Monday, November 7, 2011
Friday, November 4, 2011
Month 2 Update: A New Normal
So two months of service down and I feel like things are starting to level off. I am definitely strating to settle in to my life here and to see it as more of a reality rather than being amazed, confused, or impressed with everything. When I first got here I was so worried about Spanish that a lot of things fell by the wayside. Not being able to understand what people were saying made it hard to really understand people and their personalities. I was/am just missing out on certain little things in people's speech and the way they say things. With better ability to understand Spanish I feel like I am starting to understand the people more. I no longer am just taking everything to be nice (although the people here are extremely more open than the majority in the US) and am realizing that some people are not so fond of the US and some are pretty much just flat out asking me for money or telling me I am getting fat (Health Status Update: I am not sure if I am getting fat, they insist I am, but I think I am starting to return to normal since I am not having constant diarrhea! I still get stomach aches from time to time but I am more or less back to normal). I am still struggling to find responses to some of those more awkward questions that would be hard enough to answer in English. Sometimes I just pretend like I didn't understand.
The daily schedule has also started to take on a sort of normal appearance. I am still teaching in the high school, elementary for boys, and the kindergarden. I have yet to make a stable contact in the girls elementary and the school year is winding down so I may just wait to try to get in next year. As new editions I have started a little bit more participation in the broader community instead of just working at the schools, mainly at the assistance of my site mate. I am now a part of the library committee, a community bank, a multiuse court and have started work on two projects for the summer vacation.
The Library
With this group we have been meeting about once a week to discuss various things concerning the construction of the library, further donations, when it is going to open, and how it is going to be used. It is composed mainly teachers, an employee of the municipality (called regidore) and my site mate and I. The second floor is yet to be finished and they are supposed to start working on it this month. I think we are hoping to open it in March when the new school year starts.
Banco S.P.
This project is much more my site mate's than mine but I went to the first meeting and so joined. It is generically called a community bank but the name of ours is Banco S.P. (San Pablo). Basically this is a small group of community members that know each other well, trust each other, and want to save some money. We have a meeting every Monday during with each member has to put in a certain amount of pledged money with a minimum of 5 soles (Peru money is calld the Nuevo Sol). Then when there is some money saved up the member of the bank can take out loans with super low interest rates (2%). They have four weeks to pay back the loan. Then at the designated date, ours is in May, the bank closes and everyone gets all their money back that they have paid in. If any interest has accumulated it is divided amongst all the banks members.
The Court
Another project that I am tagging along on. My site mate won a grant from an NGO called Courts for Kids that is going to come and build a court for a little hamlet of San Pablo called Kuntur Wasi. There are 15 volunteers that are going to come in July to build the court and we are just starting preparations. Prior to their arrival we have to have the ground flattened and ready for them to pour the cement and make the actual court. We are working on forming committees within the community for preparations such as lodging, food, and actual work before the volunteers come. The community also wants to put in a type of cement bleachers/steps that was not included in the project by the NGO so there will also be some fund raising for this. The court is supposed to be done on July 27th and the municipality of this district is hoping to inaugurate the next day on the 28th, Peru's independence day.
Vaciones Utilies
This project is actually mine! Well not entirely, we are working on this together, but it's not one that I am just joining in on. As I may have mentioned in prior posts vaciones utilies is their summer vacation time between December and March. From what I am told a ton of people flea San Pablo for the cost over these months and leave those who remain without much to do, especially the kids. Thus a popular program amongst volunteers is to set up some type of program during these months. We have a preliminary plan set up as well as initial permission from the director of the school to use a classroom for one part of this. In this part we are going to have class twice a week and teach all different types of subjects. Mainly to keep the kids involved in something and also to provide some sort of educational stimulation. The other part is going to be the World Map project. This is going to be in the new library and we are going to look for a group of interested students to help out. Hopefully we can find better artists than myself.
In the meantime I have also been able to partake in various activities in the family and in the community. The most notable of which have been two funerals and the festivals during the week of All Saint's Day.
The Funeral Process
Now this is specifically a Catholic thing here, I have not seem them for any other religion yet. I have been to two of them, one was for a family member of some sort and the other was for an elderly couple that died on the same day within hours of each other. For the nights following the death and leading up to the funeral there was a constant wake at the homes of the deceased. When I say constant I do mean that they went all night despite whether you had to work the next day or not. Then the funeral itself was on Saturday. Before the mass there is a lunch at the home and the wake comes to an end. From the home they process out into the street, a group of people carrying the coffin, and a band following playing all the way to the church. Everyone files into the church and they have the mass, then process back out. The band picks up again and the group carries the coffin from the church to the cemetary. On the way they stop at the person's home, and the group holding the coffin bows three times at the doorway of the person's home and any other homes they may have lived in. At the cemetary the coffin is placed in the tomb (I haven't seen an actual burial) and people are invited to say a few words. Overall it is, as with most things, much more festive and communal than similar procedures in the States. I don't think our drivers would take too kindly to a parade of people trudging down the street for hours carrying a coffin.
