2 posts in 1 week... it's a miracle!

Only a week has past (not even..) since I last wrote, but a lot has happened. Nicole and I are making great progress on our College Fair.. It's in less than 2 weeks, so hopefully all will be done on time :)

Today is election day all over Peru! They're electing town mayor, regional president (kinda like state governor?) and the regional president's councilmen. It's kinda a big deal. A TON of money has been spent on campaigns- signs, rallies, concerts, buying votes. In my town, there are a total of NINE candidates for mayor- for a town of 16,000 people. Let me just say elections in Peru are kinda crazy. There has been a ban on purchasing or consuming alcohol since Friday and goes until tomorrow, although this evening it will probably be broken once results are read. In Peru, voting is mandatory. If you don't vote, you don't get a sticker on your ID card, and without that sticker you can't get a job or do any sort of "tramites" (documents, for lack of a better word). In order to get that sticker, you have to pay a fine that varies from S/.70- S/.15, depending on the poverty of the place you vote in. Absentee ballots don't exist, so if you're registered to vote in Cayalti, but live in Lima, you have to travel back to Cayalti just to vote. Recently, they passed some legislation that allows Peruvians living abroad to vote, but from what I heard, only a certain percentage of those votes count.. don't quote me on that! The exciting part is that we get to do this allll over again in April for presidential elections. Yay!

In other not so happy news, last night we found out that my host uncle, Tio Jose, died of a heart attack. He was just here on Wednesday and was helping me with my College Fair project. He gave me great contacts for 3 institutions and I was going to invite him to the Feria when he came today to vote in the local elections. He was fine when we saw him just a couple days ago. Apparently he went and saw other family members in Cayalti and called some friends he had been out of touch with for awhile. They're saying he was despidiendose.. saying goodbye to everyone. Saturday morning he woke up with problems with his eye or his vision and then went for a run. He was overweight, but ate healthily for a Peruvian and tried to get exercise. He was only 58. After the run he came back for lunch and had a really really bad headache, so he went to lay down. His wife was concerned and went to check on him not even 3 minutes later and found him more or less foaming from the mouth. His son took him to the hospital, where he passed away. I'm finding it hard to wrap my mind around it that I just saw the man on Wednesday and on Saturday he was dead. My host family is distraught. He was a very kind and giving man and really believed in education. He helped my host sister through college and was helping some of my cousins and my brother too. I remember joking that no matter what time we ate lonche (our evening meal), be it 5pm or 10pm, he was there... like he had a sixth sense for food. Tio Jose would show up with bread or a newspaper and would sit for hours talking (I'll admit I often got bored) about everything, especially current events. He'll buried in Trujillo tomorrow (about 3 hours south of where I live) and my family left in a hurry today. Tio Jose was a professor at the national university in Chiclayo, and they sent a bus to Trujillo and my family took advantage of this free transportation to be able to go to his funeral. I was thinking about going, but opted to stay home. I don't do well at funerals, and peruvian funerals are particularly sad. They stay up all night sitting on hard benches "acompanando"-- keeping the body company. The mom/sisters/wife often cry, no, wail and its a sound that just pierces your heart. Then they take the body and walk from the house to the church and the church to the cemetery accompanied by a band and more crying. It was just more than I think I could handle, and I also I thought my family might want some time without having to worry about the gringa. Rest in peace Tio Jose, you'll be missed by many.

So in the month since I last wrote, I've continued to be pretty busy. My PEPFAR project got approved (yay!) just waiting on the money... We were supposed to get together and work on materials last Wednesday and have our first charla on Thursday, but the school had a Spring Dance and canceled classes, so our charla was canceled as well. I'm going to try to re-schedule for this week so we don't get too far behind.

