Week One….where to begin. I type these entries in my room, and then take them to the internet café whenever I make a trip, so hopefully none of this is repeated from my last entry. The beginning of week one I felt a little lost. After all of the preparation I had in my first 10 weeks, I got here and felt a little confused about what to do next. However, if anything I remembered the key word of the Peace Corps…INTEGRATE. So each morning I have been going for walks. During this time I get to meet a lot of people. I say “Buenos dias” to everyone, and then some of the people engage in more conversations with me. The most popular questions I get are…”Why don’t you run?” and this is because the two volunteers before me were huge runners…one even a marathon runner….and then the other question is “Why do you walk?”. The run question I answer by saying I’m not really comfortable running because the terrain is very different and that I like walking. The walking question I answer by saying its good exercise. Usually they look at me very confused by both responses. But the other day I passed a guy who was hanging out in the back of his moto taxi and he asked me about walking. I told him that I liked the exercise…he said that americans love exercise…and it must be good because it keeps them looking young. I was excited by this response…someone finally gets it…sort of!
I’ve been taking my walks in the morning before it gets to hot….but a few times last week I had to meet up with BJ in the cruceta (which is the town in between ours, or really a little area where the road splits to his town and my town) and we did this in the middle of the afternoon. That walk that I enjoy so much in the mornings SUCKS in the afternoon in the hot sun. It seemed like it took me twice as long because it was just so hot, and the sun is so strong. One of the days I took my trekking book bag…that was a hike. So I think I might be more careful about doing that kind of stuff in the middle of the day.
So last week the first time that I went to meet BJ ( he is my site mate) , we were stopped by the PLAN international guys. They are our counterparts. So that was pretty exciting to meet up with them and exchange numbers. We asked about the projects they are working on and if we can help out, but most of it won’t get started again until after the holidays. So we exchanged numbers and they told us they are here to support us with whatever we need.
Thursday, my host Mom and my host sister asked if I wanted to go for a walk through the chakras (fields) we were going to take lunch to my host Dad. So I went with them, it was one of the most beautiful walks I’ve been on since we got here. It was probably a few miles, but during that time, I found out that my host family owns some land and farms it. They have corn, mangos, maricuya, and other stuff. They also raise cows to sell. So we went out there, and the few from up there is just beautiful! Afterwards, we walked further to visit the house of my host mom’s cousin. Out front of the house is this little stream that cuts through the yard. My host sister Liliana and I took off our shoes and waded through the wat
er. It was also a chance for us to talk more. I learned more about their family that lives in Lima, there are 2 siblings there. One of which is a sister Liliana is close with, but her husband won’t let her go visit. The “machismo” here is strong at times, and in certain situations is very true that the husbands run things. Although he is a nice guy, most of the time during the day he just hangs out with the drunks that come to their cantina.
After the walk I got a tour of Liliana’s house. She lives next door to me. She has the cutest house…as for Peruvian standards. There were 3 bedrooms, each was adorably decorated, and the kids rooms had cute cartoons and stuff hanging on the walls, it was just so cute, and they had pictures all over the rooms. You just don’t see stuff decorated here very much. Peruvians are definitely minimalists. I also got to hold the baby Janela!!! Another interesting fact about Peruvians is that they barely ever put their kids down, babies are always in someone’s arms. But Janela has been scared of me in the past and wouldn’t let me hold her, but apparently she is getting used to me so I got to hold her. She is 10 months and just beautiful, and a really really happy baby!
Friday, BJ and I had found out that there was a health promoters meeting. These are the women who we will work closely with during out 2 years. We will train them to help with our sessions, and they will help during these first 3 months with our community diagnostics. So we decided to attend the meeting. We got there at 8 to help set up, and once that was done…we were told it was starting at 830. Well we are starting to understand what Peruvian time is all about, and we sat there for hours…until about 10-1030 when the health promoters actually started to show up…lastly…the lady running the meeting from PLAN showed up. The meeting was about early childhood stimulation, so she went through a bunch of pictures and stuff to hand around in children’s rooms to get them to start recognizing colors, animals, gender…all kinds of stuff. Well the lady went through it quickly and as soon as she was done the health promoters went crazy grabbing all of her models to trace. Since the women sat at the tables of their towns…there was definitely a little competition in the room.
