New deep thoughts

6/10/2008
Last night we tried anticuchos (cow hearts) on the street in Chosica. They were surprisingly flavorful, a little chewy but actually really good. Today I ate a granadilla. It’s a fruit that looks like caviar on the inside, with little orbs of gooey stuff encasing hundreds of little crunchy, edible seeds. Thing was amazing.

5/10/2008
Globalization is:
-My little niece’s weekly English vocab quizzes in school, for which she studies all week with her mom. Themes include barn animals, colors, fruits and veggies, and emotions. She’s awesome at it, and it’s hilarious to hear her say words like “pineapple” and “sheep” (pronounced “ch’p”).
-The kids in the local locutorio - internet/computer center – pumping tunes like 50 Cent’s “In da Club” alternating with some Nirvana or Prince, while playing World of Warcraft against each other, and probably some kids in the next town over. Maybe even against Steve Gerhard in his basement in Columbus, Ohio. Who knows.
-College sweatshirts from elite American schools: UCLA, Harvard, Georgetown, etc. The most obscure so far has been Marist College.
-Bollywood on TV. In Peru. With songs like “Oh my darling, I love you,” in which the lyrics never ventured beyond the title.
-Cruising through a mall complete with an Apple store, an Ace Hardware, restaurants like Chili’s and TGI Friday’s, and a Payless Shoe Source. Most accepted American dollars.
-(Finally) finding soccer shoes that fit me at said mall, after spending a full afternoon in Chosica a few days before looking for a vendor who sold zapatillas de tamano grande (large sizes). Some of the old ladies took a look at my foot and just laughed.
-Going into Chosica with my sister and brother-in-law my second night here only to step into a DVD vendor’s booth boasting bootlegged versions of all kinds of b-level American action flicks (think Steven Segal), and a tiny TV up in the corner showing a live Queen show circa 1984. Definitely did not expect to see Freddy Mercury prancing around in a wife-beater that night. Also in this category are the random Mellencamp and Springsteen tunes which interrupt the standard salsa and cumbia pumping out of the tiny speakers on the coasters, as well as Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life” being the song of choice at the Miss Chosica pageant the other night.
-Coca leaves, the cultivation of which is the prime target of the “war on drugs.” They also happen to not only constitute the livelihood of thousands of campesions, but also represent an Andean tradition dating way the hell back before white people even knew there was land on this side of the world. Volunteers are strictly prohibited from chewing it, using it in tea, or otherwise engaging in its use.
-Quaker, pronounced “cua-ker.” In the states we know it by a different name: oatmeal. Here they use the brand name. It’s watered down into this sort of chunky, milky breakfast drink. Not a huge fan.

3/10/2008
There are some serious stray dogs in Chacrasana. I’m talking, big, healthy-looking dogs that seem to bark all the time at nothing at all, and growl at pretty much everything that passes them. Easily the best-looking and most frightening strays I’ve ever seen, and they are of all different breeds and mutt-combos. The funny thing is, so far they seem to be all talk. All you have to do is pretend to have a rock in hand – or even just bend down and act like you’re picking one up – and they back right off. It adds a whole new element of danger to jogging, especially when you do it in heavy fog or after dark. Which, a few attempts later, I wouldn’t particularly recommend.

1/10/2008
We don’t get much down-time here, and as a result most of us have been going to bed ridiculously early most nights. I haven’t gone to bed at nine or ten since I was in elementary school, but here you’re so worn out by the end of the day that it’s often all you want to do. I guess it’s not surprising, given our daily schedule which has us in class all day, from eight in the morning straight until five p.m. This is an entirely new concept to those of us who have been used to two classes a day and a nap in-between for four years. It’s gotta be even tougher for those who have been out of school for a while.

And on top of that, you’re working extra hard all day to listen, speak, and really think in Spanish. You get home and your brain is still constantly working its ass off, whether talking to your family, watching telenovelas, reading the paper, listening to music, or playing soccer with the local guys. Not to mention, almost everyone in the group has been sick already, either with gastro-intestinal problems like explosive diarrhea, vomiting, and/or fever (Peruvians call it the bici or “bicycle”), or with the common cold or gripe. To cap it off, most volunteers are awoken before sunrise by some combination of roosters, trash collectors, car horns, barking dogs, or in my case, shrieking parrots. It gets exhausting, but there’s no better way to learn a language and assimilate into a culture.