The Feria Vocacional is coming along, we're about 2.5 weeks out (ahhhh!!!) and so far have 8 institutions confirmed for participating. This week we are starting to invite the secondary schools and figure out the transportation. I was figuring out food costs and it is going to be less than HALF of what we planned! yay! I also went to my municipality asking for help paying for the lunches since our grant won't pay for food, and to my great surprise they approved my solicitud and are going to help out! big yay! This weekend are the mayoral and regional president elections, so I have to go back next week to coordinate it all, since the person I need is not in the office since she is running for re-election. Still, VERY exciting. Still have to get posters and handouts made to publicize the Feria. I talked to one of the radios, and they are going to help us promote it and invite us to their talk show one day to blab about it for the better part of an hour. Who's excited?!?! We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. The event is coinciding with my school's anniversary and is being included in their anniversary programing and the teachers are getting pretty excited about it. I think even if we only have those 8 institutions come, it will be a success. 

Speaking of my school, I've been pretty busy with them these past weeks, and it shows in the way the teachers treat me. Since they see me twice a week (and this past week daily) they are getting used to me being there and have realized their job is not in jeopardy and have been very welcoming. When we were talking about the anniversary programing, they told me they want me to participate in or attend all the events, specifically, they want me to parade with the school because as one teacher told me "eres parte de la institucion"- you're part of the institution. I'm really happy at my school for the most part. The one tutoria teacher that was never supportive of me, has completely stopped coming to class and doesn't even say hi to me when he sees me in the school. In Peru, not saying hi to someone, especially someone you know, is a big offense. I'm not sure what his deal is, but I don't let it bother me. Whether this particular teacher likes me or not is not why I'm here. My kids are happy and are learning something, and that is what is important to me. 

I don't remember if I mentioned it before or no, but the deWaal Foundation has a program called PreNatal that works in preventing babies being born with a disability. One of their strategies is preventing teenage pregnancies, since they carry more risk for a baby being born with a disability. They came to my school and did their program with the 4th and 5th graders. The leaders they trained were invited to a meeting in Chiclayo with the leaders from other schools and they had a poster contest. We didn't win, but the kids enjoyed meeting other kids and loved being in a fancy hotel with 6th floor views of the city. This past weekend, a group of 8 students participated in a sociodrama (social theater) contest. They only really had a week of practices and sometimes weren't always too focused and I wrote the script in about 2 hrs while falling asleep. They did a great job of fixing the script and changing parts as they felt necessary and in the end, did an AMAZING job. We didn't have money for transportation, so they were asked to put half of their transportation cost and I put the other half, and they made it money well spent. Because we didn't have money, we weren't able to bring students to cheer them on, which was kinda sad. My kids placed 2nd out of 4 schools... they were only beat by TWO POINTS. And the team that beat them stole their incubator that we spent 2 hours and half a roll of duct tape making. Grrrr. Let me just say that Ciudad Eten are a bunch of tramposos! hahah.

Maybe some pictures soon... until then, cuidense!

I'll take it as a good sign that I haven't updated in awhile, and chalk it up to being busy... haha. I've officially been a volunteer for a year! They always said that the first year was the hardest, and that the second is when things start to click, or fall into place. It sure is true. I've got a good amount of projects going on and feel like I've done some good things here. At least my students seem to like me; one class even made chocolate cake! (yes, i can be bought with chocolate.. smart kids!)

July was a rather busy month. I had Camp VALOR (50 teenage boys for 2.5 days....) and then right after that (at the same time actually..) the new trainees (now volunteers) came up for FBT... the week of practice in the field to see what its "really like". They came to my site and taught Vocational Orientation to 3 of my 4 classes. I think I need to take them with my every week, because even the worst behaved classes were angels. (that's also when they made cake...) Then I went down to Lima for a training session about working with Community Disability Organizations and a surprise (for me) session on goal 3.2. I had about 1 hour to whip up something. I got to spend Fiestas Patrias with Isa and some of her friends; ate yummy food, had some good drinks and good times.

August started with the PEPFAR conference-- a 3 day event talking about how to create HIV prevention projects. I had a whopping FOUR socios turn up! Three were sent as replacements for the people I invited, but it ended up working out for the best. I finally got an in with the health post. For the rest of August, I went at least once a week to the health post to meet with the doctor and/or obstetrician to plan our project. I submitted it last week and is approved pending paperwork that I am turning in tomorrow. The basic gist is that we are doing monthly sessions with the 4th grade high schoolers (2nd to last year, about 14-15 yrs old) about HIV prevention and have a t-shirt design contest with the winning class getting t-shirts. And us too, of course! The culminating event is a parade (known here as pasacalle) for World AIDS Day on Dec. 1st. I didn't want to do another one, but got talked into it by the doctor and obstetrician. They promised they would help me and that I wouldn't be as stressed as last year. After looking at my pictures they told me it looked like I had a great parade last year and they didn't understand why I was anxious. I'll take it as a good sign that I mentioned it to my school director and he offered up the school band's support!

