Portrait of me

This is how my host sister Nicoll sees me:

You can tell it’s me by the height.  I rather enjoy that she sees it as being all in my legs.  And I especially like my curled-up toes. 

Wish Me Some Serious Luck (May 26th, 2014)

So Monday came and went, and so too it seems have my hopes for getting money to help pay for the Pasos Adelante classes.  Monday morning I walked into the municipality full of hope.  Into the treasury I walked, confident that having spoken to the alcalde, I would be getting my money, no problem.

“Ah, pero señorita, no tengo los papeles necesarios.  Tienes que hablar con el gerente.”

--[Ah, but miss, I don’t have the necessary papers.  You have to talk to the gerente.]

Hmmm, why wasn’t I told last Wednesday that I had to talk to the gerente?

So I walk over to the gerente’s office and wait in line.  As I wait, the alcalde’s secretary walks by and tells me that she has to pass on the Thursday meeting’s notes to the gerente along with my original solicitud before I can talk to him.  Okay, I guess I’ll wait. After about five minutes, she passes him the papers and I walk in.  He happily greets, asks how I am, everything ever so pleasant. Yes, yes, we just have to type up the budget request into the proper format and then we’ll give that to the treasurer.  Return in the afternoon.

Oh the misgivings I had as I walked out of that office.  Being constantly told to come back later is not reassuring.  But who knows, maybe this really is just how it works.

No.  The way it works is that it doesn’t work.  The way it works is that Kassel is told when she returns to the municipality that, “Lo siento señorita, pero tengo malas noticias.” That’s right, he has bad news.  Turns out, there’s no money.  He begins to explain the process of the annual budget and the monthly subsidies from the national government and the restraints, constrictions, and challenges that the municipality faces.  Yeah, that’s great, possibly even true.  But over two months ago, I was promised money.  I acted upon that assumption.  I bought supplies with my own money assuming that I would be reimbursed later.  So, sir, I fully sympathize with your problems, but unfortunately I now have my own. 

In the end, I was told that in about a month there may be money.  But something in my gut tells me that next month I will be told to come back tomorrow, or later that afternoon, that there will be a certain essential document missing, and that well, you see miss, these things just happen.

But before I give up all hope and become the town’s local anarchist, I’m going to pester.  I’m going to ask for advice from the more influential people.  I’m going to smile and laugh.  I’m going to become a fixture at the municipality, because guess what?  I’m here for another eighteen months and I quite literally have nothing better to do than get that money.  Wish me luck. 

Besos!

Wish Me Luck--An Introduction to Negotiating Local Politics in Another Culture and Language (May 21st, 2014)

Yesterday, the previous volunteer Nicole called my host family to check in and say hi.  Afterward, my host mom reported that during the course of the conversation Nicole asked, “Has the alcalde [mayor] made Keisi cry yet?”

And with that question ringing in my ears I headed to the municipality to try to get some money.

About a month ago, before I started my Pasos Adelante classes I had submitted an oficio to the municipality.  I explained what Pasos was and asked for financial support for materials, trips, shirts, and snacks.  After speaking to the alcalde, he agreed to the sum, asking if I could wait until May to receive it.  Since I didn’t plan on starting Pasos until the last week of April, this seemed reasonable.  I got a document, signed by him, to this purpose, and I happily headed out, knowing that I had proof.

Fast forward a month, and I am buying supplies with my own funds and getting ready to start planning more activities with costs I’m not willing to front.  I walk to the municipality and head to the treasury. The secretary/treasurer and I exchange pleasantries, at which point I bring up my purpose for being here—the money I was promised.  She listens and then explains that she has no knowledge of this.  A fairly reasonable statement given the level of communication generally experienced in Perú.  She says I need to talk to the alcalde again, despite my signed document.  Okay then, he’s here, might as well, why fight it even if I think it’s slightly silly? So off I go to wait in line. 

