You are constantly hearing horror stories from experienced
volunteers while you are in training…about training. The worst that I heard was
about Field Based Training, but Site Visit stories ranked a close second. A lot
of people told me about staying in their rooms for three straight days,
watching 5 seasons of Grey's Anatomy or some other show. Others told me about
mistakenly calling their male mayor a woman. Others told of being greeted by
thousands of community members and having to improv “dar palabras” (“give
words,” i.e. make a speech). No matter what the story (and there were a few
good experiences I heard about), ALL included the word “awkward.” I was super
lucky with my family in Tres de Octubre because I had Dylan, who speaks fluent
Spanish. So, even though I had no idea what was going on during the first
couple of weeks, I at least had a distraction – there weren't seven Peruvians
just staring at me or desperately trying to communicate with me. I am not
afforded this luxury this go round.
What is site visit? I left my comfort zone with my nice
little family and my nice little training center to brave my new world for
the next two years. We were all going to be gone from Chaclacayo for over a week. A
day or so travelling, a day in our different capital cities to ask our new
regional coordinators and fellow volunteers in our departments about stuff and
possibly buy stuff for our rooms, a “socio day” where our new colleagues and
possibly family members attend a whole day conference to discuss roles and expectations,
three days at site, and another day in capital city to locate the things we
will need to buy upon return, and another day travelling.
Bus ride as usual, hostel stay as usual, but my nerves are a
little shot. I’m trying to think that staying in my room for three days might
not be so bad. I’m super tired anyway. Hopefully this new family will
understand. Socio day arrives. I plaster a fake smile on my face and do the
disingenuous salutation exchange that people all around the world all do. From my teeny
town, my new mom, the principal of the high school, the obstetrician from the
med post, an auxiliary from the municipality (my municipality is located in a
neighboring town, basically the county seat, but our little town has
representatives), and my mayor (a huge honor here in Peru) all attended my
socio day. I had more representatives than most. This was comforting. The
principal was soooo excited that I was a psychologist. I was glad that he was
glad, but I was also guarded because my job here is not therapy. I am
definitely not qualified for that in this country. It is not that any type of
authority here would care if I did therapy (except for maybe Peace Corps), but,
ethically, I do not know enough about the culture to be guiding people through
their problems and, personally, it would not be very good for my integration
into the community when word got out that I am telling people to ignore their
children’s temper tantrums. I can hear it now, “That crazy gringa told me to
ignore my kids. It’s just like one of those devil-worshiping, egotistical
Americans to say something like that (except all this would be in Spanish, of
course).” Anyway, I can foresee this being a problem, but fingers crossed.
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| Ketty (obstetrician), Reina (host mom), me, Miryam (auxillary of the municipality), Segundo (principal) |
I could see and feel in my heart the serious disappointment
of all my new people that I don’t speak Spanish very well. There are three
other trainees in my Lambayeque group that are fluent, so I’m sure in the eyes
of my socios and mother, I looked like an idiot. My group of folks are really
gung-ho. I can’t tell at this point if it is because they think that I don’t
know what I’m doing, they have pity for me because of my language level or if
they are just really this way. I figure that they are probably at least half as
nervous as I am, so maybe the fact that they are doing EVERYTHING (all the
activities in the conference) and I am doing NOTHING is a combination of all
the newness and nervousness. Even for the volunteers who are fluent, the whole
concept and follow-through of socio-day is completely rushed and so fabricated.
I guess it is good for some to have a very structured atmosphere by which to
meet and greet the people that you could potentially be working and living with
intimately for the next two years, but, like the day that we discovered our site locations, I would have preferred at least an hour to chill and speak on a personal level, rather than jump into a bunch of structured activities (e.g.,
make a calendar of events for the volunteers’ first week, on a piece of butcher
paper describe the roles of the host family, the volunteer, and the socio,
etc.). Talk about impersonal!
I was so glad when it was all over, but still pretty shaken.
