28 Mayo 2011 take two

Today, I rushed back to Madrigal to enjoy the festivities of San Isidro. Apparently this catholic saint was a farmer, so they celebrate him here by blessing their work bulls. They strap their horns together as if they are going to the fields, decorate them with flowers and parade through the plaza. A father came into town to bless the bulls, and their owners. With a funny face he threw water on my head and walked away. Juana wanted me to dress in the traditional attire and show the bulls in the competition, but she just looked so darling already dressed up I had to resist this time. I promised, next year. And, I would gladly.

Don Juan y Doña Juana won second place in the handsomest bulls contest. You might have wondered why I call Hercules (our black bull) my enamorado or boyfriend, but he is a handsome devil!

During the parade I had to choke back tears a couple times. The community’s pride for their cattle is formidable. Even the young woman my age who owns only one young cow walked tall. I tried to think of a comparison in Western culture. Perhaps owning a house or a car carries similar pride. But most of us don’t actually own houses or cars, we make payments on them our entire lives. And, there is definitely something to say for tending to a living creature every single day without fail. The connection between the animal and the human built over years also has to contribute to the fulfillment of owning livestock.

As the alcohol and chicha started to appear I left my post watching over Hercules y Pompeye to Roxana and took advantage of the fact that the entire community was congregated. I played a bit of the politician shaking hands, and kissing babies and bulls (oh, the shame), and chugging invited chicha. Then, handing out letters of invitation to different events coming up in the next couple weeks (greenhouse project meeting, PreNatal anti-teen-pregnancy workshop, In Service Training in Lima, etc).

As my host mother and father started drinking more, Roxana and I took responsibility over the bulls and walked them back to the house to tie up in the garden for the night. As we arrived at the house a neighbor saw the two skinny little women with the massive bulls and decided he should help us un-unite them. Even after a year, people still get a kick out of me handing the animals and speaking quechua commands at them. Sometimes I think my most important job here is entertaining my neighbors.

As the bulls munched on corn stalks Roxana sat down for tea and sudoku (or new favorite evening activity, we are getting pretty quick!). Señora Benilda knocked on my door around 8 because she heard I had free reading glasses, which I do. The dentists had left a small handful of brand new reading glasses behind as a donation and there have now been 3 individuals fitted with the glasses closest to the prescription they need. I ended up giving her a book to read from my collection (Ibañez, a favorite Spanish author of mine) and we sat looking at video and photos from my birthday last month. Sra Benilda danced the night away that night, and was just tickled to see video of herself.

This delightful day was wrapped up with apple fritter frying. Roxanna makes a delicious fried dough, and I thought it would be a good idea to add apple and cinnamon. Because it would have been rude not to share our dinner with Benilda, we were still a little hungry and stuffed ourselves with more tea and homemade apple fritters; A sublime way to send us both to the pillow after a sublime day.

28 Mayo 2011

Peace Corps regional meeting yesterday.
Mixing Pisco sours in a waterbottle to celebrate Mario and Tim´s birthdays.

Now, the boring nitty gritty: buying the supplies for the after-school program and setting up the space.

on the calendar:
greenhouse building meeting tomorrow and monday
world map mural painting all week.

26 Mayo 2011

I can’t decide if I should pull the centipede off my wall and feed it to the chickens, or if I want to continue to watch his journey across my room for the next few days.
What a conundrum.
I brought a loaf of bread back from Arequipa for my family. This is regularity as there are no ovens here and by the time bread makes it to our village it is stale. But, this time, I bought delicacy 5-grain bread for them. I gave it to them yesterday for breakfast. Today, when I went to get eggs for my breakfast I asked my host mother if she wanted anything. “Pansitos”- ‘bread’. At first I thought I misheard her, and then I saw the empty bread bag on the floor in the place where we cook.

Another volunteer forwarded me a fascinating article about world hunger and food security. They tell a short story about a man in West Java, Indonesia.
“Pak Solhin himself survived on the roughly 9 pounds of subsidized rice he got every week from the government and on the fish he caught at the nearby lake… … In the week before we last spoke with him, he had eaten two meals a day for four days, and just one for the other three.”
I can’t think of one time when my host family had more than one meal a day. A couple slices of bread and tea for breakfast (is that considered a meal?is a loaf a meal?), a full plate of rice, potatoes, and some sort of meat or broth mid afternoon, and then maybe a couple slices of bread for dinner.

