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