Three games of Sudoku later I’m called into his office and I exchange pleasantries, then pull out my “cargos” (my copies of the documentation leading to him agreeing to give me money).  Ahhh, he says, and then asks me to wait a moment as he speaks to his secretary.  After about three minutes of mildly unsuccessful eavesdropping (the clearest phrase I hear is “she asking for it now,” which was something I was already aware of), he comes back and asks if I can come back Monday. 

I say sure after a pause, because yes, I can come back Monday but…Monday I can collect the money, yes?  Yes, yes, he says.  And the secretary of the treasury will know about it…? Yes, yes, he says with a laugh. Okay, I say as I stand and shake his hand, I’m just asking because I’m new to how the municipality works.  And off I go.

So.  Wish me luck as Monday approaches, because it would just be utterly lovely if come Monday morning I walk in to a smiling treasurer, who ushers me into a seat as she happily doles out the cash.  Oh thank you so much I will gush, as she replies with, Oh, but of course.  A vastly superior situation to the one where the mayor is just stringing me along like the reneging vile term he has been called in the past, and I end up crying at home.

Besos! 

What is it exactly that I do?

It has been brought to my attention that it’s not exactly clear what I do here in Huantar, Perú.  This is due in part to the fact that until recently I too wasn’t exactly clear about what it was I was doing, and also until recently I wasn’t doing much. 

So now, let me explain some things.

The Community Health Program in Perú has two main goals.

1)      To work with mothers with children under the age of three in order to improve their knowledge and application of knowledge in the areas of nutrition, hygiene, and early childhood stimulation.  This is to be achieved by participating in a program called Viviendas Saludables (Healthy Homes), where I would visit the homes of said mothers twice a month in order to check in, talk, visit, play, and encourage healthy behaviors.

2)      To work with youth, ages twelve to seventeen, in order to encourage healthy behavior, especially in the area of sexual health, as well as to reduce the rates of teenage pregnancy and STIs in my area.  This is to be achieved by participating in a program called Pasos Adelante (Steps Forward), where I teach motivated youth about a variety of topics, such as Self-Esteem, Values, Sex and Gender, Pregnancy, Abstinence, Condoms and Other Birth Control Methods, HIV/AIDS, STIs, and others. By the end of the course, they will be PEPs (Promotores Educadores Pares, aka Peer Health Education Promoters) and able to teach Pasos and pass on their new knowledge to their peers.

 This is what I actually, officially, currently do:

1)      I teach Pasos Adelante to four times a week to twenty-five youths in the local high school.  So far we have covered Values and Self-Esteem, with Sex and Gender happening next week with the help of the obstetra (like obstetrician, but on a nurse/midwife level).  Check out some of my Pasos entries to get an idea of what the classes are like.  Punctuality is improving and I more or less keep their attention.  According to the pre-test (taken in order to measure if they actually learn anything in my classes) an astonishing number of them believe that showering after sex and the pull-out method are effective forms of birth control. 

2)      I help out at my health post, mainly through computer work, making posters for their parades, being an extra pair of hands when they go to the caserios, and by giving talks about anemia during their official trainings for teachers and health promoters.

3)      Starting Monday, twice a month I will be teaching an English/acting class to the 4^th graders of Huantar.  Their teacher approached me several times and is a wonderfully friendly and competent seeming woman.  I’m pretty excited for this actually, because every time I walk into the elementary school about twenty kids run towards me screaming Senorita Keisi, hugging me, and literally cheering when I enter the room.  It’s a good self-esteem booster, and let’s be real, I plan to take advantage of that shit as long as I can.

4)      I’m also the unofficial youth center of Huantar, providing cards, drawing material (Thanks Aunt Judy!), and computer games like PacMan to the neighborhood kids.

Here’s what I hope to soon be doing:

1)      Expanding the current trash route to include another town and to install a trash bin at the paradero (bus stop, car stop, best place to hitch-hike) at the bottom of the hill

2)      Start weekly or bi-monthly movie nights in the municipality where popcorn and kettle corn is for sale, and where the profits go towards buying things the community wants/needs (like a bookshelf for the preschool)

3)      Viviendas Saludables. 