I was leaving the comforts of having others surrounding me who understand my
plight, my emotions, have complete and total empathy for my situation, and can
speak English to embark on an adventure where I don’t know the people, the
places, the customs, the ways of interaction, and above all, the language. My
eight weeks of training suddenly seemed completely void of any utility. So me
and my people exit the building. My regional coordinator has already explained
to everyone that we will need to return to the hostel to collect my suitcases before
we head for home. First of all, the hostel is about four blocks away from the location
of socio day. I tell one socio, my obstetrician, who seems to be the one mostly
in charge, “We can walk.” She tells me, “No, we can take a taxi.” I say, “But
the hostel is less than four blocks away.” I’m feeling super superior at this
point because that is the most Spanish that I have said to them all day, (Two
sentences! WOW! I wasn’t kidding when I said that they were very gung-ho. Plus,
they hadn't figured out yet that they need to slow their speech waaaaay down
for the gringa to understand, so I had no idea what was going on in my group
the majority of the conference.) and she understood me because she replied to
me in a logical fashion. What’s more is that I, yours truly, understood her
reply, although I didn’t like it. She says to me again, “We are going to take a
taxi.” OOOOOK. Well then. So I made excuses in my head. She wearing heels. I
wouldn’t wanna walk across the room in heels, let alone four blocks. By now, it
is only me, my obstetrician, the representative lady of the muni, and my host mom.
All four of us get into a teeny cab, and the obstetrician asks me for the name
of the hostel. I tell her, “Hostel Santa Victoria.” The cabbie tells her
something that I don’t understand, but I can read the body language enough to
understand that he is communicating that he doesn’t know it. So, in Spanish, I
say, “It is less than four blocks thatta way,” and I point. The cab driver
shakes his head no. I insist. Yes, the name is Hostel Santa Victoria. Yes, it
is less than four blocks in the direction that I indicated. Yes, it is close to
the park with the Grecian monuments. I say all this yet again, and what does my
obstetrician do? She tells the cab driver to pull over to where the other
volunteers are standing on the sidewalk and ask one of the girls who speaks
Spanish. UGH! Of all the low-down, dirty, stinking, rotten things! One of my
biggest pet peeves is when people underestimate my intelligence! And the icing
on the cake is that the volunteer chick that they asked has a reputation for
her lack of intelligence! She couldn’t even tell them the name of the hostel!
HA! She did, however, tell them that it’s about four blocks that way! OMG!
While she’s struggling to remember the name, I whip out my receipt with the
name, “HOSTAL SANTA VICTORIA” plain as day, in bold uppercase letters, across
the top with the address and hand it to my obstetrician. I wish I would’ve
known then how to say, “Told ya so! Told ya so!” She just laughed and commented
on how fast I was to collect my receipt from my huge backpack.
So we ride in this cab for 30 seconds to the hostel, and
when we get there, I’m feeling a little more confident and comfortable, and we
have all had a good laugh about what just happened. So, I say, “We are going to
have to get a different cab because I have a huge suitcase.” I can understand
that I am new to this country and that my language sucks, but after the most
recent episode, I mistakenly thought that I had somehow proved that I do have a
little credibility, but no. They tell me, “Oh no, this cab is fine.” I
disagree again, and mimic the dimensions of my suitcase with my hands, even
exaggerating a little, to show them that there is no way on God’s green earth
that my suitcase, my backpack, and five full-grown adults are going to fit in
this cab. They just smile, laugh at my pantomime, and tell me again that we are
going to use this cab. I know that my facial expressions ALWAYS tell my true
emotions. This has been a problem since I was a kid. I had consciously been
trying to fix my face basically all day, but this was the last straw. I threw my hands in the air, cussed in English, and turned around hastily to go get my
suitcase. As soon as I exited the hostel (Hostel Santa Victoria, BTW), the cab
driver says, “No, I can’t carry a suitcase that large.” I was beaming with
pride for about 10 seconds until I realized that this is a horrible beginning
to my integration with my new socios and host mom.
By the time that we get to Pampa La Victoria, which is
actually the name of the town where I live, not La Cria, it is after dark. I’m
tired, but I have all this nervous energy. I briefly meet my host brother,
(Christian, 20 y/o), his wife (Miryam, 18 y/o), and my host sisters (Yesica,
19 y/o, and Dayhana, 5 y/o). They give me a quick tour of the house which took
about 5 seconds, since there are two rooms. What do you think?
SIKE! These are pics of mock slaves’ quarters of the 19th
century from the Afro-Peruvian museum from Field-Based Training. Bahahaha! I
hope I got at least a couple of you out there. Teeheehee!
