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.
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