And that about sums it up folks.

Besos!

Let's Talk About Self-Esteem

About four weeks ago, I started my Pasos Adelante classes.  Pasos is a course meant to train youth between the ages of 12 and 17 about sexual health, HIV/AIDS prevention, birth control methods, and general leadership skills. I currently have 25 kids who I teach during their normal tutoría class (which is meant to teach the same sorts of topics, but due to the lack of training for the teachers, appears to often become a second recess).  This week, we worked on self-esteem.  What is it?  Why is it important?  How is it affected?  How can we protect it? How does having high or low self-esteem affect how we make decisions?

To start things off, we played a game of sorts.  Everyone blew up a balloon and then tied it to their ankle.  They were then told that they had to try to step on other people’s balloons while protecting their own.  The expected chaos ensued:

We then did an activity where a heart was drawn and then filled with blown-up balloons.  I explained that each balloon represented something that affected my self-esteem—the love of my parents, my friendships, my grades in school.  What happens to my self-esteem when my mother says I’m “malcriada” (a word that translates to spoiled, badly raised, misbehaving, and all-around bad)?  Well that balloon gets popped that’s what, to a very loud and attention-getting effect. When my friend says something mean about me behind my back? POP.  When I get a bad grade on a test? POP.

After the kids come up with other ways of damaging self-esteem, we move on to whether or not self-esteem can be rebuild.  If the heart will ever be filled up with balloons again.  Of course it can! And the new balloons, which are a different color from the originals, are stronger balloons.  A self-esteem that was gone down and back up is an experienced, strong self-esteem.

And finally, we end with an activity where each student has a piece of paper taped to their backs.  Their fellow students have to go around and write something NICE on each of the papers.  There were some issues with students who chose to ignore the nice part. But overall, it worked.  Nice things were written and hopefully they left the class with a little bounce in their step.  More likely they just left feeling about the same, but hey it’s the spirit of things, no?

Besos!

D'aw

My host sister thought that the cat had a cough when really she was just purring. D’aw. 

They Killed the Pig (May 10th, 2014)

So as I wrote before, my family killed the pig.  They asked if Lauren and I wanted to watch the actually pig-killing, but we gracefully declined.  But just because we didn’t see it, doesn’t mean we didn’t hear it.  In case anyone’s curious, pigs scream when their throats are cut and the screams are loud enough to wake a person up.

By the time we were awake, the pig was very dead and very much in the patio:

The next step was to move it over to a wooden platform where the cleaning process could begin.  Cleaning the pig meant running a hose over it while my host sister Lesslye and the neighbor kid Cosme scraped the skin with knives to get the dirt off.  Nicoll joined in with her nails:

Mid-way through this process my host dad peeled off a chunk of skin and offered it to me with a plate of salt.  Apparently, the pig had been blowtorched for about an hour before hand and this was the classic Peruvian first bite.  Well, regardless of your gut instincts, you never really know unless you try, right?

After everyone had gotten their fill of pig skin, the butchering began: 

Fun Peruvian fact: One of the ears of the pig goes to the person who actually struck the killing blow, in this case of father of my host dad.

Besos!

Addendum: May 27^th, 2014.  My host family doesn’t have a refrigerator, so for the past two weeks or so the pig has been hanging in our kitchen, at perfect forehead –hitting height I might add, treated with herbs and salt and drying.  But entirely successful because yesterday I saw my host mom picking out the maggots from the slowly spoiling meat.  I will be abstaining from pork for the foreseeable future. 

My Friend’s Here, My Friend’s Here! (May 10th, 2014)

There’s a scene from Tina Fey’s Bossypants when she describes how she felt when Amy Poehler came to SNL—essentially “My friend’s here, my friend’s here!”  That pretty much sums up how I felt when Lauren, the volunteer from Huari, came up to Huantar.

