2012: A Recap

To all those who have been/were followers of my blog I suppose an apology is in order. Without looking back to old posts I honestly don’t remember the last time I wrote something. However I am back to bring you a sort of recap of all the things I should have written about during the past year, so you can catch up on my Peace Corps experience, or just hit a couple highlights.

Before I get started though I wanted to take a second to explain some of the reason behind why I stopped blogging for so long. For a while I didn't feel like I had anything to new to write about, then when I did have new things I was busy and forgot, but above all I just see things differently now. When I first came to Peru back in June 2011 I found myself thinking a lot about the way things are in the states and how I wish everyone could experience what I was experiencing and so I was always thinking of things to write in these posts. However as time has gone on and I have been here longer things are just normal to me. Instead of everyday finding strange things that are going on, it all just seems normal. Before it seemed like a trip away from my “real” life back in the states, now this is my life. That’s not to say I’m not looking forward to coming back (approximately 6.5 months!), but leaving San Pablo is going to be a lot harder than I ever imagined.

On to the recap, some of this may be repeated in other posts, but here is my 2012 all in one. 

January – This was probably the most difficult month of my service. I went on a New Year’s vacation with my volunteer friends and came back to an empty house. My host family always spends the two months of school vacation in Lima so I was home alone (even the cat ran away) with the constant rain and fog that brought brown water out of the faucets and made it impossible to wash or dry clothes. Along with those difficulties I was attempting to cook for myself without the aid of a microwave, oven, or freezer full of pizzas that heat up in 20 minutes. However beyond all that we did start a pretty cool summer program for kids as well as the first of many adult English classes.

February – Pretty much a continuation of what I said for January. All the classes kept going smoothly, we painted a map of the world on the wall of one of the classrooms in the high school, oh and Carnaval. Carnaval is the celebration here before the start of lent. It starts pretty much after the New Year and goes until Fat Tuesday. Leading up to the party there are kids lining every street launching water balloons at cars and any other passerby. The actual fiesta includes a paint fight in the streets, parades, dances, and of course more water balloons.

March – School comes back! I was excited for this for several reasons, mainly that I would actually have the high school kids back in town that I wanted to be working with, my host family was back, and I had just spent two months studying Spanish every day and was ready to try out my new skills in the classroom. This month didn’t  turn out quite as I had planned, I spent the first week of school in a Peace Corps training, then got back and had a bit of delay trying to get back into the schools. After returning from the training I think I spent two-three weeks just meeting with principals, teachers, and anyone else I could think of trying to get some sort of schedule set as well as present them my project ideas.

April – This was one of the two most “regular” months of the school year. That meaning there were no town fiestas or anniversaries to contend with, just classes. Which was great for me because I finally had my class schedule sorted out, working in the local high school four days a week, once in a more rural community, and 4 nights a week in the institute teaching two levels of adult English classes. All of this would continue more or less the same until the end of the school year in December.

May – This month can be summed up by two words, school anniversary. Before the two weeks of the actual fiesta, just about every day had a class-ending meeting of something that had to be planned or discussed for the party. The actual anniversary celebration included a singing and poetry competition, two soccer tournaments, a sports day, a sort of Ms. San Pablo High School competition, a dance, and more lunches than I can remember. A really fun time but not the most productive for me still trying to get someone interested in the project ideas I had. I was able to bring two of my high school boys to a regional camp we put on as volunteers twice a year, once for boys and once for girls.

June – Mas fiesta. June is the month of the biggest fiesta in San Pablo, which I had a hard time imagining after the 14 day extravaganza thrown by the high school. But as I saw people rolling in from every direction and country I knew this was a whole different level of party. I met returned sampablinos (people from San Pablo) that are now living in places that range from Lima (Peru) to New York to Sweden. This fiesta included a soccer tournament played by teams from other towns that came to play, another tournament that I got to play in (but lost in the first round), 3 nights of dances, fireworks displays you can’t even imagine, bull fights, masses, parades, and I’m sure there is more that I am leaving out. I did manage to get some classes taught during this month, and even started planning what I would be an awesome youth group with some local professionals. Unfortunately the youth group ideas all came apart when the fiestas started and some of those professionals changed jobs and left town.

