Kassel Esta En Peru!: My First Days in Huantar (Written Nov. 26th, 2013)

I write to you beneath two wool blankets (or fresadas) on my bed (left by the previous volunteer and currently under suspicion of harboring fleas, but alas only time will tell) in my new bedroom, located on the first floor of the first house on the right at the bottom of the hill after the playground, which can be found by turning left once you reach the Plaza de Armas after passing through the entrance to Huantar and continuing straight ahead.

Currently my mind is focused on two tasks: 1) writing this blog post in an attempt to stay ahead of things and 2) paying close attention to my digestive system in case it makes any sudden movements.

This post here will backtrack to before I swore in and fill in the very first days of my site visit and hopefully during my next two weeks here in Huantar before my regional meeting back in Huaraz I will manage to stitch together a few more, and before you know it I’ll have caught up on my life and you all will have more blog posts than you know how to contend with (or I will eat my words and get no farther than this sentence, it’s really a toss-up as nature is calling)

I made it back! I come to you now after a day of doing things in Huantar. I think the most frustrating thing about living in a community that primarily speaks Quechua is that everytime someone starts a conversation in Quechua, I panic and think that I’ve lost all ability to understand Spanish. It takes a sentence or two before I realize that in fact whoever is speaking is in fact speaking another language altogether. Two new Quechua words of the day: haka=arbol=tree and gocha=laguna=lake.

Since coming back to this blog post I have changed my mind and decided that this day, this post is not the one in which I will recap. Too much has happened! And by that I mean not much has happened by normal standards. Around nine I wandered up to the mirador, aka the official lookout point, and sat for a little, pondering what exactly I had gotten myself into. I had this selfsame thought process when I first arrived for site visit. A large part of me knows why I came—to work in public health, to learn Spanish, to experience another culture, to have an adventure—it’s the part that keeps me here, but there’s another part that thinks of the comfort of my life back in the US, and damn was it comfortable, and wonders why I would be willing to sacrifice that for two years.

Case in point when, during the training session for community health promoters that I sat in on, my fingernails turned blue at the base and my muscles got that tight feeling they get when you’re cold (I think that will be the constant state for muscles for the next two years). But in that same session I understood 85% of what was said—hell I’m going to be generous and say it was a full 90%. That feels so good!

And then I get invited by my host family to sit in the park with them and it’s so pleasant and so peaceful and so not lonely that I feel reinvigorated.

So as I sit on my bed, an extra sweater added to my fleece, as I listen to “Adagio for Strings” I feel happy. I just finished off a carton for Stone Wheat Crackers from home, there’s a bag of peanut M&Ms waiting for me next Sunday as a celebration of one week down, my family is going to show me the way down the mountain tomorrow, Sunday they’ll show me the way up, and, oh yeah, my family asked me to be the madrina at my sister Lesley’s confirmation (not sure how the whole Catholic confirmee—Episcopalian madrina thing is gonna play, but I guess we’ll find out when I go to mass on Sunday).

Oh, I was just told that the cute black bunny is going to die tomorrow. That’s a bummer.

Besos

(oh and some pictures)

View from the Peace Corps Hostel. Yes, it is really that beautiful

My socios on Socio Day. To the left is Luisa, in charge of Social stuff at the municipalidad, and to the right is Paola, the enfermera in charge of children's health at the Health Post

My first glance at my room during site visit. Seen at 10:30 pm after a harrowing journey up the mountain. The sports car driven by the 15-year-old stalled out five times. Literally five.