25 Mayo 2012

We aren't running the after school program right now. I am just opening the doors to the library in the evenings and allowing kids to use the last of the art supplies and books to do their homework.

The recommendations my superiors made about the program were:
1- Do not bring in more books until the people show more effort. perhaps you can organize a book exchange, but don't house more books here until you know the people will protect them.

2- Get anyone to man/woman the library. Even if it is a non-professional, it is a starting point. things can change later if it goes well.

3- Get your hands out of the dough. Flour the committee of women's hands so they are ready, and pass the bowl. Have faith in what you have done, allow them to take the lead.


So, now that I am not teaching on a daily, just keeping order in the library and helping kids find answers to their questions, I feel like I have one real task: to say, "good job".

Everyday the kids come and make art and do their homework completely on their own. Every time they finish something, whether it be a crayon flower, or the definition of "invertebrate" they always want someone to see it and say, "good job".

It is the same with the women. Complimenting them on our work together over the past two years, "you have done such an amazing job" and encouraging their strength and power like crazy so they keep going after I am gone is my occupation right now. It is so important, and so good for them, and so good for me. It is the perfect way to wrap up my service.

26 Mayo 2012

Have you ever sat with sickness?
not gone to the doctor?

For the first time in my life, I experienced an illness, beginning to end, and allowed my body to fight it off itself without modern medication (mainly because i didn't have access to it).

day one.
tired. very tired. unexplainably tired. sore throat. still working

day two
tired. fever. sweats. sore throat. not able to work.

day three.
tired. fever. inflamed, sore throat. can't swallow with out serious focus and intention. headache. forced myself to work

day four.
tired. fever breaks. swollen, sore throat. clogged sinuses. headache. able to work

day five.
less tired. no fever. red, swollen throat, horrible cough. sinus headache.

day six.
functioning normally. sore throat. still hard to swallow. nasty, phlegmy cough

day seven.
the throat is less sore. still coughing up phlegm and battling less-intense headaches.

Every morning before heading to the loom mamai juana was keeping tabs of my cough. From her kitchen she would auditorily monitor any throat sounds coming from my bedroom and counsel me on herbs and treatment. The most important being that I couldn't come out to the fields with her to weave unless I was sufficiently bundled and my throat scarved (even though it gets as hot as 75degrees midday).

I didn't even know my body could fight off such an illness with just water, herbs, vitamins, and rest. I am proud of and impressed by her for the first time in a long time. More than ever, I am convinced that rest and time are the most healing properties on the planet.

24 Mayo 2012

Peace Corps Youth Development Director, Activities Coordinator, and Volunteer Leader came to Madrigal to meet with the mayor. He confirmed he would be present


he wasn't


they left



I can not make the program sustainable.
So

Me and the committee of women are training mothers and women on the importance of the qualities the program and library provide, and how to be activists.

22 Mayo 2012

the loom

my future blanket

16 Mayo 2012

There was a woman, a guru, who opened an ashram; A place to meditate, a place to find peace.

One day, her friends living there came to her and reported that community members had been saying negative things about the ashram she had founded.  The guru said, “for each positive report I hear about this ashram I will tie a knot on the right side of my scarf. For each negative report, I will tie a knot on the left side of my scarf.”

A few weeks went by with the guru collecting knots.

Her friends came to her one day, and saw that her scarf was full of knots. She removed the scarf from her neck and showed it to them.

“you see, the scarf weighs the same on both sides.” And she hung the scarf around her neck again.

What is not optional is bitterness. I can’t fight that I feel a bitter taste in my mouth and don’t know how to turn it into something sweet anymore.

What is optional, is anger. Anger comes from loss of control, from disempowerment. Both a mentality I define.

Usually, when I feel anger, I chant/pray to channel it. I let it enter me, I feel it, I mean really feel it, and once it has had its way with me and I can recognize where it came from and why it is there, it leaves me on its own. Once the passage is over (whether it be 2 minutes or 2 hours) I am back to myself.  But, lately, the anger just keeps coming and coming. I can’t chant enough to get it to work its way through me, and I have to return to the world half-way through a baptism.

Once upon a time, I used anger as fuel. Now there is so much, it is clogging the engine. Perhaps the engine needs an upgrade, a creative change that converts this energy more efficiently. Perhaps I need to find an alternate source of energy, one very different from juvenile anger.

That seems like a lot of work to do on the self. Not only am I looking for an alternative renewable energy source, but I need to find a way to metabolize the energy thrown at me in a new way.

Perhaps, this is what I came here for; To learn how to carry the knotted scarf.

15 Mayo 2012

So,
I go to the mayor’s office to deliver an official letter requesting his presence for when my bosses come next week. The man has showed me up and lied to me so many times at this point nothing goes undocumented (funny part, documenting everything was his secretary’s idea).

