The last week or so has been much less productive than I’d like. I can’t advance with my world map project (for now) because all of the teachers used my paint during the school’s anniversary, so I have to wait for more to be delivered. I got more bags and we planted 400 trees at the school and X more in the community tree nursery – which sounds like a lot, but really isn’t very time consuming. Since the kids missed so much of regular class during the week of the anniversary, the teachers have been more hesitant to let me into the classrooms during class time (since what I teach is technically off-subject). So I’ve been doing a lot of yoga again. I guess I’ve lost 8-10lbs in the last few months. Which is exciting, except that I am still currently 25lbs heavier than I was when I got to Peru. What. The. Hell.
Halloween was not very eventful – Brad, Jared, and I walked to a site we’ve been developing for the new volunteer that is going to arrive in a few weeks to find him a host family. It went really well. Then we made s’mores at Brad’s hobo house and watched the Dark Night. No costumes. On a scale of 1 to 10 I give it a 6. At least we were together 
Dia de los Muertos was interesting to see here. Last year, this time I was still in training in Chaclacayo (weird – it’s been a really long year). Like the celebration I saw last year, there was a massive event at the cemetery – everyone brought flowers for their relatives and then got really drunk. But later that night, the town gathered in a central location to watch what they call “cortamontes”. This involves cutting down 4 eucalyptus trees that are about a year old – relatively tall (eucalyptus grows fast). Then they “plant” these trees in a row, using 2×4s… not even shovels… they pack them into holes in the ground with dirt around them. Everyone is mostly wasted by this point, so the really really drunk people and the children dance around these trees, which have been “decorated” with balloons. Several hours later, the men cut the trees down again. In the dark. Drunk.
I didn’t stay long because the sheer number of drunk men who finally worked up the courage to talk to me was unbelievable. I would be standing there minding my own business, when suddenly I would feel someone really really close to me behind me – definitely in my personal space. I look around and a creepy drunk man would say “oh! I’m so sorry! I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable! Gringa! Gringa! Dance with me, gringa!”. No. I’ve been here long enough to know that I don’t even have to do that anymore. Or. “gringa! I told everyone we would end up together! You’re going to have my babies, gringa!” No. No I am not.
Weird things a brewin.
One of the things I love most about my host family is that they are always buying baby animals. We have so many babies running around: 3 kittens, 2 puppies, a lamb, and 2 piglets – all under 6 months old. It’s freaking awesome. The kittens are like a month old. It kills me.
Lastly – Proyecto Huascaran has come to my town. What does this mean? It means that we are experimenting with having internet. It isn’t quite set up yet, but at the very least, when we have electricity, I should be able to go to the computer room and use the internet. They’re saying they’re going to install an antenna so that people can have wireless throughout the whole town, but I’ll believe it when I see it. At any rate, please don’t expect me to be any more accessible than I currently am, but the possibility exists that I will be able to have internet more frequently than once every 2 weeks.
That’s all folks!
Till next time.
mother nature’s quite a lady, but you’re the one i need. November 8, 2009
there’s a time and a place for everything and it’s called college. November 7, 2009
This month we had our regional meeting in a different city, which was a nice change of pace – we even made it out to spend some time at the beach, which is awesome because rainy season has started in the mountains and the one thing I’m already most starved for is THE SUN. We were celebrating a few birthdays and we decided to get one of the guys a stripper for his birthday. Normally, this is a good idea. However, we’re all operating on volunteers’ salaries and paying for a stripper to come out to the hotel is expensive… not to mention sketchy. So we decided to just take him to a strip club. This was by far the cleanest and fanciest strip club I have ever been in… it still had a pretty funky smell to it, but all things considered… even the girls weren’t too ugly. I guess we were the first girls to ever enter the building and they didn’t know what to think. The bouncer tried to explain to us what kind of establishment they were and was surprised when we told him we completely understood what was happening. When we walked inside, we scared off most of the dancers, which put a damper on our plans. We ordered a pitcher of beer and waited for them to come back out. After about an hour, our buddy finds one that he like and I approach her to see how much a lap dance would be. She tells me to ask the bartender. I ask him and he tells me they don’t do that here. What kind of establishment is this?! What kind of strip club doesn’t offer lap dances? I sent Sara up to go talk to her, maybe she could talk her into something. We watched her gesticulate wildly for quite some time and when she comes back she tells us that he just has to buy her a drink and then they can go into the “private dance booth”. We give him some money and he goes over there to buy her a drink. She tells him that he needs to buy 2 shots for 60 soles a piece and then the dance is going to cost 60 soles more. We love our friend… but not enough to pay 60 dollars for a lap dance. So we leave, dejected.
