Happy Anniversary to Me!

Many of you sent me “Happy Anniversary” messages last month, and it really warmed my heart that so many of you remembered. June 5^th, to be exact. Some days it feels like time is flying, and then some days it feels like the Earth has stood still. Thankfully, more the former than the latter. Also, it is a little disheartening when you hit your year anniversary and still lack more than a year, but it is still a great milestone! I have my pictures organized in my computer by month, and it was really cool to have 2 Junes!

This month was busy, stressful, and disappointment-filled. I went to Chiclayo a lot for Peace Corps meeting and events. In the last weekend of the month, we hosted a 3-day female leadership camp for girls aged 12-17. There was much planning involved. I wanted to be more involved than was possible because they kept scheduling meeting during the week when I work. Also, we had our regular monthly meeting.

This is the time of year when the new groups (youth development and economic development) are entering and the old groups are exiting. This process occurs again in September with the health and environment groups. So, we had to have a little send-off party for the “19ers.” (My group is 21). It was really nice. We put our money together and several of us stayed in a condo in Pimentel, a beach town about 20 minutes west of Chiclayo. We hung out on the beach and did a roast and toast of each member of the Lambayeque, Peru 19 group. Good times were had by all.

I was told to be the coordinator of the newbies field-based training (FBT). This was a disaster from the start. First, when the idea was first presented to me to just have the FBT in Lambayeque, my response was, “Well, two of the youth development volunteers are leaving in mid-July (2 of the 19ers), and I don’t know when FBT will be, but if it is after they leave, there will only be two youth development volunteers in all of Lambayeque left.” I got an email about a week later thanking me for accepting the position as FBT coordinator. What the hey? OK, I guess. At first I kind of thought it was an honor, but I think I was just the lesser of two evils. To make a long story short, ALL of the bosses and facilitators in the youth development program are new. My program assistant, Giovana, is a nice lady and only moderately new, but she went on vacation or something shortly after I was elected to this position, so the majority of the coordination was left in the hands of a tech trainer in the training office in Lima. This woman was very inflexible in the scheduling, considering I had the task of filling a 5½ day work week for 12 trainees that had to include at least three practicums (giving charlas) with two volunteers in the region. She also handed down responsibilities to me that I found out later are in no way supposed to be my responsibilities (e.g., booking the bus trips to and from Lima, doing the budget), and would change her opinions, rules, and desires on a day to day basis. I literally made myself sick from stress. I finally had it down to where I was missing only two hours in the schedule (due to the aid of the other amazing volunteers), and she changed something AGAIN, making six hours of holes in my schedule instead of two. I wrote a point by point numbered list of my concerns and why they were concerns and how they could possibly be alleviated, followed by a paragraph of expressing my desire to continue and help the new volunteers in any way I could, but I could NOT continue working on the schedule in these circumstances. Please understand also that this woman called me or sent me emails (sometimes 3 or 4 times a day) practically every day for two weeks. I have only quit one job in my entire life, but after that (and the fact that I spent about 35 hours working on a grant proposal and filling out the application and telling all my Peruvian socios that we were most likely going to receive funding for our sex ed program, then getting an email that the funding had run out since the month before when I sat through three days of training on the subject), I was seriously on the verge of packing my bags. The tech trainer called me the next day, and I didn’t answer for my own mental and, at this point, physical health. I did, however, receive a call from my program assistant the following day. I was still upset, and wanting to avoid the topic altogether, but she insisted on coming all the way to my site to talk about it. She said she agreed 100% with all my points that I listed in the email, and that if we just sat down together for an hour or so, we could probably get the schedule knocked out. I was resistant, but relented. It was a good thing she was so persistent because in less than an hour, we had it all straightened out and had my nerves under control. It felt really good to know that my concerns were justified and that I was not the person being obstinate, unrealistic, and uncooperative. We have had a few hiccups in the last week, but with Giovana’s help, we have worked them out easily, and I am now really looking forward to FBT next week. I am going to get to meet and get to know 12 of the new people, one of which will be my new “site mate,” more or less. I know for sure that one person is going to be placed in Pátapo (my district capital 20 minutes west of La Cria). Also, I get to stay in the hostel for a week with wifi and hot showers. Woo hoo!

