¡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.