After a jaunt to the beach...

So I arrived back in site yesterday morning after a brief trip to Tumbes, the most northern (and hottest) department in Peru. As I mentioned in my last post, we were heading out that way to see some of the projects that fellow volunteers have going concerning PEPFAR (Presidents Emergency Plan for Aids Relief). The volunteers in that area have done a great job coordinating with community members to form committees that are working with various activities to promote education about HIV/ADIS in the general population. This might involve working with youth groups that give educational sessions to other youth, radio spots (we were on the radio twice in three days, and I got the laugh track from the DJ after goofing on some spanish), parades, and even a graffiti mural contest. Tumbes is situated along the ecuadorian border of peru and is a hub for commerce and trade, sadly those locations are often hotbeds for STD's and other communicable diseases. Fortunately this area is a bit more open minded to talk of sexual education, which makes the work of these volunteers somewhat easier. Here in the sierra of Peru such educational tactics wouldn't be greeted so warmly by the general population, so us volunteers in the mountainous areas might have to be a little more tactful with our presentation of such ideas.

After 3 days of touring volunteers sites and chatting with health personnel in Tumbes I made a mad dash to get back to site to open the library during the town anniversary, yesterday the 17th of October. It took about two days to get home and I picked up the books (donated by the peruvian government) on the way back. As I hop off a truck, and finish the 20-hour trip back home, I walk straight into the whole municipality staff including the mayor as they are dressed very nicely and parading around the plaza. I on the other hand, looked very much as if I had just traveled 20 hours of buses over the last two days (with very little sleep). I was juggling various bags and boxes but I was able to snap a picture before scampering off to ditch my things in my room and set up the library for an opening ceremony that was going to take place that afternoon. A fellow volunteer James from a neighboring town came by to help me organize the library. We were able to get it done in time and set to waiting for people to show up, as I understood various important people from the community were going to show up as well as the mayor and a priest who was going to bless the books (something I never forget to do before reading my books :) ). The bummer of the deal is that I had to have a community member organize the ceremony while I was gone in Tumbes, community members aren't peace corps volunteers and usually have another job that takes up most of their time. This ceremony wasn't terribly well planned, the professor responsible for planning it showed up (after drinking a couple early afternoon beers), as well as a 2-3 other workers from the municipality but it was not enough to conduct the ceremony. So we're going to try again tomorrow afternoon and focus more on students than adults, the target population of the library is students anyways. I surprised myself by not really being that irritated that the ceremony fell through, I was actually relieved just to get the project finally (almost) completed. There has been rumors of repeating the project in a couple of the communities surrounding tacabamba, but we'll see if that actually comes together. I will hopefully have some pictures up of the completed library being used by students in the next few days. (Until then you guys can enjoy these wedding pics from a wedding I attended earlier this month.)

Today has been pretty calm, was able to clean up the room a bit as well as get some clothes washed that have been neglected for quite some time. Tomorrow will be quite a bit more busy, so I'm going to take advantage of the down time and knock out some reading.

Currently Reading: Crepúsculo (Twilight) By: Stephenine Meyer

Yep...same book...kinda sad...

So...guess it's been awhile

Well my last blog post was in July, and I've been quite a busy guy since then. Since my last post, I turned 24, ran my second marathon, passed our one year anniversary in Peru, attended two more bull fights, enjoyed my town party, as well as continued my work with hand washing education in town, self-esteem sessions in the elementary school, and very very slowly completing a library project.

Time has really been flying by but as much as I feel like I have grown accustomed to the life here I still have trouble with the slow pace of work here, this sentiment was recently exacerbated by the town party that we celebrated during the second week of september. This is the party that everyone has been talking about since I arrived in site (last december). It is officially to commemorate the town saint "Señor de la misericordia", but the manner in which they celebrate is drinking for about 6 days straight while holding rosaries and masses. There were also three days of bull fights and a concert by grupo 5 (one of the most famous music groups from peru). This coincided with my groups one year anniversary in peru and a few other volunteers came to my site to join in on the festivities. All in all it was really enjoyable, but it pretty much knocked out any possibility for work for about 3-4 weeks. In the week or so before the parties the whole town was occupied with preparations and any coordination that I had with the municipality (who organizes most of the fiesta) pretty much came to a halt. I was hoping to make house visits to a few families in the rural communities but I was told that they would not be home as it was sugar cane harvesting season, these families also wanted to take advantage of the town party to sell their sugar cane. Of course after the party the whole town took about a week to recover. I guess I'll know for next year, but it was still somewhat frustrating.

The good news is that things have been progressing quite well recently. The library is finally coming together. We have been working with a branch of the ministry of education that will provide us with the materials for a library (books, etc.) if we are able to find a space, equip it with tables and shelves, and find someone to attend to the library during working hours. Now this is something I have been working on for awhile now but that mainly involved listening to a carpenter give me various reasons why he couldn't finish the work. This carpenter kept blowing deadline after deadline but I couldn't feel like I could really get that angry because his name was jesus, and I think there is something wrong with yelling at jesus the carpenter. Eventually he finished the work and we were set to actually install them (nail them to the wall). I mosey on over to jesus' house to let him know we need his help, help that he agreed he would provide, to find that he had been drinking quite heavily and wouldn't be able to help us. Luckily the one other carpenter that I knew in town was able to throw in a hand and help us out. We're in the process of getting the last few things done and hopefully we will receive the materials from lima within a couple weeks.