The elementary school had their school anniversary celebration this month. You may recall from my blog from October, that school anniversaries are a big deal here. The students spend (at least) one week preparing and one week celebrating. I came for the game day. There is a very popular television show here called, “Esto es Guerra,” This is War. It is basically a watered-down version of American Gladiators meets Day of our Lives. It reminds me of professional wrestling – ridiculous soap-opera style melodrama, but with physical challenges. Anyway, some of the games they play on the show were imitated on game day – cup pyramid stacking, spinning a butterfly nut down a grooved metal pole, blowing a ping pong ball over upturned glasses into an upright glass, etc. etc. You know, typical war games. I had waaaaaayyy more fun watching how serious the kids take these games than just watching them play. I also attended fiesta day. There was a clown for the kids in fourth and fifth grades that was super fun, and I hung out and danced with the kids from sixth. Of course, I went home with two pieces of cake (after eating one piece at the party) and a Halloween haul of candy.

Classic field games

Cup stacking, yet another classic

Soccer is a celebration must . . .

as well are clowns . . .

and dancing!

The butterfly nut down the 'ol metal pole game.
My lil sis is on the far left. She didn't win :(

Spelling championships. Backwards letters count too!

The determined look of champion cup stackers . . .

I'm super hard to spot.

Team cheers

The all-girls leadership camp was the real highlight of the month. Minus a few volunteers irritating me and getting about 5 hours of sleep in three days, it was phenomenal! We arrived early-ish Friday morning. The camp took place in a nature center with a few animals (no, no llamas) and several different types of plant and vegetable fields. Girl Rising. If you haven’t seen it, it is a must. It is very well done with Liam Neeson as narrator along with the voices of Meryl Streep, Penelope Cruz, Cate Blanchett , and others. The film follows the suffering and ultimate triumph (mentally, at least) of girls from numerous different countries – an earthquake survivor from Haiti, a rape victim from Egypt, a slave from India, a girl sold into marriage at age 10 in Afghanistan, etc. It’s a tearjerker, but will never leave you. We began the next day with a volleyball tournament, followed by more charlas from a Peruvian female psychologist, then an obstetrician, then we planted beans and other plants, made “borro,” the mud thatch used to construct many buildings here, stuffed plastic bottles full of trash that will be used in place of bricks to build a wall, and picked fruit. That night we had a bonfire, and helped 50 Peruvian teenage girls make their first s’mores and sang songs ‘til midnight. By Sunday, we were pretty much exhausted. To ensure safety and security, the volunteers did rounds throughout the night. Luckily, there were enough of us that each person only had to do it once, but it still sucked. Sunday, we had a round robin with successful Peruvian women from various occupations – an ecologist, a teenaged entrepreneur, a nurse, a psychologist, university students, and others. Afterwards, we picked up our trash, packed up, and headed home. It was a great experience. All four of the girls that I brought had never spent one night away from home! It was amazing watching all of them make new friends and learn so much about themselves and the world. We will probably never know, but I like to think that some girl’s lives are forever changed for the better because of one little weekend.

My team was the red team

Learning to make jam

Doin a little yoga

6:00am volleyball

Probably my fav activity

Learning about feminine hygiene and health

Speaking with successful female business owners

Nope! The smores were my favorite!

Dirty, but constructive

We settled in and did intros. Then we were split into teams. The idea behind this was to expose the girls to the possibility of new friendships, other than the girls from their own communities. Later there were charlas given by successful Peruvian women about vocational orientation, and the girls took a job interest inventory which we evaluated and returned to them on the last day. We ate a ton of food that day, so much so that we asked for less on the following days. Like I’ve explained before, our “snack” was a 4’x 5’ “causa,” basically a tuna salad sandwich with mashed potatoes instead of bread and double the mayo. We had oranges the next two days. In the evening, we did some yoga, and then watched a documentary called

This is all for June. I will be sure to update soon to let you all know how FBT went. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

May, Month of Making the Mothers Merry (Alliteration!)

