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I am trying to sit here writing a blog entry about the last month or so but I am seriously struggling to honestly order my thoughts or formulate a story of any kind. I think one of the problems is that I haven’t been writing down what has happened in my day to day. Another is that I don’t really have a clue what is going on. I am at a point where things seem routine, life seems normal, and yet my mind is on crack. My mind keeps wandering from bizarre dreams, to the sight of erect cow penises to mental breakdowns. Maybe the sight of a cow penis caused the mental breakdown. I think it’s a pretty solid. Sadly I will never ever be able to scrub that image out of my mind no matter how hard I try. Here is the mythical land of Peace Corps at times having trouble maintaining my sense of self or my direction. Instead of trying to collate my thoughts into a concise order I’m just going to start with some brief highlights and see where that takes me.

Vacation:

Went to the beach with about 15 other volunteers, contemplated life while staring at the “pineapples”- it was a palm tree dumbass. Good thing I never had a spring break in college. Got super dehydrated, probably should have died. Drinking in 100* plus 100% humidity. Made me miss the days of readily accessible electrolyte pills in the training room.

Cortisone Shots:

I had to get my first cortisone shot in my life down here in Peru. Let me tell you it hurt like a motherfucker. First let me begin with the diagnosis. I went to the orthopedic. I brought my Spanish-English dictionary with me and everything fully prepared to have to explain how my foot hurt, when and all the normal complicated things you have to explain to an orthopedic doctor in the states. Turns out I didn’t need the dictionary at all. Not by a long shot. I just pointed to my heal and said its swollen, hurts when I run, difficult to walk and causes pain in the morning. Quite honestly I forgot even the word for heel I just pointed. After about 30 seconds, one poke and an inquisitive glance I got the quickest diagnosis I have ever gotten, planters factitious. I’m 99% sure I used the wrong spell check word on the end of that one but who can really spell that word anyways? Promply after my diagnosis the orthopedic said that he was going to give me a cortisone shot. No physical therapy, no exercises, just a straight shot into the heal with a giant needle. While in the process of convincing myself I was not in fact scared of the needle the doctor jammed it into my heal and decided to wiggle it around a little. Don’t worry he said the comforting words “its supposed to hurt.” Clearly those charming words made me feel about a million times better.

The Wire:

This has nothing to do with anything. Its just an amazing show I discovered, you should all watch it. Fun things my host mother says to me:

• “You fell into the river because you are so fat that the rocks cant support the weight of your enormous body. Look (while rocking on the rock) it can support my body!” o Really let’s get serious I could be anorexic and I would have still fallen into the river. And to boot I threw Harry Potter 5 into the river. Have some sympathy woman. And I can see that muffin top popping out of your fleece pants.

• “You are too fat to walk” accompanied by a fun bear impression of how I was meandering up the hills o Cant a girl meander? Felt like I had entered a time portal and transported back to 5th grade when I was a 10 year old in petite woman’s clothes. Thought I had left the fat kid taunts behind about 10 years ago. Apparently not. Awesomeee. In fact I can walk asshole.

• “You don’t know how to do anything, you are going to die of hunger”

o Sorry I am not trained to cook with pure oil and MSG. And in fact I have made you dinner a few times, and you thought it was delicious thank you very much! Give a girl a chance to learn how to cook the Peruvian way, I promise I am not going to die of hunger anytime soon. I’m pretty sure my body is 40% potatoes at this point.

Don’t worry she actually is a very pleasant woman who is caring most of the time and jokes around. It’s just every now and again she sounds like my 12-year-old nightmare.

Trainings:

went to two trainings. • One was Early In-Service Training. Lots of logistics and materials during this training. Although it was strange to see everyone I hadn’t seen in 3 moths. It didn’t feel like three months at all and yet when I actually saw people it made me realize that in fact three months had happened. That the blur of time I spent in Cusicancha was actual time on a clock, not just some weird non-existent time in a parallel universe. It was nice to see everyone whoever strange it may have been. It almost put things in perspective and allowed me a time to breathe. Until I spent 16 hours on the side of the road in a bus paro.