Snack and Lunch time rolled around and I was asked to help pass out the food. Well….let me remind you that the people holding this meeting are health promoters…in fact it was held in the house of the lead health promoter for the valley. So when it came time to serve lunch I watched 3 of the health promoters serve pasta, chicken, salad and potatoes with their hands. They would pull the food out of the pots and put them on the plates. I know for a fact they did not wash their hands because there was no running water…and I never saw them use anything. It bothers me because I am not the first volunteer here…I am the third…and all of the volunteers have worked with these women on these exact topics…but for some reason they aren’t taking it home. It just seems like I have my work cut out for me still!
So for the weekend, BJ and I went back to Piura city to shop and meet up with one of the girls who was just getting in. I ended up buying a stove so I can start cooking my own food, because even though my host family says they want to make me skinny…they go out of control on the food, so I can’t wait to have some control over that. And as sad as it is, only being under 3 months into my 27 months of service, I have already become sick of rice. Rice comes with every meal, and it just gets old. I bought all of the stuff to help me cook, and even did a little grocery shopping. It’s really fun to shop in the big open market. They have SO much stuff and it’s so cheap, you just have to dodge the crowds and taxis. But I love browsing around there. We also had the opportunity to meet more of the volunteers who live in Piura. We have our regional meeting next week so we will be meeting everyone.
This blog post is getting extended a little further because
I didn’t post the part above yet, and now I have more to add. So this week has been great. Every day I am getting closer and closer with my host family, which I love. That also means my Spanish is improving which I also love. Yesterday was the best day yet. I left my house around 8:30 because I was meeting up with BJ in his town around 10:00, I wanted to see how long it would take me to walk there. Before I left the house my host family made sure I was wearing my sun block and I had a hat. This is becoming routine! But yes I had sun block on my face and my hat in my bag, so I left. The walk to BJ’s is the same walk I make in the mornings up until the cruce, after that I take a turn that leads me to his town. I like the walk to his town better then mine, because the view of the fields is amazing, and the walk is a little more shaded and less busy as in my town.
Along the walk, an older lady came out of her house and started walking with me. She thought I was the doctor. We started talking about the weather and stuff, and she was familiar with the previous volunteers before us. We also passed some really nice houses that were coming up on the side of the road…some people here have money (for Peruvian standards). More of the houses along the road had really pretty flowers and plants outside of their houses. I just really liked it.
So somewhere along the walk I was supposed to meet up with BJ, but I was really early, so I kept walking thinking I’d find him at some point. I asked a kid where Porterillo Alta was, and he told me to keep going. After awhile I knew I was too far, so I asked an older man on his walk if he knew, and he told me I passed it a long time ago, so we walked back to find it. He was really nice, he talked to me about some of the work in the fields, and a little about the previous volunteers (everyone knows them!). By the time I made it back to the town, I knew BJ had started down the road looking for me. So I waved a moto taxi down to hitch a ride. I didn’t realize the moto taxi was full, but as I approached it, I heard the kids in there saying “gringa” “gringa”, so they made room for me. After a little while, we found BJ and I hoped out…and they didn’t want any money for the ride. It was cute!
So once I finally met up with BJ, he took for a tour of his town. We sat and chatted with some of the older men he has made friends with, and they gave us bananas and mangos. Then…we made the hike up to BJ’s house. So let me explain this situation for a minute. Porterillo, his town has two parts, the main part stretches along the road at the level of the valley, and that is called Porterillo Baja…the other part is situated in the mountains, and that is called Porterillo Alto. Originally BJ was supposed to be living in Porterillo Baja, but that family thought they were getting a girl, so once they found out he was a guy, they no longer wanted him. So the previous volunteer had to search for a new house, and he found one in Alto, unfortunately again they wanted a girl, so finally he found another house that was willing to take a guy that was situated a little higher on the side of the mountain. The walk up to his house is no joke, first it starts out as a gradual incline…and then it’s just straight up. It sucked. Basically, he makes that walk only once a day, if he comes down he doesn’t go back up until he is finished with everything he needs to do.