En serio (“seriously”), this is what I saw when I opened the
door to my room. Way more terrifying than the slaves’ quarters, don’t ya think? In my mind, I could see the poster moving up close and far away over and over, and I could hear the soundtrack from the John Carpenter’s
Halloween movies playing in my head. I let out an obscene chuckle, but quickly
recovered and acted happy that I had a room with bright pink walls that
included Hannah Montana staring down at me. (I sound incredibly ungrateful
right now. I have so much more that a lot of other people. I have tiled floors,
four full walls that reach the ceiling all the way, an electric light fixture,
a door, a window, and an electrical socket. Minus the window and the door, all
these other things are not a requirement of Peace Corps, and some volunteers do
not have these things and a whole lot of Peruvians don’t have these things, so
I am spoiled and lucky, but at the time, after socio day, it was such an
alarmingly comical sight to be greeted to my new room by Hannah Montana, I
couldn’t help but laugh). That night, we ate a small supper, watched a little
TV, and I was in my room, watching a movie on my laptop by 8:00. It was so
AWKWARD! Nobody spoke a word during supper. There were few words spoken after
supper or any time that I was around. After I went in my room, they started
talking almost immediately. I don’t blame them. I wanted to get away from them
probably about the same amount as they wanted to get away from me.
Allow me to describe the house. When you walk in, there is
the Internet “cabina” (“café,” but this is not a direct translation) with four
computers, two Playstations, and a bunch of teenage boys. Then there is the
living room and formal dining area. Following that is a long hallway. The
master bedroom, where my parents and sisters sleep, is on the left. My brother
and sister-in-law’s room and my rosy room are on the right. Past the hallway is
the kitchen with a table where we usually eat and a little den with the
television. Out back is a walled-in area (but no roof) where the family does
the clothes-washing, stores the water barrels, and houses the chickens,
rooster, and ducks. The shower and toilet are out there too. There are separate
“rooms” for the toilet and the shower, but they both lead to this open-air area
which is a little awkward. Everyone in the family just walks through to their
bedrooms wrapped in a towel post-shower to get dressed, but I am going to
search for a robe next time I go shopping. I'm posting this from my capital city and I forgot to bring my jump drive with some other pics on it, so I post more photos of the house in a future blog.
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| Den |
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| Den |
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| Kitchen |
The next morning, I heard typical morning rustling outside my room
around 6:30. Although I could not go back to sleep, I didn’t want to start my
day any sooner than I had to, so I laid in bed for nearly another hour until I
had to use the bathroom so bad I couldn’t stand it any longer. I slept hardly
any because the bed that I was furnished had a piece of ply board in the
middle. (NOT kidding.) I ate a good breakfast with the family in near silence,
except for the five-year-old chatterbox. Since I have no furniture, I had no
place to put my things, so I couldn’t use the excuse of unpacking to stay in my
room all day. I tried to help clean – my host mom was washing dishes, my sister
and sister-in-law were sweeping and mopping the whole house – but to no avail.
They are extremely hospitable. They always make sure that I have the best chair
to sit in, which is the one chair that they have that has a back. All the
chairs are plastic lawn chairs, but all but one are stools. My host mom, Reina,
is giving me the best cuts of meat at mealtime. They won’t let me help clean.
This is all super nice, but I feel like a guest in a hotel, not a family
member. I hope that this changes with time, but on the second full day, my host
mom told me that she didn’t have enough “confianza” in me to be allowed to help
with the dishes. Confianza is similar to trust or confidence in another person.
When two people have confianza, they have a very good interpersonal
relationship that is built upon respect and reliance. It is a huge deal here in
Peru. (Well, really anywhere, for that matter, but the word is spoken a lot
more here than in the states.) So, I feel like I have a bigger challenge in the
confianza area than some volunteers. We were told over and over again in
training to NOT compare your situation with other volunteers, but Caroline
tells me that her family sat her down on day one and told her that she is not a
foreigner, that she is a family member and to call everyone by their family
names, like “Mom,” and “Aunt,” etc. It is hard not to do a little downward
social comparison when your self-esteem is as healthy as mine is, and then feel
a little bit sad when my situation is on the lower end of the spectrum.
Well, all in all, I would rank my site visit as average. It
was totally awkward, but that’s normal. I met a lot of people. The high school
was on some holiday, but I met some parental units of the PTA, some teachers,
some staff, and other authority-type folks in the community (e.g., the judge, a
police officer). My socio, Miryam, and Reyna took me on a tour of the town(s).