In the next few months I will also be involved in a program called "familias saludables" (healthy families) which will be run in coordination with the health center. During the last two weeks we have been hiking out to the rural areas looking for families that want to participate. I found that it is much easier to go to the campo with the health center employees because I can fall back on them for explications if my spanish isn't doing all that hot that day. During these outings we have convinced about 15 families that they should participate in the program, it will involve a series of sessions addressing themes like hygiene (more hand washing!!), nutrition, and how to organize your house (to separate rooms, have soap at the ready, etc.)

I am quite content to be busy right now because I feel like I will be out of site for most of November as well as part of October. During the third week of October, a couple volunteers from the sierra will be traveling up to the costal department of Tumbes to visit some other volunteers and learn how to conduct sessions on HIV/AIDS education. Though the rate of AIDS prevalence is about on par with the United States, the knowledge of how STD's are transmitted is not as well understood here. For that reason Peru, and some Peace Corps Volunteers, have received funding from the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a program that has been successful in many countries in Africa. Hopefully us mountain volunteers will be able to learn a few things to use in the sexual education sessions that many volunteers get involved in during their second year of service. The month of November seems to be already quite booked as well, between training a new group of volunteers, a leadership camp for adolescent males, medical checks in lima, and a trip to the southern peruvian city of Arequipa, I think I will be lucky to be in site for about a week in November. That'll be followed by a visit from the parents in December which I'm sure will be quite exciting, it'll be great to see some familiar faces and get out and enjoy the touristy side of Peru that us PCV's don't see too terribly often.

Alright, I think I'll wrap this up with my usual promise to start posting more and something new. I'm going to start including the current book that I'm reading on the bottom of each post. Hopefully this will encourage me to post more as well as read more, so that everyone doesn't think I have been reading Twilight for the last 3 months. I hope everyone is doing fantastic back in the states, enjoy ACL tomorrow if you're lucky enough to have gotten tickets.

Currently Reading: Crepúsculo (Twilight) By: Stephenine Meyer

A schmorgasborg of pictures!!!!

So it´s been quite awhile since I´ve been able to get some pics up and I apologize for that. Unfortunately I don´t have any pictures from the bull fights. I took plenty, but my camera lens decided to promptly jam, effectively locking up my camera. I will eventually be able to pull the pictures off the memory card...but not just yet...


Blogger is not letting me easily caption the photos so Ill give you a run down of all of them.

First off weve got a picture of me at a hand washing theater presentation at the local health center.

Second is the same presentation in the town plaza, had a great turn out, and its a beautiful backdrop for a theater act.

3. Picture of a don manuel, a peruvian that I am working with in some local schools with a project that will provide clean drinking water to the students.

4 - 6. Pics from my two year old host brothers bday party, it was pretty interesting, the 6th is him breaking a pinata...they do not hit them with a stick here. Instead they sing songs and the bday boy...or honored guest of the party be it who it may....pulls the bottom out and the candy and confetti comes out. Then follows the typical scramble for goodies.

7. Cuy (guinea pig) con papas (with potatoes)...a very typical dish of the region.

8 - 9. Pictures from a handwashing parade in which all the young students of the town participated. The first sign roughly says...mom, if you love me, wash my hands with running water and soap each time you see that they are dirty

10-16. A quick progression of photos that shows the world map project that I have been working on. I have many more and will post them soon. We should be finished within a week or two.

Been awhile...

I apologize for being terrible with my blog updates, seems to be the running theme of my blog. Recently I have been quite busy with family time, giving hand washing seminars in the rural areas, and attending some local parties.

First the bit about work. I have been giving a series of charlas (informative sessions) with a group of rural mothers. One obstacle that I´ve had to overcome with them is that the great majority of them are illiterate, and because of this I´ve had to change the way that I present ideas and topics to them. There is much more reliance on pictures than on words. Also my spanish is not very easily understood by them. But I was able to finish up a series of three charlas, we do so many because we really want to drive home the importance of washing hands with soap. Along with this I´ve been looking into the possibility of installing a water system in a local community so that they will not have to drink out of pozos (holes in the ground that are not near as deep as wells, and then more suseptible to growing bacteria and other gross slimy stuff). Also we have been working to try to install a community library in Tacabamba. This is a town of more than 4,000 people and not even the colegio has a library, this is probably because no one here reads for pleasure. We will have books donated by the peruvian government and hopefully a few people will catch the reading bug.

It seems like it has been the season for social events recently. We kicked it off with my two year old host brothers bday, which was surpisingly impressive. We spent most of the day before preparing the decorations for the party and my host grandmother didn´t sleep at all the night before because she was so busy with the preparations. I will get up pictures soon, but if you can imagine a two year old dressed in a tuxedo and being the guest of honor to about 40 children and adults of all ages that´s about how it was. Following the peruvian custom, this party turned into a dance party that lasted until the electricity went out all across the town. We ate cake by candle light and then the adults had their own celebration by drinking beer until about midnight.

