipality. I have my own big adobe room with a private door out to the street. I have electricity, and a bathroom that is a short walk down a very steep hill away. There’s a common room of the house where they hang out, but I decidedly have my own space, and I’m pretty sure we don’t all eat meals together. There’s a TV, but the only channel it seems to get is the National Geographic Channel, which is pretty cool, given what I have experienced regarding Peruvian television. I will probably buy a gas stove for my room to boil my water, and cook breakfast/dinner for myself.
I spent a lot of time with Flor during the trip. She’s incredibly patient with my Spanish and general non-understanding. For example, when I went out to the bathroom my first night, heard pig noises chasing me, ran back to the house, and asked her if the pig would hurt me, she only laughed at me a little bit. I realized when I went back in the morning that the pig of doom in question was in fact a 10-pound piglet. Oops. She took me to her parent’s house in the campo, where I attended a pig slaughter. I could go awhile without eating obscure pig organs again, that is for certain.

3. My counterpart, Juan, is pretty ideal as well. He’s in his early 30s-ish and is from Sto. Domingo, but studied in Lima. He and Ryan started the solid waste management project together, so he’s not being forced into any role he doesn’t really want (unlike many other counterparts, it seems). He also grows and makes fantastic coffee, and is trying to learn English. Probably one of the funniest moments of the entire site visit was on the bus, when I had taken Dramamine (the bus ride from Piura city to Sto. Domingo is healthily terrifying), and woke up to Juan asking me, “E-sleeping?” I completely forgot who I was talking to, and answered, “Yeah, man, I took this pill, it kind of knocked me out...(long pause, confused look)...I’m speaking English, aren’t I.” He also offered me sugar for my coffee (I could probably write an entire other blog post on the overuse of sugar in this country and the deleterious effects it has on their coffee, but that is another day), and I taught him that the word “sugar,” which he already knew, was a cariño (term of affection) or a piropo (pick-up line). He then practiced saying, “Hey, sugar,” throughout the day, which cracked me up. I fear what would happen in elementary school English classes taught by profesora Alyssa.

Site visit was emotionally up and down for me, like everyone, it seems. In reality, the biggest down was the itchy realization that I slept on a bedbug-infested mattress for three nights. I felt great when I was busy and meeting people and having good Spanish days, but when there was lag time and no one to talk to, I would get nervous about certain things. Namely, I cannot figure out for the life of me what PCVs do with their time. I suppose I will figure it out eventually (and be less high-strung about my daily schedule). I am told there is in fact a lot of down time, but that having a project to come into slowly will help me have some structure. My activities for this period before swearing-in include bonding with my fellow Peru 8s whom I have come to know and love, being sick of training, taking Benadryl, spending time with my adorable host family, and finishing A Farewell to Arms before I get to my site and have to deal with machismo all the time and don’t feel like reading it, too.

Sass.

2006-10-31T16:56:00.000-08:00

This post was going to be centered around the theme, “Look at my sweet Piura and Lambayeque pictures!” but, something rather impossible to ignore occurred yesterday.

I found out where I’m going to be for the next two years.

And then I found out it’s one of the communities I visited last week, in Santo Domingo, Piura.

(Disclaimer: Eric tells me there’s a chance the site might fall through, so it’s only 90% sure, but if the site works out, it is mine.)

You might have somehow gleaned the information that we weren’t supposed to get our site assignments until this Friday, and that, my friend, is a funny story. So yesterday after lunch, the environment Trainees who hadn’t gotten their interviews to state their site preferences yet were crowded around our APCD (Associate Peace Corps Director, in this case for the Peruvian environmental program) Eric, setting times for our interviews. Eric’s notebook fell down, and a couple papers fell out. I gazed down, saw a sheet that had all our pictures on it, and immediately thought, “Well, that’s a bad picture of me.” It took another 4 seconds or so for me to think, “And why are the words ‘Santo Domingo’ WRITTEN ACROSS MY FOREHEAD?”

