Catching Up

Well to say that this blog entry is long overdue would be the understatement of the year. I guess I’ve been really busy lately since I haven’t written in almost two months! Jessica and I were joking the other day about what it means to be “busy” here. She was saying she was “Peruvian stressed out” because she had two things to do in the next five days. This makes me laugh because unfortunately, it’s so true. I think we’re all going to have mental breakdowns when we get back to the real world and have to work 40 hours a week again and have real things to worry about.

I’ll do the best I can to recap the last two months without making it extremely long (no promises though). My last entry brought you up to med-checks in Lima so let me pick up there. After being in Peace Corps for one year, we have to go to Lima for medical check-ups and meetings with our boss. The youth development volunteers go for one week and the business group goes the next week, but Peace Corps allowed us to stay for the weekend without being charged vacation days. It was so much fun to see everyone and hang out. I haven’t seen some of my friends since Thanksgiving last year so it felt like a big family reunion to have everyone together again. It was interesting to see how some people have changed since training. Training was such an intense environment because of our busy schedule and the pressure of adjusting to a new culture and learning a new language. I didn’t realize it at the time, but after spending that week together in Lima, I noticed that everyone was so much more laid-back. We’re all becoming more and more Peruvian by the minute – not stressing out about things like we used to and never being in a rush. It was really refreshing.

Luckily our med-checks were pretty uneventful. The best part about them was all of the free time it gave us to hang out in Lima together – if you didn’t have a doctor’s appointment, you were free to do whatever you wanted. As usual when we’re in Lima, we scheduled our days around eating; trying to fit in all of the delicious food we could before it was time to head back to rice and potatoes in site.

In addition to having med-checks, our time is Lima is also an opportunity to talk about our first year in site and to share ideas, challenges, frustrations, successes, etc. with each other. All of us had to prepare a PowerPoint presentation to show the group of what we’ve been up to in the past year. Normally the presentations are only shown among volunteers, but this year they decided to have us do them for the new trainees so they could get an idea of projects to do in site. I thought it was really interesting and I was so impressed by the projects some of my friends have accomplished in site. One of the best presentations was Hana’s so for those of you who know her, you should be proud of all the things she has done in her site. She has done so much for her community and they are really going to miss her when she leaves. I felt bad for her though because she had to go last and after watching presentations for four hours, no one was really in the mood anymore. All but two of the trainees had left to eat lunch so she had a tough audience. It was a very long morning and probably really overwhelming for the trainees, but I really enjoyed it. I presented first and it didn’t go so well. I did a really bad job of managing my time and ran out of time about three quarters of the way through my presentation. I got really flustered when they told me I was out of time so rushed through the end – it was a disaster. Oh well.

As you know from a previous entry the earthquake hit Peru the week we were in Lima. We felt numerous aftershocks throughout the week so we never quite felt relaxed. On top of that, I was robbed at the ATM within the first hour of arriving in Lima (only stole my card and no money was taken) and there was a robbery at our hostel. It wasn’t a Peace Corps volunteer who got robbed, but we still didn’t feel comfortable staying there. We tried to switch to another place, but no one had space for 16 people at the last minute so we had to stay in our hostel with bunkbeds with co-ed bathrooms. Needless to say, after everything that happened that week, we were all sort of on edge and couldn’t wait to get back to site.

A few days after I got back in site I got sick. I think the lack of sleep and all of the traveling was finally catching up with me. It was good for me though because it forced me to just take it easy and hang out at home. I spent a lot of time just reading, hanging out with my host family and playing with Emily (my host sister). After I got better, I worked with Rita to write up a work-plan for the World Map Project, which I presented to the Municipality, and met with the director of the high school to organize a training session with the teachers on a Social Skills program designed for adolescents.

Karina invited me to this graduation party on a random Thursday night. We stayed there drinking and dancing until 3 am. I really didn’t want to go, but it turned out to be really fun. That weekend I went to Chota for a meeting with Jose (our regional coordinator) and all of the volunteers in the area. It was the first time all seven us have gotten together in the past year! The meeting went a little longer than I would have liked, but it was interesting to hear about everyone’s projects. My friend Annie lives in the campo and someone had given her two guinea pigs and a rabbit for her family. In Peru they carry most animals in big rice sacks so Annie just left them on the floor while we were meeting. Two hours later when the meeting was over, she picked up the bag and threw it over her back. I was standing behind her and saw something yellow flying through the air and land on my sleeve. I screamed, “Ewwww Annie, your cuyes PEED on me!” Jessica told me it must have just been my water bottle that leaked on me, but I knew it wasn’t. I said, “But it’s HOT and YELLOW.” Jessica smelled my arm and confirmed that it was indeed, pee. Yummy!

The following week was my birthday. Karina and Miki’s birthday were also that week (we are the 3rd, 4th and 5th of September), but we didn’t really do anything to celebrate because we wanted to wait until Giff came to celebrate. However, it turned out to be a great birthday! Karina practically gave me a heart attack in the morning when she screamed in the middle of aerobics. I thought something happened to her so I screamed too, but she had just remembered it was my birthday and wanted to wish me a happy day. Haha. I got lots of calls in the morning (both from Peruvians and Peace Corps friends) and a visit from Rita and Consuelo (another nurse at the health center) who came to wish me a happy birthday and give me presents.