Dia de Todos Santos
The time of year when the cemetary turns into a fairground. They have heard of Halloween but I did not bear witness to anyone celebrating it in my town. It was much more about November 1st and 2nd. There were no classes for any of the first three days of the week, so on the 31st we went to San Luis, another little town outside San Pablo, and made bread. This house was more of my family members way out in the sticks that didn't even have electricity. Their toilet was a hole dug into a hill, and their shower was some tarps close-pinned around a shower head. My host mom and aunts made the tough in two giantic tubs. Then we took it down to the lower part of the house in a dark room. There was no electricty and thus no lights and we had to shut the door to keep the wind out. So we rolled the tough into the different designs by the little of one small window, and we did it for hours. We would fill up a pan and I would take it out to the oven, made purely out of ground, and the bread would bake in minutes. The oven was made out of adobe like thier houses. And like I said we did this for hours, and I didn't know that was going to happen, so we rushed out of the house without my camera. I include this story because I thought it was interesting and because my host mom said lots of families make bread around this time.
November 1st- This was the biggest day in my opinion and we got up early to get things going. My host mom left with her sisters and showed up with bottles of holy water. My host dad and I then proceeded to walk around town and he tried to give it to people (not that he was supposed to that's just what he does). Then we went to the cemetary and I got my first look at this excitement. There were food stands lining the streets and people everywhere. We went and found the grave site for my host dad's mom, and like everyone else there, cleaned it up and gave it a fresh coat of paint. From there we met the rest of my host family and had a nice guinea pig meal before walking around the rest of the cemetary and visiting other family members. In the afternoon we got the table ready for the 'offering' to the deceased souls. This was a table full of different kinds of food that we set up and left out for two nights. After this we went back to the cemetary and lit candles at every family member's grave. There were a ton of people there.
November 2nd- Pretty much more of the same. I woke up and went up on the roof to finish some laundry and could see the ton of people in the cemetary already. Some stay all night and some show up as early as 4 AM. This day was pretty much entirely spent in the cemetary for some, continuing to clean, and putting out flowers instead of candles.
Observations and Other Thoughts
One thing I have noticed in all of the festivals I have been to is someone in my host family making the comment that there are less people than in years past, which my host mom attributes to people having to work. Then when we were painting in the cememtary my host aunt made the comment that "we lose a lot of time doing this stuff don't we?". All of this I take to possibly mean that as the country continues to develop and for lack of a better term become more like the US in terms of work habits, they have to cut some things out and one of those happens to be the fiestas and cultural celebrations. In a sense that is sad, but at the same time it makes sense. Their fiestas are a blast but they can last for a week and I'd guess there's almost at least one every month, and when you have to go to work you can't afford to miss all that time.
As I have voiced several times in these posts, the language barrier has been a constant, but improving challenge. Something that continues to be a struggle is the lack of a personality and expression I have with Spanish. I can communicate most things in however a round about way but I can't say things I want to or the way I would in English. With this I have an absence of quotes in Spanish. Those of you who have ever spent time with my brothers and I together know that we quote things a lot. I have none of that in Spanish. Even things that happen I tend to remember them in English. When people are talking I am translating in my head and when I go to retell the story it is in English and often times I can't even remember how it was said in Spanish. Something I need to change.
Random things trigger feelings of what I guess is homesickness, for example the food dreams. This month I actually got to watch an inning of the World Series and oddly enough, Field of Dreams. Both made me miss baseball, something I never thought I would say, and Field of Dreams really made me miss our old wiffle ball field. It also gave me some serious cravings for a real hot dog. There are hot dogs here but I consider them hot dogs in name and appearance only.
Whether it's taking a break from reading emails to chase a chicken around the living room, dancing until 4 in the morning, or eating a guinea pig for lunch, things are definitely starting to feel more normal. I still miss home of course, but more for the people and less for the trivial things like food. However this may be attributal to the fact that I can now eat the food here and not get sick. I am even coming around to washing clothes by hand. My host mom retaught me how to do it where I can sit down and it's a lot easier, although still way more time consuming than just throwing them in the washer. But I don't want to conclude this post without some type of list (e.g. Lessons I Learned on the Toilet, Food you should send me) so not to disappoint here it is, my top 5 Spanish blunders thus far, you may already know some of them:
5) Calling the school director a woman on my first day in front of the whole school. Which both professors and students alike then decided to repeat.
4) Trying to teach kindergardeners animal names in English, I got to butterfly (mariposo) and said something like mariposa, which according to my host mom it is something offensive for homosexual. Fortunately I think only one of the kids caught it and corrected me.
3) The infamous tacho (can) v. techo (roof). Trying to tell a class to throw their garbage in the can, I told them to throw it on the roof. Unfortunately this was also about the only thing they listened to the entire period and started launching garbage at the ceiling.
