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