I have found that here, it isn’t that there is a lack of food. Rice, potatoes, and corn are plentiful and sold at market to buy cell phones and television sets. The problem isn’t that people don’t feel full at the end of the day, the problem lies in the fact that they are eating the wrong kinds of food, depriving them of the nutrients necessary to be successful, healthy adults. And the priorities are all fuced up (in my humble opinion). As this article perspicaciously writes, development experts and policymakers need to completely re-imagine the way we think about hunger. Money needs to be poured less into funding bringing food to communities, and more into teaching them how to grow the foods their body needs.


I was sitting on a comvi last week and a man was venting to a neighbor in harsh Spanish/Quechua about the presidential candidates. Ollanta has been rumored to possibly kick everything that isn’t Peruvian out of the country including big businesses and NGOs.
“NGOs have made Peruvians lazy. We used to know how to farm, now city-dwellers sit on their butts begging the NGOs to give them food and work. They are dependent and it is disgusting. We need the NGOs out. NGOs have made the Peruvian people weak.”

There was a young man named Travis that was touring Peru for a few months. I met him about a month ago before he headed back to The States where he farms in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Among the many things he taught me, he shared a story about wheat farming in The States. Because farming is no longer economically logical, the US government supplements farmers to grow basics like wheat. He says this has created a surplus in wheat that the government decided to donate to countries in Latin America, like Peru. But, because these donations create an excess of wheat, it drives down the price of wheat in the market, and farmers here can no longer afford to grow and sell it here. This creates a dependency on the United States because few farmers grow wheat in Peru anymore. Unconsciously (or consciously), our government has successfully found ways to stay a superpower through similar methods all over the world.


I am hungry.


http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/more_than_1_billion_people_are_hungry_in_the_world?page=full

24 Mayo 2011

As I was boarded back on the bus from Arequipa to Madrigal, something was pulling me. While every minute at the beach was inexplicably enjoyable, and I know it’s magnetism will pull me back there again, right now, Madrigal is where I belong. On the breach/beach, keeping my brain in a relaxed state was a challenge and a game. Hiding notes and calendars from myself to keep the worry out of my mind were my only successful tactics. I don’t know how many times Tiffyn had to say to me with exasperated and bored eyes knowing the answer to her question, “Are you talking about work again?”

Above the crappy, dirty lifestyle, this work is all I am right now. And while it is slow going, it is all I can be and do. There is no questioning it. La pituca knows she is not perfect, and I might whine and fight it sometimes. But here I am, and here I will keep coming back until I can feel I have offered all that I can, even if that offering is nothing like I expected it to be when I moved here.

People tell me the lifestyle we live here is hard, dirty, unhealthy, etc. But, because I identify with it, because I feel I belong here right now, the things that would bother others, don´t get to me. I feel better here. This is me.

Now, I sit with my head resting/bouncing in the empty seat next to me, my buttocks in my seat, and my heals in the air resting on the dirty window that only has ample stars to show me.

20 Mayo 2011

The last four days have been nothing but poor man’s comfort. We have been helping out around the hostel ´Las Terrazas´and become close friends with the owners. We brought real coffee from Arequipa and peanut butter that everyone who works there has enjoyed. The woman who works in the kitchen’s daughter has enjoyed learning how to eat fresh coconut, and Susan, Robbi, and Paul have treated us like princesses.
Susan and Robbi have a the most beautiful beach hut I have ever loved. They run out of water sometimes, and Linsey lets them cook and bathe at the hostel in exchange for help serving guests and offering surfing and snorkeling lessons. Robbi and Susan took us out everyday to familiarize us with the surfboard, and every night we cooked together. When a good friend of Robbi arrived from Lima, he upped the bar with generosity and grace getting us fish to make ceviche for lunch every day, and tuna or parrot fish by night. Linsey is a fantastic cook and spoiled my tastebuds beyond belief with every surprise she had up her sleeve. Every night we danced and talked away at our private little party.
Somehow, all seven of us have become forever friends…

Tiffyn and I send thanks and love to the beautiful people of the north, Linsey, Walter, Susan, Robbi, and Paul.