• The second one was In-Service Training and Project Design Management. This training we had to bring a socio from our community. I thought I was going to bring the PERFECT person. That was until my health post told me absolutely not. That was the first time I had a disagreement with my health post, which is more like my guardian than my boss. It was super overwhelming to get yelled at in another language, because I kept missing key words and having no actual clue what they were saying. So after a very anxious day I changed my socio. Little did I know I was now bound to the energizer bunny on crack.

Prior to leaving it was a little stressful because I thought I would have to meet him in another city. Finding a Peruvian man without a cell phone in a different city sounded like my own personal nightmare. Luckily I did not have to deal with that. But then I had to deal with a 60-year-old man who talks as if he is a 7-year-old boy. The chattiest of the Cathy’s, constantly joking, occasionally about god knows what, always running around like the energizer bunny. Luckily as much as I wanted to kill him throughout training one of the biggest problems that I has was he was a little too excited to work and cracked out. It was like having that annoying 8-year-old boy asking you what everything is and making jokes that are moderately politically incorrect constantly staying in your ear. And all in all those are not the worst problems to have. Luckily I got to send him along his merry way and have 3 more days of training free and clear.

The second training that I had was Project Design Management. Probably the most productive training that I have had thus far. By the title of the training I can assume that you get the general meaning of what the training is about.

Alcoholism:

the Peruvian Presence

I recently had a meeting with the Red de Salud presenting my community diagnostic, although I was nervous I had already presented in front of 100 people at my community meeting so it was less stressful than I thought. But back to the point. During the presentation I talked about alcoholism in my site, how it exists, how people identify it as a problem and potential programs to work in prevention. When I mentioned this detail the head of the Red agreed whole-heartedly with me that there was a presence of alcoholism and that apparently my town was semi-notorious for it. I didn’t really realize until that moment how much of a presence there really was. My site mate down the road has only one alcoholic in his town, and has never seen people in drinking circle. My site mate up the road is a mostly female population because all the men work far away in the mines. That leaves my site, right smack dab in the middle, the site with the oldest population of my district with a distinct presence of alcoholism.

I am not saying that there are drunks breaking windows and lighting things on fire but they are there. About 4 to 5 times a week there are between 8 and 10 men standing in a circle drinking on the street and another 5 or 6 you can find drunk sitting somewhere alone. These numbers may sound small to you but consider my population is about 200 on a good day so I would go so far as to say that at least 60% of the families are affected by alcoholism or occasional alcohol abuse. Recently after a birthday party I had to help walk my host dad home. He has a bad habit of drinking until he falls occasionally and not eating dinner when he gets drunk. The first man to get drunk and not eat I have ever encountered in my life.

On occasion I myself have had to run away from drunken men, or tactfully step away and say I have a very important meeting with my computer. During the same birthday party where I had to walk my father home the birthday boy thought it was his personal mission to tell me he loved me and dance the night away with me. luckily we were dancing whino, a type of dancing where it is stylistically correct to shove your partner and stomp on his feet. It became a special to watch me dance with him that every time he did the rest of the party would sit down and watch. Slowly the birthday boy would inch closer and closer to me, trying to throw his arm over my shoulder and maybe move in for the kiss. I on the other hand took every effort I could to move to the other side of the room, stomping on his foot or shoving his drunk ass away from me every chance I could.

One of the more disturbing things that I started to notice once I realized how much alcoholism existed in my site was the presence of young boys. My host mother owns a tienda so often times you will find a group of men sitting in her tienda drinking, especially on a weekend night. When the men are drinking on a weeknight or multiple nights in a row there will often be a presence of a young boy, one of their sons, sent to monitor. If the mother doesn’t want her husband to drink, or wants him to return home for dinner young boys are used as the control tool. I think that they are meant to monitor their dads, ensure they don’t drink too much, or at the very least make them feel guilty for drinking too much.

I don’t really know if this is the best system to employ, because really how much control does an 8 year old have over a fully-grown man? Also what sort of example are you setting for your son? If you are sending your son along to control his drunken father all he is seeing is men drinking, occasionally out of control. Their example is that men can drink and it is not necessarily their responsibility to control how much they drink or how often. What does that really say for the next generation? I have seen a young girl running after her father imploring the tienda not to sell him liquor because he stole her mother’s money. Entire families sitting in the tienda waiting for the father to finish his conversation so they can eat dinner. And a drunken man passed out in front of my tienda, still unidentified.