2) I am doing a survey with the kids in my school, and one question asks if they have changed houses in the last year. The word for year being ano with the tilde thing. As you can see here I don't know how to put that in so I just left it with 'ano'...which one student pointed out to me means anus. I made too many copies of the survey so I still haven't changed it. "Have you changed houses in the past anus?"
1) I was asked by a student to help with a composting project. So I did research and got all this information to help start a compost. The day we were supposed to meet classes got cancelled so we set up for another day, or so I thought. A group of students showed up at my house at the agreed upon time, but the girl who had initially asked me was suspiciously absent. I asked them if they were there for the composting meeting and after some confused looks said yes. We sat down and I started to ask them questions about the basics of their project, like what kinds of things they wanted to compost. They said "empresas" which I mistook to be "impresas" or printed materials. I thought it was weird that they would want to compost printed materials instead of just recycle them, but I went with it anyway and started explaining some of the basics of composting. All they could do was laugh. I thought it was because I was saying things wrong or funny. So I stopped until they calmed down, and one of them explained to me what was really happening, "Composting was the other group, we are working on starting a business (empresa). Yep, I spent 20 minutes trying to teach some high school kids how to compost their business.
The daily schedule has also started to take on a sort of normal appearance. I am still teaching in the high school, elementary for boys, and the kindergarden. I have yet to make a stable contact in the girls elementary and the school year is winding down so I may just wait to try to get in next year. As new editions I have started a little bit more participation in the broader community instead of just working at the schools, mainly at the assistance of my site mate. I am now a part of the library committee, a community bank, a multiuse court and have started work on two projects for the summer vacation.
The Library
With this group we have been meeting about once a week to discuss various things concerning the construction of the library, further donations, when it is going to open, and how it is going to be used. It is composed mainly teachers, an employee of the municipality (called regidore) and my site mate and I. The second floor is yet to be finished and they are supposed to start working on it this month. I think we are hoping to open it in March when the new school year starts.
Banco S.P.
This project is much more my site mate's than mine but I went to the first meeting and so joined. It is generically called a community bank but the name of ours is Banco S.P. (San Pablo). Basically this is a small group of community members that know each other well, trust each other, and want to save some money. We have a meeting every Monday during with each member has to put in a certain amount of pledged money with a minimum of 5 soles (Peru money is calld the Nuevo Sol). Then when there is some money saved up the member of the bank can take out loans with super low interest rates (2%). They have four weeks to pay back the loan. Then at the designated date, ours is in May, the bank closes and everyone gets all their money back that they have paid in. If any interest has accumulated it is divided amongst all the banks members.
The Court
Another project that I am tagging along on. My site mate won a grant from an NGO called Courts for Kids that is going to come and build a court for a little hamlet of San Pablo called Kuntur Wasi. There are 15 volunteers that are going to come in July to build the court and we are just starting preparations. Prior to their arrival we have to have the ground flattened and ready for them to pour the cement and make the actual court. We are working on forming committees within the community for preparations such as lodging, food, and actual work before the volunteers come. The community also wants to put in a type of cement bleachers/steps that was not included in the project by the NGO so there will also be some fund raising for this. The court is supposed to be done on July 27th and the municipality of this district is hoping to inaugurate the next day on the 28th, Peru's independence day.
Vaciones Utilies
This project is actually mine! Well not entirely, we are working on this together, but it's not one that I am just joining in on. As I may have mentioned in prior posts vaciones utilies is their summer vacation time between December and March. From what I am told a ton of people flea San Pablo for the cost over these months and leave those who remain without much to do, especially the kids. Thus a popular program amongst volunteers is to set up some type of program during these months. We have a preliminary plan set up as well as initial permission from the director of the school to use a classroom for one part of this. In this part we are going to have class twice a week and teach all different types of subjects. Mainly to keep the kids involved in something and also to provide some sort of educational stimulation. The other part is going to be the World Map project. This is going to be in the new library and we are going to look for a group of interested students to help out. Hopefully we can find better artists than myself.
In the meantime I have also been able to partake in various activities in the family and in the community. The most notable of which have been two funerals and the festivals during the week of All Saint's Day.
The Funeral Process
Now this is specifically a Catholic thing here, I have not seem them for any other religion yet. I have been to two of them, one was for a family member of some sort and the other was for an elderly couple that died on the same day within hours of each other. For the nights following the death and leading up to the funeral there was a constant wake at the homes of the deceased. When I say constant I do mean that they went all night despite whether you had to work the next day or not. Then the funeral itself was on Saturday. Before the mass there is a lunch at the home and the wake comes to an end. From the home they process out into the street, a group of people carrying the coffin, and a band following playing all the way to the church. Everyone files into the church and they have the mass, then process back out. The band picks up again and the group carries the coffin from the church to the cemetary. On the way they stop at the person's home, and the group holding the coffin bows three times at the doorway of the person's home and any other homes they may have lived in. At the cemetary the coffin is placed in the tomb (I haven't seen an actual burial) and people are invited to say a few words. Overall it is, as with most things, much more festive and communal than similar procedures in the States. I don't think our drivers would take too kindly to a parade of people trudging down the street for hours carrying a coffin.