I was really impressed with the way that Peruvians celebrate Mother’s Day. Like I have said before, with most holidays in general, Peruvians celebrate longer and harder than we Americans do, but Mother’s Day was a very special occasion. I celebrated for two days with the elementary school, the high school, the community, and the family. At the schools, the kiddos did traditional Peruvian dances and recited poems about mothers. There were also raffles with some pretty cool prizes, like dish sets. I made my now famous chocolates (Ritz peanut butter sandwiches dipped in chocolate and crushed up Oreo and cream cheese balls dipped in chocolate) for the moms of the PTA, the teachers that are mothers, and the moms in my neighborhood.

Some of the mamas of the high school kids

Just oneo fo the four tables of gifts

A little singing

The local obtetrician and mayor's wife
passing out the presents

A lively poetry reading

A little dancing

A little more dancing

And a little more dancing

The elementary school's celebration

The first graders' choreographed Mother's Day spectacular

The fourth grader's dance

My host mom receiving her gift

The sixth graders. They're a lively bunch.

Dancing and more dancing

My host cousin, Mauricio

A party is not a party here without a “merienda,” or snack. You should know though that we ain’t talking about a handful of trail mix here. A classic example of a snack in my community is a big hunk of goat, a heaping pile of rice, and some potatoes or yucca, followed by a decent-sized piece of cake. Later on that night, I attended another celebration in the community that had the same basic format, but with tubs full of nonperishable food items as raffle prizes and a lot of singing.

On Sunday, we woke up and immediately gave Reyna, my host mom, her presents. My brother and sister-in-law got her a set of juice glasses, and my sisters got her a set of bigger juice glasses. I’m thinking there was not a ton of collaboration going on beforehand. I got her a new nonstick skillet. She has one skillet that appears to be cast iron, but is not. It has just been well-used for probably 15 years or more, and it is definitely NOT nonstick. It hung on the wall for about three weeks before I asked to use it and made pancakes, showing her how you don’t have to use grease with EVERYTHING that you cook, and it changed her life. She still uses vegetable oil with EVERYTHING, but she is much happier when she washes the dishes. We then ate a special breakfast of chicharrones, fried pig fat. I had my usual fruit salad. Later the whole family went out to eat. This was the first time I ate in a restaurant with the entire family. Once or twice we have ate dinner in a local rotisserie chicken place and I have ate a couple of times in Chiclayo with individual family members, but never ALL together. Even my sister-in-law’s mother and aunt and uncle joined us. It was nice. My host brother paid for everyone’s meals. I tried really hard to help pay, but he made me promise to make hamburgers sometime soon.

The best part of all the Mother’s Day festivities was helping make my little host sister’s costume for her school choreography.

Yellow ballerina slippers, S/. 15, handmade
skirt and blouse, S/. 10, cardboard sun
headdress, S/. 1 . . .

One singing, dancing, smiling 6-year-old
Peruvian sun sister . . .priceless.

She was the sun. One of our neighbors made her bright yellow skirt and top, my host mom found bright yellow slippers, and I made her headdress out of cardboard, yellow poster board, and gold metallic paper. She was definitely the cutest out of all the students, but I am a little bit biased.

Whew! Other May things…It was “Semana de Maternidad,” Maternity Week, so I helped out the health post quite a bit. My good friend and one of my best colleagues, the obstetrician, Ketty, gave a few safe sex lectures in the high school. The most fun that I had was participating in a big parade in Chiclayo with many different leaders from health posts all over Lambayeque. We had a banner and four and a half (Mirian brought her son) of us from La Cria walked probably two kilometers carrying our banner and balloons. Afterwards there was a gathering in the mall with different booths, snacks (surprisingly only fruit, crackers, and juice), and a show starring youth groups. We brought four kids from the La Cria high school who put on a small skit about how to get family planning information from the health post. It was adorable. Later that week, the health post had a talent show/party for all the local pregnant ladies. They did dances, sang, painted, and recited poetry. I was a judge along with an obstetrician, a med tech, and the mayor from Patapo (my county seat). The mayor and I voted for the singer. She had a beautiful voice, and I found out later that she used to sing professionally before she settled down and had a family. However, we were overruled by the other judges who wanted one of the first-time mothers who was very poor to receive the grand prize. We really couldn’t argue with that. After the talent show, there was food, of course, and more prizes and dancing. I really enjoy working with the people from the health post. They are just a delightful, fun-loving group of folks. Still later in the week, I helped Ketty do some exercise classes with the pregnant ladies. It was really a stretching class, but I enjoyed it as well…except for the stirrups. Ha! Just kidding!

