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…

out of the campo and back again

So I’ve learned that food can be a really good way of tracking travels, so I think to start off the description of Passover/Easter vacation, I’ll explain what we ate along the way. Two Sundays ago, I went to one of the primary school teachers’ house for lunch, where the main dish was guinea pig. The next night I was in Lima for the Seders, where I was served matzah ball soup and gefilte fish. Two nights later I was in the jungle in a town called Pozuzo where my friends ordered wienerschnizl (?). Sounds like a hell of a week right—especially cuz at this point I’m more accustomed to seeing a plate of guinea pig and potatoes than the chicken and roasted potatoes that was served to me the next night.
So here’s what happened. I was in Lima for the Seders. Lima, especially the nice parts, makes you forget you’re in a “third world” country. There are malls, American stores (adidas, apple etc). It felt real world, I thought maybe I was in Europe, except I have never traveled in Europe. I also got to visit my host family from training. They were as sweet as always and seemed genuinely happy that I had taken time out to come visit them. I felt really comfortable and at home with them, and it’s really nice for me to know that I have another “home” here and a family who will treat me as one of there own. Also, while I was resting I heard my host parents talking and they said, in Spanish, “Alex knows how to speak Spanish now” which gave me a bit of an ego boost.
The first night of Passover was pretty normal. My Peace Corps friend Lauren and I were invited to the conservative Rabbis house with about 12 other people. The Seder was pretty similar to how it would have been at home, except for the fact that the attendees were a mix of Peruvians, Israelis and Americans, which meant that English, Spanish and Hebrew were all flowing together. Now that I have some sort of proficiency in all three, my head was spinning. I’m pretty sure I got greeted at the door in Hebrew, processed that and responded in Spanish. I’m still not sure.
The next night was a bit of a disaster. I had signed us up for a Seder with Chabad, which is an ultra-Orthodox Jewish organization. I thought it would be kinda laid back and fun, as that is the impression I got of them at Cornell. It wasn’t UNfun, but…well, it was an experience. It was about 30 people, separate tables for men and women, which separated me from my only friend. Also, throw Yiddish into the mix of languages, which made things even more confusing. But to explain the real challenge of this evening, I’ll give you all a background on Passover and the Seders for those of you who are unfamiliar. The holiday celebrates the Israelites exodus from Egypt by a retelling of the story (kind of, mostly it’s just rabbinical commentary and songs) and a big festive meal. This whole shebang is called a Seder. Now normally at a Seder, you go through the retelling, and talk about the exodus a bit, but you don’t drag cuz you want to get to the brisket. Well, at this Seder, we focused on the story. We sat down with our books at 7:30 (pm). The first course wasn’t served till 11:45. For those of you who have never been to a Seder that is not the way we normally do it. So anyway, we ate and gracefully bowed out after dinner, claiming (truthfully) that at our sites, we would have been asleep hours ago.
The next day we set out for the department of Junin, east of Lima, where we would be meeting a bunch of friends and traipsing around the jungle. We got there and I got to reunite with some good friends I haven’t seen in four months, which was really great. Now this trip took us to two towns in the jungle, Oxapampa and Pozuzo. These towns, both accessible only by narrow dirt road in vans, have German roots. How did that happen? Well here’s a brief history lesson, as told to us by a German speaking restaurant owner/historian of Pozuzo/descendant of the town founder: in the mid 19th century, Peru was looking for settlers, for this region of the central jungle. Poor Germans, who were not allowed to marry in Germany because of their poverty, took up the offer and you wind up with two towns with signs in German, German food and blue eyed Peruvians (we really thought they didn’t exist…).
Pozuzo was the real gem for us. You get there by three hour van ride from Oxapampa, and this is a harrowing ride (mom you can skip this part…). This is a one lane dirt/mud road, curvy and on the cliff edge overlooking a wide, muddy river. In a 20 year old van. In passing rain showers. With rivers/streams running over the road every 10 minutes or so (no joke we had to get out twice and water entered the van once). But after three hours or so, when you think you’re never gonna get there alive, the road suddenly turns into a paved, double wide road, with curbs and sidewalks on either side, garbage pails every block (separating organics and inorganics), and cute little cabin houses that you didn’t think existed in Peru. This is Pazuzo, possibly the strangest place in the entire world. We checked into our hostel, which was a big wooden château (almost) and sat out on the porch and decided we had accidently been time warped to a cabin somewhere in Appalachia. We felt that out of place. From there we explored the town and threw around a Frisbee and basically enjoyed vacation. We went on a beautiful hike to a waterfall, splashed around there for a while and went to a bird refuge to see the national bird of Peru. I took about twenty pictures of it, I’m still not sure why, I think mostly I was just surprised that it actually showed up. The next day we went to the town museum and headed back to Oxapampa, where we went to a sweet bat cave and explored a bunch. Then from there we bought some native coffee and made friends with some store owners before I had to get back on a bus and come back to my Peru.
It was really nice to come back to Yanamito. Life here is relaxed and I fell accepted in the town to the point where I’m really comfortable. Things in the school are going well. I have big plans for Earth day (April 22nd), including some garbage clean up and tree planting. This week I also wrote/finished my diagnostic, which turned out to be like 15 pages in Spanish. I hope it’s grammatically readable. So anyway because of that I’ve been thinking a lot about what I am going to be doing here over the next year and a half about (that first chunk flew by) and I think I can actually accomplish some things—I’m excited. And that’s life. Probably the funniest/dumbest thing of the last two weeks was my family trying to teach me to use a slingshot (a circle of rubber with a leather piece to hold the rock), which resulted in me smashing both my thumbs. Or my four year old buddy Jefferson asking me why legs were so hairy. And why my arms aren’t. In an hour I go read a book about the endangered Andean Puma to the first grade class, followed by them coloring for Earth day. Tomorrow I go to Huaraz to learn some more Quechua and have a regional meeting, and in a week I go to the Northern department of Lambayeque to have a training conference, see all my environment Peace Corps friends and hopefully get to the beach. Hope you’re all well and enjoying a beautiful spring in the US.