When we get back to the hotel, we find that there is a wedding in full swing. The stage is just on the opposite side of the wall of our room. They will be celebrating until 5am.
The next morning, I get on a bus to Lima and about halfway there I look out of the window to see seven men carrying a corpse out of a ditch. Then I realized that this whole series of events doesn’t even phase me anymore. This is my life here. Oh Peru.
the mystery of iniquity November 7, 2009
This week marks the anniversary of the school. The town is bustling with activity to prepare: dance practice, band practice, sports, cleaning the classrooms, painting the school, finishing projects. There’s a lot of excitement, but not a lot of time to work with me, so I haven’t been as busy as usual.
I think we may have hit the limit of what people are willing to donate to the museum project. The next step is to figure out who has moved into the cities and send them notifications to see if they’ll be willing to donate something they’ve taken with them.
Since my first day in my new site I have been trying to get the attention of the community president to organize a tree planting session. He has been less than forthcoming. Finally, after about 4 months I got him to agree to a meeting at least and he couldn’t even bother to show up for that. He says that they are super busy taking care of the trout farm project – they have to feed the trout 3 times a day to fatten them up and they’re a pretty far walk from the center of the community. So instead, he pawned me off on CORENA, the committee for natural resources, made up of 6 women. These women and I planted 600 trees in 2 days. More than I have accomplished in 4 months trying to work with the men. Interesting.
I still have a ton of seeds left over, so I just need to pick up some more bags when I go to Lima.
That’s all there really is to write about this time around. Oh! I almost forgot… the whole communist flag saga…
Well, the security officer came up to my site with an investigator to check it out and the consensus is that some drunk A-hole was trying to scare the authorities because he disagrees with their politics. Elaborate and not funny. But not terrorists. They’ve narrowed down the list of suspects to 4 or 5 people and asked for the help of the provincial police in identifying who it was. But the police never came. Apparently, it’s too far of a drive and they just don’t care enough to do it. So… everyone has moved on and it is basically just like it never happened.
No cause for concern… October 11, 2009
One of my weirder days in Peru was this week. It started out as usual. I woke up at 6:30 and started running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I went to a few houses to collect relics for the museum project, went to the tree nursery to start planning out my beds and then walked to the neighboring town for a presentation by an NGO called “Valle Grande”. They were presenting on cocinas mejoradas. This was all fine and dandy until the engineer presenting started to tell the room full of people that cooking with a gas stove isn’t safe because since stoves are generally at crotch level, the exposure to kerosene/petrol can cause ovarian cancer in women, thus freaking out all of the campo women in the room. He then said that the reason people wear glasses is because they read by candlelight as children and exposure to cold apparently causes asthma. I got fed up around lunch time and walked back to town. I love the 3km walk between towns. It’s gorgeous and isolated and I sometimes just walk there and back for the heck of it.