Once I saw his house, I realized I definitely lucked out on some things. We have a few cement floors in our house, plus a decent kitchen, and satellite TV, and doors on our rooms. All of the floors in BJ’s house are dirt, there are no doors to the room, just hanging sheets. O yeah, and we have walls, he only has adobe for walls. He also really doesn’t have a sitting area. And his mom cooks over an open fire in a little room located on the outside of the house. The advantages of his house is that his family has a really nice latrine that actually has a nice toilet, and they put in an area for him to shower the other day, similar to mine. But the best part of his house is that the view is amazing! He overlooks the entire valley and it’s beautiful, so there is at least one major plus for climbing that mountain!
Afterwards we decided to be adventurous, I had this idea from the other day when I went for a walk in the fields that there has to be a road or trail that connects his side of the valley with mine other than the roads we already know about. So we took off trying to figure that out. Along the way we found this little river where people usually take baths and wash stuff, so we took some time out too wade around in that. My feet were killing me and this river actually had soft sand at the bottom, so it felt really good, we walked around in that for awhile, and there was this little boy in his tighty whites running around with us. Like a jungle kid. On our way out there were two little girls wrapped up in towels sitting waiting for us to get out. I noticed that the little girls were naked and probably trying to take their baths. BJ was carrying conversations with them and everything, so I had to point that out. That is the weird part of this place, in the US this river would be full of kids just playing, but here kids go to the river to bath or wash clothes and stuff ( they do play while they are doing those things), but I am having to find that there is a new way of respecting these things. After that we took off towards the fields. To get there you have to cross over this bridge across the river. The bridge is like those cool bridges we used to have as kids in playground that you would jump on and it would shake and stuff, kind of scary but really fun. Well this bridge was the same.
We walked for a long time through trails through the fields. At times we stopped to take it all in , because we were out in the middle of the fields in the middle of the valley, and it suddenly changes your appreciation for everything that your doing. I always get a little more excited in those moments about where I am spending the next two years of my life. It’s amazing! We walked through corn fields with the donkeys and cows roaming around. We jumped across lots of little streams and stuff, and often I got stuck in the mud, one time I almost lost my flip flop it was so deep. It is cool, because along the walk we came across mango and banana trees, and onion field, rice fields, and other fruits we weren’t so sure about. We ended up getting ¾ way across the valley when we realized the trail ended and we didn’t know how to go any further. So we turned around and came back, that is when we noticed that we were burnt to a crisp, I had worn a tank top and my arms and neck and stuff weren’t red. I am all about getting a tan but I know better. I just forget how strong the sun is here.
I went back to the river one last time to clean off my feet and legs, and while I was there the little jungle boy was back, at first, fully clothed, and within a few minutes he had gone to a bush and got completely naked and was running around. I think he thought it was a game because he would hide behind bushes and stare at us, and then take off running without his clothes.
I decided to walk home, even though my feet were killing me (flip flops are a terrible idea here), and it was 4:30 by the time I got back home, and my feet were horrible, and I was completely burnt. I think my host mom was a little upset that I didn’t come back for lunch because she had made me something special. But I didn’t know that, and this is more of a reason for me wanting to cook for myself. I hung out with my host sisters and my host mom for awhile, and they made fun of my burnt skin and kept saying how “Moreno” (brown) I’m getting, which of course makes me happy. I found out that they are deathly afraid of frogs, which is interesting because at night the frogs are everywhere outside, I stepped on one the other night. One of the sisters asked if I like kids…and when I told her yes she told me that people steal kids and take them back to the US and get arrested. I told her that I like kids, but I don’t steal them. That was a little strange.
Also, next week we are going to go to the gigantic lake in the valley to go swimming. I asked about swimming here and the Peruvians thought I was crazy, but it gets so hot sometimes that is all I want to do. So we will have to find a spot, which wont be hard, where no one is at to be able to go swimming without them thinking were more weird then they already do. But of course I will be doing this is shorts and a tank top, because I think bathing suits are unheard of here and they would really really think I was crazy!