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.

A little bit about culture...

I know February is a short month, but as I’m starting to understand, it seems inevitable that my time here will continually fly by. It’s hard to believe that I will soon have been in Peru for a full six months. Nothing too exciting has been happening—every day is a little bit of an adventure, but for the most part, with my summer school classes and my new family I was able to form a bit of a routine, in which I taught in the morning, napped/relaxed, ran, played soccer and talked to the people of Yanamito in the afternoon.
But there has been some time to start processing the culture and the people around me. One of the things that I have found really interesting is the stage of development that my town, and those surrounding it, has reached. Fifteen years ago there was no electricity here. Today, not only is there light, but there are cell phones, [sporadic] internet access, television and DVDs. They have completely passed over VHS, landlines, dial up modems etc. So basically there’s this weird mix of poverty and modernity that is really interesting to confront on a daily basis.
The culture here is also in a bit of a flux. I saw a perfect example of this two weeks ago, at the 4 day long Carnival festival (pre-lent, I think their equivalent of Mardi Gras) in Tumpa, the town 25 minutes down my hill. People from all the towns in walking distance came to celebrate with multiple bands playing the previously mentioned whino music and lots of drinking and dancing. And water balloons. Lots of stupid water balloons. I haven’t been able to ride in a taxi with an open window or walk down the street without looking over my shoulder for fear of being doused by a water balloon, or a bucket of water or a water gun. I wish I had a giant super soaker. Anyway, what I saw was that most of the women of about 35+ years of age were wearing the traditional pollera and manta (http://k43.pbase.com/u27/gchong2426/upload/16693845.per91.JPG) and the men of that age were wearing khakis and plain wool sweaters. Meanwhile, most of the women aged 12-35 were wearing tight jeans and tank tops and the younger men were sporting euro-style jeans and shirts and jackets emblazoned with English writing and/or symbols and logos. It’s interesting to see the culture shifting in front of my eyes and also what parts of our culture have been adopted over here. Somehow, the youth of my town have managed to discover emo and Eminem and they flock to the internet to chatear (you should be able to figure that one out even with no Spanish), but are still shocked to discover that, yes, it does also rain in the US, we also grow potatoes and no, New York is nowhere near Spain or Italy.
The language here is also in flux. I started learning Quechua. By started I mean I sat through 12 hours of class, I have 12 more this week, I can count to two and I can name various animals and body parts. The truth is I’m probably not trying as hard as I should be. Partially this is because I don’t particularly like learning languages and I’m still coming along in Spanish. But also it just doesn’t seem that urgent to me. In my town the adults prefer Quechua, and some of the oldest people really don’t speak very much Spanish, but for the most part I can converse with everyone. While my host parents grew up speaking mostly Quechua, my host brother, who is 15, says he understands it but can’t speak it. If I had to guess, it probably won’t be around THAT much longer in Yanamito. Which I guess is kind of a bummer if you see the value in indigenous culture. Anyway, there are times when I miss out on the conversation around me, and I will keep trying, but I’m not all that stressed about Quechua at the moment.
On to my new family. They’re great. My host parents are super sweet to me and refer to me as one of their children, and the house is nice and I’m really comfortable. And having a 15 year old host brother is great. He’s a bit doofy, but he’s fun to hang out with. Here are some highlights: we collected 5 pounds of wild blackberries last Sunday. We started playing marbles (on an uneven mud floor—very challenging). I watched him take down a small bird with his slingshot (he was very excited, I was slightly disgusted. But this was two days after we gathered the berries, so I did feel like kind of a hunter gatherer, which was cool). We burned through all three seasons of the Simpsons that I bought for cheap in Lima, and now he pulls some annoying Bart Simpson lines on his mom, which she chuckles at and I find hilarious—definitely a kid after my own heart. There are some slightly aggravating aspects as well, like listening to the Tupac California Love remix he made on repeat, but on the whole having him around (or maybe him having me around) is awesome.
And that’s life. There are a million more things that happen on a daily basis that are either perplexing or hilarious (For examples: A chicken wandered into, and died in, my friend Pete’s latrine. I asked a 3 year old in a class I was helping to facilitate what she had in her mouth. It was an entire pencil sharpener. When I walked back over 3 minutes later, she was chewing on the business end of a colored pencil—slightly confused. I watched the second half of the super bowl in Spanish—during the first half we experienced a blackout. I went on a beautiful 4 hour hike with a bunch of friends to a glacial lake and jumped in, which was cold enough to induce some profanity shouting, but worth it (I think)), but for the most part I am just choosing to accept them as the intricacies of the life I chose to lead for these two years, although I still get together with my friends and laugh about them. But if anyone wants to come see for themselves, I hear airfare can be cheap (says the recent college graduate not making any money…) and in a month I get to start taking vacations, so let me know…

