No more shots

So the vaccination campaign is over…however, it did not go out with a bang.  The last day of the vaccinations the nurse decided that we should go out to these much smaller towns that are connected with Chipillico, they are just much further out then the central part.  I was excited because I had only heard about these places and hadn’t gotten a chance to go visit them yet.  So a we headed out around 8 one morning to go hunt down these kids.  The first town we went to is called Pariamarca, and really what it is the name someone gave an area, because the houses are drastically spread out, and each house is on the top of it’s own, very steep very high hill.  So when we reached the top of the first hill for the first kid and I walked into a lady cutting into this giant bird, I knew it was going to be an interesting day!

The bird, I am not quite sure what kind of bird it was, it was HUGE with a gigantic wing span , but it had the face and beak of a puffin bird, even colorful like that.  Apparently the bird was killed by bow and arrow of the 7 year old little boy who lived in the house.  I was just thinking how a mother would react in the US if her son came trotting home with a GIGANTIC bird.  The lady was cutting into the bird in order to remove it’s heart.  The heart is often sold and used a remedy.  As I was watching her do this, covered in blood, I got to thinking about biology class and the endless amount of animals we dissected.  However, we would study for weeks in advance in order to know the anatomy.  This lady just knew it, and was cutting into it knowing exactly what she wanted.  Kind of interesting.  Of course I asked a million questions from which I found out that there REALLY are lions that live in the mountains that surround the valley, and I officially have proof from the skin that was hanging on a wall in her house.  The aren’t huge, just small mountain lions, but a mountain lion is a lion in my book.

We continued on climbing hills searching for kids.  The entire time we were carrying a cooler with the vaccination in it, as well as sticks because the people who like to live out in the middle of no where often have vicious dogs.  Which we encountered a few times, fortunately they are easily deterred with a large stick.  At one of the next stops we end up at a house of a man who didn’t have any kids and we stopped to take a break.  As I was sitting there I noticed these 3 bundles hanging from the porch.  I kept trying to figure out what they were so I went for a closer look.  I discovered that they were snake skins all rolled up.  And we aren’t talking some little garden snake…we are talking anaconda sized snakes…gigantic.  And the guy just casually tells me that he caught and killed the 3 of them just this year.  I swear if I ever seen anything that size around my house, I will be on the first plane back to the US.  I can’t do snakes, especially not of that size. 

The rest of the day was traveling house to house.  It is interesting to visit the different places.  These people are poorer then most, many of their homes are made of sticks rather then adobe.  It’s crazy, their houses remind me of forts I would have made as a kid, but they live in them with their families and don’t know any better.  But the locations of the houses sometimes have it’s advantages.  There was one area were all the houses were located along a creek, great for getting water and washing clothes, even made me a little jealous and I wished my house here was that close.

It was a really long day, but we accomplished a lot.  We even found kids that weren’t on our lists, and were visiting from other places.  My nurse would argue with the mother’s until they would give in and let her vaccinate the kids.  She is relentless and determined that every kid will get their vaccination!

So without wasting any time we moved onto other things.  The CADI ( center for early childhood stimulation) was finally opening.  This is exciting because the health promoters have been working on this for a long time and finally their trainings are coming to and end and they are going to be working there.  I have been working on getting the lists together so that each promoter will have her own class and age group.  It is exciting.  But as with anything here, an event like this does not go without having a party to start it.  So I met with the promoters the other day to make the arrangements.  Turns out, they hadn’t done the work they were supposed too, so we were trying to throw a party together the night before.   Because of that, the mayor was unwilling to donate money to get it started, he needed more concrete documentation.  So based on the 33 soles (approximately 10 dollars) and donated rice, we planned to put together the party.  Fortunately they are really good at working off of nothing like that and put together a pretty good program and menu.

So the next day we had a really small party for the opening of the CADI.  It was held in the school where the center is located.  All parties have godparents, and the godparents basically christen the party.  I was asked to be the godmother.  This meant that I had to sit at a specially decorated table with the godfather, get served a ridiculous amount of food, dance with the godfather, and break a bottle in the entryway of the CADI.   And because it was so last minute thrown together, one of the police officers was the godfather.  He has absolutely nothing to do with the CADI.  The way we were treated you feel more like you are the bride and groom of the wedding, literally we had a first dance.  It was akward to dance in front of everyone, but it is their tradition.  Now I have to go buy a gift for the CADI as well, that is tradition too.  But it’s open now, which is great, and another place for me to do some work with the Moms.  