As the secretary is helping some girls use her computer to do some homework assignment, I am patiently waiting and admiring the secretary’s patience with the demanding teenage girls (perhaps I am one of those girls to her too). 

As the secretary is printing out my stupid official letter, the mayor walks in behind me. I didn’t even know he was in town. The last time we spoke was the meeting where his council members talked me in lying circle after lying circle. Neither of us knew how one-another would act today. He knows he lied, and he knows I know he lied. He isn’t a stupid man by any means, just a victim of poverty as much as the kids I work with.

“Hola, Señorita Luz”

I nervously perform an about face, and there we are, nose to nose. He has the most nervous, almost apologetic face I have ever seen on a Peruvian man. He diverts his eyes, straight down, immediately.

“hello, Señor Mayor. Just now I was printing out a letter to request your presence for a meeting when my bosses come down from Lima next week. Do you think you can be here the 24^th?” I smile, a real one. As much a begging smile as a I-have-no-strength-to- give-you-anything-more-than-this smile.

As he turns to his calendar he says, barely joking, “They are going to rip me apart, aren’t they?”

“No, sir, me. They are coming to review my work here. What I have been doing for the past 2 years.” Awkward shared laugh.

He points to the calendar. “Where are we, here we go…”

He points to a date over a week ago.

I point to today’s date. “Ah,” he says “next Thursday then”

“yes sir, you can really be there?”

“I can.”

“wonderful… how is Richard? We miss him at the library. Did he enroll in classes in Arequipa City?”

Then he gives me this kind of smile that I am all too familiar with. When I can’t give someone news they don’t want to hear, I get uncomfortable and smile. When my dog ate my roommate’s flying squirrel years ago, I smiled through lunch as I told him what happened.  I can’t explain it, but I know that smile.

“no…” he smiles.

I give him my confused face.

“he is still in bed. Getting better.”

I have no freaking idea what this means, but experience tells me requesting a medical explanation will get me nowhere.

Not knowing what else to do, the mayor smiles. I hate the sympathy that wells up in me for him at this moment. I want to shove it away, but I let it settle in my chest. What does this father want to hear right now?

“I will send him all the good energy I can, we all hope he gets better soon” and I put my hands in a prayer position.

He scurries away without saying goodbye, still carrying that weird, cold smile.

What do you do with a father struggling with serious personal issues that has absolutely no accessible tools for managing them? What do you do with that man when he is responsible for a town? When he can’t manage his responsibilities, but he can’t step down because he needs the paycheck to pay the medical bills for the accident he caused that killed his mother and critically injured his wife and child? What do you do with that man?

14 Mayo 2012 take two

Last night I walked around town with Elvis and Robert collecting signatures for the library petition. I am thinking how good it is for them to see how to make change happen, and to put the two together with one goal. Elvis, un-popular, bigger but slower than everyone else in his class, insecure- with Robert, also a flunky, but not because he is slow, because his family is also alpaqueros and had him moving schools and pulled out of classes the first 10 years of his life, a great artist, popular, funny, athletic, confident. The funny part is they are both amazing artists, and attentive, caring alpaca herding boys. They really only differ in confidence.

I am doing a very bad job of hiding the fact that I am trying to push them to be friends and encouraging Elvis to speak up. But, they are doing it. Working, laughing together, showing me house to house.

These are the interactions that matter. These moments are why I am here. You may not be able to measure it, and you may never see a tangible effect, but these two boys would never otherwise interact, let alone be important staples in a social cause together.

I was able to walk around town last night when parents were coming back from the fields for one reason, and one reason only: Lucia was wo-maning the library.

This morning when I was ripping myself from my sleeping bag, “Luz, te buscan!”

I waddled to the aluminum door and screamed for joy. Lucia, the young woman who has a degree in education and art that started taking flute lessons so she could be the VALE teacher next year when she graduates, is standing there. We embrace. She and I talk about once a month about the development of the project and the advancement of her studies (she is going to university in Arequia). We monitor and motivate one another with a regular coffee and/or crepe. This is the first time we have seen each other since the drama with the Municipality last month.

I serve her her pulled coffee, black (sans 3 spoonfuls of sugar- a peruvian rarity), and she listens to me rant.

“But, Lu, why don’t you take the program and library to a community that isn’t so resistant? Why don’t you take it to the French NGO’s Cultural Center in Corporaque or the American NGO’s Orphanage in Yanque and start working on it’s implementation there?”

She is right, I can feel how right she is, along with everyone else who has wanted to see me stop torturing myself.

“Because those kids have help.” Is the only excuse I can give her.

Then, she answers her own question, “You are going to do everything you can until the last moment so that you know you did everything you possibly could for these kids.”

“I have to do it like that.”

“I want you to know, that after I graduate in December, I am devoted to the VALE program, whether it be here or wherever. I am in. I want it to live.”

We have to secure a salary for this young woman.