A Week

I was thinking of how to write this blog entry for about two weeks now but each time it seemed an impossible task because it was hard to write. Sometimes in Peace Corps it’s very easy to loose your voice. Finally I think I have found it. This is the story of the week that exemplifies the roller coaster that is Peace Corps. This is the story of worst week ever and the moments of accomplishment and joy that brought it to a close.

The week, well really lets extend it into a 10-day week, started off on a seemingly good note. After Carnaval I made it back up the mountain and powered through finishing a grant application. The energy I was running on was sheer deadline and adrenaline. Now to give you some perspective, I can barely add 2+2 so having to make sure the math was correct in a grant was something that made me want to shoot myself.

Thankfully I found a way to finish foraged my way back to site.

When I got back to site I knew I was going to crash from traveling. I could never have predicted just how hard I would crash. My immune system decided to all but commit suicide. Really, I had it coming so I couldn’t be angry. What started as an innocent travel cold quickly turned into something resembling pneumonia. After a week of struggling in bed and watching far too much Boy Meets World (which h by the way is filled with life lessons, some of which just did not sink in and chock full of parenting advice, super relevant to 7 year old KCM) there came the day I The day I accidently got drunk on robatissin and thought my body was inflating like a beach ball and floating away, I decided it was probably time to call the doctors. Sounding like a drowning sea lion was not my most attractive look.

After the antibiotics started to kick in I decided to head to the coast to experience warmth. I was sick of 1 hour of sunshine and perpetually being damp and cold. I wanted a relaxing weekend where I could just enjoy the sun. Of course I had no such luck. I fully learned the truth behind the phrase “nothing good happens after 2am.”

The beginning of the weekend was calm, filled with pizza, an attempt at working out, and moving at the pace of an animal slightly faster than a turtle. Friday night we went to a friend’s birthday party. It was a low key and entertaining affair filled with far too much food. After making the world’s most awkward exit from the party, its hard to escape when you are ½ the party, we went to grab a drink at a bar. Around 3am we decided we were hungry and tired, and headed off on a mission. For some reason that I will probably never fully understand we decided to go out to get food rather than cook it in his nice swelteringly hot kitchen. Instead we made the ever-logical decision to go to a random restaurant to get some moderately tolerable food…

When we got to the restaurant we decided to go for the worse of two options. Naturally. We got something resembling fried chicken soggy fries. After we paid we patiently sat and waited for our food. Around this time 2 guys casually strolled in asking for some pop. Yes it’s pop not soda. This seemed to be a totally normal request, until one of them whipped out a gun. Now this may sound scary, and don’t get me wrong it was and it was the closest I have ever been to a gun, but on a scale of one to shot, this was pretty tame. The gun was a solid 3 feet away from my face and in perspective it was the politest armed robbery possible.

3 am is time you can’t really get all that mad about getting robbed. Nothing good happens after 2 am. To boot we were in a part of town that we really should have expected to get robbed. Finally since they were robbing a restaurant we just happened to be there the aggression was never directed at us. Besides the moment they ripped off my little purse, which I would like to add I was trying to take off to politely hand to them, there was no time the hooligans were within 3 feet of me. So at the end of the day a polite armed robbery, or really a robbery we could have prevented by simply pretending we were intelligent and not wandering to a random restaurant at 3 a. But you’re only young once and I find most things you have to learn the hard way.

I also now know that I would be the worst witness ever. The whole hullabaloo I was really just focused on the gun because in my head that was the most interesting part of the situation. The guys themselves were just blurs flurrying around. The next day when we had to give a police report all I could say was one had a red hoodie, the other one existed. Not the most helpful information.

The most awkward part of the entire ordeal was after the robber left the building. In the USA if a restaurant were robbed the first reaction would be to call the police, or get the hell out. In Peru on the other hand the first reaction is for the restaurant owners to run after the robbers with some knives while we sat there dumbstruck. After about a minute and some confused eye contact we wondered if we should call the cops. It seemed like an effort no one was willing to exert so we went with the Peruvians and didn’t call the police.

Around this time we also realized we had already paid for our food and since we had no other money at the moment we made the executive decision to wait for our food. An awkward 10 minutes passed while we sat patiently waiting for our food and the restaurant owners were still flittering around in a tizzy. It was one of those strange moments that could only happen in Peace Corps. This is probably the only job where the fact you had already paid S/. 10, a chunk of change on a Peace Corps salary, for some crappy food would lead you to the decision to sit and wait for your food after an armed robbery. But it wasn’t like we were very well going to get our money back if we left without the food so we might as well get something out of the excursion.

The next day after spending far too long in the police station doing what can only be described as the world’s most pointless police report (no real details about the man, no real investigation to follow, The restaurant owners didn’t even bother filing a report) I went to the beach for the regional meeting. The beach was nice, relaxed and chilled. A good remedy to the night before…. that is until 2am. At 2am, almost on the dot, I wandered off on the beach to pee. Let me remind you nothing good happens after 2 am. On the way back, in a perpetual competition to trump my own clumsiness, I jammed my toe into a piece of rebar hidden in the sand. By far the most comfortable injury I have ever sustained. Basically I stubbed my toe so hard the nail bed just filled with sand. Delectable. It has currently left me down one big toe nail. The best toe nail to lose during the summer months.

Of course, as life works I had to go bad to site at an absurd hour the next day. So at at 5 am I headed back up to site to participate in a “yunsa” to celebrate my health post anniversary. For those of you unfamiliar with the term “yunsa” it’s a party where you decorate a tree with gifts, dance around it in a circle while slowly chopping down the tree with an axe. When the tree falls it is a free-for-all for the gifts and whoever chops down the tree is in charge of paying for the decorations the next year. Also while the chopping and circling is going on there is a war of boys vs. girls with baby powder, lipstick, flour and powdered baby food, where you want to cover the opposite gender in any and every of these products. The yunsa was where the world’s worst 10 days seemed to turn around. I’ll admit it was a bit awkward to dance with a screwed up big toe, so I became the beer girl rather than try to dance in the circle. Right after the yunsa I got the news that my grant had been approved and my boss was happy with my work and growth demonstrated through the grant. That was the real turning point. That same day we played carnavales (throwing water at each other, of course only the opposite gender) while washing the pots and pans from the yunsa.

The 10 days show to me how much can happen, not happen and change in one week in Peace Corps. You can have what is seemingly the worst week ever but it can end almost as abruptly as it began. There are no predictable moments in Peace Corps. There is no such thing as a typical week or even a typical day. Whenever people ask me what I do in a day I become stumped and speechless. I can tell you about my projects, my site, yesterday. But to tell you about a typical day. well there aren’t any. You never know what can happen in a week. All you can really know is that nothing good happens after 2am and it is not wise to go on excursions at this hour.