put on your reading glasses...

The end of March brings Passover and Easter, a combination that I detested as a kid (imagine being a five year old and getting a chocolate Easter bunny that is off limits for a week…) but in Peru it’s getting me out of Ancash for the first time in over four months. This week I go to Lima for Passover Seders, followed by a trip to the department of Junín and a few days traipsing around the jungle with my friends from training for our Easter vacation. I’m excited for both parts—to get to experience Passover in another culture (my 4th country—America, Israel, India and Peru) and then afterwards to see another part of Peru and reconnect with some good friends who I spent the really intense 3 months of training seeing every day, but I haven’t seen since…Come to think of it, this is also the probably the longest period of time I have spent within a 50 mile radius (my town and the regional capitol) without leaving since high school, if not longer. And it’s not that life has gotten monotonous, I really like being in Yanamito, but it has been four months—it doesn’t really feel like a semester abroad anymore, so getting to go on a bit of an adventure should be really fun. And then at the end of April we have a week of “in service training” in a national park in Lambayeque, and in June another conference and in July hopefully my parents will come and I’ll be running a marathon, so it seems like things will really start flying from here. What the more experienced volunteers have told us is that after the first few months, these “special occasions” kind of continually line up and there’s usually something every month or so that would be considered out of the ordinary. It looks like that is in fact the case, I just hope that having all these crazy things on the horizon doesn’t distract me from my day to day life in my community too much.
I don’t think it will—I have started teaching in the primary school, 4 days a week anywhere from 1 to 4 hours a day. This is a lot different from summer school cuz the kids have to come and they have to bring notebooks and I have the full support and backup of their normal teachers, which is good. I am teaching each grade, 1st-6th, English and environment (because our school is so small, about 50 kids, 3rd and 4th grades learn together, as do 5th and 6th grades). After two weeks it is so far so good. I don’t know if I would trust a 23 year old with a big beard and Spanish as a second language to teach my kids, but the teachers, students and parents have welcomed me with open arms. I think that is mostly because they really ant there kids to learn English, which I don’t really want to teach, but it’s a good hook. Actually I don’t mind teaching English, as long as it’s vocabulary. The real problem is that I sadly have very little grip on English grammar. For now I’m just doing themed vocab—we’ll cross the grammar bridge when we get to it. So anyway, a lot of people now call me “professor Alex” which is cool I guess, if not a little misguided. And I get to do fun things like read to 1st graders about endangered Peruvian animals and make signs with 3rd and 4th graders encouraging tourists to be environmentally friendly and try and teach forty kids how to make a “th” sound (you need to stick your tongue out in between your teeth, like this…). But the educational methods and philosophy is a lot different. The kids don’t seem to know how think very well, and they try and tell you what they think you want to hear. For example I asked for a definition of the environment, and after several explanations of what I was looking for, the closest I got was a chorus of “don’t pollute the environment”. It was a bit frustrating. In terms of the teachers, there are four of them, and on a personal level I like them all a lot. They love the novelty of me and they’re better educated than the general populace, so talking to them is a bit different and always interesting. But they’re also not going to win any world’s best teacher awards. Every day there is recess from 10:30-11, but usually they sit down to eat their mid-morning snack at 11, and meander back to class around 11:20. That’s just one example and it’s not the worst thing in the world, but it’s also not the best thing in the world, and I obviously am the product of a system where that would simply not fly. The other thing that’s way different is discipline.
Most of the kids are respectful, but they’re primary school kids, they’re going to screw around. The teachers tell me I should pull ears or otherwise physically get the kids to behave. I instead usually somewhat meekly resort to a threat to send them to the principal’s office (which is usually empty because he teaches 2nd grade…) or talking to their parents. So discipline is tricky, and I as of yet have no long term solution. But that, in a rather wordy nutshell, is the school at the moment. If any of you wander into Yanamito anytime soon, most of the 3-6 graders should know the abcs in English and at least have a grasp on the numbers between 1-100.