We also recently celebrated the large annual party of the local province capital. This involved concerts from some of the biggest groups in peru as well as bull fights featuring matadores (bull fighters) from all over the world. It was interesting and my first bull fight. I wasn´t such a big fan of the bull fights, I see that it demands quite a bit of courage in the face of possible injury. Especially after seeing a mexican matador mauled by a bull (he recovered...the matador, not the bull). A friend that I played lacrosse with at trinity happened to be traveling in peru and was able to make it out for the celebration. One downside of the party is that almost everything in the town shuts down and work is almost impossible.

In the coming weeks I hope to start working with another group of rural mothers with hand washing charlas as well as working with some health center employees to train some health promoters in local communities. The idea is that they will be a resource to their own community, it should work better than a strange looking gringo that speaks funny. Hopefully it works out. Oh...and then there´s the marathon that I will be running this sunday. I thinking that will be quite difficult considering I haven´t been able to run in about a week. I believe I will be walking quite a bit and trying to avoid a knee injury. I´ll keep you all posted on how that goes.

Hope everything is going great back home!!

One Year Later...

So I glanced at my watch earlier today and realized the date today, Saturday May 16th, is pretty much exactly one year from when my class of 2008 graduated from Trinity University, Saturday May 17th 2008. So of course this threw me into a reflective attitude, and anyways, after getting my haircut I didn't really have much to do today. I came up with a short list of things that have occurred and changed in my life since one year....

- I have visited 9 countries in the last 12 months

- I received an undergraduate degree and am now making about $10 a day

- I am living on the other side of the world

- I am working where I am not 100% sure that people understand me....and vica versa

- After barely surviving a marathon the year before, I signed up and am currently training for another one

- I got my paramedics license....and didn't ever use it

- I have a secure (hopefully) job for the next year and a half

- 8 months after graduating from college I had my own business cards….but not in english

- Though I have bought and had one for 4 months....I still can't play guitar....

- I am damn happy to be living in Peru

Though there are still some uncomfortable times in site and I've been spending most of the time recently looking for new projects to get started, things are going very well.

One year ago I knew that I would be serving for the Peace Corps in Peru, but that was pretty much it. I thought that I may be working in a site where spanish isn't even the primary language (like some of my friends now). The Peace Corps experience to this point has been better than I could have ever imagined, I become friends with an amazing group of fellow volunteers and had the great privilege to be placed in such a great site (albeit it is raining once more as I type this). In the coming months I'm looking forward to becoming even further integrated in my community and starting longer-term projects....but now....a bit on what I've been up to recently:

About a week ago we had a training session called PDM...can't remember exactly what the acronym is but we (all the community health volunteers) brought community partners to a city on the coast and had a few days of meetings on how to formulate work plans for projects in the future. Pretty important stuff but for some reason it seemed to drag on forever. It was great to see the other volunteers of my program though. My community partner and I came up with a plan to give educational sessions to a group of health promoters, school teachers, and students in a remote community about 3.5 hours hiking away from my site. So hopefully that plan will come to fruition in the next few months. I also hope to work in other schools of the area communities to provide clean drinking water to the students and lower cases of diarrhea as a result of the lack of potable water. Here in Tacabamba I have been working with the kids of the colegio to draw a world map on a wall in the school, it's more than 5 meters wide by 2.5 meters tall. So it's a decent size, but luckily many of the kids from the school are more artistically gifted than I am. I hope to have pictures up soon showing the process of making the map from start to finish.

Beyond that I have been trying to improve my spanish by reading the harry potter books in spanish. It is quite helpful with learning the conjugations of verbs in the various tenses....and I also get to learn all kinds of fun words for magic....that will be absolutely useful in my day to day life in rural Peru. Luckily the cities have many bookstores and it wasn't that difficult to find all 7 of the books, I am currently about half way through the third and have set a goal to read all of them before the end of the year. I have a notorious habit of getting half way through a book, becoming bored with it, putting it down and never touching it again. Hopefully that will not happen with these books.

There are not too many vacations planned for the near future, the first would be the marathon in Pacasmyo on July 5th. I have been training for this more seriously recently, but I am still worried that I am starting a little bit late. To further motivate me, and to keep me from misbehaving, I have made a 5 sole (~$1.60) bet with another volunteer that I will not drink a drop of alcohol until after the marathon. I took it as a bad omen when I stepped off of the bus to my site and within two minutes I was talking to a neighbor that offered me to share a beer with him. We'll see how this bet goes.

I hope everyone is doing well back in the states, congratulations to those that recently graduated from college!!! I wish you all good luck in the job search, and if that doesn't pan out, go ahead and turn in your Peace Corps app and run south of the border....hasta la proxima!! (until the next time)

Quick Post...

