6 months deep

9/6/2009

The other day I hit the six-month mark at site, and it struck me as a milestone that called for some reflection. Now, I don´t really like reflecting on myself, and it´s not something I´ve ever done a whole lot of, but there are a couple things I´ve been noticing lately that sort-of capture where I´m at these days, mentally-speaking. So here goes.

I´ve noticed myself referring to Chalaco as “home” in emails, conversations with other volunteers, and more. I guess that´s a pretty big step anytime you´re in a new place, but as a Peace Corps volunteer it feels like a definite sign that I´m achieving the “community integration” we´re always talking about. Which is fantastic, but I don´t want to overemphasize my role in it; I credit it largely to the fact that I´m the sixth volunteer in Chalaco, and all things considered it´s been incredibly easy to adjust to life here. Whatever the reason, I´ve definitely hit the point where, as I told my Dad on the phone the other day, this is “just…life” now.

Part of that is having some real friends; through my various projects, playing guitar, cooking, playing soccer (as well shared misery in the Peruvian national team), not refusing cane liquor with apparent strangers on the corner at 10AM, and just generally hanging around, I´ve made what I would call some pretty good friends. Most 20-somethings in these parts, though, leave to study or work, or if they´ve stuck around they´re out in the fields working all day. Thus the friends I refer to are all several years (if not a decade or two) older than me, with an average of 3 or 4 kids. I was shocked to find that out…a couple of them I just assumed were bachelors in their late 20s, waiting around Chalaco for their big break. Not the case, as it turns out.

Although I see community integration as largely a good thing, there are definite drawbacks, too. My first few months here flew by in a frenzy of picture-taking, over-the-top cordiality with everyone I came across, and this little voice in the back of my head constantly telling me not to take a single moment for granted. I was also in sort-of turbo fitness mode, with a daily exercise routine before breakfast and a bedtime of 10PM at the latest. Most of all, I found myself feeling higher highs and lower lows than ever in my life; when the tiniest little thing went my way I felt great, and thirty seconds later I could be stuck in the classic Peace Corps existential funk, wondering what the hell was I was doing here. Don´t get me wrong, I don´t mean in a mentally-unstable or even remotely worrisome kind of way; those feelings only lasted a few seconds and then I´d be back to normal. But I definitely noticed it. I think it was a combination of a total lack of expectations, direction, and supervision for the first time in my life, and too much time to think about it. In any case, time flew, and I generally felt pretty damn good about the job I was doing.

A lot of that has changed; you come to realize that A) the landscape and the animals and the food and the people, while beautiful, are gonna look exactly the same tomorrow, so taking (another) picture of them today really isn´t all that necessary, B) at some point you become a community member with a name and not a tourist (or worse, a miner) known to all as “Gringo,” and with that promotion you can thankfully lose the cultural-relativity-and-community-acceptance-above-all attitude and start to think about your own needs a little more and actually form natural opinions again about the things and people around you, and C) you don´t really need to wake up an hour early every morning to run or do pushups to stay in shape…in fact, watching your third Sopranos episode of the night, and sleeping another hour the next morning and then drinking a whole bunch of coffee is often the better option. Additionally, I´m no longer shocked by the creencias (country myths) like the notion that cold drinks cause illnesses or that leftovers go bad faster when covered and refrigerated than when left out in the open; or by the everyday customs like pulling on a kid´s ears when he´s choking, or breast-feeding “babies” who can ask for it in complete sentences, or the automatic impulse to piss right out the front door when the bathroom is neither occupied nor any more difficult to access. In fact, I too have adopted the latter habit (sorry, Mom.) I´m no longer uneasy when I think back on the day and realize that I´ve eaten only bread and roots (albeit roughly half my weight of each), and I´ve come to accept that just about everything is, in fact, going to start at least an hour late. And I no longer wonder how an entire 10,000-resident district can be made up of only a handful of family names: Cordova, García, Calle, Peña, and one or two others. That doesn´t mean I understand it…I just don´t wonder about it anymore.

More poignant than any cultural revelation I´ve had, though, is the mere fact that I´ve been in Peru long enough to have a baby (not me personally…but you get the pic), and in my site half a year – a quarter of my two years of service. That´s just unbelievable to me. One thing that hasn´t changed as I´ve adjusted to life here is the passage of time; it´s still flying, even though I feel like I´ve evened-out a bit, from a mental health perspective. And with the weather finally improving in the mountains, a dog to keep me company, and my 2009 Water Campaign and other projects underway (topic for another blog entry), it´s only going to pick up from here.

Although it´s true that by now I´m starting to feel like a true Chalaqueño, I know that at the end of the day a towering gringo is never going to totally integrate anywhere in the developing world. I´d like to think that someday I could pass Joe Campesino out on the trail and not have him turn around and stare after me. But as far as I can tell that day hasn´t come yet, and I´m not sure it ever will. And honestly, the more I think about it, maybe that´s not such a bad thing after all.