Medical Staff from all over the region participated in this parade

Staff from the Posta de Salud, Pampa La Victoria and me
...and our banderola... and Piero, Mirian's son

Phoebe and two of her pups

Another addition was made to the family. Phoebe, my sister-in-law’s dog, had her pups. She had five, but within two days, two had died. Originally, I was excited like the rest of the family. Newborn puppies are adorable, and I figured that we would sell them later once they got weaned and started making noise and pooping everywhere, like we did with Lassie’s puppies. However, my host mom came to me after about six weeks, saying that she was tired of having five dogs in the house. I told her that it was her house, and if it were me, I would make my sister-in-law sell the puppies. She did just that through my host brother, but it backfired in the worst possible way. I sat down at the breakfast table one day, and my host brother said, “I took Lassie to our aunt’s house to live.” I melted. “Why?” He said that Reyna said the she didn’t want five dogs in the house, and Miriam (sister-in-law) wanted at least one of the puppies, so they got rid of Lassie first, and two of the puppies were to follow shortly. I was so upset. Lassie was probably my best friend. She followed me everywhere. I had to shut the door to the house when I left for work each morning. Today, nearly two months later, it is still a touchy subject, and I still miss her.

Oh! My little host sister was inducted into the school police! It's a pretty big deal here.

 

Miriam, my sis-in-law, pinning on Dayhanna's cords

Awww, they grow up so fast

Mirian and I at the conference with our
completion certificate

I did one other thing in May of note. We had a training in Chiclayo to learn how to apply for a grant for our sex ed. classes that most of us teach. I have plans to start my sex ed. program with Ketty in August, so having the training in May seemed like perfect timing. I generally despise these Peace Corps trainings, but this one was not that bad. I was irked that the volunteers from Lambayeque and La Libertad had to attend a 3-day training with our socios when the volunteers from other departments only had to attend one day without their socios, but I tried to look at the bright side.

I was going to get to stay in a hostel for three nights, and eat American food a few times at the mall, etc. The teacher at this training was really interesting, and I do like passing time with my socia, Mirian. So, all in all, it was nice to get away for a few days too.

That’s about it for May. It is July 1^st as I am writing this, so right now, I’m only a month behind! By Peruvian standards, I might as well be early!

Abril: Don’t adjust your screen, it’s “April” in Spanish

Time is flying. I feel like I wrote the last round of blogs yesterday which was almost three months ago. Here’s a quick recap of April (the month, not my best friend):

I continued to work in the tutoria hour in one of the primary schools and the high school. In the elementary and the lower grades in the high school, I taught self-esteem elevation.

La Cria's 5th grade class

La Cria's 6th grade class

Profe Fenco and I teaching "Raising your Self-Esteem"

This is one of the objectives of the youth development program in Peace Corps. I had a lot of fun with the kiddos in these lessons doing some “getting to know myself” exercises and “it’s OK to be different” lessons. I really enjoy working with the kids in the elementary school – no back talk, better listeners, and they have genuine interest. Plus, the world is still a very magical place where we can take trips to whole different worlds in our imaginations. I get to be a fairy princess if I wanna. LOL!

Gender stereotypes collages

With the older youth, I taught sex and gender. This is a foreign concept here. I had a rough time with this, but there were slight improvements in their pre- and posttests, so I must have done a little something right. Being so used to teaching at the university level, I tried to throw in sexual orientation with one class, and WHOA! Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! It was not a total disaster, but too complicated. Not only are gays extremely prejudiced against here, but it was difficult enough for them to understand the concept that gender is a social construct, not a genetic trait. You have to understand that here, EVERY little girls’ favorite color is pink or purple, and if it is not, they are kind of shunned. You should have seen the looks on their faces, boys and girls alike, when I told them that the picture on the board of the baby in pink was a boy. “How do you know, profe?” (“Profe” is short for “professor” here.) “Why would his mom dress him in pink? That’s a girls color!” True enough, this is still tricky to most of us in the states also, but it was really cool to spread the word of breaking those restrictive gender stereotyping chains in a machista culture.