So it´s been awhile since I´ve been able to get a post up, I should apologize for that. I´ve actually been somewhat busy recently. The focus of my work recently has been preparations for a theater group that will be coming to Tacabamba this weekend to give a few presentations on the importance of hand washing. I´ve been in contact with some higher ups in the organizational scheme and they only told me that they would like to do 4 presentations in my town and that a reasonable number of people should attend. So with that alone I set off to find a few communities and places in town that would be friendly to a theater presentation, especially on Saturday, the slowest day of the week. But I´ve been able to secure 4 locations, get the word out to a few mothers clubs, the students from the schools, and get a few radio ads out on the local radio station. So I´m hoping for a good turnout….as long as the rain doesn´t rear its ugly head and have one last laugh. Hopefully we are at the end of the rainy season, which robs me of any excuse to make the long hikes to the communities to do some training for health promoters and do work with mothers groups, but that´s a good thing, and will open up some more work opportunities for me. Over the last few weeks I´ve been talking to people of the community about painting a world map on the wall of the high school, with the help of the high school kids of course. It should be fun and get the kids involved in learning some geography. I heard some statistic somewhere that said something like one fourth of the united states population cannot find the US on a world map (but 94.4567% of statistics are made up on the spot), and I´m thinking education on geography might be a little bit worse here. It´s a great plan and everyone wants to get involved with it, but the rain and paint don´t mix too well, so I´ve just been sitting twiddling my thumbs and waiting on that project.

But of course it´s not all work here, recently we had our easter vacation, for which we received a couple free vacation days as volunteers. A large number of us made the way to the coast to a beach town called Mancora, rumored to be one of the best beaches in Peru, and I sure was not disappointed. It was great to be able to get away from site and relax for a little bit. Being in site, as great as it is, is a 24/7 responsibility, you´re always supposed to be on your game because you´re representing your country and working hard to find your place in the culture. Honestly it is nice every once in awhile to be able to relax and just act like a tourist, and Mancora was the perfect place to do it. It seemed like everyone spoke English (catering to the usual crowd of tourists that don´t know Spanish) so I didn´t even have to speak Spanish if I didn´t want to. We stayed at a hostel popular with international travelers and met a bunch of really cool people from Canada, Sweden, Germany and Australia. But after a couple days the vacation came to an end and we made our way back to the mountains and the rain.

All in all life is going great, still healthy, still trying to train for that silly marathon and looking forward to getting some new projects going in the next few weeks. Hope everyone is still doing well back home, and I hopefully will be able to get the next blog post up a lil´ quicker!

Readjustment and lessons on running etiquette...

So I returned to site a little under a week ago from a volunteer conference on the coast and have been having some trouble readjusting to life back at site. Our conference was called "reconnect", it's an opportunity for the volunteers of my training group to get back together and chat about what's going well in site, what's not going so well, and have a good time seeing each other for the first time in 3 months. The fact that the conference took place on a beautiful beach and included St. Patrick's Day were added bonuses. Some other volunteers and I showed up a day early to "enjoy" some surfing and relaxing on the beach. I say "enjoy" surfing because as it was the second time of my life that I went surfing, I didn't have quite as much success as the veteran surfers, but it was fun just the same. Unfortunately this reconnect conference took place two days after "theater camp" (see last post). So between the two conferences I was away from site for almost two weeks. When I returned a couple things had changed around here. After spending two weeks on the coast it seemed like it rained so much harder than I remembered. My family, who rents out rooms in the house, found two new tenants. The first is a physical education teacher at the local elementary school, who should be a great connection for future programs at the school, and the other is a young architect who works in the municipality. She can't quite figure out why I don't also have to work 9 to 5 like she does, she should get used to it soon enough. Also in the health center, I went to visit a friend of mine but found his office was moved in the building because they were knocking down walls to accommodate the expansion of the building, they are adding 7 more offices on the second floor as well as an operation room and expanded areas for patient care on the first floor. This is a very very big expansion for the health center, most volunteers have health posts that maybe have 4 or 5 rooms for everything necessary at the post.

Recently I have begun training for a marathon here in Peru that will take place in July. I ran the austin marathon in february of 2008, but haven't been running much since then. The last few days I've been going on short runs around site and the first was on sunday, that just happened to be market day here in Tacabamba. This means that all the families were coming down from their communities to sell cheese, cows, milk, fruits, vegetables, and all sorts of other things in Tacabamba. Because of this, every road out of town was crowded with cows, goats, sheep, horses and people walking and giving funny looks at the gringo that seems to be running for absolutely no reason. Around here the people "control" their cows by wrapping a piece of rope around their horns or neck and using that to guide them, I say "control" because these large animals can really do whatever they want if so motivated, a piece of rope around their horns held by a 12-year-old will only slow them down a little bit. A motortaxi might appear suddenly on the road and this cow will jump across to the other side of the road, because of this at times I would have to slow to a walk and carefully make my way around cows and horses. All the while with the lyical poety of Busta Rhymes playing in my ears. I think I'll avoid running on Sunday mornings from now on.