17 Mayo 2011

The last bus ride literally dropped us off in the middle of nowhere. After being greenhouse affect toasted for hours, the driver announced Punta Sal, and we rolled out into the dessert sand a little nervous. A mototaxi scooped us up, and we asked him to take us to the least expensive and cleanest hotel in Punta Sal.
This decision, was the best decision Tiffyn or I have made in years…

16 Mayo 2011

Starting to lose our minds on the busses we ask the attendant to put the subtitles of the movie on in English. She politely agrees. It took us a good half an hour to figure out why we couldn’t understand the movie… every other sentence had words in Russian. As we laughed at our ridiculousness the guy across the isle rolls his seat back completely pinning in the rider behind him. We looked at each other in silence with complete fear that this was just about to happen to us.
Tiffyn decides it would be hilarious to tell the guy in front of me to roll his seat back and pin me in but not to let his wife roll back hers under any circumstances.
“oh yeah? Go ahead. How you gonna talk to him without your translator?”
Then, Tiffyn demonstrates to me an intended sign language of,
“pay you 5 soles if you, seat, back, no tell wife”
which to me looked more like “5 soles, to go to back of bus with me, don’t tell wife”

Let me tell you. With our 30 hours on buses craziness, we laughed ourselves to sleep as our fellow riders pinned us both in.

15 Mayo 2011

Now, it is officially vacation.
22 hours of bus rides done, we arrive in Lima. The second we step off the bus the pollution fills our nostrils. We headed to Kennedy Park and the beach and dead fish smell took the place of the pollution.
After a cup of coffee and a cigarette Tiff was ready to get out of this dirty city. We both dreamed of the beach… and hopped on our second series day-long bus rides.

“Wait, you farted? With all these smells in the air, you really coulda let that slide.”

13 Mayo 2011

As Tiffyn and I were relaxing in our first bath in a week at the volcanic springs I got a series of exasperated phone calls.
“Where are you? We need you here.”
“I told you I needed to bath and wouldn’t be there for an hour.”
“We need you here now.”

As I am begging Tiff to hurry out of her first moment of cleanliness in days, she poignantly notes, “You let people walk all over you sometimes.”
“I like helping, and they need my help.”“Yeah, but you also need a bath, you stink. They can wait.”

With nervous energy due to my tardiness, I finally arrived at the meeting, refreshed and ready to do the work they needed and everything was fine. Thus began the quickest translating I have ever done in my life.

A sister of the catholic church had run a soup kitchen in Yanque for years. It fed a large community of children for decades (my apologies for not knowing the specific details). When the sister passed away, the director of Quechua Benefit promised her he would make sure her work was continued. The local church immediately took over the responsibilities and QB didn’t worry about it. In less than a year the church lost their funders and could no longer manage the soup kitchen, so now, QB wants to gracefully step in and make sure what needs to get done gets done. My job: translate between the QB director and the father of the church and make sure communication was clear and no one felt their toes were being stepped on.

What I realized this day: there really is something odd about my ears. I mean, we figured it out when I was little that I was a freak that had some sort of relative/perfect pitch, and I know I am an audio learner and need to read out-loud to make studying effective, but this meeting was just ridiculous. My auditory loop was out of control. The average phonological loop is extremely limited, especially with primacy and recency effects that you find in speaking language (in other words the stuff that comes before and after makes you forget what is in the middle). Somehow I could allow the words of one language to continually enter my ear and my mouth would translate it as it came allowing for no retroactive interference. Just barely speaking over the speaker, with no lost time, the listener could get a translated version then speak directly back. I was like a little computer chip they could put in their ear. Of course I had to stop a couple times for vocabulary I didn’t know, but the whole meeting was so important and went so fluidly I felt proud when I left. It was fun to be the person to ensure communication between two parties so different from one another.

There was a This American Life Episode quite a few years ago about a man who translated for political meetings in the middle east. He talked about how intense the responsibility is to translate properly. The fate of a nation could be in the words you decide to use. There is so much trust involved in choosing a translator. I am not a human dictionary by any means, and could never be a translator by profession. But, the reading of anther person, in a second, that is so necessary in translating, is a bit of a challenge I have come to enjoy.