We had a ceremony for students chosen for the “policia escolar,” the “school police.”

The kids in front are the scholastic police

Three of the newly inducted

The principal, a corded policewoman,
the secretary, and La Cria P.D.

Hi!

The main force of discipline in the school system here is conducted by the good kids in class. Don’t get me started on this one, but the ceremony was cool. The chief of police came, and they all do this little march, and they are awarded cords to wear with their school uniforms.

We also did earthquake drills.

Standing in their circles, the safe zones

The "injured"

Adding another

No fire drills, no tornado drills, no terroristic threat drills like were carried out in my school years. There are great big circles drawn on the pavement in open air, one for each class, and the students have to stand on until the danger has passed. The biggest different between their drills and ours? They act out possible injury! Awesome! The kids used red paint and markers to draw blood on various body parts, and the school police students are responsible for carrying their injured classmates to a special circle. The kids were just plopping the “injured” on the ground and running back for more. I was glad that I had my camera to hide my smiling face.

We also got a new water tank and new toilets. We had toilets, but they were the old kind that has the tank high up on the wall with the pull chain instead of a handle, and the kids would pull the chains continually just for fun, so we were always out of water. Now I don’t think that we have run out of water one day which is awesome because 300 students and unflushable toilets make for one stinky school.

I took two really cool trips this month. It was Easter, but like most holidays here, they celebrate twice as long and twice as hard as we do in the states. The volunteers got free vacation days, so the 3dO crew headed to the sierra for four days. This was our first outing without Caroline, so, honestly, we were all a little nervous. Caroline was kinda our glue. You know, every group has one, and Caroline was ours. However, everything was amazing. We had a magnolious time! We went to Chachapoyas in the department of Amazonas. Much of Amazonas is the jungle, but the capital, Chachapoyas, is in the mountains. There is only one trustable bus line that goes that far north, and it departs from Chiclayo, my capital, so we all met up in Chiclayo. After a nine hour bus ride, we arrived, checked into the hostel, and promptly signed up for a 10-hour tour of some mountains and some ruins.

One of the replicated houses

Outside the fort

Rebecca photobombing my selfie

Standing on the wall of Kuelap

Token turistic Peruvian llama

Some cool structural designs and our guide, Pedro

Hi

These ruins are supposedly the Machu Picchu of the north. Although I haven’t seen Machu Picchu yet, they were really cool. The ruins are called “Kuelap.” We had a really nice tour guide, and there were token llamas to see. It is really an ancient military base. Nobody knows for sure why it was abandoned, but one theory is that when the Incans overtook it, the people were scared of the infantry, never seeing horses before, and ran. The ride up and down the mountain was of course gorgeous, but our meal at this restaurant that was obviously contracted with the tour company was seriously overpriced for a Peace Corps volunteer’s salary. It was a great day, but we were exhausted by the time we got back.

Rebecca had to travel the farthest out of all of us, so she was going to go home early, but for once, procrastination paid off, and due to the high traffic for the holiday, there were no available seats on the bus, so she had to stay the extra day with all of us. This was awesome because we ended up resting the second day. A volunteer from Amazonas that actually did not take advantage of the free vacation days had heard that there were volunteers in town, so he came in for one night to hang out and show us around. We basically ended up hanging out in the hotel kitchen for all morning and afternoon, making American style breakfast and turkey sandwiches for lunch and just talking. That evening we watched an Easter parade and went to a disco.

On the third day, we saw the third-largest waterfall in the world.

Check out the waterfall behind me

A little closer

And a little bit closer...

Those specks down there are humans.
For a little perspective

Me and Scotney's feet after the hike

It has two levels, but our tour took us to the very bottom. Without wanting to sound too hokey, it was one of the most majestic spectacles of nature I have ever seen. Like all of the sites I have seen, the photos do not do them justice, but especially in this case. You can see how huge this thing is by checking out the tiny specks at the bottom of the pics that are real people. Although there were horses you could rent, Peace Corps rules dictate that volunteers must wear a helmet when riding a horse, so we chose not to. This was the most difficult trek I have taken thus far. I think it was around five miles one way, and the path was slicker than snot with wet clay mud. In some places there was a male guide helping people cross. Plus, it was uphill both ways. For the first time in my life, I truly understood all those old folks who had to walk to school. It was totally worth it though!

