Next up: January

The best place to start is at the beginning, so I’m told.

January went something like this:

New Year’s: There are two festivals in my town each year. One is during Halloween and the other is during New Year’s. The New Year’s festival is called the celebration of the “Santisima Cruz Colorado,” and it lasts about two weeks. In a lot of ways, it looks exactly like the festival that we had in October, but it was bigger. There were more fair-type games and food. A very popular Peruvian band played in La Cria, “Grupo Cinco.” My brother and sister went, but I didn’t want to pay the S/.20 entry fee. I kind of regret that now. They have pretty good music.

What I most enjoyed about New Year’s was learning the Peruvian customs. First, at midnight, there is a party downtown in the plaza. (Every town has a plaza, Spanish tradition.) There is music and dancing and drinking, but the most interesting part was when they lit a giant wooden tower with firecrackers and whirly-twirly fireworks. When the flame reached the top of the tower, it spelled our “¡Feliz Año Nuevo!” Happy New Year. Then, they had two dummies, clothes stuffed with straw, that they set on fire. Someone told me that this is supposed to burn away any bad stuff that is going to happen in the new year. And finally, a young man put on a cow costume (basically just some white card board crudely shaped like a cow that fit snugly over the boy’s back when he was hunched over at the waist), which was promptly set on fire before he began his run through the crowds. This was absolutely the safest part of the evening. (Sarcasm.) This is supposed to spread good luck. I held my breath, waiting to see who was going to be the first person set aflame, but there were no casualties, and, honestly, it was really fun. Other customs that I took part in was eating twelve grapes – one good luck charm for each month of the year. Also, my sister gave me yellow underwear. Wearing yellow underclothes on New Year’s Eve is good luck, but when someone gives you yellow underwear, it’s double good luck. I must admit that I prefer black-eyed peas and cornbread over grapes, but I had a really great time.

I returned to “la puntilla,” the swimming hole quite a few times this month. We had a lot of extended family members visiting. My host cousin came home for summer break from studying at a university in Lima. Another host aunt and her 3-year-old son stayed with Tia (Aunt) Rosa also. The whole family went to la puntilla a couple of times to picnic and hang out. Also, I went fishing for the first time at la puntilla and some of the surrounding fishing holes on the river. My cousins don’t use poles, they use nets. Although I only got to throw it once, I was the collector the fishes. There is some technique and skill involved, but it is so different than any fishing that I’ve ever experienced. I think I will try to purchase my own net next summer. They keep ALL the fish that they catch. The first one that my cousin caught, I laughed out loud when he told me to put it in the bag, but he was serious. It was what most of us would consider bait, especially in Texas. We caught one decent-sized tilapia. Afterwards, I sat on the shore and helped clean them with my pocket knife. They don’t skin or gut them here, just scrape the scales off and throw ‘em in the frying pan. (Sorry I don’t have any pics of these excursions. I lent my camera to my cousin to take some pics of all of us swimming and she promptly went to pushing buttons, and since she, of course, cannot read English, erased every photo that I had of anything that occurred to me in January and the last part of December.)

After nearly a month of boredom, I started up some English classes for the wee little ones during their summer break. (10-14 year-olds. They are “wee” because all in all the Peruvian people are small. I once mistook a 15-year-old for a 10- or 11-year-old. High school kids look like our elementary school kids.) Youth Volunteers are strongly encouraged to do some kind of something during the summer break. Honestly, I think this is mainly to combat Volunteer insanity more than anything else.

Alphabet caterpiller

This was the first day. The number of kiddos swelled
to over 40 the next day.

Nonformal education at its best

Learning the parts of the body in English

The lesson on clothes 

This was my first business encounter with the municipality, i.e., I begged for some money. At this point, I am already highly familiar with the snail’s pace of work around here, but this was my first go. Good news, though – I got the money…three months later. Because of this, I was unable to do many of the cool activities that I had planned for the kiddos, but they seemed to enjoy themselves. The best part was that my host sister, Yessica, helped me out most days. I started out with 18 kids, but by the second week, we had 42. The numbers evened out in February. A rumor went around town that the classes ended in January, so attendance plummeted that first week. Small towns! What do ya do?