After looking forward and preparing material for the reconnect conference for the last three months, it's taken some time to get readjusted to life and working in town, it doesn't help that it rains heavily every morning and afternoon with only a few hours of sunlight between. Also a friend of mine on the coast was able to hunt down a hammock for me that I was able to hang on the roof of my house, that's been quite a motivation killer, as sitting in the hammock and reading (yes, peace corps is very hard)is much more appealing to hiking around the campo in knee high mud. This video project with the kids of the colegio (high school) should be taking off soon. It also recently occurred to me that a town of this size (7,000) should really have a library, not even the colegeio has one. Creating a library has been a daunting task for other volunteers, so hopefully the challenges created by that will be enough to get me out of my hammock and start working. All in all I don't really have many complaints, I'm still healthy and besides the rain, everything is going great. Take care, and I hope everyone is doing well back home!!

Here are a couple pictures from the reconnect conference, the sunsets were amazing...




And we enjoyed a couple green beers for Paddy´s day...

Watching the final sunset of the conference at the end of a rickity pier...

This one time at theater camp....

So I arrived back in my site yesterday morning after more than 17 straight hours, with very little sleep to be had, from what I thought was going to be a course for health promoters put on by world bank. This course was put on by world back but instead it was training by a group called teatrovivo (living theater), who were training professional acting troupes and groups of student actors in ways to present the importance of hand washing in a new and different way. This came as quite a shock to the peace corps volunteers who expected to be sitting in 4 days of lectures.

But first, a trip to the beach and an unfortunate discovery. Alright, the bad news first, I lost my first cell phone of my life. I've been carrying these things around for 7.5 years now and have always kept pretty good track of 'em but after getting of a 12-hour bus ride at 5:30 in the morning my wits weren't about me and I left it in a bus station, only discovered this about 4 hours later....back to the good stuff....Due to a miscommunication between us volunteers and the higher ups in Peace Corps, we arrived a day and a half early to the conference. I had traveled to Piura with a volunteer named Julie, whose site is about 2.5 hours from mine, and we were able to meet up with our buddy from training Eric whose site is only about an hour from Piura city. We had heard so much about piura being close to the beach and decided to head out to check it out. By chance, on the street we ran into the one peruvian we knew that lived in piura, she was the girlfriend of a volunteer and we met the couple a week or two back at the carnival celebration in cajamarca. She directed us to a beach called San Pedro, we took a bus for about 45 minutes and got dropped off in what seemed to be in middle of no where. After some haggling with a moto-taxi driver we were able to get him to take us to the beach and wait for us to take us back. It turned out we hit the beach at a good time and had it completely to ourselves, well, us and the groups of dolphins about 20 yards out from the beach. We started to swim in that direction, but gave it a second thought as eric advised us that dolphins sometimes cluster together to protect themselves from sharks and other predators. But plenty of fun was to be had soaking up the sun and playing frisbee on the beach. The volunteers of Peru 12 have something of a youtube video competition going on, so we shot a couple scenes that we will hopefully use in an upcoming video. After awhile we called it quits, took our moto-taxi back to the middle of no where, and hitched a ride on a truck hauling bags of salt back towards civilization.

The next day we had free, Eric headed back to his site and Julie and I were free to wander the city. Julie was hunting for a hat and I was sent on a mission by my host parents to find some pink shoes called "Bubblegummers" for my host sister. The pronunciation of english words down here can be twisted at times, and it was weird when I had to repeat the shoe brand a couple times in different ways before the salesperson recognized what I was saying....even though I knew the right way to say it....but we both struck gold and found what we were looking for. And i had another unfortunate discovery, it looked like I was developing pink eye in my left eye after swimming in the ocean. Luckily I still had some antibiotic eye drops in my bag from my last 'bout with pink eye, when I took a dip in the gulf of mexico at 5 in the morning after a friends wedding in Galveston, Texas. So I set to diagnosing myself and medicating myself as soon as we got back to the hotel.

Saturday morning we were joined by another volunteer from our group, Jessica, and set off to see what this course was about. The only things that we knew was that it was four days long, funded by world bank, about hand washing, and a small note on the bottom of an email told us to bring zancos and baldes. We recognized baldes as buckets (we were introduced to those during the carnival celebration), but we had to look up to word zancos....it meant stilts.

Within 30 minutes of arriving to the course we found ourselves seated cross-legged in circle with about 45 other youth our age, there was a single candle in the middle of the circle and we were passing a xylophone around, each person had the strike a note, tell a bit about themselves, strike a note once more and pass the xylophone along. Here we discovered that most of the people in the circle had a bit, or a few years of theater experience, and when it came my turn, I just made a bad joke about how hot it was, struck my note and passed it along.