I know there is an unsaid tiff between the wives of alcoholics and the owners of the tiendas. The mothers and wives think that the tiendas should stop selling when the man is clearly inebriated. The tienda on the other hand view it as a business and really is it their responsibility to stop a man from drinking. Don’t get me wrong many of the tiendas will stop selling to certain men at certain points but it brings a question to my mind. What is the level of social responsibility of the community to prevent alcoholism? When you can see it is a prevelant problem in a community so small is there anything you should do about it as a community member or let the problem lay? Do the tiendas actually have responsibility to their fellow community men?

It should be interesting to see what happens during my town anniversary, the acceptable party time in my town.

Teaching Children:

I now have way more respect for every teacher I’ve had

Since January I have been teaching children, especially the kindergarten kids and the 5th and 6th grade kids. I must say I like the kindergarten kids way more than I like the kids from 5th and 6th grade most of the time. For one thing most of the activities I do with the kindergarten kids are arts and crafts activities I make up on the way to class that day. I generally pick up water bottles and figure out some sort of activity to do with them on they fly. Little kids are the easiest in the world to entertain The 5th and 6th graders not so much, they are of the age to be opinionated and not disciplined at the same time. I am never going to teach middle school when I return to the states. You don’t get paid enough for that shit; I am learning that now considering I’m currently paid roughly nothing to help out with their class. Anyways you never know what you are going to get with the kids, sometimes super attentive, sometimes the whiniest people in the whole world. I have learned the hard way to never assign anything resembling homework and expect it to actually be done.

I also learned that capture the flag is probably the most captivating thing that has ever happened to 5th and 6th graders. I forgot how competitive that game gets, there was hair pulling, shouting, leaving the boundaries and calling out cheating all though out the game. I felt like I had to watch every single one of the kids the entire time in order to ensure fair play.

I then tried to teach the 1-4th graders the very same game. It however did not go over that well. Maybe it was my Spanish skills, maybe it was the fact they were young but whatever it was it completely failed. Instead of attempting to capture the flag all of the kids simultaneously ran to the other side, picked up the flags and ran back to their same sides. The game lasted all of 7 seconds. My explanation took longer than the game itself.

Machismo:

it exists

Machismo, male superiority basically, is a phenomenon that exists in my site. It is subtle but defiantly there. I have to say at first I didn’t even notice it, little things, but slowly but surely I recognized its presence. Some things that are so minute like the men get served before the women every time took me a while time to pick up on. Other things like my own personal habits took me even longer to realize. The main habit that has changed is cleaning up after men. Since my mom’s tienda is under construction right now and previously served the workers in town for the new water system I have eaten with a lot of men. Not a single one of them knows how to take their plate to the sink after they are done eating. Sometimes they will just stare ate me woefully until I take their plate to the kitchen. Others just straight up expected it.

I realized it about a month ago when a man just straight up handed me his dirty plate and I took it to the kitchen without a second thought until I arrived to the kitchen. If some guy who wasn’t a very good friend or boyfriend just handed me his dirty plate in the states I would have said what the fuck do you want me to do with this? Here on the other hand I dutifully walk to the kitchen and help washing. It makes me wonder if I am just fitting into the culture or if part of me is changing. It is hard to tell at this point; especially since I am wrapped up in this little world I call Peace Corps.

All in all this is a brief synopsis of my life in the past month; in the best way I could find to organize my thoughts. If I am being honest with you the past month or so I have had way too much time to think and started to feel less and less like myself. There were moments where I didn’t even know who I was or what grounded me. It felt like I was floating away and there was no one there to catch me. I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing, or what was inside of me. When you have too much time to examine your own life you sometimes don’t necessarily like the answers that come up.

Sometimes your mind becomes so clouded that you cant actually tell what the prob

lem is if any. In a world so foreign, so far away from the life that you became accustomed to and the friends you depended on it is easy to loose site of yourself. To feel forgotten and start acting like you are forgotten, or simply forgetting what defined. Not the superficial defined you like fresh kicks, but what actually defines your identity, your soul, and your core being. The problem is you have to figure that out first.