Moving on – In the afternoons I have meetings with the kid volunteers for the museum project. Only 2 showed up. And as I was walking the streets I noticed that most of the houses were padlocked from the outside, meaning people weren’t in their houses. The two girls that showed up got really quiet and said that a lot of people went to go sleep on their farms. A little more investigation led me to more interesting information. Apparently, in the middle of the night, someone had put up a communist flag, (red with a yellow hammer and sickle) in the church tower in the plaza de armas. This happens to be the flag that Sendero Luminoso, or the Shining Path (a terrorist organization that wreaked havoc in this region about a decade ago), would put up to announce their arrival in town. So since less than 20 years ago people stood and watched their family members shot in the head by members of this terrorist organization or by the Peruvian military in the plaza de armas and in their homes, they understandably freaked out when the flag reappeared. It was a ghost town. The authorities say they are investigating it. The people that aren’t paralyzed with fear over the situation think it was a drunk prank by someone from the neighboring village. I guess since nobody’s been hanged in the plaza yet, they’re probably right. But… not a funny prank. And it made for a really weird day.
Update: The flag has been taken down, but now people are talking about a pamphlet that was left behind. Making a pamphlet seems a little elaborate to me for just a prank. Then, graffiti started showing up in the tower of the municipality building, saying “Viva PCP (the Peruvian Communist Party)”. Further questioning revealed that this also happened in the annex of my town, where the situation was even worse back in the day and that the “Viva PCP” graffiti is also painted all over the rocks on the route to the big city.
The mayor has been out of town for the whole week, getting drunk somewhere else, so nothing has come of this yet, but he gets back on Saturday. The way Sendero used to work back in the day is they would come in and kill all of the authorities – the mayor, the president of the community, the regidores, the juez de paz (my host dad in this case), and then sometimes they would start on the professors. The idea was to create radical political change by starting from scratch. So I’m going to be hiding out in the city for a few days until the PC Security Officer has a chance to come check out the situation and determine if it is an incredibly elaborate prank or if it a situation that has the potential to escalate. I’ll keep you updated. I’m not too concerned.
a return after long wanderings October 11, 2009
We got 2 piglets today and the family let me name them! Since I am a creative genius, their names are Pinky and Piglet. Don’t ask me to name your baby.
Right after I named them, my host mom told me that we were going to eat Piglet when he gets bigger and in a few days we were going to cut their tails short “so that they grow bigger and fatter”. Whhhhaaa?
I suddenly find myself incredibly busy in site. And it feels goood. I start my day anywhere between 6am and 8am, depending on whether I have meetings planned for before the school day starts. I then spend most of the day until 1pm teaching environmental subjects at the highschool 3-4 days a week. I come back for lunch around 2 and work on the world map project from 3-5 most days. On off days, I plan lessons and catch up on correspondence or do paperwork or read. Around 5 or 6 I usually meet with the kids for the museum project we’re working on and we either coordinate and plan or go around town house to house talking to people about donating their relics. I get home around 8pm, exhausted, cook dinner and read a little or watch a movie before passing out and starting all over the next day. It’s comforting to know that I can work hard and play hard and have it feel good.
On days when I have a little more free time I spend it doing yoga. I’ve been getting a little more serious about my practice lately… I just wish I had a little more clean space to spread out. I can’t wait to come back to the land of carpeting!
Switching topics completely, I want to thank everyone who was a part of one of my top 5 birthdays! Thanks mom and dad for finally buying and installing a webcam so that I could see your faces after a full year! It was adorable and I loved it. Thanks for sending all your love, friends back home. And thanks to my beautiful new Peace Corps friends from Ica up to Piura for celebrating with me for basically 3 weeks. Going back to Piura was amazing and necessary. I got to see my old host families and was serenaded by “Sorpresa Juvenil” (a locally known orchestra/band that plays a variety of latin music for special events) on my birthday. Then, I got to spend a gorgeous uplifting few days at the beach in Mancora. I forgot how good it felt not to have to wear sweatshirts all the time and to feel the sand between my toes and the ocean on my feet. Awesome. Thank you.
Switching gears again: I was walking around with the kids working on the museum project when I had a really odd conversation which threw me out of my routine and reminded me that I am a long long way from home.