11 Mayo 2011 take two

Since Tiff and I had gotten in to my site, I had been running around to my usual duties. I promised Tiff that after my workshop with the teachers, I had to go to the municipality for another meeting, then I would be all hers the rest of our vacation.
The majority of the secondary school teachers didn’t show up for the workshop (as has been the latest trend), but every Primary school teacher was there. We practiced playing nonformal educational games; good methods to link information to the emotion and senses to facilitate better memory recall. The teachers had fun laughing at each other and had good questions on how to apply them in their classrooms.

As we walked away from the school and I started shifting my materials for the municipality meeting I got a phone call, “can you translate for a very important meeting Friday in Chivay?” I looked at Tiffyn and she nodded equally irritated as supportive.

Tonight, the Municipality actually handed me the cash to purchase paint for the world map in the primary school. HUGE success!
We start as soon as I get back from vacation.

11 Mayo 2011

Today we had the third round of a letter exchange with one of my classes here and a classroom in the states. There might have been the slightest of a wet glimmer in Tiffyn´s eye when she observed the students excitement and curiosity. It was a good morning.

There is nothing like a wonderful vacation to make you not want to go back to your Peace Corps assigned site.

here are a couple teaser photos of the wonderful time tiff and I had on the beach relaxing, surfing (well, learning how to), eating, talking, and making new forever-friends...



Can you see the ocean behind us?



more to come on this fabulous vacation of 92 hours on buses and 4 full days in paradise...

Donate to the project!

we have recieved some fabulous donations.
If you are interested in helping buy some books, or just curious about what I am up to, this is the official site to donate to the Madrigal, Peru ´´Fly to the Stars´´ afterschool program and library:
https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=527-040




This is the website for another NGO that I work with often called Quechua Benefit. They have supported projects in the canyon of varios themes from doctor and dental campaigns, to supporting small business development, to getting blankets to newborns. This is an orphanage they are building just down the street from me that still needs some donors to complete the already begun construction. http://quechuabenefit.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=category.display&category_ID=66

12 Mayo 2011

It is funny how this work and this experience has released me from my past.

It has taken a year to forget what fills the boxes in my parents’ basement. These things that I was so latched on to that I could not sell them in a garage sale sit waiting for me. Even from the other side of the world I still hold on to these “things” physically speaking. But, emotionally, I don’t even know what they are anymore. Through anger, sadness, pain, beauty, simplicity, and happiness I have just begun to find some sort of balance in the here and the now. Pardon the cheesiness, but after a short period where my mind actually might have been lost, I have begun to come out of a little cocoon, My third birth in a sense (or debatably the completion of the second 4-year-long rebirth).
For the first time, I can look at a cactus and acknowledge its shape to be that of a dancer with peace in my stomach. I can handle the idea of being friends with ex-lovers. I can be alone and not lonely. I can be possession-less and yet accomplish. There is so much more learning and growing to be had, and now I am free to begin.

11 Mayo 2011

We got the World Connect grant.

A couple months ago I was writing grant applications like a crazy woman and organizing social counterparts to develop and support the afterschool program and future library space. Yesterday, I recieved an e-mil stating that one donor in particular has approved the entire amount requested for the afterschool program, and, they can get the money to us in about two weeks! This means that additional donors will be supplying shelving and books for the space we will be meeting in daily to develop a library.

Beyond exciting. There are no words. Thank you World Connect.


However this grant award carries more than rejoicing for me.
It also carries feelings of doubt ad insufficiecy that come with charity. Have I developed this program optimally? Is there enough community support?
Then the what ifs... what if no students show up daily? What if they don´t create the habbit of going to the library daily and it sits empty? What if this program just isn´t a success in raising world awareness and self esteem?

Fortunately my confidence in my research in developing the program, and the community individuals that are excited as well kick my doubts out of my way and I plow on with paperwork and project implementation.

Here we go! Cross your fingers for us!

10 Mayo 2011

I have unfairly unloaded a lot of anger and sadness onto my darling Tiffyn and she had rightfully smacked me around a little bit. We stay up for hours just talking and laughing, working things about this place out in our heads, together. She sits patiently through my classes in the high school and teacher workshops (even though she doesn´t understand the spanish), then, she pulls off my Peace Corps professional hat and we laugh...

8 Mayo 2011

Picking up Tiffyn in Lima and dragging her back to my site becuase I have work to do this week.
Knowing that someone I love is going to get to see my site and understand better what is going on in my life is soothing beyond belief.

Laughing with my girl is just what the doctor perscribed for this crazy, confusing, challenging period in my life that I don´t think I am handling too well.

