Back to Work

We raced back from Trujillo to go to our district capital, Las Lomas, for a meeting with the mayor and the boss of the health center.  So it was our first time staying in Las Lomas.  It was kind of neat to see how the place runs at night.  It was kind of busy since it was Sunday, lots of people out and about.  Lots of parties and music.  However, it was HOT and I hadn´t missed that part of being away at all. 

So the next day we had our meeting with the mayor, which was supposed to be at 10am, I think we were actually called in around 11am.  It all seemed to be going well, he seemed interested in our work, and interested in supporting our projects.  But as I am learning, there are no normal conversations with Peruvians, and all of the sudden (forgive me grandma if you are reading this), he proceeds to tell us he is like the Japanese, because he can have sex 3 to 4 times a day and not finish, in fact he says he probably only finished 3 to 4 times a year.  All three of our faces were just blank.  That was a first for me!!!  Ihave never been in a meeting with an official, at any point in my life where he interupts the conversation to discuss the complications of his sex life.  Only in Peru!

Later once that successful/awkward meeting had ended, we went over to the Health Center and met with the boss there.  He was a young enthusiastic doctor who was familiar with the Peace Corps and eager to work with us which was very exciting.  I wish all the time that I had a doctor like him working in my site, it would just help things flow so much easier.  Fortunately my doctor is leaving in April and I am counting down the days.   I just really hope we get a better one to replace him.

So after all of this was said and done, I went back to my site for the first time in over a week.  But I was heading back with several objectives.  The first one was with my host family.  I decided after talking to over volunteers that I wanted to start cooking breakfast and dinner for myself.  I really like their food, but it can greasy and just too much so I wanted to take control of that.  So I told them I would be only eating oatmeal for breakfast and having tea at night.  Our dinner is usually around 8pm and I am just not hungry then, and I feel like I´m forcing myself to eat.  So of course my family was okay with this when I told them.  But when I actually started doing it, they keep giving me the hardest time.  They think I am not eating enough and they keep offering me more and giving me dirty looks for declining.  I am still eating their biggest and most important meal of the day with them.  But I am really sick of feeling like a child and I wanted some control over what I do in a day.  However, they are having a hard time with that.  And I am too.

The other thing that makes me beyond furious is having me younger host sister who is 22 tell me what to do all the time.  The other day I left the house and she questioned where my hat and sun block were!  And then the other night I went to sleep with my fan on, and around 11pm she wakes me up to tell me to turn it off because I will get a stomach ache. 

I have been very patient.  But I am 26 years old, I am adult!  And I´ve lived ALONE before this for a very long time.  I am REALLY sick of being disrespected.  So I´ve been nice, but I think now I´m going to have to start getting stern and maybe even rude if it takes that to get my point across. 

Integrating with family is really important for us, but sometimes I need to remember as well as them that I am also a tenant, and am paying rent.  So I don´t need to be treated like a child. 

So yesterday, I did a demonstration in the health post for Mom´s on how to make the puree baby food.  Most of the Mom´´s strictly feed their babies potato puree and they don´t really get more creative with it.  Since we had a meetign the other day where we taught them the importance of food groups in their babies diet I thought I would show them some examples.  I had about 13 mom´s show up, which was good.  But I found out later they were expecting plates of food and not the little samples they got.  I am just shocked sometimes with them!  But they seemed interested in what we made and I hope they are going to practice it.  They are always challenging me I feel like!

So my host Mom and host brother are in Piura getting him settled for school and his new place to live.  And my host Mom is going to return and my host sister Mirta (who I don´t really like) is going in her place.  That makes me really happy!  However, before Mirta can go, the family is going to slaughter a pig to pay for her way.  One thing I am learning is that these people´s money is not saved away in the bank, it is actually saved away in the animals they have. 

I have wondered why we have so many animals that we never eat.  It is because my family raises them, and then kills them when they need money.  I have seen them do it over and over again.  We do not benefit directly from the meat, it get sold away.

A few weeks ago one of the turkeys got really sick, it can´t walk or do anything.  And my family has been really nervous and nursing it back to health.  Because they told me it´s an 80 sole turkey, which is a ridiculous amount of money to them.  But for me it´s been sad watching this turkey suffer for weeks now, it still can´t walk. 

So there is the update...I am sure I will have more soon!

EARLY IN SERVICE TRAINING

I remember over and over again during my training in Lima when they would refer to early inservice training (EIST).  They would tell us after our first three months in site we would all be brought back to together to do our training and present our community diagnostics.  It felt like it was so far away when they kept talking about it.  But nope, it came so fast, and here I am after finishing up a week that started with the EIST and ended with the Field Based training.

So basically, the peace corps put all of us 32 health volunteers from Peru 16 back together again from all over the country in this really cute hotel in Huanchaco, La Libertad, a beautiful beach town for four days! La Libertad is two departments south of Piura.  It is about a 6 hour bus ride, as long as you take the right bus line, which was our first mistake.