Nicole, my sitemate, and I are also hard at work planning a College Fair. This was a new concept to most people we talked to, so there was a bit of confusion. Some of that might have been that at first we referred to it as a "Feria de Carreras". Carrera can mean race or career (how they refer to majors in college). Now we are calling it a "Feria Vocacional de Universidades e Institutos" which more or less translates to a University and Institute Vocational Fair, and the idea gets across a lot quicker. So far, 3 of the 4 institutions we have invited have confirmed that they are coming. We still need to invite a LOT of institutions, so there's a lot of work to be done still. We are also compiling a University and Institute Guide to give to each High School that has basic information about majors, costs and admissions requirements. The idea for this started because even though we are only 1 hour from the city, many of our kids and their families don't have money or time to spend a day or more in the city going from school to school getting information. We wanted to bring the information TO them and also make it available to our youth in caserios (small rural areas away from town center). For those kids, the idea of going to a technical institute might be a whole new concept, since their families are mostly dedicated to agriculture or animal raising. It's all very exciting, and a bit stressful as the days pass. But I think it will end up being a great thing for our kids and their families.

So right now I'm in Lima for mid-service medical exams. Tons of fun. I've been poked and prodded just about everywhere, but turns out I'm A-ok. Got to go to the dermatologist and get some persistent acne checked out and have my psoriasis looked at too. The fish oil mom brought has been awesome, but he wants me to use some stronger steroid too. Hopefully that will get rid of the bit that's still there.

I'll look through photos and see if there's anything fun to put up. I lost my camera at the end of July, it literally disappeared, so no photos since then. just got a new one brought from America, so I get to take more pictures! yay.

Really missing home and everyone there, but buoyed by the small successes I'm having here.

¡Feliz Aniversario!

This past week marked my 1 of living in Peru. It’s had its ups and downs for sure, but I’ve made it to this point alive, healthy, and happy. I’ve had lots of new and interesting experiences and have met some wonderful people along the way. One year down, 1 year 3 months to go. I’ve been in site for about 9 months, and I feel like things are finally starting to get going on the work front. Vocational Orientation is up and running, though not with the complete support of the teachers. One of my teachers is amazing and participates in the classes. The other one is a blob. He usually doesn’t show up, or comes late and leaves early, always with some sort of excuse. And the five minutes he is in the room he doesn’t participate in anything. Luckily I have mostly good kids and hopefully they are getting something out of it. We’ve been spending a lot of time focusing on identifying their strengths and abilities and they really struggle with it. I have two more activities planned to try to get them to see their good qualities.

My Health Promoters are planning a movie night on Saturday in front of the park to talk about HIV prevention, show some testimonies, and then show a movie. It is their first activity that they are planning, so hopefully it will go well. They’re also in the process of designing t-shirts for when they do events. We’ll see on Sunday what designs they come up with :)

Last week I had a charla with a group of moms in one of the neighborhoods (not so far away as the caserios, but not exactly close to much either). It was in a small neighborhood chapel dedicated to some saint and an obstetrician came from Chiclayo and talked about women’s reproductive health. I hope to continue monthly charlas with this group of women and talk about all sorts of topics from hand washing to family violence. Any suggestions or resources, let me know! We’re also planning a Pap smear campaign where professionals will come from Chiclayo and for only S/.5 the women get a pap smear. This usually costs S/.10 plus another S/.7-10 for travel so it’s a great opportunity for the women. They will also bring medicine and I’m hoping to coordinate to have HIV tests available for free at the same time. The HIV test costs S/.35 if you get it done privately, but the Health Post has a certain amount of them to give to women of childbearing age to help prevent vertical transmission (mother to child).

