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!
No comments:
Post a Comment