I only did two days a week because I had plans to start a Youth Leadership Group. This was one of the three things that the authorities asked for help with before I moved to town. This was specifically listed in my welcome packet. I plastered the town with flyers, made announcements on the “emisor,” (a big bull horn on a pole that announces important messages to the town and plays the national anthem at 7a.m. every morning J) and personally invited about 7 youths that I really wanted to attend. In a small town and with the support of the high school staff (yes, the director and secretaries and PTA are at the school for most of the summer break), I figured that this would be sufficient advertising. I made “American” appetizers (PBnJ, ham and cheese pinwheels, tuna fish sandwiches, and my now famous chocolates) for my first meeting and some really cool team-building exercises ready to go. I waited for an hour…for no one to show. I had heard of this happening to practically every volunteer, but when it happens to you, you just aren’t prepared like you think you are. I started questioning…well, lots of things. Do these people truly like me? I mean, not even my host sister or neighbors came! Why did I have 7 people look me in the eye and say, “Yes, I’ll be there."? What did I do wrong? Why am I here? I had a heck of a lot of appetizers to share with the family. When I went to the PTA to get their support, they told me that there was no way that the kids in the community are going to participate in something like that during their summer vacation. They told me that all the kids are “lazy” during the summer. I retorted with, “Well, I would think that watching tv all day and all night would be a little boring. Plus, I see the kids swimming in the canal and in the river every day. I think that starting now would give the kids a good opportunity to do activities at least every week because when school starts back up, they will need the time to study, and we can probably only meet once or twice a month.” This logic didn’t sway a single person. So, they promised to support me in “anything I wanted to do” when school started back up, and if I needed something to do during the break why didn’t I teach a dance class? Because I’m not a dance instructor. Ok, then sports. No, I’m not a coach. So, basically I entered a meeting to beg for support for a community youth leadership group, and I walked away teaching a Zumba/aerobics class for middle-aged mamas. Anything for the sake of integration.

Oh! And I forgot to mention that this happened a little over a week that I tried to renegotiate my eating arrangements with my host family that went over like a lead brick. Probably 90% of Volunteers renegotiate, but my family either didn’t understand what was told to them or were misinformed. I tried to prepare my own meals because I explained that I have high cholesterol and I had gained probably about 15 pounds in six months and all the carbohydrates in the Peruvian diet (Seriously, they mix rice with spaghetti here and call it good.) were very bad for my health. I was willing to still eat lunch with the family, but I wanted a healthy breakfast and dinner. My family agreed, but they were only going to give my S/.50 per month to eat 60 meals. Nope! That’s pretty much impossible. I guess I’ll just have a heart attack, get sent home, and you can have a big fat S/.0 a month! Now, at the time, the family thing, the food thing, compiled with the youth leadership group thing, my high school principal telling me that it was my fault that nobody showed up, and the realization that I had 21 months left to go, was almost too much. There were many tears shed and much McDonald’s put on mommy’s credit card, but I persevered! Honestly, this was my lowest point so far. For this reason, I couldn’t write blogs for a while. “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all’ type of thing. Today, things are better. The awkwardness remained with the family for almost two months (From my experience, Peruvians don’t really talk things out; it’s either stuffed down deep or screamed out.) until I couldn’t stand it anymore. My host mom makes me salads with practically every meal and I am much more honest about what I do and don’t like. I don’t eat rice very often, and I eat very little meat (cuz it’s all fried). Also, I started buying my own cereal and box milk (there’s no fresh milk here) for breakfast for some days and every now and then, I cook my own dinner, so they dropped my rent S/.50 a month, but I get much healthier meals that they prepare, so everyone is happy.