We then had to go to focus groups, also known as group therapy, where we talk about our feelings, our reasons for being here, and diarrhea. I had a small breakdown of impatience waiting to talk to Eric, got a little teary, blamed it on the baby flu I picked up in Lambayeque. Two hours later, he came and got me, we sat down, and while I could recreate the conversation creatively, it’s probably more entertaining and informative in its natural form (according to my memory, where everything is performance).

Act I:
Eric: Hi. How are you feeling?
Alyssa: I...have something to tell you. This might totally change the dynamic of this interview. I saw the piece of paper that said Santo Domingo across my face.
Eric: Oh. That does change the dynamic of this interview. Cheater.
Alyssa: Right.
Eric: Did you see anyone else’s?
Alyssa: No (this is true, I swear. Only 3 more days!).
Eric: Okay. How do you feel about going to Santo Domingo?
Alyssa: I’m terrified of replacing Ryan (the Volunteer who’s there now who started the solid waste management program I’ll be working on).
Eric: Well, there are plenty of other niches in the community to work in to make yourself unique. The schools are wide open, and they’re considering a reforestation program for the forest that’s about an hour away.
Alyssa: Since it’s obvious my preferences didn’t really affect your decision to place me, and it was all about your perceptions of me, I’d like to know what your perceptions of me are. Why did you think Santo Domingo was a good place for me?
Eric: You’re confident and fearless. You’re not easily intimidated by authority figures, and you speak out when you need to. You’ll be working with the municipality, so this is all pretty necessary.
Alyssa: Huh.
Eric: Plus, you studied urban planning.
Alyssa: How does that figure into this?
Eric: The municipalidad wants to create an integral plan for all their natural resources that combines solid waste, forest, and water resource management. It would be a lot of working with planning documents.
Alyssa (soliloquy): I talked up my urban planning experience far, far too much on my CV. Planning documents...in Spanish? Here’s hoping Peru hasn’t discovered zoning.

(intermission)

Eric: Well, now you know your site. Want to talk about something else?
(short conversation about the progress of training, see previous entries for more)
Alyssa: Well, I thought at some point you’d want to address my age. Everyone keeps fussing over me being The Twenty-Year Old Peace Corps Volunteer.
Eric (smirking): No, see, I wouldn’t have brought that up in an interview, because that would be illegal. It’s called age discrimination.
Alyssa: Oh. I thought age discrimination only protected older people.
Eric: No. Remember that, Alyssa.
Alyssa: Okay.
Eric: Since we’re on the topic, how DID you graduate from college that early?
(short conversation about my life story)
Eric: So you’re bright, then.
Alyssa: And, apparently, sassy. (This is probably a lie, I fear the word “sassy” was not in fact used in this interview, but it was totally implied.) Are we done, then?
Eric: Yeah, I guess. You really did change the dynamic of that interview.
Alyssa: Well, that’s a typical Peace Corps experience. You think you’re getting into something small and easy, and then it turns into something else completely (this was verbatim what Eric told us during our pseudo-kidnapping. That sass is going to get me in trouble someday.)

End scene.
I’m overall pretty pleased with this site. As with any site, there are things to be excited about and intimidated by, pleased with and confused by. And I tried to post the pictures AGAIN, but was again let down by Blogger. And it is now time to get home and finish this 80s mermaid (¿?) costume I concocted for Halloween. Options are limited here.

Piura/Lambayeque: Ridiculous Stories

2006-10-29T06:55:00.000-08:00

I have just gotten back from an amazing week in the mountains of Piura and the coastal dry forest of Lambayeque, and I tried to upload pictures from my camera on the computers in the PC Office in Lima, but it didn't work. Silly Peace Corps Office and its constant promises of hot showers, free internet, and coffee makers.

I had some good moments:
-We led a satisfactory meeting of a group of male volunteer forest guards in Lambayeque. I came up with an analogy about neighbors stealing guinea pigs that actually seemed to make sense.
-The knitting projects of the women's group in Piura were also awesome. It's so gratifying to see successful PC projects, especially in the small business sector.
-Spending plenty of hours on the bus, actually seeing the countryside, finally feeling like we're in Peru.