Just had my first cup of coffee in three weeks...

and it was very, very good.
Well the month of January has come and gone, which is kind of hard to believe, especially because without any seasonal weather changes, and without weekends really being any different from weekdays here in Yanamito, the passage of time feels all screwy. Anyway, the past couple of weeks have been a bit up and down, but overall good I would say. I made it through three weeks of summer school, teaching English and some environmental themes. I’m not going to lie, so far the majority of my environment classes have entailed either old discovery channel DVDs or environmentally themed coloring pages with brief discussions about why the kids should care about the environment. During that time they mostly just fight about who gets to use what markers, over my repeated insistence that they need to be shared. English class is a bit more involved—there’s a whole bunch of kids running around town singing “heads, shoulders, knees and toes” and shouting out “good morning” or “good afternoon” or “hello teacher” when they see me. Overall it has been a slightly taxing but good experience so far. Every day there are anywhere from 8-15 kids who show up, we have class from 8 (usually 8:30—timeliness does not really exist…) until 10 and the kids seem to enjoy it, and the parents, and townspeople in general, seem to be happy that I am teaching. The classroom experience is a lot different from anything I have ever seen in the US. The kids are well enough behaved, although the concept of hand raising is foreign to them, but it doesn’t seem like they have really been taught or encouraged to think. They like being told what to do, they like copying off the board and they like repeating, but trying to get a discussion going is like pulling teeth. I am interested in sitting in on some classes during the school year to see what it’s like when the real professors are at work.
The other big thing that happened this month was that my host mom took the kids and left the house. I’m not going to go into any detail, given how it’s a personal matter for them, but I will say that that has been tough. The house has been really quiet, and my host dad and grandma have been pretty bummed. I also was perpetually confused because anytime anyone discussed anything relating to it, they spoke in Quechua, so I had no clue what was going on. Anyway, after talking to a bunch of higher ups and friends, I decided that the best thing for me would be to change houses. I feel bad about leaving, because Rolando and his mom have both treated me really well and I feel a little bit like I am deserting them, but given the fact that this is going to be where I’m at for two years, I need to do what I feel is best for me. So I am moving into his brother’s house, about a 3 minute walk away. They have a real toilet (!!), a fifteen year old son and two daughters who live outside the community (this is what Peru has done to me—real plumbing takes precedence over children), so all of those birthday wishes I made when I was little asking for a little brother are kind of coming true. I know the family pretty well, they are really nice and they said they’d welcome me like a son and I am kind of excited to be living in a family structure where the parents are actually closer to the age of my real parents. So I moved all my stuff yesterday and hopefully that will be for the best.
Other thing of note: I started playing football (that’s soccer to us). I am still pretty bad, but I vowed to get better. It’s giving me a good in with the younger guys around here too, which I think will be good. And despite my lack of skill, they still invite me to come play, which feels welcoming (they also bet a sol on every game, so maybe they’re just taking me for my money…who knows?). Football is actually another cool way in which the community comes together—whoever wants to play can, so you get a good mix of teenagers, guys in their 20s and a few middle aged men thrown in as well, and they all have a really good time with it. Anyways I hope I get better quick, but if not, there is are a few kids who are begging me to buy a basketball, and although I’ve never been Michael Jordan, if nothing else my height will allow me to make them all think I’m really good.
Also, Quechua classes start tomorrow, so we’ll see how that goes. It’s a really hard seeming language, and I’m not much of a language person to start with but I will try my best.
And that’s about it here. As my mom pointed out a week ago, this is the longest I have ever gone without seeing my family (5 months), which was to be expected, but still feels kind of strange (I also ran out of my regular Colgate toothpaste, which didn’t happen in India or Israel…). When I here news from home (job updates, engagements, weddings, random encounters etc) I realize that a lot is going on while I’m off trying to be a do-gooder in Peru. But I am glad I am doing what I am doing, I think I’m really lucky to be where I am and every day I get more comfortable with the people around me. So yea life is good and I hope you all feel the same…