July – The fiestas subsided somewhat, but not completely. The mining strikes were still hanging around and interrupting classes. There was some fierce opposition to a mining project in another area of Cajamarca that ended in the deaths of a few protesters in another province. In San Pablo it felt like more of a recovery time from the fiestas and for me a new starting point having my best chance at a sustainable project ended the month before. Classes continued and this was also the month of Courts for Kids. Courts for Kids is an NGO that a lot of Peace Corps volunteers try to work with who send groups of volunteers to under developed areas of the world and build athletic courts in those areas. My former site mate had already done the application before I arrived and the last week of July we got to see the project come to fruition. We spent a week with a group of Americans from Washington and Oregon mixing and pouring cement and at the end have an awesome court to show for it.

August – The end of July/beginning of August marks school vacation time in Peru, something comparable to a Christmas or Spring break. July 28^th is Peru’s Independence Day so things start there and are followed by two weeks of vacation. This was a transition period for me as I was still making an effort to restart things after they had come apart in June, my first site mate Ana left, and my new site mate Jackie arrived. There were no classes to be taught but I did somehow manage to get a group of artisans into the fair we had in my town and we won first place. This was also the month of yearly medical checks for Peace Corps so I got to go back to Lima for the first time with my entire volunteer group.

September – After January, this was the second most difficult month of service. I got back from our medical checks and was able to have roughly five days of classes before the teacher strike came. If I thought the fiestas and vacations were an interruption, I had yet to see anything. The teachers went on strike for one entire month, fighting things like pay raises and a new law that would require them to take exams to prove they are qualified to teach. I still had my English classes in the evenings but anything I had hoped to accomplish with the high school would have to wait. I did have break in this month and that was my new site mate introducing me to one of the new psychologists in town. We almost immediately formed the San Pablo Mental Health Team between my site mate, two psychologists, and me. The youth group had a new hope.

October – The strike finally ended…and I was on vacation. To be fair this was a trip I had been planning on taking for months before there was even the idea of a strike, and it was an awesome trip. Along with one of my volunteer friends, Amanda, her boyfriend, and her friend from the states we made a loop of the south of Peru getting to see Machu Picchu, Lake Titikaka, and the Colca Canyon in the departments of Cusco, Puno, and Arequipa. That could possibly be the best trip I ever take. The best part I think was that when I got back to site it was time to hit the ground running. Classes were back, we had the new mental health team, and I had a lot of energy with little time left before the end of the school year to expend it all. We quickly formed our youth group, “Young Leaders of San Pablo” (Jovenes Lideres de San Pablo) and had weekly sessions with our group of about 12 students.

November – This was the best month of work I have had. In comparison with September where I was teaching night classes and looking for something to do the rest of the time I was now working roughly 12-14 hours a day. I would have classes at a high school or grade school in the morning, some sort of meeting or the youth group in the afternoon, and English classes at night. It was a great way to end a year full of frustrations and interruptions. The schools were also making up classes that they missed during the month of strike so I even had classes in the afternoons sometimes. This was also the month of our second youth camp and we were able to bring three of our high school girls, specifically three girls from our youth group, to take part in the camp.

December – The pace of the November work kept up for about the first two weeks, we took the youth group on a field trip, finished our sessions with them, and I finished my classes both in the high school and with the adult English students. Finishing with the adult classes was a gratifying experience that having been one of the only things that continued throughout the year without interruption. Then it was time for more fiesta! However this time I was ready for it. Having already experienced a December in San Pablo I knew a little bit more of what to expect, although this year was even more intense than the last. Things got started with my birthday, or maybe I should say birthweek. I think in all I counted seven different parties that different groups threw for me, including my adult English students, a few classes in the high school, the elementary school girls, my host family, and our youth group. I got caked in the face twice, ate tons of awesome meals, danced in the middle of many circles, and just had a blast. From there came some baptisms, graduations, and of course the chocolatadas (fruit cake and hot chocolate parties) and all ended with a Navidad cookout on the roof with the extended members of the host family that came to visit.

2013

So now I am in the last stretch of my service working again in a summer camp in the high school, which we have been able to improve a lot based on the lessons learned from the year before. I am living alone again, although it is more manageable this time and has been a much less severe rainy season. From here I will be looking forward to being able to accomplish a few more things before my time is up and to finding out what I will be doing in the United States come August time.