My host family had been pushing for a while to have my fellow dark-siders come up to Huantar to visit, and this weekend was not only Mother’s Day, but also my host sister Nicoll’s seventh birthday.  There was only thing for it—Celebrate!

So they killed the pig.

But before the pig killing occurred, my family and I got into a tizzy about having a visitor.  My host mom swept and reorganized the upstairs, and I swept my room, put up some new decorations, and, to top it all off, I showered.  We were pulling out all the stops.

I don’t think I realized how excited I was to have someone visit my town.  I wanted everything to be perfect; I wanted to show off where I lived and the people I lived with.  I had to stop myself from telling random people on the street that my friend was coming.  And I’m fairly certain I might have skipped through the streets at some point.  Internally I had hung a banner across the entrance to the town saying “Welcome to Huantar Lauren!”

Huantar is fairly tranquilo—Lauren in fact was told this by practically everyone we ran into in fact.  The day’s itinerary involved walking around town and walking through the countryside (mountainside?).  We walked throughout the town and to the sites.  We hit up the mirador and the tree on the hill.  And since there was another gringa in town I finally got some shots of me in Huantar:

We walked and we talked and I just kept on smiling.  The weather and the birds conspired to make Huantar especially lovely.  The sun shone down on green fields of wheat and corn.  The birds chirped merrily as we walked along, and the clouds in the distance briefly parted to let the Cordillera Blanca shine on through.

And to top the evening off, we ate some Dark Side of the Rainbow Skittles (ever so appropriate to eat on the Dark Side of the Mountain):

The next morning we ate breakfast with a family down the street that owns a parrot named Polly.  Polly very much enjoyed eating Lauren’s fingers:

I wanted to write about this because having someone visit me made things feel so much more real. Here I am, living in a strange land, and most of the time I feel at home.  But to have someone who also spoke English, who also is living in a strange land, come visit me, made things feel slightly less foreign.  For once I was the resident expert on all things Huantar.  I’m working here and for the next two years am a part of this community and it felt so nice to be able to share that with someone else.

Besos!

Room Improvements (May 9th, 2014)

In preparation for my friend coming (See next post for more information on that topic), I decided to do some home improvements, Peace Corps-Perú style.  Check it out:

During the Carnaval parade in Huari, the car that “Queen” Lauren was riding on was decorated with a ton of masks like these.  At the end of the day everyone was grabbing them, so I was grabbed one too. 

A little reminder of home and a little reminder of what I’m doing here.

The continuing saga of Kassel’s wall

Say it loud, say it proud.

I bought a plant.  Its name is Archie.  And sadly, succulents don't do well in my room.

Besos!

The Latest in Peruvian Fashion

Flea Bite Ankle Bracelets:

Easy as pie to make—just add fleas!

Besos!

Colombia and Huanchaco

Some pictures of my vacation in Cartagena, Colombia and Huanchaco, Perú:

Besos!

The room I stayed at in Cartagena.  Yes, things are actually white there. 

The skyline as we headed out to the island

Close-up of the mangroves we paddled through

The Alpens out on the water in a small canoe

Turquoise waters

The foliage in the center of the hotel

Some of the architecture.  The hotel was originally a convent for nuns. 

The pool.  Need I say more?

The Cartagena skyline, this time from the fort walls

One of the original cannons

The tunnels within the fort.  When originally built, there was no artificial light (obviously), and Colombian/Spanish soldiers would hide in the dark corners, waiting to jump and surprise stab the invaders/pirates.

On the walls that surround the Old City

Modern Cartagena seen over the century-old walls

Storefront

Street Bookstores

The sun setting on our last night

The famous balconies of the Old City

Heading towards the Plaza de Armas

Huanchaco, La Libertad, Peru:

One of the ruins from La Luna near Trujillo in La Libertad

The sun setting on my last night of vacation