The days were pretty long, starting around 8 and usually getting back to the hotel around 10. The activities of the first day included some ice breakers with some of the actors from universities in Piura and Cajamarca, it was actually really nice to be around educated people of our own age. I have interviewed illiterate 22 year-old mothers in the campo who are on their 3rd or 4th child and it's not quite the same. We learned how accenting different parts of your body while you walked could help you better act the part of a different character, and a lot of other things that quite honestly I hadn't ever taken the time to really think or care about, during the first day it was hard to figure out what we were doing there. It got easier in the coming days as we knew what to expect. The final part of the first day involved separating ourselves into three different groups, and each had to use their bodies and creativity to form a monster that can walk, eat, love, and sleep.....but it didn't have to wash it's hands. In the coming days, the coordinators worked in the theme of washing hands and the acting troupes put together some pretty good skits about hand washing. The second day was interpretive dancing and what not, and the third day involved a little bit more dancing as well as some circus tricks. They actually provided stilts for us and some people picked it up pretty quick. I was a little worried about it because the stilts were made for peruvians, half of my big american foot hung off of the part where you secure your foot. I decided to pass and instead trade some juggle tricks with a friend. After three long days of acting classes and on our last night together, we decided to hit the discoteca. We had a pretty large group and pretty much took over the whole disco, there might have been 15 people there that weren't in our group. After three days of interpretive dance and making human dragons, I needed a beer. I ordered one and was walking back to my seat and was passing by the dance floor when I hear people clapping and saying my name to urge me to dance. Now I'm not going to say that I'm a good dancer, it's actually quite the opposite, it's just that Peruvians like to see gringos do stuff that make them look silly, and this was right up my alley. So I reach out for a hand and start twirling someone around the crowded dance floor. Now, due to my bout with pinkeye, I was still wearing my glasses. Anyone that wears glasses and contacts knows that no matter what, vision with contacts is far superior, so there I am with glasses, in a dark discoteca. That's when I discover the hand that I grabbed and started spinning was attached to a much older and very drunk peruvian woman who is immediately enamored with me, the gringo that picked her out of a group of college aged girls, you could say I wasn't quite feeling the same about her. Instead of just walking away, I decided to bust out the worst dance moves I could think of to make sure she knew very well that I couldnt' dance and it would be no fun asking me to dance again, I was trying every stupid disco move I could think of but it just didn't work. Eventually the song ended and for the most part I was able to avoid her the rest of the nigh. We soon had to leave because our large group that was not buying any drinks was upsetting the management, it was a short but very enjoyable night out with our new friends.

Julie and I took of early the next day to make the long trip back home, and because of this we missed the culmination of the course, a trip to a local school to show off what we had learned. Luckily the acting group will be coming to my site in April to give a few presentations to the community, I still have not decided if I will be dancing and acting in the presentation.

Like I mentioned previously, I arrived back in site yesterday morning, and spent most of the day sleeping. I spent most of today running around town and apologizing to people for returning late, missing meetings, and not calling to advise them (lost my phone and all my phone numbers). And tomorrow I will be leaving for our Reconnect conference, it takes place after a new group has been in site for 3 months and is a time to....reconnect....and share stories about successes and....things that haven't gone so well...(don't believe i should use the word failures). It's on the beach, and I'm sure once more I will get sunburned and have a good time, but hopefully this time less acting lessons will be involved.

Unfortunately I don't have pictures from the conference, I was letting Julie play photographer for the weekend, but as soon as I can get those from her, and possibly some videos as well, I'll put them up on here. I hope everyone is doing great back in the states!!!!

Carnival and a couple pics...

The big news recently was the celebration of carnival in the capital of the department, Cajamarca city. Until recently, to me, carnival was the fair they unfolded from a bunch of 18 wheelers on the highway near the neighborhood, which looked so enticing as a child but the parents wisely never let us kids go to. But around here it is the celebration before ash wednesday, it's a fat tuesday kinda thing, trying to get all your partying and sins out of the way in one big blow out before the observance of lent. In the states, fat tuesday is celebrated, especially among the college crowd by excessive drinking. Here in peru each neighborhood of the city gangs up and attacks the groups of other neighborhoods with paint, water balloons, and buckets of water. Somehow, all of the opposing forces know that paint is only permitted on saturday, the rest of the days are reserved for water only. The only people safe from this onslaught are those with small children, because of this I saw many parents carrying children that seemed to be a little too large to be carried, solely for protection against attacks of water. What amazed me is how rarely people would get irritated after being soaked with several buckets of water, or hit by a water balloon by an unseen assailant. With the right attitude, it's actually a lot of fun. We were able to get a good group of volunteers together, which is actually pretty fun, because we usually only see the volunteers that live very close to us. It was a chance to meet some new faces from some different places. As gringos, we present a very obvious target to water attacks, especially the girls. Usually the rule is that you attack those of the opposite sex, but for us they very often made an exception, in one instance, chasing us down the street yelling "get the imperialists!!"

While we were in the capital we had the chance to go to the mall. This mall feels very american, it has a food court, movie theater, and an escalator. An escalator doesn't seem to odd to us Americans, but to Peruvians from rural areas, a ride on an escalator is a very daunting task. There was actually a mall employee whose sole duty that day was to stand at the food of the escalator and assist those trying to ride it. Other than that...and that everyone was speaking spanish...it felt just like an american mall experience. We saw the new movie "Seven Pounds" with Will Smith, which I thought was a very good movie. I hadn't heard of it before, but it could have been released in the states several months ago without us knowing.