Then, this week I was supposed to go to a training in Chiclayo, a large capital city about 3 hours south of Piura.  This was a training for project planning and we were supposed to bring a community partner to attend the training.  I decided on the lead health promoter.  However, with the Peruvian tendency to be extremely late to everything I decided to buy our bus tickets ahead of time to give her more of a deadline.  I also was too nervous to stand around and wait for her to get herself together.  So I went earlier in the day thinking that if she knew I was waiting for her at the bus station it would also be more incentive for her to get there.  Do you think that worked???  Nope…I was literally on the bus and head to get off and get my things because she didn’t show.  I waited another hour in the bus terminal and she never showed.  I called me boss and couldn’t attend the training without her.  So I had to stay the night in Piura alone.  Finally the next morning she started calling me.  I was too angry to talk to her, so we ended up texting.  She told me she spent the night in Chiclayo. But I knew she was lying because whoever was texting for her, because she can’t, said their bus would be arriving there in the next 30 minutes, so she had left that morning, not the night before like she tried to tell me.  I went back to my site and ignored her.  Much later I talked to her and she tried to tell me she got on a bus at 5:20 (buses leave on the hour), and I must have missed her carrying her red bag (the bus station was empty).  So I was left very frustrated.  But I also see it as a sign of disrespect, so therefore I will probably not end up working with her. 

On another subject, I found out today my host Dad has another child by a women who isn’t my host Mom, and the girl is about the same age as my youngest host sister (12).  I just can’t believe the infidelity here.  My host brother in law also cheated on my sister and has a 1 year old little girl by another woman.  The interesting thing is that I live in a town of 1600 people.  It’s impossible not to know everyone, and yet all this is still happening right under their noses.  It’s really horrible.  But everyone stays together and they just ignore the incidence.  What is interesting is how much my host mom trashes my brother in law….but she fails to tell me that her own husband did the exact same thing!  The women are so dependent on their husbands that they do nothing about it, and just keep living their lives.  It’s really sad. 

Well that is all I have.  I am sure there will be a new story to post soon!

Shots and Thieves!

So I was reminded by a friend recently that I have fallen behind on my blog posts.  I apologize for that.  It has been an incredibly busy few weeks.  I have been helping out with the vaccination campaigns going on in my community, which means I go door to door, or in the school with the nurse vaccinating kids.  Right now, the campaign is for polio, rubeola, and somethnig else I can´t remember and it´s for kids between the ages of 1 and 4. 

Honestly, it was been a very entertaining couple of weeks. The first day of my experience was going into the preschool for the vaccinations.  The kids are usually generally excited to see us, and this particular day wasn´t any different.  They just didn´t know what was coming to them.  Since I am where I am, having a parents consent isn´t always necessary for vaccinations.  For example, if the kids had a neighbor picking them up to take them home that day and the neighbor said the Mom wouldn´t mind, then we did it anyway. The poor little guys were crying and calling for their moms that weren´t there...it was really really sad and chaotic.  In fact, when the nurse´s son turn came up, she looked up for him, and we all watched as he had taken a hard start running across the field.  He was determined his Mom was not going to vaccinate him, but she took off running and caught him.

Later that same night we decided to go give more vaccinations ( I do not vaccinate kids, I register them and talk to the moms about the vaccination) and we were walking around neighborhoods when we came across a party (it was right before mother´s day weekend).  And the Mom´s were celebrating and cooking with their kids.  So there were tons of kids, and my nurse was super excited.  I felt bad, we were basically going in to ruin a party, which is what we did.  When we left, all the kids were crying and the Mom´s were rocking them in chairs saying how the nurse was a bad woman.  It was funny actually, and we got a large number of our quota down that day because of the party. 

Other days of vaccinations, we would continue till after dark, and since a lot of people in my community do not have electricity, this interesting.  Fortunately I have a small flashlight on my cell phone and it could illuminate things just well enough for the nurse to get the needle in the skin.  At times she demanded the moms get their kids out of bed for us to vaccinate them.  That is right...we vaccinated sleeping babies!  The reason we have to do this, is because the Mom´s are even scared of the shots, and they claim they will bring the children the following day and we never see them.  From experience, my nurse knows this and has to be so demanding.

Then, there are really persistant Mom´s.  The other day my nurse and I were standing outside a home arguing with a Mom for at least 20 minutes, she was really convincing us that her kid had recieved the vaccination later that week. She was doing a good job until my nurse asked what color card was left behind for her with the date of the vaccination, she said yellow, unfortunately for her it was blue.  So we then vaccinated her screaming 4 year old. 

Later in the week we went back to visit the preschool to hand out the vaccination cards to the kids to take home to their Mom´s.  This time, when we entered, it was nothing but kids crying.  They were scared that we were there again. Poor little guys!