Dia de Todos Santos
The time of year when the cemetary turns into a fairground. They have heard of Halloween but I did not bear witness to anyone celebrating it in my town. It was much more about November 1st and 2nd. There were no classes for any of the first three days of the week, so on the 31st we went to San Luis, another little town outside San Pablo, and made bread. This house was more of my family members way out in the sticks that didn't even have electricity. Their toilet was a hole dug into a hill, and their shower was some tarps close-pinned around a shower head. My host mom and aunts made the tough in two giantic tubs. Then we took it down to the lower part of the house in a dark room. There was no electricty and thus no lights and we had to shut the door to keep the wind out. So we rolled the tough into the different designs by the little of one small window, and we did it for hours. We would fill up a pan and I would take it out to the oven, made purely out of ground, and the bread would bake in minutes. The oven was made out of adobe like thier houses. And like I said we did this for hours, and I didn't know that was going to happen, so we rushed out of the house without my camera. I include this story because I thought it was interesting and because my host mom said lots of families make bread around this time.
November 1st- This was the biggest day in my opinion and we got up early to get things going. My host mom left with her sisters and showed up with bottles of holy water. My host dad and I then proceeded to walk around town and he tried to give it to people (not that he was supposed to that's just what he does). Then we went to the cemetary and I got my first look at this excitement. There were food stands lining the streets and people everywhere. We went and found the grave site for my host dad's mom, and like everyone else there, cleaned it up and gave it a fresh coat of paint. From there we met the rest of my host family and had a nice guinea pig meal before walking around the rest of the cemetary and visiting other family members. In the afternoon we got the table ready for the 'offering' to the deceased souls. This was a table full of different kinds of food that we set up and left out for two nights. After this we went back to the cemetary and lit candles at every family member's grave. There were a ton of people there.
November 2nd- Pretty much more of the same. I woke up and went up on the roof to finish some laundry and could see the ton of people in the cemetary already. Some stay all night and some show up as early as 4 AM. This day was pretty much entirely spent in the cemetary for some, continuing to clean, and putting out flowers instead of candles.
Observations and Other Thoughts
One thing I have noticed in all of the festivals I have been to is someone in my host family making the comment that there are less people than in years past, which my host mom attributes to people having to work. Then when we were painting in the cememtary my host aunt made the comment that "we lose a lot of time doing this stuff don't we?". All of this I take to possibly mean that as the country continues to develop and for lack of a better term become more like the US in terms of work habits, they have to cut some things out and one of those happens to be the fiestas and cultural celebrations. In a sense that is sad, but at the same time it makes sense. Their fiestas are a blast but they can last for a week and I'd guess there's almost at least one every month, and when you have to go to work you can't afford to miss all that time.
As I have voiced several times in these posts, the language barrier has been a constant, but improving challenge. Something that continues to be a struggle is the lack of a personality and expression I have with Spanish. I can communicate most things in however a round about way but I can't say things I want to or the way I would in English. With this I have an absence of quotes in Spanish. Those of you who have ever spent time with my brothers and I together know that we quote things a lot. I have none of that in Spanish. Even things that happen I tend to remember them in English. When people are talking I am translating in my head and when I go to retell the story it is in English and often times I can't even remember how it was said in Spanish. Something I need to change.
Random things trigger feelings of what I guess is homesickness, for example the food dreams. This month I actually got to watch an inning of the World Series and oddly enough, Field of Dreams. Both made me miss baseball, something I never thought I would say, and Field of Dreams really made me miss our old wiffle ball field. It also gave me some serious cravings for a real hot dog. There are hot dogs here but I consider them hot dogs in name and appearance only.
Whether it's taking a break from reading emails to chase a chicken around the living room, dancing until 4 in the morning, or eating a guinea pig for lunch, things are definitely starting to feel more normal. I still miss home of course, but more for the people and less for the trivial things like food. However this may be attributal to the fact that I can now eat the food here and not get sick. I am even coming around to washing clothes by hand. My host mom retaught me how to do it where I can sit down and it's a lot easier, although still way more time consuming than just throwing them in the washer. But I don't want to conclude this post without some type of list (e.g. Lessons I Learned on the Toilet, Food you should send me) so not to disappoint here it is, my top 5 Spanish blunders thus far, you may already know some of them:
5) Calling the school director a woman on my first day in front of the whole school. Which both professors and students alike then decided to repeat.
4) Trying to teach kindergardeners animal names in English, I got to butterfly (mariposo) and said something like mariposa, which according to my host mom it is something offensive for homosexual. Fortunately I think only one of the kids caught it and corrected me.
3) The infamous tacho (can) v. techo (roof). Trying to tell a class to throw their garbage in the can, I told them to throw it on the roof. Unfortunately this was also about the only thing they listened to the entire period and started launching garbage at the ceiling.