Me: “Excuse me, we’re coming back again to see if you’ve found any relics laying around the house which you would like to donate to the museum”
Lady: “Hmmm… would you accept a skull?”
Me: “yes, absolutely!”
Lady: “I have just the thing!”
minutes pass… she returns holding a broken child’s skull in a plastic shopping bag
Me: “Um… thank you! Is there a story behind this?”
Lady: “Oh, yeah… that’s my brother!”
Me: *flabbergasted! – “what?!”
Lady: “yeah… he died when I was about 8 years old. We had a funeral and buried him and everything. Then, 10 years later, we had to change grave sites because they moved the cemetery. So when we exhumed him, my dad separated the head from the body so he could take it home and have it watch over us. The skull has been in the house ever since then. My father passed away this year and it kind of creeps us all out, so we were going to just throw it away, but now I can donate it to the museum! How lucky!”
Me: “Holy crap. Are you serious? Yeah.. awesome. Thank you.”
Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Fire Coming Out of a Monkey’s Head September 8, 2009
Every time this song (Fire coming out of a monkey’s head, by the Gorillaz) shuffles through on my ipod, it makes me think of the mountains of Peru and how they have been changed and continue to change. Just wanted to share
Once upon a time at the foot of a great mountain,
there was a town where the people known as Happyfolk lived,
their very existence a mystery to the rest of the world,
obscured as it was by great clouds.
Here they played out their peaceful lives,
innocent of the litany of excess and violence that was growing in the world below.
To live in harmony with the spirit of the mountain called Monkey was enough.
Then one day Strangefolk arrived in the town.
They came in camouflage, hidden behind dark glasses, but no one noticed them: they only saw shadows.
You see, without the Truth of the Eyes, the Happyfolk were blind.
Falling out of aeroplanes and hiding out in holes
Waiting for the sunset to come, people going home
Jump out from behind them and shoot them in the head
Now everybody dancing the dance of the dead,
the dance of the dead,
the dance of the dead
In time, Strangefolk found their way into the higher reaches of the mountain,
and it was there that they found the caves of unimaginable Sincerity and Beauty.
By chance, they stumbled upon the Place Where All Good Souls Come to Rest.
The Strangefolk, they coveted the jewels in these caves above all things,
and soon they began to mine the mountain, its rich seam fueling the chaos of their own world.
Meanwhile, down in the town, the Happyfolk slept restlessly,
their dreams invaded by shadowy figures digging away at their souls.
Every day, people would wake and stare at the mountain.
Why was it bringing darkness into their lives?
And as the Strangefolk mined deeper and deeper into the mountain,
holes began to appear, bringing with them a cold and bitter wind that chilled the very soul of the monkey.
For the first time, the Happyfolk felt fearful for they knew that soon the Monkey would stir from its deep sleep.
And then came a sound. Distant first, it grew into castrophany so immense it could be heard far away in space.
There were no screams. There was no time.
The mountain called Monkey had spoken.
There was only fire.
And then, nothing.
Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish September 8, 2009
After being sick in Lima for so long, I finally made it back to site just in time for Fiestas Patrias. Jenna came with me. It’s always interesting seeing your site through someone else’s eyes. Plus, tourist season was in full swing, so nothing was quite normal. Someone stole my phone out of my purse on the bus on the way up to site and so I have decided that I quit phones. I’m in the Peace Corps, in a site with no reception and it’s really just not worth having one at this point. After Jenna left a few days later, I was left to my own devices. Schools nationwide were closed due to a swine-flu scare, so there was no work to be done there. Plus, I had been gone for so long that I was continuously mistaken for a tourist. My days were frustratingly relaxing. I read. A lot. I did yoga. A lot. I went to the municipality building literally 4 times a day to see if I could get a hold of the mayor or his secretary to start working on some sort of project, to no avail. The mayor was enjoying his month of “fiestas”. In fact, it was commonly accepted that he was drunk for the month and sometimes they even had to lock him out of the municipality building so that he couldn’t do any work while drunk. The days were punishing – the hot intense mountain sun… and the nights were hard – the wind and the cold just makes you want to hole up and hibernate. I would cook just to make my room warmer. I would walk by people on the street and they wouldn’t even greet me in return. Things were looking rough. Then the shower broke and my host sister broke my bike. I was dirty and frustrated and bored and unproductive.
