Thursday, March 26, 2009

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...





Friday, March 13, 2009

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!!!!

Sunday, March 1, 2009

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 caƱa (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