2010!

Happy 2010! So it’s been a pretty interesting week or two here in Ancash, starting with new years. I’ve never been such a big new years partier, so I figured I would just hang out with my host family and do what they do. What they do is stay up until midnight, drink hot chocolate and eat paneton, wish each other “feliz año nuevo” and go to bed. Things were going fine until 10, when I got sleepy and my host dad put on a terrible, dubbed martial arts movie. But I powered through that and at 1130 the snacks were served and we put on Rambo, which was a good change of pace. So I made it until twelve, which I think is the latest I have been up since training ended 6 weeks ago. We went outside and it was a beautiful night with a full moon that illuminated the snow covered mountain peaks—really gorgeous. There were some fireworks and my host mom burned a doll made of old clothes—it’s supposed to bring luck for the New Year, and everyone likes burning things. Then I walked over to the town plaza (up the street) where there were some beers being passed around a circle and really loud whyno music (you should check it out—it’s not good http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04JpzkDbIq8). All in all it was a nice tranquil way to pass the New Year. And New Year’s Day my Peace Corps friends Pete and Kaitlin, who live within walking distance, and I went on a long hike to celebrate amongst ourselves. It was absolutely beautiful, and it proved our theory that where we live, if we start walking in any direction, we’re bound to wind up encountering a stunning landscape. So that was a good start to 2010.
Then this week has been a week of what else but potatoes. My host family harvested their biggest field of potatoes all week long. At this point we’re about ½ to 2/3 done and by my calculations it’s already been over 3000 pounds sent to market. I was invited to come help and for the first time I was actually allowed to do a little work (usually when I go out to the fields I am told “this work is hard, you should sit here in the shade). The whole extended family came out (about 12 people per day) and the jobs are either digging up the potatoes with a pick or sorting them by size. At first I just sorted them, but eventually against everyone’s advice, I grabbed an unoccupied pick. No one believes that I’ve done physical labor before, and unfortunately it has been awhile—my calluses are gone and I have what my old manager at the farm would refer to as “wuss hands”, so within an hour I had a few blisters and I was encouraged to go sit in the shade. But I pushed on for long enough to salvage some dignity and I think that at the end of the day I was more of a help than a hindrance (I hope).
So we harvested a lot of potatoes and then my dad asked if I wanted to accompany him to the market to sell them on Saturday night. I have always been fascinated by markets so I jumped at the chance. So at 11 pm on Saturday night we crowded into the back of a truck with a few tons of fresh produce (potatoes, beans, hot peppers, herbs, corn etc) and about 10 other people and drove two hours down the hill to a city called Carhuaz, where they have this huge market Saturdays and Wednesdays (I also went Tuesday night for the Wednesday market at 1 am in a small station wagon of a cab with 13 people in it. At least I think it was 13—I couldn’t fully turn my head to count…). The market is awesome, a combination of wholesalers and retailers, selling everything from fresh produce grown locally, to tropical fruit brought in from the coast, to fresh meat, to dry goods and clothes. We arrived at about 2:30, set out our 15 sacks of potatoes and slept on the sidewalk until a buyer walked up at 3:30 and asked my host dad how much. We had sold everything by 4, at which point we sat/slept with some other vendors from Yanamito until 6, when we did our grocery shopping for the week. I was amazed by the huge variety of goods, as well as the hustle and bustle of the market, accompanied by throngs of people, many of them women in brightly colored traditional clothes. I’m excited to go back on a full nights sleep and wander around for a few hours.
So yea those were all cool things. The other two notable things were I was coerced into tasting tokush, which is some kind of fermented porridge which tastes OK because it’s loaded with sugar, but was honestly the foulest smelling thing I have ever eaten. That was not so fun—the smell is kind of still haunting me. I also saw a feature on Peruvian TV about a Peruvian midget who dances to Michael Jackson songs in the Times Square subway station and is known as “the mini Michael Jackson”. So if anyone passes him by, give him a dollar for me…
And that’s life. My summer school teaching starts on Monday and the kids seem excited, which is great. And in two weeks we have intensive Quechua language training, which will be cool if I can learn enough to communicate with the older folks who don’t speak much Spanish or follow a conversation. Wish me luck and I hope everyone had a great new year’s.