I just got hooked up with an NGO in Chiclayo that works with preventing disabilities and part of their strategy is working to prevent teenage pregnancies. They will be working with the 4th and 5th graders at San Martín, one of the high schools, in my town. So I’ve been trying to coordinate with the person in charge of the NGO and the directors at the school to get a group trained and then for them to give the charlas to the other students; we’ll see how all that goes.

After months of feeling like I’m doing nothing here, I finally feel like perhaps I’m actually having some sort of impact. We’ll see about the whole “behavior change” thing being successful, but at least I’m doing something, hopefully.
I’ve spent months complaining about the heat, well, now the cold is here. I’m sleeping in sweatpants and socks and have worn jeans various times in the past couple weeks. The mosquitoes are still out and biting, and my blood is still just as sweet. Mom comes in just over a week, and she’s going to think I’m a liar for all the talk about how hot it is here, and now it’s cold.
The new group of Youth Development and Small Business volunteers come this week. Peru 15. Crazy to think, we won’t be the youngest odd number group anymore. I’ll be going down in July to give a training about working with community disability groups and so will get to meet at least the YD volunteers. There will be 35 of them! That’s how many were in my WHOLE group. Craziness.

more pictures!

So I had a post typed up, ready to copy and paste, and then went to do just that, and realized that my document was saved in Word 2007, and this high class internet establishment doesn´t have that, or even the compatability pack installed. Thank you Peru. So, you just get the pictures today.

Me and Yilda at her "Cordones" ceremony. She asked me to put her cordones on for the ceremony. She is a brigadier general... a school leader. The cordones is that yellow rope, the blue on her shoulders and the embelm on her lapel pocket. It was a lot for an inexperienced gringa!

Grandmom´s NoBakes.. cooked like never before! Guinea pigs in the background, baby ducks underfoot and a headlamp because the one light in the "kitchen" is useless.

Bettina on her birthday pretending chomp down on the cake. With Doña Hilda´s help I made her a delicious chocolate cake which I iced and she decorated.

Me and Doña Juana, my host grandmother, on her 91st birthday. But she´s actually older... they don´t know exactly when she was born.

Awesome photo mural around the PC logo in a community library another volunteer built in his site. It´s a sweet library.

Caramelo more recently. He was tired after his bath. His mange got better all by itself. He still follows me around sometimes and causes all sorts of problems.

Picture Time!

Doing my godmotherly duties and holding the baby. Who was sound asleep until the padre poured cold water on his head.

Segundo, Yadira, Baby Randy, Me, and Alex (the godfather). He was always apart in all the pictures.

The formal picture. I'm the only one smiling, notice?

Me with ANDY YAIPEN from GRUPO CINCO!!! This is like getting your picture taken with NSYNC back in the day. They came to my site right after the anniversary. So now I have seen both Hermanos Yaipen and Grupo Cinco in my site.. sweet!

My Health Promoters! Not all of them finished, but here they are, with Anna (to the right of the banner) and Humberto (sitting in the middle) from Viviendo en Positivo from Chiclayo.

Employing "non-formal education techniques" to show how HIV works in the body to destroy your immune system. Thank you Victor and Yilda for volunteering!

My Community Diagnostic presentation. Of the people you can see, two are relatives and one is my AMAZING site mate Nicole. My socio told me I was "toda congresista" because I was dressed up.

Me and my friend Yilda. She really helps lift my spirits when I'm wondering what the heck I'm doing here. She's bound to do great things in this world! :-)

CARAMELO!! This was when he was newly adopted, so he was rather mangey still. He's been eating better and plays with me so he's happy and now, even without treatment (or a bath! I'm a bad doggy mommy) his mange is clearing up. I thought he looked like a CowTail (the candy) but I couldn't call him that, because that would just be weird.. and worse in Spanish (Cola de Vaca) so I decided on Caramelo, or caramel in Spanish. But here it also means any small candy, so they were still confused. Oh well. He's a cutey. And follows me EVERYWHERE! even into the school director's office and to the Combi stop!