Some bad ones:
-I had an uncomfortable homestay in a compound house with 60 inhabitants where the only thing separating my bed from the main living room was a potato sack curtain. Having 30 kids watch you put on deodorant, being woken up at 4 by Christian radio blasting through the house, and then being asked 12 times in the morning how you slept = not that cool.
-The baby in the last house I stayed at was "con gripe," and it's entirely possibly I now I have baby flu.
-Patrick and I brought about an unintentional emotional breakdown in a woman who was kind enough to show her around her house and tell us about her animals. We were asking pretty standard questions, or so we thought, about how long she'd been living in the pueblo, when she met her husband, where she was from, but when we asked the question of how she felt about her pueblo, she burst into tears. She then started telling us about how her whole family in Cajamarca, she doesn't like where she's living now, she really misses her family but it's too expensive and difficult to visit them. I felt so bad, and my Spanish was inadequate to convey sympathy. Nor could I empathize completely; I miss my family too, but I can keep in touch with them easily and it was completely my decision to leave in the first place.

And now, I present to you probably the most ridiculous thing to ever happen to me in my entire life:

We were leaving the meeting with the men's forest group, and Liz and I went back to use the bathroom at a Volunteer's house. On our way back to the meeting place, the Volunteer's counterpart from INRENA (Instituto Nacional de Recursos Naturales = National Institute of Natural Resources) drove by with three other trainees and told us to get in the car, there had been a change of plans. We said okay, and they told us we were going to a mayoral debate about the environment and that our boss was following with the other trainees. This seemed like an interesting enough prospect, even though it was already 5:30, we hadn't yet met our host families for the night, and it was absolutely ridiculous to fit 7 people in a truck of that size. Patrick asked them where it was, and they said "Illimo." Ten seconds later, we saw "Welcome to Illimo" signs, and thought "Well, that was easy, we're there."

Fifteen minutes later, we were in a new town, and Patrick once again asked where we were going. They said "Tucume," and sure enough, we were already in Tucume. After ten more minutes, Patrick apologized and asked again, and they again told us the name of the town we were already in. At this point, we figured out that Patrick was in fact asking "Where are we?" instead of "Where are we going?" Once that crucial detail was cleared up, they told us we were going to Fereñafe, and we laughed at the name for awhile. They told us it would 5 more minutes.

Ten minutes later, I said half-jokingly to the rest of the car (in Spanish), "I feel a little bit...kidnapped." I don't know I remembered the word for "kidnapped," but everyone laughed, including our potential kidnappers. Our boss was nowhere to be seen behind us, and I asked them if he was in fact coming, to which they laughed and said, "No. You are kidnapped. Ha, ha." The longer we spent in the car, though, the less funny that joke became.

We eventually got to the holy haven of Fereñafe, where they dropped us off at the INRENA office, and told us, "Here. Check your email." and left. The free internet subdued our concerns for about 5 minutes (Would kidnappers let you check your email? Probably not), but then the fact remained that it was 7:30, we were an hour away from the community we were staying in (and eating dinner in), our boss was nowhere to be found and there was no landline to call him, and we were under the custody of some Peruvian men who seemed to show concern for any of these facts.

Eventually, our boss called the INRENA guys and told us to take them home. We did not, in fact, attend the debate. Our chaperone stopped three times to call someone on a public phone for no apparent reason, which at that point, was pretty okay with us. By the time we got back, my family had already gone to bed and felt very bad about feeding me lukewarm chicken and rice. I'm told that this is a typical Peace Corps experience, that you get invited to something that doesn't seem like it's going to be a big deal, and then immediately transforms into a Science Fair Project.

HUH.

2006-10-20T15:38:00.000-07:00

I just realized I had this set to not allow non-Blogger comments, and that was silly. So you can comment now, if you feel so inclined. I would appreciate the love.