2) I am doing a survey with the kids in my school, and one question asks if they have changed houses in the last year. The word for year being ano with the tilde thing. As you can see here I don't know how to put that in so I just left it with 'ano'...which one student pointed out to me means anus. I made too many copies of the survey so I still haven't changed it. "Have you changed houses in the past anus?"
1) I was asked by a student to help with a composting project. So I did research and got all this information to help start a compost. The day we were supposed to meet classes got cancelled so we set up for another day, or so I thought. A group of students showed up at my house at the agreed upon time, but the girl who had initially asked me was suspiciously absent. I asked them if they were there for the composting meeting and after some confused looks said yes. We sat down and I started to ask them questions about the basics of their project, like what kinds of things they wanted to compost. They said "empresas" which I mistook to be "impresas" or printed materials. I thought it was weird that they would want to compost printed materials instead of just recycle them, but I went with it anyway and started explaining some of the basics of composting. All they could do was laugh. I thought it was because I was saying things wrong or funny. So I stopped until they calmed down, and one of them explained to me what was really happening, "Composting was the other group, we are working on starting a business (empresa). Yep, I spent 20 minutes trying to teach some high school kids how to compost their business.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
The First Month...plus a few more weeks
For those of you who read my last blog, I thought about apologizing, but no, I'm not sorry, all you did was read it, I was the one who had the joy of experiencing it.
Anyway so my idea for this is to provide a monthly update on life in Peru mainly around my work and my life and anything else interesting that happens. So far in just the first month so much has happened I am not sure where to start.
One thing is for sure, what started as a slow, painfully ill, first week, has accelerated beyond belief. While life and work are very different than our concepts in the US, I have gotten a lot 'busier.' Living a life where I am constantly a representative of an organization let alone an entire country it kind of feels like I am working 24/7. Add to that the fact that it takes 100 percent concentration to understand what is going on around me at all times makes for some exhausting days. The Spanish, as always, is coming along but I've got a long way to go. That's something that is continuously being revealed to me a little bit more everyday. I am up to the point where I can start a little bit more in depth conversations but I get tripped up a lot and I feel bad for the people on the other end trying to figure out what the heck it is that's falling out of my mouth.
Despite these language barriers I have managed to put together a fairly productive daily schedule that involves the majority of my time being spent in the schools. At this point the classes I teach have been by invitation. Twice a week I go to the 'Inicial' (kindergarden) for about an hour and teach some very basic English. This is more because the director of the school is my host aunt and it is a good opportunity to interact with some kids and to put myself out there to more of the community. I see the kids in the street after school and they love to point out to their parents that the gringo is their English teacher.
That is typically the start to my Monday and Wednesday morning. Aside from this I go once a week to the boys' 'primaria' school, which is comparable to our elementary/junior high. I'm not sure how it is in all of Peru but in my town the boys and girls go to school together at the Inicial but the Primaria level is separated. Here I teach another section of English. English teaching is a popular way-in for a lot of volunteers in Peru. Just about all, if not every, school teaches English. The problem is that often the teachers don't know the language all that well themselves so when we role into town that is typically the first thing we are asked. Also because people don't fully understand Peace Corps and what we are there to do, but they know we can speak English so it makes sense that this would be a first request.
My other major task, what I consider to be my primary responsibility now, is at the 'Secundaria' (high school). This school ranges 5 grade levels and the kids typically finish when they are 16. Here I have been working in the 'tutoria' program. Each class has one period a week where they are supposed to talk about something outside the normal curicculum. Things like self-esteem, making life decisions, alcohol and drugs, etc. In several cases this ends up just being a free period where the kids just run around or sit and talk with their friends. So naturally the teachers had no problem letting me come in for this period. Up to this point I have been making my rounds and trying to meet all the classes. Per request of some of the teachers I have been talking about leadership and doing different activities with the kids regarding this theme. Next week I am planning to start a different, more class specific, program which is yet to really take shape. Writing lesson plans in Spanish is quite a task.
Weekends are usually pretty dead around town so I use this time to read, write those lesson plans, or do laundry. Washing clothes by hand is the one things I truly despise here. For the most part I don't mind not having the amenities we have in the US, but oh how I miss washing machines. Basically what laundry boils down to here is trying to stay as clean as possible with my dress clothes so that I can wear them again and again without washing them, which I have managed to do with some. The times I have been forced to wash clothes I try to dry them before my host mom sees them because she says I don't know what I'm doing and then will rewash them. All of which is true but I feel bad letting her wash my clothes, even though it does come out with much more positive results. However, as with everything here, I am learning and it is getting noticably easier, although I don't know how to remove stains and may have already ruined a few shirts.