So last Saturday, the other 3 Piura volunteers and I hopped on a bus a midnight to take us to our training.  We only paid 20 soles for the bus, which is really cheap.  However, it turned out to be a really crappy bus line, and even though we were scheduled to leave at midnight, we ended up not leaving until 2am.  Then the bus stopped a million times letting passengers off and on.  One time we even stopped to take care of a deflated.  So many hours later, frustrated, tired and hungry, we got to Trujillo (the capital of La Libertad).  We had signed up for a tour that day of the ruins and just made it in time to drop our stuff and go. Trujillo, unfortunately, is not a very safe town.  In the few minutes we had to walk over to a street vendor to buy a snack, a man bumped my friend Brittany and stole her wallet.  Later in the trip, one of the staff got her wallet stolen in the market as well. 

So that we spent the entire first day touring the ruins of Moche, which cover much of the area that Trujillo was built on.  There were some really interesting parts.  And in the middle we stopped at a tourist restaurant where my friends Brittany and BJ competed in a dance contest and won pisco sours.

At the end of the tour, we were dropped back off at our hotel in the beautiful beach town.  By this time many of the other volunteers were showing up, most of which we haven't seen in 3 months.  So there was a lot of catching up to do and it was really nice to compare in-site stories.  Later we were greeted by the Peace Corps staff and given a run down on what would be going on the first few days of the week.

So the training part was a little rough.  We'd sit in the conference room for ours on end listening to presentations and watching power points.  Which would be frustrating at times knowing that the beach was literally feet away, and we could see the beautiful hotel pool from where we were sitting.  It wasn't until almost the last day, after lunch we were all lounging around the pool waiting for our next session when the staff recognized that we needed a break and let us swim for an extra hour.  A group of us went running to the beach.  But when I jumped in the water and realized how rocky it was, I came back to the hotel and enjoyed the pool.  Later that night we went out wondering the town in search of dinner.  The town of Huanchaco is very touristy and full of adorable restaurants.  So it felt more like being in a cute beach town at home and I missed that.

So after the first 4 LONG days of training, we were broken into 4 smaller groups and sent all over the country to do our Field Based Training.  Which means we go to a second year volunteer's site and we do work in their site, as practice for what we could do in our own sites.  I was put in the group with BJ and 6 other volunteers from the Cajamarca group, which was nice to spend more time with them.  We stayed in La Libertad but drove about and our west to reach our destination of Simbal.  Simbal is a town of about 3500 people that is situated in a canyon surrounded by tall, dusty, dry mountains (or really hills).

So we stayed at what was kind of a creepy hotel.  It was big, and has the potential to be nice, but you could tell that no one ever stays there.  Our beds had no mattresses, only box springs.  And not only that, but the hotel owners were raising roosters.  And you know how much I love roosters, just imagine 20 of them doing their thing very early in the morning.  So between roosters and box springs, it was three nights of little to no sleep. 

The first day in Simbal, we went to the health post and built a garden. It was a little tough because the land is very very dry and rocky.  So we spent a lot of the day removing rocks, it was a long process and we were there all day, but the finished product looked really nice.  But after working in dust all day we were incredibly filthy.

The second day we went to a neighboring town and cooked lunch with a bunch of health promoters.  They killed a turkey for us, right in front of us.  And we provided fresh salad.  The purpose was to explain the benefits of a healthy meal.  And we proved this by having the fresh cut salad and explained that when you don´t boil those vegetables that hold more of their vitamins.  The people really seemed to like it.  We even made deviled eggs which was a huge deal!

Later that night we went over to another town and held an early childhood stimulation session and we made toys with the Mom´s and children.  They love when they get ¨stuff!  But the somewhere during all of this a few of us started feeling sick, and later into the night all of the 6 girls I was traveling with ended up with major stomach issues, so on our final day we were pretty miserable.  We listened to a session by the doctor about tuberculosis, and then after that we all packed our things and headed back to Trujillo. 

When we got back to Trujillo we had a few hours to kill until we were all leaving for our sites on buses.  We heard there was a pretty cool mall near by so we decided to go there.  This meant I got to spend some quality time in Starbucks, which was amazing, and later we went and saw a movie...in english and went to Pizza Hut afterwards...our last HOORAY before heading back to site. 

It was a real whirlwind of a week, and it was informative, but exhausting.  I was happy to get back to my site.

WORK WORK WORK

I never thought I could possibly get stressed out here with regards to my work, but I have been proven wrong.  I am at crunch time.  Next Saturday I am heading to Trujillo, the capital of La Libertad, with all of the volunteers that I spent my 10 weeks in training with.  We are headed to early IST (not sure what abbreviation that is, peace corps  loves abbreviations).  There we will be presenting our community diagnostics.  So I am under a lot of pressure to finish this thing up.  It reminds me of my last two years grad school where I spent days upon days sitting in the library researching on the internet in writing my paper.  Except here, I have no library, I have no internet, and I am having to write this paper in Spanish, a language I am doing my best at just trying to speak.  However, my work at the health post is really starting to pick up, and the nurse keeps asking my to put together these different presentations on health topics to present to the Mom’s.  I spent 5 hours at her house the other night putting one together.  And this is work that is hard to turn down because it’s exactly what the peace corps wants me to be doing.  It’s just overlapping at a difficult time.  But I am looking forward to all of it!  After our first 3 days in Trujillo with everyone as a group, we are getting split up into smaller groups and all heading off to different places, I am staying in La Libertad with my group, probably going to a more rural area to do our field based training.