Luckily, it soon came time to go down to the city for our regional meeting. The usual festivities were quickly followed by a trip back to the north of the country in Lambayeque for In-Service Training (IST). All of the environment volunteers from my training group were reunited… and it felt so good? It was an awesome week. I learned more than I did in all of our months in training when we first got here. We learned how to properly prepare and plant tara seeds in a nursery, we visited Peru’s first privately owned natural reserve, where we were taught about artisanry, reserve management, reforestation… I saw innumerable indigenous (and often endangered) bird species, I fed the endangered “oso de anteojos”, the only bear native to South America (also endangered), I saw a fox that wasn’t afraid of people… it was out of control sweetness. It got me thinking and motivated and I basically ran back to site full of ideas and ready to work.
After IST, coming back to site was like fast-forwarding a few months integration-wise right away. Suddenly, everyone knew my name and greeted me when I passed then on the street. I started teaching at the school right away, I helped birth a cow, I made my own cheese, I judged a poetry contest and started a project expanding the museum.
The current museum houses 6 Incan mummies and some artifacts found nearby the burial site. In 1929, a group of elementary school children were playing by one of the waterfalls in my town and happened upon an Incan burial ground. They dug up the mummies (in the process damaging a few of the skulls) and stored them in the school. One of the mummies was a person of importance and the rest were buried alive along with him (including some holding small children). Their faces frozen in a permanent grimace, they are haunting. 
Only recently, a few years ago, were they taken from their storage place in the school and put in a museum. Some of them have been painted by children over the years, adding what I think is an interesting layer to their history. What one of the professors and I are trying to do is add a second floor to the museum. We plan on showcasing more recent history of my town. Photographs, centuries old horse saddles, any kind of relics people will be willing to donate. The tentative plan is to be able to inaugurate it by November, but getting proper lighting and setting up the room might actually take a little longer. At any rate, I’m excited to see how that turns out.
I also went to a park-guard meeting, which turned out to be a complete waste of my time, since they spend the whole day reading out loud from the reserve manual, explaining the big words, like socio-cultural. I couldn’t get out of their fast enough. And since they don’t seem eager to work with me, I think I might be closing the book on them – there is plenty to do with the school and community.
I have already given a talk to the older kids about HIV prevention, which ended up being really awkward. We were talking about myths and realities of HIV and one of the cards I made up said “I can’t get HIV because I only have oral sex”. Obviously, this is a myth. But a room full of 16 year olds about to graduate high school in a town with no internet or radio ended up asking me what, exactly, oral sex was. Cue incredibly awkward moment. And once they realized I would answer their questions, they just started pouring right out of them. Things I (wrongly) assumed 16 year olds would know by now. Hi. I’m American. I’ll talk to you about sex. And I thought that would be the end of it. Awkward moments pass. The next day, however, I’m cornered by 4 female teachers at the school. They have questions of their own. These women, with children, in their 30s, are asking me what a female orgasm is. They didn’t know such a thing existed. *headdesk*. I am for sure going to end up with a reputation here. Also, I’ve been struggling a little with the futility of teaching safe sex in my site. Even if they wanted to use a condom, the stores don’t sell them for like a 60km radius and the health post doesn’t offer them either. It is a catholic country. So what is the point in teaching about protected sex, about adequate condom use, if abstinence and pregnancy are really their only 2 options? I’m at a loss.