Health Promoters Graduation. These aren't all of them, just the ones that didn't get perfect attendance.. haha. In the back row with me are the town Governor and Ana. I was really sick that day and had a bad fever. Still had to give speeches and smile though!

Yilda and I helped Nicole with an HIV charla she did with the women in a rural part of her site. The woman was so gung-ho about getting the condom ALL the way down the banana that the banana popped out of my hands and went flying.

Pretty good save though, and all the women thought it was hysterical. I had previously mentioned that I really like giving charlas about condom use, because it really empowers women and gives the information they can teach their daughters and granddaughters and thereby is empowering generations of women. So it was even better, when I was so "excited" about doing a condom demonstration that I couldn't hold on to it.

Peru 13 and our counterparts at our Project Design and Management conference. See if you can spot my forehead! My socio is the third from the left kneeling and my boss is the woman in the orange shirt on the right.

My nephew/godson, Randy, bathing and enjoying the water

Despite having a ton of plastic balls to play with, Randy decided that a carrot makes a good toy and that he wanted to share it with me :)

More of Randy bathing. It's hysterical how he jumps up when the water drips down his face! *Naked Baby Alert*

Is anyone still reading this??

So I just realized that it’s been about 2.5 months since I last posted on my blog. Ooops. Of course, a lot has happened. February was pretty much just finishing up my Health Promoters course and not much else. They had their clausura (graduation) on March 6th with a ceremony in the municipality along with Nicole’s Health Promoters since they never got a clausura. We finished with 13 Health Promoters, 11 youth and 2 women, and they all presented final projects. The mayor wasn’t there because he went to Spain, and we had to drag the assistant mayor (is that a term??) out of her office to come and say a few words. No one from the Health Post came and neither did they come from the schools. The cable people came and filmed it and it was live on TV!

I had a fever and it was really hot that day and I broke my phone. Let’s just say that sweat and phone screens don’t get along very well. After many emails and phone calls and trips to Chiclayo, I have a “new” phone which is really just an old phone from a volunteer that left. I call it the piedra—the rock—because it pretty much is. It’s an old school Nokia, but much more practical for PCV life than the flip phone I had before; I don’t have Tetris anymore, but I’ve got a FLASHLIGHT!!!

So for my Health Promoters I made a manual for them, to help them when they do their talks and what not. I showed to my APCD (my boss in PC speak) and she liked it and wants to send it off to Washington to make it available to volunteers in other countries. I’m gonna be famous! At least in the Spanish-speaking Peace Corps world… lol.

OH! I forgot that towards the end of February I presented my Community Diagnostic, a 50ish page document, all in Spanish that took me 3 months to research and write. This should be more important for the people of my town, than for me, but of the 35 institutions that I invited, only 5 bothered to show up. Mind you, that inviting 35 institutions means writing a formal “oficio” or letter and making copies and THEN walking all over town in the sun and heat handing them out and making sure everyone signs the “cargo” (my copy) to prove they got it. Just handing them out was an all day affair. (I did the same for my health promoters graduation with worse results…) So for the presentation I got all dressed, put on make up, heels, slacks, and a blouse I had to IRON. I was nervous mostly because I know how judgmental my town can be and knew that no matter what I did or didn’t do it wouldn’t be right or sufficient. And I was right. After presenting, I opened it up for questions and the first comment I got was, “I congratulate you for what you’ve done, but there’s a lot of holes in it and it still lacks a lot.” Well gee thanks. Glad I spent 3 months of my life doing something that no one here has ever attempted to do, oh and I did preface by saying it’s a living document and in no way am I pretending that it’s complete. The joys of being a volunteer… you’re likely the one most invested in what you are doing in the community.

Since the end of March, I haven’t been in site very much. I left on Sunday March 21 (happy bday mom!) for a dentist appointment and a meeting in Lima. I was back in site Thursday morning and left that Wednesday morning (the 31st) for vacation! We got 4 free vacation days for Semana Santa (Holy Week) and so I took advantage and went to Mancora, a sunny beach in Piura. I ate a lot of yummy food, got some sun and went out until the wee hours of the morning. Easter Sunday I had an omelet at a restaurant owned by gringos called Green Eggs and Ham, but it was nothing like Easter at home. No Peeps and chocolate crosses and jelly beans (though mom says they’re on the way!). Then I travelled back to Piura and had a delicious salad at Cappuccinos (third time eating there in 5 days.. yes!) and then got on a bus back to Chiclayo and back to site. I luckily have no crazy Semana Santa stories, unlike others from my group that got lost in the Colca Canyon or were stuck on a dugout canoe for 18 hours with 14 people in the Jungle.