I might also remind you that I can still receive letters and packages (padded envelopes) of up to a pound. Postage does not seem particularly expensive. Email me, check facebook, or ask my parents for the address. (Desired items include any American candy that could withstand the trip, hand sanitizer, and, most importantly, pictures from home! Particularly those of trees changing colors, Ann Arbor, or...anything at all, now that I think about it.)

In news unrelated to me soliciting affection, we had an awesome nutrition charla with the chiquititos (1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade) at the elementary school yesterday. This might have been partially because or expectations were low. Andrew's and my activity was a relay race in which kids picked up food from a bag, ran to the other side of the patio, and put it in the bucket corresponding to what food group it belonged to, and returned. There are only three food groups in Peru, growth, energy, and protection, so that made it considerably easier. We also included a segment, perhaps 90% for our own entertainment, in which we taught the kids the English words for the foods. It went something like this:

Us: La palabra para ''carne'' en ingles es ''MEAT.'' ¡Repiten todos!
Kids: ¡MAY-AHT!
Us: Mas o menos. Y la palabra para ''queso'' es ''CHEESE.''
Kids: ¡CHAY-AY-SAY!
Us: Excelente.

And last night, Andrew and I made chicken parmesan, menos the parmesan, for my family. They thought it was muy rico, or so they said. We then went out with Melissa for Coke floats. Not all American traditions are for others to understand.

Leaving tomorrow, back next Sunday, excited to get out of the Santa E.

Tomorrow we make chicken parmesan.

2006-10-18T16:58:00.000-07:00

I'm leaving Saturday for field-based training in Piura and Lambayeque, so this may be my last post for awhile.

This week, two things happened. One, I had one of the longest days of my life. Two, Valentín Paniagua, the ex-president of Peru who held down the fort between Fujimori and Toledo, died. People here LOVED him; he was president for less than a year, but his approval rating then was something like 80%. This was a very big deal, with all-day news coverage, flags at half-mast, and yesterday afternoon (and in some places today) being a don't-go-to-work holiday.

For me, however, Paniagua's death only meant one thing: logical fallacies.

Let me explain: yesterday we had technical training all day in the dreary building of the Municipalidad de Santa Eulalia. The session had its ups and downs, but by 5:00, the appointed time for leaving, we were all ready to go. Imagine our surprise when at 5:15, they announced that we would begin to prepare a presentation, give a presentation, and receive individual criticism about it, all before leaving. It was expected to take, if we were good Trainees, 40 minutes.

An hour and a half later, our boss got in front of everyone and said something to the effect of, ''I know you're tired, but our guests are here and they want to finish the session. After all, they came in on their day off to speak to you.''

At the time I accepted this, because it was in fact their day off. It was only until later, after knitting class, when Libby pointed out that this session was probably planned months ago, when they had no inkling the ex-president was going to die, thereby more or less negating that logic.

We did not leave the Municipalidad until 7:15, making for an eleven-hour day. I seriously entertained thoughts at some point that we were unknowingly participating in a psych experiment about captivity.

Alas. It was just a hard day all around, with blame to go around, or at least to a couple people. We're all tired of training, and this week is particularly strenuous. My family and I had a good laugh about it when we got home, but maybe they were laughing at my conjugation of the sentence ''They didn't know the president was going to die.''

HAPPY EPILOGUE

2006-10-15T15:05:00.000-07:00

My mom made Pachamanca today. And it was all I could have hoped for and more. It also contributed to the confusion in my house, because my friends came over to work on a project on the patio, and when I came back into the house, the furniture was being reupholstered by my cousin and there was Pachamanca on the stove, neither of which I had any previous information about. My family must just not tell me things sometimes to avoid me being confused in the same way I sometimes avoid situations that require me to explain things (that then confuse them). Maybe it's a symbiosis. Maybe it's a communication gap. Definitely it involved me eating Pachamanca today.