Our fourth day was spent hanging out in the hostel doing Internet things. We had to be out of our rooms by 1:00, but our bus wasn’t until 10:00pm. We took one last quick trip to this canyon that the Amazonas volunteer had told us about. It was only a two minute cab ride away, and you could see everything in 30 minutes. It ending up being almost better than the ruins in my opinion. It’s not quite as epic as the Grand Canyon, but close.

The canyon

Livin on the edge

Fallin off the edge

Gorgeous

We took some pics on the outer edge of a cliff, and then climbed a lookout tower, where we spent our time looking at the canyon a little…watching Rebecca do contortionist tricks. It was a super great way to spend my Peruvian Easter.

The other outing that I took in April was with my host mom and sisters. Even though they have lived in La Cria all their lives, they have not explored the local tourist sites. For one thing, they don’t have a lot of money to spare, and when they do, they make improvements to the house. For another thing, they don’t have a car, so traveling is difficult. Anyway, we agreed a couple of months prior that we would try to see the sites together. Lambayeque, my department, is known for its ruins of the Moche culture, a pre-Incan civilization. There is a very impressive museum in Chiclayo that houses “Señor de Sipan,” a great Moche king. His remains, among others, were found in the early nineties in a pyramid tomb in a site called Sipan, very close to Pucala, a small sugar factory town close to Pátapo, my district capital. Although most of the really cool paraphernalia found at Sipan is kept in the museum in Chiclayo, there is a small museum at the site of the ruins in Sipan. One Saturday we took an outing to Sipan. First of all, I got back to my Southern roots on the way to Sipan. We took a mototaxi for S/.30, but we got stuck in the sand up to the frame of the taxi trailer part of the motorcycle. My sister Yessica and I pushed the guy out with all our strength. It was not an old Chevy pickup and it was not mud, but it was sure nostalgic of my teenage years in Texas. The museum was better than I expected it to be. There were ruins of other ancient kings found in the same tomb as Señor de Sipan, and it was super awesome to walk the same cobbled streets where the ancient king once walked.

Host mom and little sis

Thousands of jars buried with the dead Moche.
My little host sister thought she needed at least one.

El Senor de Sipan' tomb. he was buried with four other people,
some riches, and some animals

El Senor

Me and the host sisters

The site is still only partially excavated, and you can see in spots of hills of sand where clay pyramids are buried underneath. I really, really enjoyed myself. I don’t have the patience to be an archeologist, but I do so admire their work. In a world where there’s nothing left to discover, they are the last great explorers. After we walked around the ruins and took some pics, we ate lunch at the little open air restaurant next door to the museum. It was not as good as my host mom’s cooking, but it sufficed. What impressed me was the kindness of my host mom. Even though the moto driver tried to refuse several times, she insisted that we buy his lunch, while I was still trying to bargain down the taxi fare because my sister and I had to push him out of the sand!

That is the extent of the month of April. I still keep threatening to write more blogs about the cultural differences, like the social norms, the food, the institutions, the TV, etc., but I just can’t seem to stay caught up on these things. I’m glad that I still have a few followers! Thanks for all the support. I am going to say that I think it’s OK to send me packages now. Especially if it is something that you can fit in a large envelope. Mom sent me two pairs of sandals and I had no problems there. Plus, many of the other Lambayeque kids gets huge packages of clothes and food and all kinds of goodies from the states with no problems. Another thing is that my Spanish is so improved at this point that I could definitely navigate a problem if there were to be one. So, if anybody is interested J, I would love to have some American shippable foods – candy, beef jerky, french vanilla creamer, pop tarts, soft cookies, or anything else that would remind me of home – pics, a new fingernail polishes, an American flag, little trinkets. The shipping costs are pretty outrageous, so I understand if I don’t have 15 packages waiting on me the next time I go to the post office, but I must admit that I am crazy jealous when my fellow volunteers get packages. You might wait a few weeks though. The postal people are striking and we have been having recent problems getting our packages. Next month coming soon!

208 Casilla Postal

Oficina Serpost

Chiclayo, Lambayeque

Peru