After a long weekend in the capital, on monday I decided that I start my 7 hour journey back to my site. It turns out I was trying to leave the same day of the biggest parade this city has all year, and my bus stop was on the other side of this parade. After being reassured by several people that the cars were still running, I devoted the 45 minutes necessary to cross the parade, all the while being a target for water balloons. When I arrive on the other side of the parade I am quickly informed that the cars aren't working today. Luckily I stumble across a couple peruvians that allow me to pass the time with them, sharing beers, watching the parade, and throwing water balloons at people. A few hours later the parade subsides and I can cross and find my friends to spend another night in the capital.

After returning to my site on tuesday it took a few days to adjust from relax and speak english mode, to work and speak spanish mode but I think I'm finally there. But....this wednesday I'll be traveling to the coast to attend a conference for health promoters put on by world bank, so I'll have this whole adjustment process to do once more in about a week. But I'm excited to get to see the peruvian coast, aside from Lima, I have not yet had that opportunity. I'm pretty sure I'll still prefer to live in the cooler climate of the andean mountains, but it might be nice to have a few days in the sun and out of the rain.

Alright, I'll stick a few photos on here to show how a smaller parade on sunday looked, as well as some older pics.  I hope that everyone is doing well back at home.  

Some of the costumes were quite unique...that´s a barbie doll being eaten by a dinosaur on top of that guys head.

Members of a band dressed up like cuyes (guinea pigs).

Me posing with one of me many dancers of the parade.

A mill powered by bulls walking in a circle is used to press sugar cane and extract the liquid that will be used to make miel de caña (somewhat like maple syrup, but tastes like it will immediaely cause diabetes), I think they also make a liquor from it as well.

A pretty Peruvian sunset, snapped this one because it reminded me of Texas.

Hiking at a friends site about 3 hours away.

An example of how muddy some of the paths are that I use to travel to the outlying communities, I may be walking on something like this for 30-45 minutes at a time

So apparently I'm an urban legend...

So a fellow volunteer, whose mastery of spanish is a little better of mine, was telling me about an urban legend they have around these parts of a man they call pishtaco (not sure how it's spelled but it sounds like fish taco with a p). It's my understanding that parents use this legend to scare their children....if you're not careful the pishtaco will get you or something like that. The legend tells of a man that will suck the eyes out of children and use their fat to power rockets and modern factories (the belief is that nothing that technologically advanced could exist without the use of human fat, kinda silly). Unfortunately for me this pishtaco is supposed to be tall, white, with blue eyes, blonde hair and a red beard....and that's an exact description of me. Now this legend isn't extremely prevalent, but I find it humorous to chalk it up to the legend when children shy away from me, rather than the natural timidness that many people have around here.

Legends be damned, it still hasn't stopped me from working with a few groups of kids. I gave two charlas (brief sessions with educative theme) to a couple groups of kids about the importance of nutrition and variety in the foods they eat. It's fun working with smaller groups of kids (I crashed and burned pretty good when I tried to teach english to a class of almost 40 kids). But the trick is figuring out games or...pretty much tricks...to get them to participate in the lectures. As mentioned above, until they get to know you, many people here have a natural timidness. This doesn't bode well for a charla where I am attempting to get participation, or even responses to very easy questions. I would ask a girl, 10 or 11 years old, what her favorite food was, and the reaction about 60-70% of the time is to blush and turn her face away or start giggling with her friends. I know my spanish is still a long way from perfect, but I'm positive that it was understood by everyone. It seems that every volunteer that I have spoken with quickly noticed how different the children act here, the natural leadership and assertiveness that seems to be fostered in young folk in the US seems to be absent here at times. This is frustrating because all of the techniques that I have used with working with kids, be it swim lessons, boy scout camps, or whatever, don't work as effectively here. A game of jeopardy worked pretty well with nutrition-oriented questions, but I will have to get creative with other activities in the future.

We've had a rare couple days of sunshine and I've been taking advantage of the opportunity to wash some clothes by hand up on the roof of the house. I'll be out and about in the town later, but gotta always watch the sky so I can take off towards home and take down the clothes on the line before it starts raining, or just hope that the host family will do it for me.

This weekend we will be celebrating the fiesta of carnival in the capital of the department, Cajamarca city. It'll be great to see some other volunteers, get together to speak english, eat some pizza and take a break from our communities for a couple of days. I believe that I have mentioned this celebration in previous posts, but it involves the youth of the city taking to the streets and engaging in a huge water balloon battle for an entire weekend. A couple people have started the festivities early and a majority of the street corners near the plaza in my town have boys sitting and waiting with balloons for some unsuspecting victim.

All in all things are going very well here, I am looking forward to the end of summer vacations for the kids, which will hopefully allow me to get a youth group together to do a couple activities, and hopefully coordinate with a couple US high schools for some cultural exchange activities. I'm still pretty healthy, had a small cold during the week last week after a few interviews with rural families who had children with colds, thinking I might have caught it from them. But I feel pretty lucky if that''s all I've got to complain about on the health front.

Alright, I'm off to get some work going, hope everyone is doing well back in the states!!