happy new year!

So I have been at site for a little more than a month, which is kind of hard to believe. Time has been moving kind of strangely—the weeks seem to shoot by, but sometimes the hours just seem to drag on forever. Part of the problem is that I just don’t have all that much to do right now. The first months are supposed to be spent doing a diagnostic, learning about the community, meeting people, but no big projects. As a result, especially cuz people know that I am here as a development volunteer and expect me to be getting things done, without having concrete work it’s really easy to feel as if I’m not doing anything, especially because the people here do a lot of hard physical work. So yea, things are a bit slow. But in two weeks I am going to start teaching summer school to the primary school kids, twice a week English class and twice a week environment classes and I’m pretty excited about that.
And overall things are generally good. All the kids know my name. A lot of the adults do too, or else they just call me “gringo,” which pretty much signifies any foreigner, or “papi gringo” which I think is a bit more affectionate. And I have a hard time remembering anybody’s name, so I don’t really mind at all. The food is fine to good—my diet continues to be based around rice and potatoes, with sides of bread and corn thrown in as well (and other things, but the emphasis is definitely on carbs). One evening last week for dinner, my bowl was filled with one part rice, one part potatoes and one part spaghetti. That was a fun one. But I can’t complain, I’m generally eating well.
There have been some interesting cultural experiences as well. About two weeks ago I got sick for the first time. Nothing serious, just a loss of appetite and some general stomach pain. From what I learned in my medical sessions, I can expect much worse. But anyway after two days, my host family was concerned. In my town we don’t have a health post or a doctor, but we do have an old lady who takes your pulse and diagnoses the cause of your ailment. So after we convinced her to take a break from doing laundry, we went inside her house, she took my pulse and told me I had a very bad stomach infection and proscribed a specific type of antibiotic. I’m not sure what or if I’m going to tell my hosts next time I am not well…
This past Monday was the graduation ceremony for the primary school, which is the only school we have in town (the kids go to the next town over for high school). There were 11 kids who graduated, which involved them getting dressed up (boys in ties, girls in matching prom dresses), a ceremony and a big meal and dancing with most of the community. I think one of the funniest things I have seen so far here is a bunch of 13 year olds in fancy clothes trying to eat a heaping bowl of potatoes and cuy, with a spoon and without a table. After the meal the adults broke out some cases of beer, which is an experience in it of itself here. When Peruvians drink beer, they open one bottle at a time, someone fills up a glass, drinks it and passes it to the next person and so on. I’m not going to get into any moral territory of alcohol, but this custom does have a nice communal ring, when you see people my age sharing with people who are the age of their parents and grandparents and everyone is having a good time together…
The other big event of the past couple weeks was of course Christmas. Now just about everyone here is Catholic, but it seems to be a much more relaxed, laid back sort of Catholic than what we are used to in the States (I am of course no expert on Christian sects). So they definitely celebrate Christmas, but it felt a lot different here than it does at home. First of all, it’s summer here, not winter. Also, they don’t have the money to celebrate in the same way we do, with lots of decorations and gifts. So we woke up Christmas morning and had hot chocolate and paneton (kind of bready fruitcake…I’m a bit ashamed to admit I really liked it…) but then everyone went out to the fields to tend the crops and animals. I guess I’m really used to everyone being distinctly really happy at Christmas time, and even though my family doesn’t celebrate, we are usually together and we usually spend the day relaxing and enjoying each other’s company. It was strange to have it be just another day.
So yea, that’s life in Yanamito more or less, or at least the interesting parts that came to me off the top of my head. And as one last possible point of interest, I haven’t showered for a little over two weeks, but it’s cool here, so I think I can get away with it…I hope the holidays went well for everyone and I wish you all a happy and healthy 2010.

The above represents solely my opinions, not that of the Peace Corps nor the US government.