5 Mayo 2011

This morning I met with a the nurse, Janeth to present a campaign program we have for the High School. We had a meeting with the NGO PreNatal this past weekend, and would like to do a workshop with the adolescents of Madrigal about planned pregnancies instead of adolescent ones. The program we would be using really is fabulous for many reasons 1) it is already developed, we just have to follow a well written script 2) it has been successful in other towns in Peru 3) It doesn’t talk about abstinence or condoms or sex specifically (which freak out Catholic Latinos), it discusses what happens to your life when you have a baby, and how to healthfully prepare for having your own child.
The principal of the high school was mostly onboard, but only for the older classes, which is fine. That means, in less than a month Janeth and I will actually have half the high school in our hands for an entire afternoon to talk about things their parents and teachers are afraid to talk to them about. Good stuff!

So, Mothers Day is a big deal in Latin America. A really big deal. Probably as big as Christmas or Easter. Both the primary and secondary school had a huge assembly where the kids put on little dances, acts and what-not. All the mothers came. I have to say surrounded by tacky artwork, poems and presents, I still found myself a little emotional for the happy moms. Yup, you know that biological clock is ticking into place when I feel left out in a room of 20-30 year old moms. I was asked to be the “madrina” or godmother-type-figure to a few of the kids during an award ceremony. The kids and moms were just so darn proud as I poked their award buttons through their little sweaters.

Since then I have been thinking about how appreciative I am to my mother, father, and entire family. Part of the beauty of Madrigalanians are the strong ties to family and tradition that a majority of Latin America has left in the dust in a conquest of modernism or “coolism”. This impoverished struggle in South American cities has left the culture a very fend-for-yourself mentality with formal familial relationships. But, in Madrigal, the parents do indeed talk to their kids. From what I have observed they have very close, intimate relationships, maybe purely because they spend so much time together in the one bedroom house or working in the fields. The love and affection for each other is not what lacks here. And, seeing the stark comparison of these relationships to city life relationships makes me appreciate my family in the States all the more. Everyone from Cathy on my mom’s side to Diane on my dad’s makes an effort to keep me in their lives even from the other side of the world. You all are such a beautiful strong base for me and my brother to build ourselves from. I cannot thank you all enough for your support from the moment our little eyes opened until now.

4 Mayo 2011

I spent the past few days pushing my butt a little to prepare the teacher workshop for this week. When I arrived at the high school today the teachers had forgotten the program was scheduled for today and were occupied preparing for other things. I ended up meeting with the principal for a while. He seemed a little embarrassed and was hypersensitive to the fact that I might get upset. While I was disappointed in the lack of responsibility from the teachers, I wasn’t mad at them. In fact them showing up for the past few weeks on time was more than I anticipated. But talking to Gregorio about his concerns about his school was great.
To be honest, ultimately, I did leave the school a little disheartened. Not for me, but for the fact that I am spoon-feeding them and if the teachers don’t show an improvement, how can we ever expect the kids to? Teachers set standards, students live up to them.

But, those feelings were all buried when I arrived for the workshop in the afternoon at the primary school. All the teachers were there and ready and extremely interactive and curious. The goal of this meeting was to teach the teachers activities and games they can use the classroom to make learning more interactive. So all we did was play games based on what they had learned the weeks prior, and they really did very well. The primary school teachers are such a great group. I am so proud and appreciative of them.

3 Mayo 2011

“Never let myself love like that again.”

I have allowed so much of this Peace Corps experience to mold who I am. I honed in on the attributes I wanted to hold on to dearly (optimism, motivation, etc), and allowed the less defining qualities to self-modify.

Bertrand Russel said something about fools and fanatics being sure of themselves, and the wiser [human] full of doubts. By that logic I would be unbelievably wise. So why is it that my openness and curiosity have hurt me at this point? In an attempt to understand and accept I have been punched in the gut repeatedly. It isn’t weakness that allowed me to return to the punches, but a strength and longing to conquer it. Apparently the unwillingness to punch back lost this 6 month war.

Relieved that I will no longer have an upset stomach or need to question the sincerity of my partner I step again into the world of singledom and independence.

“Yeah, I know that I was warned. Still it was not what I hoped.”