Today, my feet and sunburn is killing me, but I have a meeting at the health post this afternoon with the health promotes and the doctor, and BJ is coming by to work on our letter to the school to request rooms to do summer school. We decided to do it together because with our Spanish skills are lacking it’s much easier to have someone else there, so we are going to do two days of art and health classes mixed with a little English in my town, and then 2 days in his town. Since the seasons are opposite here, the kids are about to start summer and they are out of school until march, starting the week before Christmas. So it is going to be a good way to “integrate” with the community and practice some of our diagnostic skills. I am really excited about starting to do some work. This weekend I am going back to the capital city for our regional meeting and then I plan on being in my site until January. It’s going to be very weird celebrating Christmas here, but this whole experience is about being a part of a new culture and it will be new to experience another way of celebrating Christmas.
Well that’s it for now…sorry for the long entry. I’ll write again soon.
I’ve been taking my walks in the morning before it gets to hot….but a few times last week I had to meet up with BJ in the cruceta (which is the town in between ours, or really a little area where the road splits to his town and my town) and we did this in the middle of the afternoon. That walk that I enjoy so much in the mornings SUCKS in the afternoon in the hot sun. It seemed like it took me twice as long because it was just so hot, and the sun is so strong. One of the days I took my trekking book bag…that was a hike. So I think I might be more careful about doing that kind of stuff in the middle of the day.
So last week the first time that I went to meet BJ ( he is my site mate) , we were stopped by the PLAN international guys. They are our counterparts. So that was pretty exciting to meet up with them and exchange numbers. We asked about the projects they are working on and if we can help out, but most of it won’t get started again until after the holidays. So we exchanged numbers and they told us they are here to support us with whatever we need.
Thursday, my host Mom and my host sister asked if I wanted to go for a walk through the chakras (fields) we were going to take lunch to my host Dad. So I went with them, it was one of the most beautiful walks I’ve been on since we got here. It was probably a few miles, but during that time, I found out that my host family owns some land and farms it. They have corn, mangos, maricuya, and other stuff. They also raise cows to sell. So we went out there, and the few from up there is just beautiful! Afterwards, we walked further to visit the house of my host mom’s cousin. Out front of the house is this little stream that cuts through the yard. My host sister Liliana and I took off our shoes and waded through the wat
er. It was also a chance for us to talk more. I learned more about their family that lives in Lima, there are 2 siblings there. One of which is a sister Liliana is close with, but her husband won’t let her go visit. The “machismo” here is strong at times, and in certain situations is very true that the husbands run things. Although he is a nice guy, most of the time during the day he just hangs out with the drunks that come to their cantina.After the walk I got a tour of Liliana’s house. She lives next door to me. She has the cutest house…as for Peruvian standards. There were 3 bedrooms, each was adorably decorated, and the kids rooms had cute cartoons and stuff hanging on the walls, it was just so cute, and they had pictures all over the rooms. You just don’t see stuff decorated here very much. Peruvians are definitely minimalists. I also got to hold the baby Janela!!! Another interesting fact about Peruvians is that they barely ever put their kids down, babies are always in someone’s arms. But Janela has been scared of me in the past and wouldn’t let me hold her, but apparently she is getting used to me so I got to hold her. She is 10 months and just beautiful, and a really really happy baby!
Friday, BJ and I had found out that there was a health promoters meeting. These are the women who we will work closely with during out 2 years. We will train them to help with our sessions, and they will help during these first 3 months with our community diagnostics. So we decided to attend the meeting. We got there at 8 to help set up, and once that was done…we were told it was starting at 830. Well we are starting to understand what Peruvian time is all about, and we sat there for hours…until about 10-1030 when the health promoters actually started to show up…lastly…the lady running the meeting from PLAN showed up. The meeting was about early childhood stimulation, so she went through a bunch of pictures and stuff to hand around in children’s rooms to get them to start recognizing colors, animals, gender…all kinds of stuff. Well the lady went through it quickly and as soon as she was done the health promoters went crazy grabbing all of her models to trace. Since the women sat at the tables of their towns…there was definitely a little competition in the room.
Snack and Lunch time rolled around and I was asked to help pass out the food. Well….let me remind you that the people holding this meeting are health promoters…in fact it was held in the house of the lead health promoter for the valley. So when it came time to serve lunch I watched 3 of the health promoters serve pasta, chicken, salad and potatoes with their hands. They would pull the food out of the pots and put them on the plates. I know for a fact they did not wash their hands because there was no running water…and I never saw them use anything. It bothers me because I am not the first volunteer here…I am the third…and all of the volunteers have worked with these women on these exact topics…but for some reason they aren’t taking it home. It just seems like I have my work cut out for me still!