A standard weekday of training starts off with four hours of language class in the morning in our small groups of four or five students who are more or less at the same Spanish level. I think a lot of us are looking forward to our upcoming second round of language evaluations, by which we can advance a level or two in our classes. It takes a couple weeks to knock the rust off, but I’m starting to feel like I’m about back to the level I was at while I was abroad in Spain, and I’m definitely looking forward to moving forward. After an hour for lunch, three days a week or so we go into our separate technical groups – either Health, Environment, or my program, Water/Sanitation (WatSan for short) – for the remainder of the afternoon. These sessions are really pretty cool. We’re already wrapping up the water systems section of our training, which has included learning all about the existing water systems (or lack thereof) in rural Peru: their sources, their parts and pieces, the people who run them, and most importantly, what tends to be lacking or go wrong with them. One afternoon last week we learned how to heat up PVC pipes with hot sand and bend them into “elbow” shapes for changing the direction of subsoil water conduction systems. We’ve also taken field trips into local communities (my own of Chacrasana being one) to talk to water officials and see the systems in action. Pretty sweet stuff. Next we’re getting into solid waste management, and later on we’ll be building a model latrine, as sewage and hygiene constitutes another major component of the WatSan program.

WatSan is a badass program, no doubt about it. We’re the first group of water volunteers since the Peace Corps came back in 2001 after a quarter-century absence due to political and economic instability. We’re going to all-new sites, meaning we won’t be replacing exiting volunteers, as often happens in other programs. And the places we’re going have been selected because they lack a very basic water or sanitation need. We’ve heard stories from past volunteers that sometimes they have to work really hard just to find work, because the needs of the community are not as severe as expected. The consensus within our WatSan group seems to be that we’re all going to places that are going to need real, concrete structural and/or organizational improvement, which is very exciting.

The fourteen of us in the program don’t know specifically where we’ll each be sent, although we do know that three are going to the department of Tumbes (way up north bordering Ecuador), three are going to Piura (just south of Tumbes, still about an 18-hour bus ride away), two to La Libertad (north as well, but closer to Lima), and six more to Ica (only a few hours south of our current communities). We also know that all the sites are at pretty low elevations, in the same arid climate in which we are living now. Which is kind of a bummer, given the spectacular views and climate up in the mountains, but I’m sure we’ll all be fine. Tumbes and Piura are supposed to be really neat spots, but super-hot. I guess that’ll make cold bucket-baths not seem so bad.

On the odd afternoons the whole group (all forty-seven of us are collectively known as “Peru 12” as we’re the twelfth group since ´01) will get together for a session on health (what to do if/when a bug gets stuck in your ear, etc.), emergency planning (what to do in the case of an earthquake, flood, or political coup), or other topics relevant to day-to-day volunteer life. The other day some firefighters came and went through CPR and First Aid with us. Turns out the firefighters are far and away the most respected and reliable of the emergency services in Lima. And they’re all volunteers with no government benefits, and who work full-time at other careers. Pretty awesome people.

One of the coolest things so far has been to hear the stories of past and current volunteers who come by the training center sometimes and share their experiences with us. We had a huge influx of volunteers last week from Bolivia, because the Peace Corps had to pull out all one-hundred-plus volunteers due to the worsening political situation, capped off by the expulsion of the US ambassador by Bolivian president Evo Morales. They shared some interesting stories, and it’s super helpful to talk to other volunteers about what life is really like out in a rural community. The most surprising revelation, which almost all the volunteers agreed on, was that the first year or even eighteen months on-site is often really, really difficult and seemingly unproductive, as gaining trust or confianza out in the rural communities can be an extremely long process. But most agreed that eventually it all comes together and things work out better than expected. As for their future, a lot were near the end of their two years and are just closing their services (“COS-ing” in Peace Corps lingo) and heading home a little early. Others are being re-assigned all over the world, some going to Africa and Asia even. And others are COS-ing but actually going back into Bolivia on their own to finish their projects in their respective communities. Which is a testament to not only the kind of people who are doing this stuff, but also to the incredibly powerful effect these communities have had on people after a year or two on-site. It’s super exciting to be just starting out and to have all that to look forward to.

That’s still a ways off, though. Training is three months long, and although it feels like we’ve been here forever already, we’re actually not even three weeks deep. The other thing all the veterans agreed on was that, compared to in-site service, training basically sucks. I think by the end of November we’re all going to be more than ready to get out and get our hands dirty.