Today I am workshopping with the teachers again. Today, we apply more what we have learned together. In other words, we are playing games all day. Practicing incorporating nonformal-ed into the classroom and playing! Time to put on the heals and be professional ☺.

2 Mayo 2011

On the bus ride back to Madrigal there was a faint burning smell. The stench actually woke me up from a comfy little nap. Fortunately, the driver pulled over to attempt to render the situation to no avail. Our bus was done. On the side of a cliff all 50 passengers waited for Arequipa City to send another bus to pick us up. With my ipod battery getting low, and having lost the last book I picked up, the fear of ultimate boredom kicked in. for about 45 minutes I sat and watched the Sun set behind the silhouette of a cactus. The driver knocked me out of my calm trance as his round self waddled over to pee on my cactus.
Two hours later the rescue bus arrived. When I popped out the door into the cool fresh air I realized we were stopped much more literally on the side of the cliff than I knew, wheels inches from the edge. Thank god I did not know previously, or I would have been a nervous wreck. Pure blackness dropped off next to the wheels of the bus, but the smell of budding cactus that must have been near by cloaked in black filled my nose.
This is the first time I have been in South America for the start of winter. It is amazing to see all the constellations one is so familiar with flipped on their side. It feels like the crazy mirror house at a fair. The constellations are so unfamiliarly distorted it disorients you.

Funny, how in the middle of quite a bit of disorientation and lonliness I have found solace in the Peruvian friends I have made in Madrigal. So many of them have come to know a little bit about me, and all remember my name. I ran into such a heavy handful of friends on this bus that it is hard to even think I could be lonely. Yeah, we operate on different playing fields, but the curiosity and affection for one another gets stronger with every interaction. It is so rare that I want to escape site, but when I do, they pull me right back in so lovingly it is hard to think the doubt ever crossed my mind.

24 Abril 2011

Saturday night not-so-quickly turned into Easter morning. With the sunrise the church opened it's doors and a giant mountain of candles being carried by a rumored 500 individuals made its way into the street.



Just as the brilliant float moved into the Ayacucho plaza and the sun rose from the horizon a small Jesus figure popped out from the peak of the candles. Hillariously amused, the volunteers and I didn't notice that the float was just about to trample us. Smooshed in the crowd and unable to move in the slightest we all doubled over laughing as our bodies we mashed together out of the way. The float really was beautiful and heavy. The individuals underneath were chanting "si, se puede" which is kind of like a "yes, we can" type phrase.

This was the best way I could have asked to spend my Easter away from my family. Good Friday service was always my favorite, and i was sad to have missed it. But, this parade celebrating Jesus resurection brought me back in touch with my family and Christian roots. Thank you for that, Ayacucho.

Then it was bed time and more buses to head back to Arequipa.

24 abril 2011

Saturday night we were encouraged to stay up all night and watch the festivities of Semana Santa in Ayacucho.
It involved a lot of fireworks and me eating a ton of cotton candy.

23 Abril 2011

On Saturday the volunteers got together to see the traditional festival's running of the bulls. As we asked people where the running of the bulls was going to take place they reported, repeatedly, the plaza. Now, dont get me wrong, that is cool and all, but how the heck were these people going to let bulls run loose in their beautiful plaza? And, do we really want to be there for it? To our simple minds it seemed just a little bit dangerous. But... we went anyways.
So, what is the running of the bulls in Ayacucho? A stampede of irritated "torros" mindlessly tromping the streets of the city? Not quite. When we saw one man on a horse ride by with a bull tied by the horns to a rope in his hands we thought that was the warm-up act. Silly us. There were four bulls run by in this fashion. Just as a bull would get dangerously close to an observer the horse rider would yank the bull away. Mildly frightening, distinct from Pamplona or Peñiscola, Spain.

Between the visit from each bull and his liege the Peruvian observers in the plaza started to do something all too familiar. Just like I had observed in Spain, there were Peruvians building human castles!
Here is a photo that I took (that I actually won an award for in a UTexas photo contest, toot, toot) in Barcelona of the "Castell" a Spanish friend of mine was a part of:



Here is a photo of the non-professional Peruvian Castells:



So, what did the group of 15 Peace Corps Volunteers decide to do?