So, this exercise class thingy. I pretty much smelled failure from the start. Peruvians are not known for their health habits, (For example, my 18-year-old cousin invited me to go “running’ with her when I first arrived at site. I am NOT a morning person, but I needed the exercise and as many friends as I could get, so I agreed to go “running” at 5a.m. We went walking. I tried to explain to her that it is recommended to elevate your heart rate, but she didn’t really understand my broken Spanish, and I just took off jogging, meeting her on the flip side of the highway 15 minutes later where she rejoined me for about 3 minutes before she ate my dust again.) and I had been seriously trying to lose weight since about mid-December. I explained to the PTA that I could do the videos that I had been doing in my house, but that was pretty much all I knew about teaching an exercise class. “We want to dance!” they tell me. Ok, but I don’t know any dances, but I can find some on the Internet and we can learn them together. So, since this was labeled an “exercise class,” I decided to start with stretches as performed by Sean T. from the Insanity videos, dance a few peppy numbers with the ladies, then do the cardio exercises from the “Fit Test” from the Insanity series. The Fit Test is about ten different cardio exercises that you do for exactly one minute as hard as you can, but at your own pace. I could not have stressed “at your own pace” harder. It is important that you are able to breathe. I even brought a huge jug of water, glasses, and I made spreadsheets for the ladies to count the number of reps they were able to accomplish, so they could track their progress throughout the next two months. As you can imagine, (and honestly, I knew better, but I was just a little bitter that I could get support for a mom’s exercise class, but could not get support for a youth leadership group, the #2 reason that I was invited into this community, so let’s just say that my heart was really not into this whole thing.) things were going semi-well with the dancing. Some did not like the songs that I had found on youtube, and all of them couldn’t imagine why I didn’t use the song Festejo (Remember how I said that EVERY class in the high school did their choreography to the same song back in October for the school’s anniversary celebration? Yeah, that song.), but there were still smiles on faces. When I busted out with the Fit Test, the looks on their faces were priceless. You want us to do whhhhaaat?!?! “But D.D., those people on the video are skinny!” Uh-huh. “But, D.D., I thought this class was for mamas.” Yup. And my personal favorite - “But, D.D., I’m sweating!” At this point, I stopped and tried to explain that I was asked to teach an exercise class and that I agreed to play my videos for everyone. I added the three Zumba dances out of the goodness of my heart and to please the ladies because I have no interest in doing the dances, I want to lose weight, so I want to do exercises that will contribute to weight loss. Then I explained that there is probably a cultural difference in the definition of exercise, but to me, exercise is not the most fun thing to do, but we do it for the physical benefits, like a healthy heart, weight loss, to combat diabetes, and to live longer. And, yes, when done correctly, exercise causes one to sweat! If there are any ladies that do not want to do the aerobics part or the dancing part, that was absolutely OK, but this is what the classes are going to be like. I did my absolute best to say this in an assertive (not aggressive) tone, but in my head, I was doing something (yet again) that I really didn’t want to do without any sort of tactical or tangible help, amidst of cacophany of complaints were plentiful. There were 12 women in my first exercise class. The following class, I expected to have a whoppin’ 0, but to my surprise, I had 19! Over the 2 ½ month period that I continued the classes, there were many that came and went, but I had four ladies that really stuck with me, and we talked about meal plans and how they could do the exercises in their houses since they now had the knowledge, and all four reported weight loss and two talked about better sleep. They even want to perform one of our dances (Festejo, of course) during the next school anniversary. LOL! Two of the ladies are some of my closest friends here now, so……totally worth it despite my crappy attitude in the beginning.

Also, I got some feedback on my huge community diagnostic that I turned in in December. My boss of the Youth Development Program gave me a textbook compliment sandwich. She said that it was so nice to read a diagnostic from an older, highly educated volunteer with obvious work experience……buuuuut I was too scholarly. Here’s a few recommendations, but very in-depth and interesting to read. Now, I have been accustomed to an APA writing style, and by “accustomed,” I mean I did about 1,672 rewrites during my two years of Master’s training, so being “too scholarly” was more of a compliment to me than a negative criticism. In reality she gave me a compliment compliment sandwich with a thick slice of compliment in the middle and extra compliment dippin’ sauce. When you’ve been trained to write like you’re writing for publication in scholarly journals (Thanks, again, Psych Profs of MSU!), it’s a challenge to dumb yourself down, for lack of a better term. She was absolutely right, by the way. I forgot my audience when writing, and the people and authorities of La Cria, Patapo, Lambayeque, Peru are not aching to know about the statistical methods employed or the limitations of the diagnostic.

So, that was pretty much my January. I hit my lowest point in the now 111/2 months that I have been here. I had to engage some of those darn psych techniques that I learned on myself, but all in all, I’m doing above average now. I know, I know, that still isn’t super reassuring, but I doubt that I will ever reach that natural high honeymoon period naiveté that I had my first couple of weeks in country. It’s possible, but it will be fleeting, and that’s just reality. Peace Corps has mapped out the science of Volunteers’ bipolarism, and I can expect another round of the blues in August, when I have been here for 15 months, but still lack another 12. By then, my dearest mommy will have been here and brought me Reese’s peanut butter cups and ranch dressing to help me cope. Luv u, Mom!