Anyway as I mentioned in a previous post I have started working on our major assignment for our first three months, the community diagnostic. For this I have been spending my period with the classes to have them take a comprehensive survey and ask other questions about lives and their opinions of their school and community. My goal is to survey all the students, which is something over 600 so we'll see if it works out. It equates to a lot of reading and trying to analyze results, hand-writing, and Spanish at the same time. Needless to say I am not off to a great jump on that part, I think I have only read three surveys so far. It has been an interesting project though and I am learning a lot about the youth in my area and starting to form ideas for what I might want to do in the future.
As for the near future there are a few things taking shape. My site mate and I have a tentative plan for a summer school program. January and February are their primary months of 'summer' vacation and from what I've heard a lot of families leave for the coast since it is the rainy season here, thus I'm not sure what town will look like but we are hoping to get some kids involved in something constructive over the break. We are also planning a project that is very popular amongst the other Youth Development volunteers, the World Map Project. Yes, this is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. We have obtained permission from the municipality to form a group of kids to paint the map on one of the walls of the new library. With this we are hoping to do some geography/culture lessons and promote literacy, also giving the kids a feeling that they could contribute to the creation of the library. (Speaking of library we are always accepting donations!)
After this the new school year will be back around and I will have to see what lies ahead for me next year, I am hoping to present my community dianostic findings at the beginning of the term which is in March.
In other news life here has been very interesting and I continue to find myself in situations that I don't fully expect or understand. I find myself often wondering, 'this might be the most ridiculous situation I have ever found myself in.' For example one night my host parents informed me that they also like music in English and happened to have a CD that they wanted to put on for dinner. Thus we had a nice family dinner listening to Nirvana. Another day I walked out of my front door at about 10 or 11 AM to go to the school and was met by the town drunk who said something in Spanish like 'Hey! German, weightlifting!.' And several other examples like dancing with the old church ladies at the town festival.
Just to hit some of the other highlights; I have joined the teacher's soccer team and we have games every Thursday, with jerseys and the whole deal. We are in third in the league in case you were wondering. I have only played two games because at first they didn't believe me when I told them I know how to play soccer (they thought I was referring to our version of football), then the other teams didn't want me to be able to play because I don't actually work for the school, but that issue was eventually resolved. So that is a really cool assimilation experience, being part of the team. We also play just about every afternoon at the school for fun so I get to know a lot more kids this way (they are also more concerned on whether I am going to show up for the game than for class).
Back in September there was the town festival for El Senor de los Milagros (the God of Miracles) so just about everything stopped for a couple days. One day there was a race, where I experienced my worst encounter with the 'hora peruano.' By this they refer to the fact that almost nothing starts on time. My host dad told me the race started at 8, so I went around 8:30. At 11:30 we finally started. I ended up getting second place, some kid that works out in the farms blew everyone away. There was also a guy who ran the race in his dress shoes and dress pants and did an impressive job of it.
The rest of the festival included some awesome fireworks that we would never be allowed to have in the US, a procession through the streets of the town, and a 'bufa' which is something like a fake bull fight comedy. At some point I will be posting videos or pictures of those events.
Most recently there is another event that I am not exactly sure what to call. Basically my site mate's host mom told me that Mary was coming and they hung a bunch of stuff up on the ceiling like bananas, pop, wine, and some other things. Then this last Saturday there was another procession where they brought a small statue of Mary which has occupied the living room ever since. People then come and pray the rosary or other things. Peru is very much about the community parties and the first night the house was jam packed with people and a band, all of which were fed (one of my favorite parts about this country). Rumor has it this weekend the presents come down and whatever you recieve you have to bring back two of the next year.
So that's my update for now, if you have actually read to this point let me know what you want to hear about life in Peru, there is a lot going on and I know I am leaving out a lot so let me know if you have any questions.
Hope everything is going well back home!
Oh and PS as far as homesickness goes I of course miss my family and friends and everyone, but I have to admit my toughest days are when I have dreams about food. More than a few times I have woken up after I dreamt about eating something delicious and that was the only thing I could think about during the day.
So if you are interested in sending me a care package please consider including the following iterms;
1) turtle cake(s),
2) a Pat's Donuts & Creme chocolate filled stick,
3) Pat herself for to make me said donut
3)Dairy King,
4) general tso's chicken, (will also accept General's Fried Chicken, I haven't tried it but I hear it is "butt kickin'")
5)a real pizza (yes I've sunk so low as to even have a dream about Little Cesear's)
PSS on the topic of food, here is a list of some of the interesting things I have eaten, fortunately only two of them have looked at me before/during when I was eating them:
Several different colors of potatos (all of which have been good and my favorite being a purple sweet potato), Ceviche-the raw fish version (probably my favorite thing in Peru), Anticucho (cow heart-also actually delicious), Papa reina (fried potato stuffed with glory), fish from head to tail (delicious but annoying because there are a lot of bones), Cuy Frito aka fried guinea pig with face and all (actually not too bad), cow stomach (that bad), intestines-not sure which animal (worse), pig skin- hair included (I'll let you imagine how that turned out for yourself).