So this campaign has been interesting, and it´s almost done.  The best part of it was that I got to meet more people in my community.  I even noticed over the past week or so more people know my name and greet me in the streets.  It will be great for my work!

Now for the not so great news....as if giving shots were good news.  I was on my way home the other day from the city, and some jerk went into my bag and robbed my charging cables for my computer, ipod and phones....and stole my hard drive which practically has my life one it, photos, letters, presentations, all my movies and itunes stuff.  I was devastated.  Because some of my valuable workw as stolen, and now I can´t use my computer or ipod.  Fortunately little by little I am replacing it all.  However, that day was crazy.  I thought I knew the guys that did it.  They rode in the back of the station wagon taxi where my hiking bookbag was on the way into my town.  So I went to the police station in tears and the police road me around searching for the guys.  Once we found them they searched their things and bodies, and recovered nothing.  The police weren´t convinced they didn´t do it, but at that moment they had nothing.  I was able to file a police report and hopefully my insurance will take care of things.  There were a few other suspicious people I came across that trip, so really my things could have been stolen anywhere.  It has just been really frustrating and I have had to change the dates of meeting until I can recover my work.  So because of all this, I am so late on my blogs.  I will try better next time! 

Mancora

So my beach vacation has come and gone and I am a little slow to update the blog about it.  It was a really great trip.  But it is really interesting how Mancora, is in the same department (state) as where I live, but it feels like a completely different world.  It was kind of an eerie trip because for most of it we drove through the desert, nothing but desert everywhere you look and canyons and everything.  For most of the trip, I just couldn't imagine that there was going to be this town at the end. 

So I expected that Mancora was going to be the peruvian equivalent to Cancun.  However, once I got there I was quickly reminded that I still live in a developing country, so even their popular vacation spot would be developing too.  Turns out, after all the hype I have heard about Mancora that it is really a small place.  Just a small strip of hotels, stores and restaurants.  But it all had a very authentic vibe just the way they looked and the materials they were built out of. 

Our hotel looked like something out of Mexico, it was really nice.
It had a pool   And when I walked up to the desk to check in the room, I started talking in Spanish, but the guy quickly started responding with in english with a heavy british accent.  Turned out this would be the way the rest of the weekend went, almost everyone we met spoke in english.  The hostel was filled with tourists and backpackers from all over the world, and they all spoke english.  That made for an even better vacation knowing I wouldn't have to stumble through my Spanish the entire time.

Now since it was a hostal, you kind of just get thrown in everywhere, so even though there were tons of peace corps volunteers there we still got broken up into rooms all over the hostal.  In my room I was with my two peace corps friends, but also with 3 other guys, 2 from england and one from California.  Turns out they were good guys and we didn't have to stress about them stealing our stuff.

So the rest of the week was nice and relaxing, we spent our days laying by the pool or on the beach enjoying the sun.  One night one of the volunteers had arranged for us to go on a little sunset cruise.  So we all walked to the pier, again expecting more then we should.  And when we showed up there was a rickety looking row boat and a guy waiting to meet us. Apparently my friend just convinced one of the fishermen to take us out, so that is exactly what we did.  There were no seats in the boat, so we all leaned against the side.  It actually was really beautiful, just a little scary at times when the boat started rocking like crazy.

At night we would search out nice restaurants to eat.  Fortunately Mancora had a great variety of food that we haven't had in awhile.  We went for delicious Mexican food twice.  I loved it!  One morning we went to a place called "Green Eggs and Ham", and I was actually able to get a waffle!  Turns out the lady who owns it also owns a store and she is from the United States, and her son manufactures and sells clothes in Peru.  I bought one of the shirts, actually really nice quality which is hard to find here.

So the night life was what everybody lived for.  I only went out once, the hotel was pretty popular and had good drinks and music so everyone hung out there for the most part, but when that ended everyone moved to the beach party.  When everyone kept telling me about the beach I was expecting some club that was on the beach.  It turns out the beach party is just people dancing and drinking on a sidewalk in front of a bunch of restaurants blaring music.  It was kind of crazy.  I didn't last very long down there, it was mostly peruvians. Drunk Peruvians.  So they stare or try and dance when they are really sloppy.  So I danced for a little bit there and called it a night.

The saddest part of the whole trip was when we had to leave and got back to site.  A few days after my boss was coming to visit and that meant I had a lot of work to do to prepare my meeting. 

I was really nervous about the meeting, because relying on some of the people in my town can be scary at times.  However, it turned out that a lot of them showed up and pulled through, there were 17 to be exact.  Almost all of my wonderful health promoters were there, a few teachers, and the nurse and technician from the health post (who is also a lt. for the mayor).  It turned out to be successful and my boss was very pleased.