Adventures in the Campo

It is pretty obvious that my goal for weekly updates to this blog was a little ambitious, but maybe I'll make it my new years resolution....that starts the second week of February. (just checked my last post, and I made the same joke last month, sorry about that)

Things down here in the southern hemisphere have been going pretty well. Last weekend the volunteers of Cajamarca had a meeting in the capital city and the majority of us were able to attend (26 of the 28 volunteers of this department). It was nice to meet some volunteers we hadn't met yet and got to see a bit of the super bowl (the million-dollar-english commercials weren't shown to the spanish speaking population of peru). About half way through the game we had to leave to start making our way back to site. There are about 7 of us that live within two hours of each-other, the downside is that our central town of Chota (population about 20,000 people) is 7-9 hours from the capital city depending on the weather. Because of this we usually take a night bus that leaves at 9 (from Chota or Cajamarca city) will arrive around 4 or 5 in the morning (in Cajamarca City or Chota). Like the doorframes, bicycles, rubber boots, and many other things here in peru, the buses are made for peruvians and I find that it is quite uncomfortable for my 6'2" American body. So I usually pass these bus rides listening to music or podcasts on my MP3 player and pray that the batteries don't run out before we reach our destination. We usually only spend one night in the capital city, so 2 out of 3 nights are spent sleepless on a bus. Because of this I try to avoid going into the capital city as much as possible, it is also much more expensive than life in site. Some recent purchases in site were 7 bananas and two HUGE mangos for 4 soles (about $1.33) and a haircut for 2 soles (about $0.66), don't think I'll ever beat that price anywhere.

So now that I'm back in site I've been continuing with my community diagnostic, which involves getting integrated in the community as well as interviewing families in the rural areas about health, especially the nutrition of their young children. One of the biggest health problems here is malnutrition, which causes not only physical stunting in children but also handicaps their abilities to learn in school. My site is a reasonable sized town of 7,000 people and our target population for this activity is the people living in much more rural conditions. So to conduct my interviews with families I have to hike out to these outlying communities. One bad part is that Tacabamba is located in a valley, which makes for a really pretty landscape, but a tough hike because no matter which direction I go, I have to hike uphill. Another downside is that I need to conduct 100 interviews with families, to this point, I have completed 15. I'm finding it somewhat difficult because these families have been educated before on the correct answers for the questions, and, of course, these are the answers I am receiving during my interviews. The mothers all know that their children should have nothing but breast-milk for the first 6 months and then afterwards can eat other foods. They all know that they should boil the drinking water before consuming it and that any animals in the house (cuyes, chickens, rabbits, dogs, etc.) should be kept out of the kitchen. I'm not all that convinced that these mothers are actually practicing these things, but that's what they've been telling me. So I've been trying to change the survey around to try to get the real answers.

This last thursday I took a hike out to a community I had never been to before, but just assumed that it was easily hikeable. Three hours later of hiking up and down hills on paths will mud that would completely swallow my boots at times, I arrived at the community. I was able to do a couple interviews and was hanging out at the health post with a nurse that was working there, it turned out she was the only employee working there that day and there were quite a few patients standing around waiting to be seen. I though, hey, I did paramedic stuff, I bet I could take vitals and what not to help her out a lil' bit. I volunteered and she quickly put me to work, something was lost in translation though. I was not only taking vitals and history on a few patients, but thought I would be making diagnoses as well. So I've got this old lady saying that she's got pain running from her right flank down her right leg to her ankle and she's asking me if I think it's a problem with her nerves or just the muscles and I give her a blank faced stare that I've been using quite a bit when I don't really know what I should do in a certain situation. After consulting with the nurse we (the nurse) decided to call it muscular pain and we got the lady some pain pills. A short while after that I made the three hour hike back home, using a different route than when I hiked there. Luckily the people are extremely helpful, I'm sure it helps that I obviously don't fit in with the other people hiking between communities (the people that are using a sheet of plastic as a rain jacket and usually are walking barefoot).

The next holiday that we have here in Peru is Carnival, I'm not exactly sure about the cultural root of carnival, I think it has something to do with fat tuesday and the big party to get everything out of your system before ash wednesday and lent. But here the tradition involves throwing water balloons at other people, who don't know they're playing. This stuff started soon after new years and now it is very common place for younger boys, even older ones at time too, to be walking around the town plaza with water balloons in their hands waiting to hit some unsuspecting victim. Though there are a couple rules to the game, usually a person can only target a person of the opposite sex, and they cannot have very small children with them....but that's pretty much it for rules. I luckily have not been hit yet (the girls here don't have too good of aim), but I've heard the game keeps going until the actual celebration of carnival, which is in late February. The water attacks are also much more vicious in the city, there are actually trucks that will drive around the plaza with kids (or drunk adults) in the back who will throw balloons, or use squirt guns and buckets of water on whoever they can. The most surprising thing of all is that no one really gets that upset, I can not imagine that happening in the states. All the volunteers of the area will be going to the city for the actual celebration of carnival, so that should be pretty interesting.

That's about it for now, I know I've promised several times to have more frequent updates, but this time I'm actually gonna stick to it (hopefully). I hope everyone is doing well up north.