Anyway so my idea for this is to provide a monthly update on life in Peru mainly around my work and my life and anything else interesting that happens. So far in just the first month so much has happened I am not sure where to start.
One thing is for sure, what started as a slow, painfully ill, first week, has accelerated beyond belief. While life and work are very different than our concepts in the US, I have gotten a lot 'busier.' Living a life where I am constantly a representative of an organization let alone an entire country it kind of feels like I am working 24/7. Add to that the fact that it takes 100 percent concentration to understand what is going on around me at all times makes for some exhausting days. The Spanish, as always, is coming along but I've got a long way to go. That's something that is continuously being revealed to me a little bit more everyday. I am up to the point where I can start a little bit more in depth conversations but I get tripped up a lot and I feel bad for the people on the other end trying to figure out what the heck it is that's falling out of my mouth.
Despite these language barriers I have managed to put together a fairly productive daily schedule that involves the majority of my time being spent in the schools. At this point the classes I teach have been by invitation. Twice a week I go to the 'Inicial' (kindergarden) for about an hour and teach some very basic English. This is more because the director of the school is my host aunt and it is a good opportunity to interact with some kids and to put myself out there to more of the community. I see the kids in the street after school and they love to point out to their parents that the gringo is their English teacher.
That is typically the start to my Monday and Wednesday morning. Aside from this I go once a week to the boys' 'primaria' school, which is comparable to our elementary/junior high. I'm not sure how it is in all of Peru but in my town the boys and girls go to school together at the Inicial but the Primaria level is separated. Here I teach another section of English. English teaching is a popular way-in for a lot of volunteers in Peru. Just about all, if not every, school teaches English. The problem is that often the teachers don't know the language all that well themselves so when we role into town that is typically the first thing we are asked. Also because people don't fully understand Peace Corps and what we are there to do, but they know we can speak English so it makes sense that this would be a first request.
My other major task, what I consider to be my primary responsibility now, is at the 'Secundaria' (high school). This school ranges 5 grade levels and the kids typically finish when they are 16. Here I have been working in the 'tutoria' program. Each class has one period a week where they are supposed to talk about something outside the normal curicculum. Things like self-esteem, making life decisions, alcohol and drugs, etc. In several cases this ends up just being a free period where the kids just run around or sit and talk with their friends. So naturally the teachers had no problem letting me come in for this period. Up to this point I have been making my rounds and trying to meet all the classes. Per request of some of the teachers I have been talking about leadership and doing different activities with the kids regarding this theme. Next week I am planning to start a different, more class specific, program which is yet to really take shape. Writing lesson plans in Spanish is quite a task.
Weekends are usually pretty dead around town so I use this time to read, write those lesson plans, or do laundry. Washing clothes by hand is the one things I truly despise here. For the most part I don't mind not having the amenities we have in the US, but oh how I miss washing machines. Basically what laundry boils down to here is trying to stay as clean as possible with my dress clothes so that I can wear them again and again without washing them, which I have managed to do with some. The times I have been forced to wash clothes I try to dry them before my host mom sees them because she says I don't know what I'm doing and then will rewash them. All of which is true but I feel bad letting her wash my clothes, even though it does come out with much more positive results. However, as with everything here, I am learning and it is getting noticably easier, although I don't know how to remove stains and may have already ruined a few shirts.
Anyway as I mentioned in a previous post I have started working on our major assignment for our first three months, the community diagnostic. For this I have been spending my period with the classes to have them take a comprehensive survey and ask other questions about lives and their opinions of their school and community. My goal is to survey all the students, which is something over 600 so we'll see if it works out. It equates to a lot of reading and trying to analyze results, hand-writing, and Spanish at the same time. Needless to say I am not off to a great jump on that part, I think I have only read three surveys so far. It has been an interesting project though and I am learning a lot about the youth in my area and starting to form ideas for what I might want to do in the future.
As for the near future there are a few things taking shape. My site mate and I have a tentative plan for a summer school program. January and February are their primary months of 'summer' vacation and from what I've heard a lot of families leave for the coast since it is the rainy season here, thus I'm not sure what town will look like but we are hoping to get some kids involved in something constructive over the break. We are also planning a project that is very popular amongst the other Youth Development volunteers, the World Map Project. Yes, this is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. We have obtained permission from the municipality to form a group of kids to paint the map on one of the walls of the new library. With this we are hoping to do some geography/culture lessons and promote literacy, also giving the kids a feeling that they could contribute to the creation of the library. (Speaking of library we are always accepting donations!)
After this the new school year will be back around and I will have to see what lies ahead for me next year, I am hoping to present my community dianostic findings at the beginning of the term which is in March.
In other news life here has been very interesting and I continue to find myself in situations that I don't fully expect or understand. I find myself often wondering, 'this might be the most ridiculous situation I have ever found myself in.' For example one night my host parents informed me that they also like music in English and happened to have a CD that they wanted to put on for dinner. Thus we had a nice family dinner listening to Nirvana. Another day I walked out of my front door at about 10 or 11 AM to go to the school and was met by the town drunk who said something in Spanish like 'Hey! German, weightlifting!.' And several other examples like dancing with the old church ladies at the town festival.