On the way to Lima, my laptop got a “golpe”, it was hit somehow, and the screen broke, it was white and had lines going across it. I took it to get fixed before heading on vacation, and $210 later I have a shiny new laptop screen!

So I came back from vacation Sunday night and left again Monday afternoon for PDM- Project and Design Management- a training we had in Lima and had to bring a counterpart from our sites. I brought Felix, the treasurer from the Association of People with Disabilities. We planned a project to train the association members in different types of crafts and artesania so that they can sell them and improve their economic situation. It was a long 2.5 days. I was supposed to have a dentist appointment on Monday (I have to get a crown remade) but since there were no bus tickets for Easter Sunday I had to travel on Monday. Instead my dentist appointment was Friday, after the training. It’s a series of 3 appointments and the second was yesterday. Unfortunately something happened, the mould wasn’t right or something, but the tooth base didn’t fit right, so they had to re-make the form and send it out again. So I have another appointment on Monday to do what was supposed to happen yesterday. After that, there’s one more appointment… hopefully on Wednesday. If not, it will be Thursday. Thursday and Friday I have a meeting of Special Ed volunteers to plan training for Peru 15 and talk about best practices etc. So I need to be out of Lima Wednesday night. That and I’m getting tired of Lima. It’ll have been over 2 weeks in Lima… and about 3 weeks out of site (4 if we don’t count the fact that I was there for like 20 hours…)

To break it up, last weekend I went to see my host sister Yadira and my nephews Bryam and Randy. It was nice to see them after not seeing them for a few months and also to get out of the touristy section of Lima for a bit. I’m going to go see my training host family this weekend since I only got to see them for about 2 hours when we were in Chaclacayo for PDM. I’m really excited to get to spend some real time with them and get out of the hostel for a night or two.

When I finally get back to site, I’ll be starting a Vocational Orientation class with all of the 5th graders (last year of HS) at San Martin, one of the public High Schools. It was supposed to start the 13th, but I was stuck in Lima still. I’ll be working with about 100 students, hopefully helping them to learn to set goals and figure out what they want to do when they graduate in December. Most kids in my community want to be “great professionals” but don’t know what they want to be exactly or aren’t doing anything to help reach that goal of being a great professional. Teen pregnancy in my site is at about 9.5% and went from 30 cases in 2008 to 77 cases in 2009. Kids are having sex at a very young age and not thinking about the consequences. I want them to set goals for their lives and realize that having a baby is going to make it hard to go to college or even the institute and will change their lives forever. I’m going to work in some HIV/AIDS and general sex ed sessions so hopefully that will help on that front.

The best part is that my site mate and I are planning an awesome Career/College Fair in October to bring representatives from the colleges and institutes in the area to my town to give the kids a chance to get information from them without having to go all the way to Chiclayo. We’re also going to have a parent session about how to pay for it and other worries parents have. We want to invite a couple of professionals (based on the kids’ interests) to come and talk about their profession and also how they got to where they are. Like I said, it’s gonna be amazing!
While I’ve been on a “sabbatical” in Lima, I was informed that there is now dengue in my site. Dengue is carried by mosquitoes (which LOVE my blood!) that bite during the day. It’s treatable the first time, but according to our PC doctor, the second time you’re pretty much guaranteed to die. I will be bathing even more in bug repellent than I did before!

I’ll post some pictures in a separate post since this one is already so long. Sorry if it’s an incredibly boring post but not too much exciting has been going on. Especially not here alone in Lima…

I miss everyone incredibly and am counting down the days until my mommy comes (64 days!!) and waiting anxiously until my sister figures out when she is coming. It will be so amazing to see my family again. And also get clothes that fit properly!!!

Until the next time,
Sarita