Wow, that came out longer than I was thinking of it. So what else has happened. We harvested my old host dad’s carrots. That was fun, and another thing to put on the list that I have done in four countries. The way it works here is that in the field, you pull up the carrots and rip the tops off and put them in sacks. Then you take the sacks down to a stream, where you transfer them to big mesh sacks which you then throw in the stream and someone basically dances/jumps up and down on top of for a solid 20 or thirty minutes. This is how the carrots are cleaned. Obviously. From there you dump them out again, sort them by size (big or small) and send them to the market. It was fun. And I know carrots better than potatoes and the work was somewhat easier, so I almost felt competent.
Probably the most entertaining thing that happened this month was a story I have shared a bunch already, but it’s begging to be published for all eternity on the internet. One evening I came home after a soccer game to find my host dad on all fours in front of the toilet. I thought something bad had happened, like the toilet breaking (that would be tragic) but he was actually giggling manically. It turned out a ferret had snuck in and was hiding in our bathroom and he was trying to catch it. Eventually with the help of his son, he had it trapped in out fishing net. But while he was trying to decide what to do next, it bit him on the hand, which resulted in him dropping it and the ferret escaping. Now of course the biggest concern at this point wasn’t rabies, but where did the ferret go? Our dog answered that question by bringing it in dead… I thought that would be the end of it. But no. the next night I walk into the kitchen and what do I see right next to my mom cooking our big pot of potatoes? My dad, with a big bowl of ash from the stove, stuffing the ferret. Campo Taxidermy! So now we have a stuffed ferret, which they like to put in various parts of the house and make jokes about (“look Alex—the ferret is on the windowsill, he wanted to see Musho.” Or “The ferret is guarding our cell phones, no one will want to steal them now…”). Then I mistakenly thought that was the end of the ferret sage. Nonono. One day while passing our close line, I noticed what looked like a piece of jerky hanging from a string. This piece of jerky closely resembles a skinned ferret. What did I think happened to the meat? I asked my mom what it was for. “it’s a remedy.” “For what?” “For a variety of things…” Oh. “You didn’t think we were going to eat it did you?” Me, only in my head, “you eat guinea pigs and songbirds, why not a ferret?!” So the meat is still hanging up outside and the stuffed skin is still guarding the cell phones diligently.
Cute/funny host family story of the week (this one involves a little bit of Spanish): It was raining at 3, so my mom came back early from the fields and started cooking. So we ate at about 5 and by 530 we were kind of bored, as our favorite TV show doesn't come on till 8 and we usually don't eat till about 7:15. So my mom says in a slightly whiny voice "yo quiero kevin, Clinton (host brother) sacame kevin" or in English: "I want Keveen. Clinton find me Keveen." He's lazy so she gets up to look through the DVDs and I ask him what she's talking about--turns out to be home alone, or in Spanish mi pobre angelito--my poor angel. Anyway she couldn't find it, so we settled for Babe II: Pig in the City. Follow-up: the next night my mom again asked for Kevin. my host brother put on "Final destination 2". Follow-up part 2: the next night we watched home alone 2 (the one in New York City). my mom was enthralled and I was repeatedly asked whether I had been to every place seen in the movie.
OK last thing (sorry, transitions don’t really seem to be happening…). It’s corn harvesting season. In these parts, they harvest corn at two different stages—first choclo, which is basically sweet corn (it’s not really sweet, but they eat it like our sweet corn). Choclo is harvested gradually, only taking in what’s gonna be eaten that night. The rest of the corn is left on the stalks to dry and is harvested as maize, which is further dried and stored or sold. So now everyone is harvesting their maize, which means there’s corn everywhere. There are cobs hanging from every available post and rafter in every house, not mention tarps full of drying kernels lying out in the sun. So needless to say, we started eating more corn. One day last week I ate corn in 4 different forms—fresh boiled, dried and boiled (called mote), dried, ground and steamed with some other stuff as a sweet tamale called a humita and pan fried in oil to make a crunchy soup crouton, called cancha. All of these things were/are tasty, and if I could get that much of a range with my daily heaps of potatoes, I’d be ecstatic. So that’s my culinary commentary for the month, for anybody who has made it that far down the page. Hopefully in the next month I’ll have some more exciting adventures from other parts of the country to relay. I hope you’re all well and have a happy Passover, or Easter, or whatever else you may be celebrating.