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.