So for the weekend, BJ and I went back to Piura city to shop and meet up with one of the girls who was just getting in. I ended up buying a stove so I can start cooking my own food, because even though my host family says they want to make me skinny…they go out of control on the food, so I can’t wait to have some control over that. And as sad as it is, only being under 3 months into my 27 months of service, I have already become sick of rice. Rice comes with every meal, and it just gets old. I bought all of the stuff to help me cook, and even did a little grocery shopping. It’s really fun to shop in the big open market. They have SO much stuff and it’s so cheap, you just have to dodge the crowds and taxis. But I love browsing around there. We also had the opportunity to meet more of the volunteers who live in Piura. We have our regional meeting next week so we will be meeting everyone.
This blog post is getting extended a little further because
I didn’t post the part above yet, and now I have more to add. So this week has been great. Every day I am getting closer and closer with my host family, which I love. That also means my Spanish is improving which I also love. Yesterday was the best day yet. I left my house around 8:30 because I was meeting up with BJ in his town around 10:00, I wanted to see how long it would take me to walk there. Before I left the house my host family made sure I was wearing my sun block and I had a hat. This is becoming routine! But yes I had sun block on my face and my hat in my bag, so I left. The walk to BJ’s is the same walk I make in the mornings up until the cruce, after that I take a turn that leads me to his town. I like the walk to his town better then mine, because the view of the fields is amazing, and the walk is a little more shaded and less busy as in my town.Along the walk, an older lady came out of her house and started walking with me. She thought I was the doctor. We started talking about the weather and stuff, and she was familiar with the previous volunteers before us. We also passed some really nice houses that were coming up on the side of the road…some people here have money (for Peruvian standards). More of the houses along the road had really pretty flowers and plants outside of their houses. I just really liked it.
So somewhere along the walk I was supposed to meet up with BJ, but I was really early, so I kept walking thinking I’d find him at some point. I asked a kid where Porterillo Alta was, and he told me to keep going. After awhile I knew I was too far, so I asked an older man on his walk if he knew, and he told me I passed it a long time ago, so we walked back to find it. He was really nice, he talked to me about some of the work in the fields, and a little about the previous volunteers (everyone knows them!). By the time I made it back to the town, I knew BJ had started down the road looking for me. So I waved a moto taxi down to hitch a ride. I didn’t realize the moto taxi was full, but as I approached it, I heard the kids in there saying “gringa” “gringa”, so they made room for me. After a little while, we found BJ and I hoped out…and they didn’t want any money for the ride. It was cute!
So once I finally met up with BJ, he took for a tour of his town. We sat and chatted with some of the older men he has made friends with, and they gave us bananas and mangos. Then…we made the hike up to BJ’s house. So let me explain this situation for a minute. Porterillo, his town has two parts, the main part stretches along the road at the level of the valley, and that is called Porterillo Baja…the other part is situated in the mountains, and that is called Porterillo Alto. Originally BJ was supposed to be living in Porterillo Baja, but that family thought they were getting a girl, so once they found out he was a guy, they no longer wanted him. So the previous volunteer had to search for a new house, and he found one in Alto, unfortunately again they wanted a girl, so finally he found another house that was willing to take a guy that was situated a little higher on the side of the mountain. The walk up to his house is no joke, first it starts out as a gradual incline…and then it’s just straight up. It sucked. Basically, he makes that walk only once a day, if he comes down he doesn’t go back up until he is finished with everything he needs to do.
Once I saw his house, I realized I definitely lucked out on some things. We have a few cement floors in our house, plus a decent kitchen, and satellite TV, and doors on our rooms. All of the floors in BJ’s house are dirt, there are no doors to the room, just hanging sheets. O yeah, and we have walls, he only has adobe for walls. He also really doesn’t have a sitting area. And his mom cooks over an open fire in a little room located on the outside of the house. The advantages of his house is that his family has a really nice latrine that actually has a nice toilet, and they put in an area for him to shower the other day, similar to mine. But the best part of his house is that the view is amazing! He overlooks the entire valley and it’s beautiful, so there is at least one major plus for climbing that mountain!