Yup, the smallest, yours truly, was thrown up top. Because we were the tallest three tiered tower, we quickly became minor celebrities in the crowd.
But the three-tiered tower was just too stable, and we had not seen anyone build a four tiered one. So, we put our engineering capabilities to the test and started building again. Once the third level of human bricks went up he crowd cheered because we had two people at the level that I was previously at as the peak. Then, as I started to climb up the crowd recognized me and went a little wild in anticipation.



Just as I got my knees on the back of the third tier, the entire castel gracefully collapsed landing us in a mountain of uninjured bodies. What a rush!

22 Abril 2011

This day is when the festivities of Semana Santa really began.
The volunteers and I took a bus out to a small pueblo called Quinoa outside Ayacucho to do some hiking.
Then we hit some Wari ruins and a small museum on the way back.
It really is an experience to think about where you are standing being where this war ridden tribe lived 1,500 years ago. It was obvious why they chose to build where they did. It was a plateau in the middle of a valley. Not only beautiful, but you can see everything from the protective wall circling the fort. In the museum we were able to see a mummy (or it might have been a replication, the placard was -purposefully?- not clear), and some deformed skulls. These skull deformations were traditional for the leaders of the tribe. There are even some skulls in the museum that show signs of brain surgeries! I can NOT get over that! Unbelievable!

I heard that while we were hiking waterfalls and ancient housing that the Semana Santa festival continued with a mock crucifixion in the plaza. I am kind of glad we missed that.

20 Abril 2011

traveling...

All the volunteers that came to my site to celebrate with me piled onto the only bus out of Madrigal at 3am. Exhausted from the fun evening we slept the 6 1/2hour ride into Arequipa. Then Mario and I hoped on another series of buses towards Ayacucho for our Semana Santa- Holy Week vacation.

Two days later, exhausted and uncomfortable we arrived and met up with other Peace Corps volunteers from the North that we had never met before. A little cranky I hit the cold showers in our unrightously expensive hostel and then napped.
Feeling a little lonely I wondered the streets of the city to familiarize myself and went to bed early.

19 Abril 2011

Today was a heavenly birthday and an unforgetable day in the story of my life.
Cesar had surprised me and come in the night before carrying homemade sushi and wine. Delicious.
We woke early and joined my family in the kitchen sipping on warmed morning milk.

After tending to the chickens we picked the rabbit that would be the day's dinner and prepared him for the solar oven. Surprisingly, they don't skin the small animals, they di-fur them so they can fry the skin. We treated the rabbit just like a chicken, thanked him for his life, slit his throat, stuck his whole body in boiling water, then pulled out his fur in clumps. The little guy was cut into fourths, rubbed with spicy aji pepper and garlic then set up in the solar oven. He roasted in his own juices all day while I went to work.




I had two teacher workshops scheduled for the day on nonformal education and how to integrate activities that are emotionally and kinesthetically stimulating into the classroom. They went very well, but there was definatly some frustration expressed by the professors in a lack of funding to purchase supplies to play games. The gov't supplies the building and the horrible ministry of education books, but no more. The teachers and/or the students have to pay for papers, copies, markers, pencils, tape, chalk, everything. Getting supplies for games can become costly quickly. So, we decided to extend this workshop for the next week when I would bring them a large collection of games that cost nothing but preparation (like jeopardy, or the human knot).
Just as the Primary school workshop was beginning the comvi arrived with my good friend volunteers ready to eat and celebrate my day with me. They sat in on my workshop and were able to give me very good constructive criticism and take some information back to their sites for their social counterparts.
Following the workshop the professors, very sneakily, coaxed me into their "teacher's" lounge and surprised me with tea, music, and a delicious lucuma and chocolate cake. It was such a lovely surprise. I felt so appreciated!
The professors and volunteers danced until the sun went down, and with hungry bellies we headed back to my house to check on the rabbit. You could smell it from outside the patio. It was perfectly baked from the 5 hours in the sun before the afternoon clouds came in. Thank you to Dr. Hallquist for providing me with the resources for solar oven cooking!


We put potatoes on for "papas chancadas" my host families new favorite side dish-mashed potatoes and sipped on the delicious wine Cesar brought in the night before. As good friends from Madrigal began to appear at the house Mario, Kaysi, and Kelly wipped out a cake they brought from Chivay and the festivities began... traditional style. We ate and bouned around dancing Huatiti into the wee hours of the morning.





The biggest hit of the night was my host father dancing to Billie Jean once we got a few drinks in him...