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.