On a completely different note, Sarah and Valerie, 2 other volunteers came to visit me recently as well. We went out to an annex of my site to see their waterfalls and lagoons. It’s a 5 hour walk, 1 hr car ride. It was really nice to go with volunteers instead of with people from my town the first time around. We’ll see how different it is after the rains come and fill out the waterfalls a bit. We also went horseback riding, which I have been meaning to do for a while now.
So that is the brief coverage of my time since being sick. Frustratingly relaxing to comfortably contentedly busy.
Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop. July 16, 2009
It’s been a really weird month. I left my site to go to my first regional meeting for the new region and was able to make it through less than a day before the pain in my ear got so severe that I had to go to Lima. A shot of morphine and a bunch of pills later and I was good to go to set up in a hostel until further notice. The ear infection turned into a blood infection, which caused reactive arthritis. How do you enjoy Lima on a volunteer’s salary and when it hurts to walk? Not easily, my friends. The pain is mostly gone these days except for the intense, persistent stabbing in my left knee, ankle, and foot. 13 blood tests and an ecocardiogram later and I know all of the things I don’t have. That’s what fancy doctors are for, though… and mine’s Dr. House without the bad attitude. There’s the chance I can go back to site this Saturday… we’ll see.
Lima is a fuzzy antibiotic-induced blur of creativity-sapping consumption. I’ve been useless. Completely incapable of productivity. This past week has been much better though. The painkillers still make me fuzzy, but I’m down to a few pills a day, so the fog is starting to clear.
I’ve learned that public transportation strikes lead to inflated cab prices. Annoying and unfair.
It’s also been interesting to be in Lima to see all the political tension lately. Not that it really affects my day to day, but if I were at site, there would be no access to the outside world and I would be missing out on news. I’m trying to find positives here.
And it’s hard to tell if it’s from being on all the meds or if I’ve fallen through the rabbit hole a few times since I’ve been here, but I have fuzzy memories of finding this unmarked bar, that’s really just a big house where what appear to be Peruvian hipsters go for fun. People draw on the walls and they play good music… it’s like I’m not in Peru anymore. And then there was meeting that weird British kid who got robbed as soon as he stepped out of the airport and was staying in the hostel with us. Soccer hooligan. It feels like it almost didn’t really happen.
On the upside, since I’ve been in Lima, I’ve gotten to see a lot of people I otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to see – like some of my favorite Peru 9ers for their COS med-checks, Geoff and Tyler before they quit and went back home, Carol, and PC volunteers I hadn’t previously known. Also, I got to see Harry Potter and I get to do very un-PC things like go to starbucks and watch the ocean.
Downside – I don’t really feel like a volunteer since I haven’t accomplished anything in the last month except for writing a few lesson plans. I’m bored and unfocused and restless. I want to go back to site!!!!! There are too many stimuli in Lima. I miss having nothing but my books and my music to pass the time. Too much internet access, too many cell phones, too much to spend money on, too much to choose from. I am not a city girl. Oh and also, I only packed for 3 days when I left site, and I’m getting kind of sick of wearing the same things over and over again.
But I’m adaptable. And so I will enjoy my remaining time in Lima to the max. And when I get back to site, I’m going to have somewhere to put my clothes (I bought a dresser), a bike to use, and lesson plans ready for me to go. This really gives me a chance to hit the ground running and that’s pretty exciting
So until I get back to site I probably won’t update again, because, well… living in a hostel just isn’t interesting enough to write about. Fun fact about my hostel: the lightswitch to my room is outside of the actual room, in the common area outside of the bathrooms… and it’s not well marked, so people turn it on and off accidentally at least 3 times a day. Fascinating, I know.
Case in point.
Also, you should all know that Lima makes me homesick and I miss all of you a billion times more than usual. Including you, America.