I think this blog entry shall be organized into lists:

Things I’m Happy About This Week, in an American Way:

1. Getting the stabilizer for my laptop, thereby not having to write emails/entries in the internet cabinas for a whopping S/.1 per hour. Also, reclaiming my music. I am listening to Jesus Christ Superstar as I write this, and it’s putting me in an incredibly good mood.
2. Sort of getting used to cold showers. The key is to close your eyes and pretend it’s a pristine mountain waterfall. Or, if that fails, just acknowledge that you only have to be under the water for three minutes and start the countdown.
3. Realizing my house has ESPN, consequently watching the Tigers games (that is, when Peru wasn’t losing to Chile in soccer on another channel).

Things I’m Happy About This Week, in a Peace Corps Way:

1. Finally scheduling our community development activity: three nutrition workshops with elementary school kids. We have two tomorrow with some of the older kids during their gym class, which should be fine. The slightly more daunting task comes Thursday, which is one big workshop with 80 first-, second-, and third-graders. Good Lord. This project has also provided me with one of my favorite moments of training, when fellow Trainee Kevin and I walked through the elementary school and were met with hundreds of small Peruvian stares.
Kevin: God, you’d think they’d never seen a gringo before.
Me: Maybe they haven’t.
Kevin: I was here yesterday.
Me: Oh.
2. Having a stellar workshop in how to hold a community meeting.
3. Composting.

Things I’m Happy About This Week, in a Bilingual Way:
1. Correctly saying, off the top of my head, the sentence, “If I know who she was, I would talk to her.”
2. Having a good enough language interview to get moved into the next higher language level. Hurrah.

Things I’m Marginally Homesick For:
1. (Ye Olde) Franklin Cider Mill specifically, Michigan apple season generally.
2. Trees changing colors.
3. Soy products generally, a tofu pop from Red Hot Lovers specifically.
4. My yet nonexistent diploma. Did I graduate?

In other news, it’s one month in-country today, and every day is one day closer to finally knowing our sites. We’ll know those in about three weeks, and in the meantime, we’re writing our site preferences, so hey, another list:

Alyssa’s Site Priorities:
1. A project in protected area management and/or income generation.
2. Mountains (versus coast).
3. Semi-rural, but not so remote as to make a trip to the department capital an insurmountable inconvenience.

But like they say, every site has its advantages and disadvantages. If I ended up on a recycling project in an urban coastal community, I would embrace it. Almost none of the decision is in my hands, so Peace Corps flexibility is a necessary strategy.

From the sounds of it, my 4-year-old brother is having a dance party in the living room, so I am going to investigate.

No Pachamanca for you.

2006-10-08T16:23:00.000-07:00

I finished One Hundred Years of Solitude this morning, which was the kind of book that finishing left me feeling kind of dazed, but I tried my best to give the day some direction

Today Melissa and I ventured to the park in Santa Eulalia, where there was a festival of Pachamanca and free plates for 2,000 people. It was absolute madness. I'm still unclear on exactly what defines a food as Pachamanca, but it involves cooking things (potato, sweet potato, meat, tamale) in a hole in the ground. I wasn't even hungry initially, but I certainly was after an hour of waiting in line and seeing deliciously large portions pass by. There were five people before the line ended and they ran out. Melissa and I consoled ourselves with some picarones (fried donut-type desserts doused in anise honey) and then found every Peace Corps Volunteer in the madness and mooched some of their food. It was almost worth standing in line with people who have a vastly different idea of personal space than we do and having ''COLA! COLA!'' shouted at us every time it appeared we veered away from the line by half an inch or so.

This week has been filled with entertaining ''cultural exchanges'' with my family.

Exchange 1 (with my host sister, who has a 5-year-old daughter):
Angela: ''Do you know the movie Shrek? What does 'Shrek' mean in Spanish?''
Me: ''Oh, nothing, it's just the ogre's name.''
Angela: ''No, it sounds exactly like another English word you taught us.''
Me: ''Um, 'shriek' is a shout?''
Angela: ''No, no. Something the kids say on Halloween. A travesura.''
Me: ''Oh. TRICK.''