Afterwards we decided to be adventurous, I had this idea from the other day when I went for a walk in the fields that there has to be a road or trail that connects his side of the valley with mine other than the roads we already know about. So we took off trying to figure that out. Along the way we found this little river where people usually take baths and wash stuff, so we took some time out too wade around in that. My feet were killing me and this river actually had soft sand at the bottom, so it felt really good, we walked around in that for awhile, and there was this little boy in his tighty whites running around with us. Like a jungle kid. On our way out there were two little girls wrapped up in towels sitting waiting for us to get out. I noticed that the little girls were naked and probably trying to take their baths. BJ was carrying conversations with them and everything, so I had to point that out. That is the weird part of this place, in the US this river would be full of kids just playing, but here kids go to the river to bath or wash clothes and stuff ( they do play while they are doing those things), but I am having to find that there is a new way of respecting these things. After that we took off towards the fields. To get there you have to cross over this bridge across the river. The bridge is like those cool bridges we used to have as kids in playground that you would jump on and it would shake and stuff, kind of scary but really fun. Well this bridge was the same.
We walked for a long time through trails through the fields. At times we stopped to take it all in , because we were out in the middle of the fields in the middle of the valley, and it suddenly changes your appreciation for everything that your doing. I always get a little more excited in those moments about where I am spending the next two years of my life. It’s amazing! We walked through corn fields with the donkeys and cows roaming around. We jumped across lots of little streams and stuff, and often I got stuck in the mud, one time I almost lost my flip flop it was so deep. It is cool, because along the walk we came across mango and banana trees, and onion field, rice fields, and other fruits we weren’t so sure about. We ended up getting ¾ way across the valley when we realized the trail ended and we didn’t know how to go any further. So we turned around and came back, that is when we noticed that we were burnt to a crisp, I had worn a tank top and my arms and neck and stuff weren’t red. I am all about getting a tan but I know better. I just forget how strong the sun is here.
I went back to the river one last time to clean off my feet and legs, and while I was there the little jungle boy was back, at first, fully clothed, and within a few minutes he had gone to a bush and got completely naked and was running around. I think he thought it was a game because he would hide behind bushes and stare at us, and then take off running without his clothes.
I decided to walk home, even though my feet were killing me (flip flops are a terrible idea here), and it was 4:30 by the time I got back home, and my feet were horrible, and I was completely burnt. I think my host mom was a little upset that I didn’t come back for lunch because she had made me something special. But I didn’t know that, and this is more of a reason for me wanting to cook for myself. I hung out with my host sisters and my host mom for awhile, and they made fun of my burnt skin and kept saying how “Moreno” (brown) I’m getting, which of course makes me happy. I found out that they are deathly afraid of frogs, which is interesting because at night the frogs are everywhere outside, I stepped on one the other night. One of the sisters asked if I like kids…and when I told her yes she told me that people steal kids and take them back to the US and get arrested. I told her that I like kids, but I don’t steal them. That was a little strange.
Also, next week we are going to go to the gigantic lake in the valley to go swimming. I asked about swimming here and the Peruvians thought I was crazy, but it gets so hot sometimes that is all I want to do. So we will have to find a spot, which wont be hard, where no one is at to be able to go swimming without them thinking were more weird then they already do. But of course I will be doing this is shorts and a tank top, because I think bathing suits are unheard of here and they would really really think I was crazy!
Today, my feet and sunburn is killing me, but I have a meeting at the health post this afternoon with the health promotes and the doctor, and BJ is coming by to work on our letter to the school to request rooms to do summer school. We decided to do it together because with our Spanish skills are lacking it’s much easier to have someone else there, so we are going to do two days of art and health classes mixed with a little English in my town, and then 2 days in his town. Since the seasons are opposite here, the kids are about to start summer and they are out of school until march, starting the week before Christmas. So it is going to be a good way to “integrate” with the community and practice some of our diagnostic skills. I am really excited about starting to do some work. This weekend I am going back to the capital city for our regional meeting and then I plan on being in my site until January. It’s going to be very weird celebrating Christmas here, but this whole experience is about being a part of a new culture and it will be new to experience another way of celebrating Christmas.
Well that’s it for now…sorry for the long entry. I’ll write again soon.
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