Love love love,
Alex/sasha
Site change. June 21, 2009
So as many of you may already know, I got a site change… for a myriad of reasons. And I’ve been busy moving and starting over. And it’s HARD. Leaving my beloved Santo Domingo was hard. Coming to the new site – even harder. It’s beautiful, but man.. it’s going to be a long year and half.
Well, to start with, I was a bit sick when I got to the new site (I see a pattern) – but this time instead of the bacterial infection, it was some crazy skin fungus, plus what was originally thought to be a viral sinus infection, but now seems more like a cold, and some sort of dysentery. I still think giardia, even if the stool sample disagrees. We’ll see. So that made everything seem even harder than it already is.
The food is cooked on a wood-burning stove, which makes everything taste the same – like smoke.
It’s COLD. I’m at 3600m (about 12,000ft+). The mountain casts a MEAN shadow. At night, I sleep in my 2 degree (C – 35degrees F) sleeping bag, in 2 shirts and a sweatshirt, fleece pants, wool socks, gloves, in a scarf and a hat and under 4 wool blankets and I still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night from the cold. During the days, the sun is STRONG. Even the Peruvians get sunburns here. It’s too hot to stand directly in the sun for more than 10 minutes and too cold to stand in the shade for as long, so you have to alternate throughout the day. Also, my family is really poor. When I first got here, they didn’t use toilet paper – used notebook paper instead. And we only eat meat once a week if someone brings alpaca meat down the mountain. If not, we have trout. Other than that, it’s half a plate of rice, half a plate of potatoes, with the occasional bean/vegetable combo thrown in. It’s not easy. And sound carries in this house, so I am always listening to the music the teenagers are listening to directly above me… and my ceiling is made of moldy newspaper, which means it probably leaks in the rainy season. *sigh*
On the upside… I live on a natural reserve in Peru. And that’s pretty sweet. We’re so high up, that on a clear night, you can see the entire milky way. The waterfalls and lagoons are breathtakingly gorgeous. I see condors and flocks of green parrots. My host family is adorable. My host dad, Antonino works in construction and is the “Judge of Peace” in the town… which means nothing. My host mom, Sulma, is a houswife. I have three host siblings living with us in the house. The youngest, Aldair, is 6. And he’s a SMART kid. I had him adding in English after 2 days. And he’s a sweetheart. But we need to work on boundaries still. The next oldest is Eliana, 14. She’s awesome – plays volleyball, is really welcoming and outgoing and not so self-conscious that she’s awkward yet. And the oldest, (get this, mom and dad), BLADIMIR, is 16. And he’s super awkward. I’ve actually made a game of it to have entire conversations with him without him saying a word because he will not talk to me. He barely talks to people in his family, definitely not the weird gringa who lives downstairs. It’ll go something like this me – “did you have a good day at school, Bladi?”
me – “why, yes, thank you for asking, alex, and how was your day?”
me – “my day was great too, thanks”
and he just stares at me until I walk away. I’ll break him yet.
Ah yes… that reminds me. I go by Alex now. No more Sasha for me. Because, well, as it turns out, in Quechua (and this site speaks even more quechua than sto. domingo did), Sasha means incompetent. When they told me it meant “difficult” in training, they were trying to be nice. In Spanish, the V and the B both make a B sound, so my last name sounds a lot like “bitches”… and that’s a word everyone knows in English… so the long and the short of it is that my name means incompetent bitch. I figured if I have to start all over anyway, I may as well not be a joke this time around. So I’m Alex. And I like it.
It looks like I’ll be teaching at the secondary school every thursday – something about the environment… and aside from that maybe sitting in on a few english classes and helping out with the “tourism class” – they’re making a video next month and I’ll be helping out with it.
It’s kind of a slow start here – I lost a few days to sleep. The altitude makes it really hard to breathe, and I was sick. I still need some furniture, but things are starting to look up here.