To be fair, in a Spanish accent, those words do sound exactly the same. And I was pleased that my lecture on the customs of Halloween stuck with them.

Exchange 2 (with my host dad, a history teacher):
Me: English speakers have trouble learning to say dates in Spanish. Because in English, we don't say one thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven, we say nineteen ninety-seven.''
Everd (laughing uproariously): Haha, English speakers, you have to separate it because you don't like to count to two thousand.

This honestly seemed like as reasonable an explanation for why we separate our numbers as any.

Exchange 3 (with Melissa's 13-year-old brother, watching professional wrestling)
Julio Cesar: ESMACKDOWN is on! What does ESMACKDOWN mean in Spanish?

Yesterday was also another successful day at the Agrarian Institute, with transplanting broccoli, learning about living fences, techniques for breaking up hard soil without water, etc. If getting up on Saturdays weren't so hard, those would easily be some of the best educational days of my life.

Perceptions thus far

2006-10-03T15:19:00.000-07:00

This morning's technical activities were a vast improvement on the ones of the past couple weeks of training, as they involved...actually studying the environment. All the environment Trainees got dropped off at different altitudes on mountain farms and had to explore, make a map, and figure out from the owner some information about the farm owner. Some people had some trespassing issues, but our farmer told us our instructor had talked to him ahead of time and he was glad to talk to us. He had inherited the farm from his great-grandparents and was growing, depending on the season, broccoli and cauliflower, or green pepper, tomatoes, and zucchini. We came in the middle of a pesticide spraying, and were aghast at the lack of face mask on the pesticide applier, but so it goes. We romped around the farm for a couple hours, and then came home for Spanish class.

Spanish class is sort of unsatisfying and I'm hoping I can get placed into a higher level next week when we have interviews again. We're starting to study the vocabulary of farming concepts, so that's good.

I am getting more into the groove of training as it becomes less theoretical and more technical, and soon enough I will know my assignment. At that point, tech training will become a lot more useful, because it will be site-specific. In a way, I appreciated the theoretical training, because it really defined a paradigm from which Peace Corps works that you have to apply to every project you work on. Essentially, you are there as a facilitator of community development, you will not have a specific project assigned to you so it is your job to talk to the residents and figure out what problems exist that you can help with, and then it is your job to develop the capacity within the community to address the concern, and lastly, find ways to make the project sustainable after you leave. In that way, all Volunteers seem to do the same basic work, with slightly different technical knowledge to offer. It's entirely likely that I'll end up teaching English or nutrition charlas, despite being neither a TEFL nor a health Volunteer. It's all very lofty, but it seems important to get the approach to development down before you get thrown into a site. I laughed this week when I remembered talking to an SNRE grad student at Michigan who said, ''I thought about Peace Corps, but I'd want to do agroforestry and not environmental education. I can't imagine a worse assignment than environmental education,'' because really there's not a single PC assignment in which the Volunteer isn't an educator. No Volunteer gets to solitarily plant things in tree canopies for two years.

I'm trying not to mentally fuss over what kind of site I want, because it's really entirely out of my hands. I want to do protected area management ideally, but I'll have to work with whatever I get.

The Amish story made the afternoon news in Perú yesterday. Very surreal.

Yesterday was the first day of celebration for the anniversary of Neyda's school today, marked the Paseo de Antorchas, in which all the kids design something out of tissue paper, put it on a post, put a candle inside, and march around. I would like to have a word with whoever thought it was a great idea to combine small children, fire, and tissue paper into a single night of mayhem. The kids were cute, though, and there seemed to be minimal damage to life and limb, even when someone shot fireworks off a gigantic tissue paper caterpillar. One girl got to be the queen, and another, her maid. Peruvian girls love their hoop skirts, I tell you.

Well.

2006-10-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

Well, it seems I am in Perú.