So as for a general update on things I will start with the construction going on in my house.  My family approached me a few weeks ago and asked to borrow money to put another room in our house and to close off the back of the house, which was a wall of sticks.  So I agreed, it was going to be 250 soles, which is literally approximately 80 American dollars, and for the work being done, this is incredibly cheap.  However, the peace corps allows us to do stuff like this on loan.  Which means, I gave my family the 250 up front, but for the next 5 months, I will be paying them half of my rent until the amount is settled between the two of us.  As volunteers we cannot give our community the wrong impression that we throw money into it, because that is not the purpose of a volunteer.  Although I am always buying little odds and ends for my family, a 250 sole construction project is a big deal. 

Money is a very touchy thing here, they are constantly asking me how much everything I own is.  In fact the peace corps gave me a substantial amount of money to buy a bicycle, and when I returned with it, everyone, including my neighbors asked me about the cost.  Even though I bought it with peace corps money, I told them it was a gift and I just picked it up from the peace corps that I didn’t know the price.  If they think I have money, they will keep asking for things.

My family does, however, keep complaining to me that my host brother, who is 17 and just returned from school in Lima, would like to go to college, but it’s 300 soles a month and he can’t afford it.  My first question to them was “does he have a job?”, because personally I don’t see why he can’t go to Piura and start working first and then save the money.  But my family just looked at me confused.  Personally I think that would be a better idea then him sitting around day after day playing his guitar or pan flute. 

Having a brother around has been really fun.  In fact the other day he was waiting for me outside my room with a scorpion he found IN the house.  I have decided that between the scorpions and tarantulas that both live here, I’d prefer a scorpion over a tarantula any day.  The funny thing is, my family is scared of neither a tarantula or scorpion, their fear are the giant frogs that are everywhere at night.  They are so freaked out by them!

So my work at the health post has been going really well.  Right now I am working there 5 to 6 days a week.  Which will eventually cut back, especially with school starting back up next week and I will need to be doing some work there.  But the health post is so incredibly disorganized, so the days I am not helping with the baby check ups I am helping them get organized so they can be a little more effective.  There are lots of kids missing important vaccinations because the paperwork is all over the place.  Yesterday, I did my first presentation.  Once a month the mothers come to the health post to collect food that is provided by the government, but before they can leave with their food, they have to listen to a presentation.  This time the nurse and I did one on malnutrition, and nutrition in children 6 months or older.  Originally I didn’t see the problem with nutrition, however, the nurse explained that it is usually good until they are 6 months old and start eating foods, and suddenly there is a drop in their height and weight  growth.  And now I am seeing that for myself. 

So all these mothers piled into the health post with their kids and babies, and trying to give the presentation was difficult. And honestly, the presentation was very very simple.  But when the nurse went around the room and started to quiz the Moms that hadn’t comprehended much of anything.  Afterwards they received their food, and that was chaos even though we had given them numbers to try and keep order.  They each received A LOT of food, 6 bags of papilla, hard to explain but it’s basically a powder that gets mixed with milk to make baby food, and 2  one liter bottles of vegetable oil, and a large bag that contained 2 large bags of rice and beans.  It was heavy, and although the Moms do this every month, they didn’t bring bags to carry them in so they kept beating on me to give them the bags I had to cut open to give them their food.  It got crazy. 

There were a few Moms who showed up late and didn’t hear the presentation so the nurse refused to give them their food and told them they would have to come back later in the week when we give it again.  The Mom’s were so mad, but they have to comply and they need to hear this stuff!  So when it was all said and done it was an exhausting day.  But I am loving seeing how all of this stuff gets done! 

One part of the presentation that was exciting was when I was explaining how to make purees to give to the babies, I introduced lots of different ideas, because usually the Mom’s only make purees out of potato and sweet potato.  So when I introduced the types with vegetables and fruits they were freaking out and want me to do another presentation on just that.  But I think I might make house visits and help with that because I’d like to be in their houses and see how they are living and other areas for work.  Plus, if some of them have blenders, like many people do, their lives could be simplified!   So I am pretty pumped about that!  Even my nurse didn’t know about this and she is really on top of things.  Except when I was at her house the other day (and she has a relatively nice house for here) and her little boy said he needed to poop and she told him to go outside near the corral and go….we teach parents not to do this! 

With work and some upcoming travel things are going great.  And some of my friends have just planned our  “Semana Santa”  (Easter), it’s vacation time for us, and a group of us are going to “the beach” of Peru, Mancora, to relax and have a little fun.  It looks like I will be going on my first Spring Break ever, and I’m pretty excited!