Just to hit some of the other highlights; I have joined the teacher's soccer team and we have games every Thursday, with jerseys and the whole deal. We are in third in the league in case you were wondering. I have only played two games because at first they didn't believe me when I told them I know how to play soccer (they thought I was referring to our version of football), then the other teams didn't want me to be able to play because I don't actually work for the school, but that issue was eventually resolved. So that is a really cool assimilation experience, being part of the team. We also play just about every afternoon at the school for fun so I get to know a lot more kids this way (they are also more concerned on whether I am going to show up for the game than for class).
Back in September there was the town festival for El Senor de los Milagros (the God of Miracles) so just about everything stopped for a couple days. One day there was a race, where I experienced my worst encounter with the 'hora peruano.' By this they refer to the fact that almost nothing starts on time. My host dad told me the race started at 8, so I went around 8:30. At 11:30 we finally started. I ended up getting second place, some kid that works out in the farms blew everyone away. There was also a guy who ran the race in his dress shoes and dress pants and did an impressive job of it.
The rest of the festival included some awesome fireworks that we would never be allowed to have in the US, a procession through the streets of the town, and a 'bufa' which is something like a fake bull fight comedy. At some point I will be posting videos or pictures of those events.
Most recently there is another event that I am not exactly sure what to call. Basically my site mate's host mom told me that Mary was coming and they hung a bunch of stuff up on the ceiling like bananas, pop, wine, and some other things. Then this last Saturday there was another procession where they brought a small statue of Mary which has occupied the living room ever since. People then come and pray the rosary or other things. Peru is very much about the community parties and the first night the house was jam packed with people and a band, all of which were fed (one of my favorite parts about this country). Rumor has it this weekend the presents come down and whatever you recieve you have to bring back two of the next year.
So that's my update for now, if you have actually read to this point let me know what you want to hear about life in Peru, there is a lot going on and I know I am leaving out a lot so let me know if you have any questions.
Hope everything is going well back home!
Oh and PS as far as homesickness goes I of course miss my family and friends and everyone, but I have to admit my toughest days are when I have dreams about food. More than a few times I have woken up after I dreamt about eating something delicious and that was the only thing I could think about during the day.
So if you are interested in sending me a care package please consider including the following iterms;
1) turtle cake(s),
2) a Pat's Donuts & Creme chocolate filled stick,
3) Pat herself for to make me said donut
3)Dairy King,
4) general tso's chicken, (will also accept General's Fried Chicken, I haven't tried it but I hear it is "butt kickin'")
5)a real pizza (yes I've sunk so low as to even have a dream about Little Cesear's)
PSS on the topic of food, here is a list of some of the interesting things I have eaten, fortunately only two of them have looked at me before/during when I was eating them:
Several different colors of potatos (all of which have been good and my favorite being a purple sweet potato), Ceviche-the raw fish version (probably my favorite thing in Peru), Anticucho (cow heart-also actually delicious), Papa reina (fried potato stuffed with glory), fish from head to tail (delicious but annoying because there are a lot of bones), Cuy Frito aka fried guinea pig with face and all (actually not too bad), cow stomach (that bad), intestines-not sure which animal (worse), pig skin- hair included (I'll let you imagine how that turned out for yourself).
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Friday, September 2, 2011
Host Nephew's Video for my Ma
Before I left my first host family my nephew said he wanted my real mom to 'know' him. So we made this video and thought I would share it with everyone. The translation is below.
Mi nombre es Deivi Gonzalez Ramirez. Tengo seis anos. Yo tengo mi familia y se llama mi mama se llama Haydee, Eliana, Fatima, Felix, Jose, Eulalia, todo la familia, gracias. Y mi tio, tio Nicolas. Mi hermanita, hermanito, mi hermanita se llama Tonye y mi hermanito Paris.
(My name is Deivi (Davey). I am six years old. I have my family and their name is, my mom's name is Haydee, Eliana, Fatima, Felix, Jose, Eulalia, all my family, thank you. And my uncle, uncle Nicolas. My little sister and little brother, my little sister's name is (Antonella) and my little brother's name is Paris.
Mi nombre es Deivi Gonzalez Ramirez. Tengo seis anos. Yo tengo mi familia y se llama mi mama se llama Haydee, Eliana, Fatima, Felix, Jose, Eulalia, todo la familia, gracias. Y mi tio, tio Nicolas. Mi hermanita, hermanito, mi hermanita se llama Tonye y mi hermanito Paris.
(My name is Deivi (Davey). I am six years old. I have my family and their name is, my mom's name is Haydee, Eliana, Fatima, Felix, Jose, Eulalia, all my family, thank you. And my uncle, uncle Nicolas. My little sister and little brother, my little sister's name is (Antonella) and my little brother's name is Paris.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
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