The basic information:

I am in Santa Eulalia, 45 minutes northeast of Lima, during training. Training takes place at this crazy enclosed plaza 10 minutes from my house that used to be a rehab center for the Peruvian Army. We have classes in language and culture, technical learning (in either environment or health), medical information (you really haven't lived until you've had a 45-minute lecture entirely about diarrhea), and other miscellaneous topics (like Peruvian history and government). Training is pretty intense: 8 hours a day Monday through Friday, and on Saturdays we go to the National Agrarian Institute on the outskirts of Lima in the morning for vegetable gardening training.

A PSA:
Coincidentally, Santa Eulalia is currently in the national news for having a man die of bartonellosis, a mosquito-transferred disease. The Ministry of Health has responded with a huge campaign. The citizens are displeased with this negative portrayal in the news, and are going to Lima to protest tomorrow. It's generally the impression that this has gotten way too hyped up, bartonellosis has been around forever, and it's quite easy to diagnose and treat. So, for those of you who may worry: I do not plan on dropping dead from a mosquito bite tomorrow.

I live with an adorable family, and even after two weeks of living there, I'm not 100% clear on who lives there and who just passes through a lot. My host mom, Neyda, definitely lives there with her husband, Everd, and three of her four kids. Sigrid is 26-ish and has 2 kids who also live there: Amir is 4 and Alisa is 9 months. The first week was filled with much laughter at the idea of the Volunteer having the same name as the baby. One of the other daughters, Angela, who is in her 20s, has a 5-year-old girl, Kenya. The son, Gary, is 28 and intends to teach me to dance at the discoteca. I got really lucky, my family is so nice and supportive and always tries to make me understand what they're saying, even though my Spanish is...mediocre. I think the best moment I've had with them yet is when I came home and told them a story at dinner about another Trainee whose eyes are different colors, a fact he did not notice until he was 9 years old, and my host mom laughed and said, ''Oh, Alyssa. She always comes home with a joke.'' I took this to be a sign of success, because it really is hard to be funny, and thereby win people over, in another language.

My health may be kind of up and down (mostly up!), but one thing I am not suffering from is seasonal affective disorder. Santa Eulalia is where people come from Lima to get sun, because it is sunny literally every day and almost never rains. Another thing I am not suffering from in out-and-out culture shock, as living in the city during Training is a little cushier than working in the campo. We have running, albeit cold, water, and cable TV. The kids watch Powerpuff Girls dubbed in Spanish and we discuss the finer points of Ghostbusters over dinner. Ask me about the presence of American culture in 2 months, and I feel quite certain I'll have a different answer for you.

More later, now it is time to go home and eat (more) potatoes.

First order of Peace Corps Volunteer business:

2006-08-02T06:44:00.000-07:00

Get cheap Chacos.

Look at them.
Look at that Vibram sole.
They're BEAUTIFUL.
And they're mine, for 50% off.
It's not unlike turning 65.

Ta da!

2006-08-01T12:48:00.000-07:00

So I guess this marks the actual beginning of the blog: The Day I Got My Invitation.

My roommate Erin actually opened the invitation, so it's quite possible I'm not going to Peru at all and she is a dirty liar who merely PRETENDED to open the overnighted envelope. Today was filled with much phone-calling, CIA World Factbooking, and dancing about the house. Today was also the day I realized the questions from other people are far from over, that they have merely transfered from "Where do you think you're going?" to "What exactly are you doing?" Apparently, "environmental awareness/action" is too vague. Soon, I'm sure, there will be another round of paperwork (I here there's an essay involved), not to mention all that packing.

The official timeline:
9/13/06-9/15/06: Staging, Washington D.C.
9/16/06-11/24/06: Training, Peru
11/24/06-11/24/08: Official Service Dates

Also, I'm writing a paper.

2006-04-07T16:01:00.000-07:00

I started this blog ridiculously early as an outlet for my Peace Corps-related enthusiasm and clever blog-naming abilities.

Status: Dentally and legally cleared. Medical pending.