Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish

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.