The girls in my youth group had told me I had to be home in the afternoon because they were going to come get me and take me somewhere. I thought we were going to go eat cake somewhere, but it turned out they had planned a surprise party for me! They messed up a little bit by sending two different groups of girls to get me so when they second group got there, they got really nervous that I wasn’t home – haha so cute. One of the girl’s families owns a house on the outside of town that they don’t use so they decorated the living room with streamers and balloons and brought me to the house for the party. They had made popcorn and jello (typical staples at any Peruvian birthday party) and a cake that said my name! We hung out in the backyard talking for a while and then we went inside where they sang to me and we took lots of pictures. They said they even planned a game for us to play, but it ended up getting too late and we didn’t have time. We all walked back to town together and then parted ways. I saw the girl’s mom where they had made the cake the day before and she apologized for the cake looking a little “messy”. She said the girls had never made or decorated a cake before and she offered to help, but they said, “No mom, Kristen likes it when we’re creative and do things by ourselves.” That made my day. I was so proud of them for recognizing that and for organizing this party. They are so adorable. It all meant so much to me and I will never forget it. Chabu had invited me over for a birthday dinner so that evening I went to the doctor’s house for pizza and sangria. It was the best birthday I’ve spent away from home!

Believe it or not, even though I had just got back from Lima, I was already preparing for my next trip. Kitty planned an IST (In-Service Training) workshop for us in Chiclayo for early September. We had to bring a youth leader from our town with whom we’d design a community project. I invited a girl named, Cinthya, who is in 5th grade (the equivalent to a senior in high school). She is very involved at school and in the community and isn’t afraid to speak up and express her opinion so I was excited for her to come with me. We traveled to the workshop with Jessica and Katy, the girl she brought from Chota. The girls really seemed to enjoy the workshop and designed cool projects. Our project is a talent show for the kids at Cinthya’s high school. She said many of her peers have a lot of potential in music and dance, but if they don’t have something to work towards, they don’t practice and spend their time drinking and doing drugs instead. She thought a talent show would be a good outlet for them because they really enjoy participating in such activities.

We had a lot of fun with our girls. One night we went out to dinner and there was a live band playing. The girls put in a request for them to wish me a happy birthday and to congratulate Jessica on her pregnancy – she thought it would be fun to pretend she was pregnant. We stuffed her shirt with scarves and a shirt and it really looked like she was pregnant. We told the girls to just go along with it as a joke and they did. In the grocery store some random lady came up to Jessica to congratulate her and ask her how far along she was! It was so funny and we thought they understood it was a joke, but apparently a couple of the girls were really confused and thought Jessica really was pregnant – oopsie!

Although we had fun with the girls, they turned out to be little rebels. They are both really boy crazy and every time we turned around they were gone. They were planning to go out dancing one night, but we asked Kitty to make an announcement that they weren’t allowed to leave the hotel after 8 pm. That didn’t solve the problem during the day though. Jessica’s girl really wanted to go shopping for knee-high black socks because she likes to dress “gothic” and can’t find that stuff in Cajamarca. My girl wasn’t interested in that stuff, but was influenced by Jessica’s girl and would go off with her. One afternoon we gave them 30 minutes to go shopping before we had to leave to catch the bus. We told them they could walk around the area of the Plaza and meet us at the ice cream shop (we were stressed out from “babysitting” them all weekend). When they didn’t come on time, I called my girl and she said they had gone to the mall without our permission! We were so mad at them. The mall is about ten minutes away so they had to take a taxi to get there. I have never seen Jessica go into her “teacher mode” so when she called her girl to tell her that it was not acceptable that they had gone to the mall without permission, I couldn’t stop laughing. Jessica said to me, “Kristen can you at least pretend to be mad when the girls get here.” I told her I really was mad at them, but I had never seen that side of her and it made me laugh. Between the two of us, we called them about eight times before they finally came back 30 minutes after they were originally supposed to meet us! Luckily we still made it to the bus on time and everyone got back safely.

I ended up staying on the coast (ssshhhh) because I was headed down to pick up Giff in Lima! It didn’t make sense for me to go all the way back to Bambamarca just to turn around for Lima so I visited Chabu’s mother and sisters in Ferreñafe and then Rita’s family in Trujillo. While I was in Trujillo I also met up with a friend of mine from Cajamarca who studies at the university in Trujillo. The guy he rents a room from has his own car so they drove me all around Trujillo. We visited two different ruins – Chan Chan (the oldest “mud city” in the world) and Huaca de la Luna y Sol – and downtown so I could get an idea of what Trujillo is like. It was a great city tour and I was really grateful to them for taking the time to show me all around. That night I boarded the bus for Lima knowing that in less than 24 hours Giff would be with me!