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