Oh, and there’s no cell phone or internet here. There’s a community phone which is solar powered and there’s a computer with internet, but it’s also solar powered, so you can’t use it before 4pm, there is always a line, and it is slow and expensive… so I’m just going to say there is no internet. But that leaves me a lot more time to write out blog entries ahead of time and post them when I go into the city every two weeks or so.
Life is divided up into phases. Each one is very different from the others, and you have to be able to recognize what is expected of you in each phase. That’s the secret of successful living. A new phase begins now…
Here’s to new beginnings,
Alex.
Perspective is a luxury when your head is constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons May 18, 2009
“Do you want to come to mass with us tomorrow morning?” She asks, anticipation in her eyes…
She must not know. How is this possible? Nobody invites me to church anymore. As if it’s not bad enough that I’m not Catholic, I’m also a single woman in my 20s. I may as well be the antichrist here.
“Well, 7am mass is pretty early”, I say, “But if I wake up in time, I’ll go with you”
“It’s for Salo’s mother – she died 12 years ago tomorrow”.
Oh…
I find myself waking up at 6:30 and debating it in my head. But they’re my host family and they’ve been good to me. It hurts my heart to think of not going. Damn it. I’m off.
And I’m basically the first one there. Punctuality in Peru? I don’t know why I bother.
25 minutes later we’re walking back to the house together. My host dad tells me it cost them 50 soles to have the mass for his mother (not a small sum of money, especially not in the campo). What? 50 soles for a 25 minutes half-assed mass? The priest didn’t even try – he didn’t set up a microphone, he mumbled the words to the songs (I suspect he might not know all of them), and he looked like he was just going through the movements. At least one of our dogs, Benji, followed us into the church, ran up to to the podium, full of curiosity, and proceeded to pee on the podium. For 50 soles, that dog can pee anywhere he wants, as far as I’m concerned.
Then the priest went off to give another mass in one of the caserios. It costs even more there, I’m told. This priest makes more than a doctor! Goodwill and brotherhood, my ass. I should probably leave the churchgoing to Ryan from now on… Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it absolutely terrifying.
On a sunnier note, since I’ve been back, my relationship with my host mom has changed a lot. Before, it was funny misunderstandings and awkward, frustrating “I don’t understand what you’re saying!” moments because she has a really strong campo accent and uses a LOT of slang. But I’m back and suddenly it’s like we’re old girlfriends, inside jokes, hardly any misunderstandings and a lot less annoyance. At the rate I’m going, by the time I leave Peru, I might fancy myself a cook. I already make a pretty good Chaufa and orange chicken and there’s nothing but time left to learn. However, my host grandma, Carmen, schooled me in the art of tamale making today. I failed. It is not as easy as it looks.
I’m walking through town, looking for my counterpart, printing things out, making copies, running from place to place. I walk past the old man on the corner – I’m sure to slow down so he has time to process my “buenos dias” and say it back. His eyes crinkle behind his thick glasses and the corners of his mouth turn up, hinting at a smile. Later, he’s gone and a kitten lays on the corner, keeping his spot warm for when he returns. It reminds me of how adorable everything in this town is, and I keep walking with a little extra skip in my step. And then I see it. It’s a dog. It’s convulsing. There’s a crowd gathering… “maybe it has epilepsy”, I think naively. “Ooohhh.. it was poisoned” I hear an onlooker say. Fuck. I’m just going to keep walking. I come back a half an hour later to run another errand and what do I see? The poor, helpless creature is still convulsing on the ground. “It’s almost dead now” someone says. I keep walking and hope someone puts the poor thing out of it’s misery. 10 minutes later, I have to walk by again (it’s not a big town), and it’s still convulsing. I’m repulsed. How can you spend 40 minutes of your day watching a dog die?
I get home and the doctor that lives in the house with us is crying. Jesus – so much for cute fuzzy adorable happy day. It’s been raining. A camionetta flipped over in a caserio about 40 minutes away. 3 people died. Her friend was in the car. Some days just have to be about death, I guess. The night is just a part of the day.
