A little late, but mothers always deserve some credit

The adventures of the bearded idiots

April has turned into May, and while I hear that in the US spring is in full force, here the days have become slightly warmer, the nights slightly colder and everything pretty much remains the same. But it has been a pretty good couple of weeks. First we had Earth Day at the end of April, which for an environment volunteer is like Christmas, Thanksgiving and New Years rolled into one. Not really, but I did plant 80 native trees called Quenals (Google it, they’re awesome looking trees) around town and led the entire primary school in a circuit of the town’s roads to pick up garbage. It was a good day.
A few days after that I left for the northern coastal department of Lambayeque for what Peace Corps Peru calls “early in service training” or early IST. All of the environment volunteers from my training group left sight for a week and went up north to see some sights, sit through some sessions and hang out. We started off the week in a privately owned protected forest called Chapparri, which was beautiful and cool because it’s owned and run by the local community. Instead of the case in many national parks here where the National Park service has to fight with the surrounding communities, in Chapparri the locals are the biggest stakeholder and proper conservation benefits them more than anyone else.
From there we presented our community diagnostics to each other (and our environmental “boss”), got medical lectures, safety and security lectures, some technical talks and lectures from the head and vice head of Peace Corps Peru. But it’s a lot hotter in the North than it is in Ancash and I can’t say my attention span was at its best in a hot stuffy room. Beyond that, the 17 of us were in the same place for the first time since training ended in November. It was great to see everybody and my friend Pete and I had challenged the rest of the guys in the group to grow out their beards until IST. Sadly only the two of us and our friend Will obliged, and we showed up with 6 months of beard. We left that for two days, shaved silly designs for three days and then shaved completely. This is while basically all of the higher ups from Peace Corps Peru were present. This stunning display of professionalism probably explains why I’m off in Peru and not working in an office somewhere or studying law or some such thing…
We also absorbed some Peruvian culture while we were travelling. We saw some Wacas, which are Inca pyramids, although now they just kinda look like big piles of dirt. We also went to the museum of the Señor de Sipan. This guy was a priest almost 2000 years ago whose burial chamber they unearthed about 20-30 years ago. Now they have a really great museum set up with all the archeological finds, ranging from gold earrings the size of small plates, to necklaces of giant golden and silver peanuts to the remains of the Señor de Sipan and some of the 8 or so people buried with him. Lambayeque also has a really cool shaman market, which showcases some of the relics of the indigenous religion that are still practiced in the North and in the jungle. I wish I had taken my camera cuz there was some cool and really weird stuff—all kinds of beads and sticks and herbs that are used in shamanistic ceremonies, in addition to various animal parts, heads and fetuses and a lot of other stuff I can’t even think how to describe. There’s a lot of interesting things about Peruvian culture and history that I still have yet to scratch the surface in discovering…
Things in the school are still going well. I continue to teach English and environment, and hopefully in the next week or two I will start teaching some environment themes in the high school in the next town down the mountain. I did a mother’s day project with the 5th and 6th graders where we made beads and bracelets out of an old Sports Illustrated my dad sent me. They’re stylish. Then there was also the day we went on paseo, which literally means kind of just going on an excursion. The professors invited me on Wednesday to go with them on Thursday to a town called Huarca. I thought that the whole school was going on a hike or something of that nature. But when I showed up on Thursday morning it was just the 4 professors, the secretary and me getting into a cab to go to Huarca. Turns out classes were cancelled for the day. Why? Because it was the school in Huarca’s anniversary. And how do you celebrate such a monumental day in the history of Peruvian rural education? By cancelling school and inviting professors from all over the region to cancel their schools to play volleyball and soccer, drink beer and eat food. While I couldn’t help being struck by the irony of the event, and while the state of education here makes me want to bang my head against a wall, it was undeniably fun and to tell the truth I can’t wait for the next one, or when we get to have one in Yanamito. I honestly have no idea how to balance my two paradoxical reactions, other than just to kind of say “screw it” and enjoy fun things as they come. And it was the day before slope day at Cornell, so I kind of earned it.
And that’s life in this part of the world. This weekend coming up the Ancash volunteers have a weekend long leadership camp for teenage girls (each volunteer brings two from his/her community) which should be fun. Next week we have 4 days of AIDS training in Huaraz (the capital city of Ancash). The week after that a group of Peace Corps environmental volunteers is coming up from Southern Lima to see our sites and two weeks later we go there. So life is full of distractions/work, which makes the time go scary quick, but it also makes you (me) want to get more done while I am in site, so it’s a good system (I think). Happy belated mother’s day to anyone who that applies to and I hope you’re all well wherever you are…