Previously I said I live in Pampa La Victoria, and you already know that I
learned that my site assignment was La Cria. Well, there are two tee-nincey
towns right next to each other. In America, they would be one town, but here, I
guess if a canal with a ten-foot bridge exists, you separate the locations into
two towns. This is true at Caroline’s site also. She lives in Mocupe, but works
a lot in Ocupe. Weird. There are more thingys in La Cria, like a park, a
concrete soccer/volleyball field, four schools, the Catholic Church, the
market, but I think that the majority of the houses are in Pampa La Victoria. I
live right behind the biggest building in town, the Mormon Church. Excuse me, La Iglesia de Jesucristo
de Los Santos de Los Últimos Días. I thought Church of Jesus Christ of
the Latter-Day Saints was a long name in English. My family is Mormon, and my
mom told me how sometimes we have Mormon ceremonies in our living room, so I’m
super stoked about that (not really, a bit of sarcasm.), and every person in
town asked me if I was a Mormon when I met them. I did not meet any blonde, tall, white Mormon missionaries while I was at site, but I sure heard about them.
Some folks said that my Spanish was better than some of theirs, so that’s cool.
I made myself stay out of my room for a minimum of 13 hours a day. This way, I
could say that I spent more than half of the day mingling with Peruvians. As
soon as my 13-hour limit was up though, I raced to room. It is so tiring to
translate every word that you hear and speak. Imagine concentrating on a math
problem for 13 hours a day. That’s what it feels like. I didn’t get to meet my
host father cuz he works out of town for a heavy machinery company, so he was
in Cajamarca (where I visited for my Shadowing Trip). My sister and sister-in-law
pretty much actively avoided me. When I would enter the room to watch
television, they would leave and watch TV in the bedroom. The kids (my little
sister and the billion kids in the neighborhood) loved me. My little sister and
I played games on my tablet and took pics with my camera, and I played
volleyball outside with the kids. The little ones are so much more receptive to
me than adults.
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| My little sister, Dayhanna |
OH! So, remember how I said that the Volunteer in Patapo, my
district capital (i.e., county seat) was pretty rude to me during FBT? Well, I
met him our first day during site visit, and he was super stoked to have me
living so close. I still was pretty sure that we had nothing in common – he is
a young, mega stud health nut from Colorado that speaks almost like he is an 18th-century
romantic novelist or something (e.g., “There is nothing more pleasing in this
earth than to help poor people,” “My destiny was to be at this site.”), I’m an
old, down-to-earth Texas chica that like chicken-fried steak and not running –
but it was decidedly refreshing that he was happy to have me. The first day of
site visit, in Chiclayo (capital city), he says to me, “I feel like I should
tell you something, but in private, much later. I don’t want everyone else to
know just yet.” So, I just said, “OK, lemme know when you’re ready,” but in my
head, I’m thinking, “Ugh. Drama queen.” Anywho, that afternoon, he pulls me to
the side and tells me that he has had constant diarrhea for the 15 months that
he has been in Peru. The docs have done a bunch of different tests and tried a
bunch of different meds, but to no avail. Our doc in Peru was talking with the
boss doc in D.C. to decide whether or not he should return to the states. About
an hour after he told me, he got the call that he was going home. I felt so
mean for thinking poorly of him, and I had serious sympathy for his problems,
but that meant that I was going to get all his stuff. I am terrible. The guy
gave me his mattress, plants, mirror, and three storage units for clothes and
things. Super nice. I was relieved that all I had to buy now was a bedframe,
decorations, and maybe a desk. There were all these mixed feelings about his
leaving. I was sorta glad that I didn’t have to get to know one other person
that I really couldn’t foresee us being great buds anyway (Like I’ve said
before, I’m here to spend time with Peruvians, not Peace Corps peeps), but
kinda sad that I was not going to have someone closer. On my way back to
Chiclayo, my mom travelled with me to his site to make arrangements to get his
stuff to my casa. It worked out really nicely.
So, that’s pretty much it for site visit. Mixed emotions,
more stuff to think about, as has been the case since before I left. When I got
back to Chaclacayo and Tres de Octubre, I was not really feeling rested since I
slept on ply board for three nights, but I really wanted to cherish the last
bit of time with this host family. My older sister, my host mom, and I went to
the movies. It’s the same as in the U.S. It’s overpriced. The majority of the
movies are American movies, in English with Spanish subtitles. We saw Scary Movie 5. Absolutely terrible, like
the others, but I laughed a few times. The main differences are that in Peru,
they have delivery service in the theater, so you don’t have to wait in line
for your popcorn and drink. A waitress brings it to you before the movie
starts. Much better, but the downside is that Peruvians pay absolutely no
attention to the “please silence your cell phones” rule. All throughout the
movie, people were not only texting, but talking on their phones as well. This
is not just in the movies, but people do it in the middle of meetings and other
seemingly important events too.
Soooooo, that's all, folks!
