Saturday, February 15, 2014

Rocita

This is a story of Rocita, a girl from the annex where I worked. She was a 19-year-old mother of an extremely malnourished child. Her 1 and a half-year-old had the healthy height of an 8 month old and with that level of chronic malnutrition it’s likely that she will never recover. Her mother was young, timid, uneducated, and had extremely low self-esteem. She was a young girl who used to run away from nurses during vaccination campaigns, whose father told her it wasn’t worth his time and money to help her go to secondary school, whose primary teachers cared about her education so little they didn’t even teach her how to read. She was a young girl who had no income but for the first and a half of her daughters life could not enter into the Peruvian welfare system. She was a young woman who had been written off as a hopeless case by nearly everyone.

There was no real reason for me to have much faith that working with her would change anything. She had proved difficult, resistant and unwilling in the past. She was stuck in a cycle of patterns that seemed unbreakable. And yet there was something about her that drew me to her.

I first noticed it when I would be wandering around the community trying to hunt down mothers to do house visits. Since Rocita didn’t have her own chacra she was around the community more than most other mothers. Whenever I was walking around it seemed as if she was there peering out at me while masking her face with her hair. Curious about what I was saying and ease dropping on my conversations.

During our first few house visits I found myself getting frustrated with her lack of knowledge. It seemed like I was asking the same damn questions time and time again and we were getting nowhere. Was it that she didn’t understand me? That he didn’t want to understand me? That she never would? As time drew on it became more and more obvious that it was in fact that she didn’t understand me. Not for lack of trying, she actually had the best attendance of any mother in my Vivendas Saludables project. It was that I was using words often outside of her rudimentary vocabulary.

Things that seemed so simple to me were in fact complex concepts to someone who spoke Quetcha as a first language and only had a primary school education. Words like protein, development, even diarrhea were things that had never been clearly defined for her. Time and time again the nurses in my site had explained these concepts to her when she went for her child’s doctors appointment but no one had realized that the actually had to go further back and explain the basics. Because as simple as diarrhea seems to us it is actually foreign concept to someone who has never had it explained properly to him or her.

On top of low education and knowledge level her abysmal self-esteem made her self conscious to answer any question. She would get this feared look in her eye; clearly preoccupied that someone would judge or scold her for responding incorrectly. Better to stay quiet in the corner than express an incorrect opinion.

Throughout the course of the project as shy and self conscious as she was, she would arrive to every meeting on time, participate and pay attention, which is more than I can say for some of the mothers. During our house visits she was able to explain more and more concepts, and had a growing pride in the development of her child. I was able to deduce when she didn’t understand a concept I was talking about on a fundamental level and break down the word or concept to a more basic level.

I cannot report to you that her chronically malnourished child was miraculously cured and is now growing healthily. Nor can I definitively say that the next child she has wont suffer from malnutrition. I can hope tat it will be less likely. I can say that she understood that you should play and interact with your child on a daily basis in order to develop their brain. I can say that I saw a growth in her. Something that was different than many of the other mothers I worked with. I think partly because she was coming from such a lower point. She was a case that seemed so hopeless that the world had all but given up on her.

Her parents had essentially told her at a young age she wasn’t worth advancing. The educational institutions had cared less about her intellectual future. Her community had relegated her to the position many women were in, young, with child and stuck in the campo forever. The health post had tired but they didn’t have the time to sit there with her time and time again to try to explain things. Also since she was not a part of the welfare program they couldn’t force her to come to her daughter’s doctor’s appointments. And I know I wouldn’t go to an appointment regularly that was a 2.5 hour walk away that just made me feel more inadequate than I already felt.

What I realized was there had never been anyone to just sit there and talk to her. Someone who had the time to figure out what she didn’t know before assuming she knew the basics. Someone who would not get exacerbated when she didn’t answer question and keep prying for answers.

She was by no means my most successful mom in terms of behavior change, but she showed me something that I often think is hidden in modern day society, the value of taking the time to talk to someone. If you spend your whole life surrounded by people who cant seem to take the time to care: health workers overloaded with work and pressed for time, indifferent teachers, uninterested parents, a community with low expectations for you future you become a product of your surroundings. There is really no chance for growth and change. You never really had a chance. It is if she was predestined at birth to be a campo mother with a malnourished, under stimulated child because it was all she knew and all people expected of her. There was chatter behind her back about how her child was one of the most malnourished in the community, a bad mother, but no one took the time to talk to her. Everything was accepted as indelible fact.

I by no means think this is a problem unique to Peru, in fact I think it is quite prevalent in the inner cities of the United States as well. There are millions of people who are fundamentally ignored and pushed to the side. They never achieve anything because there is never anything expected of them. They become more by-products of society rather than whole people. And in the age of increasingly impersonal education I think the problem will only get worse.

Rocita taught me that even though someone may seem hopeless from the outside, if they have a curiosity inside, a semblance of a spirit to better their lives they are not a hopeless case. If they still try to the best of their ability to pay attention and grow there is still something worth reaching out to. They are not a hopeless case they are simply someone who was never given the chance. They may not achieve what you want but there can be growth and change, and a spark in their eye that grows with time and patience.

Third Year

Well this is a far over due entry. Let’s get serious I took a pretty hefty hiatus from writing on this blog. My life just became overwhelmed with building cook stoves, saying good-bye and all the change that I forgot to write. At points I thought no one would be interested but I’m starting to write again in the self-indulgent hope that you are interested.

I decided to stay a 3rd year in Peru, extending my service to be a Peace Corps Volunteer Leader in Chachapoyas, Amazonas, Peru. As I am quickly learning a Peace Corps Volunteer Leader (PCVL) is a lot more administrative work than being just a volunteer. 60% of the time I work as a PCVL, doing things like running regional meeting, helping with site development and helping volunteers with various projects and genera life and the other 40% of the time I am still doing health projects.

At the moment the health project that I am doing is helping the municipality to set up the Early Childhood Stimulation Center in a community in order to have a functional, sustainable and well-monitored center. I am also helping an obstetrician with her teen health group. She works with 120 kids from around Chachapoyas in creating youth peer educators.

Anyways the most common question that I get is why I decided to stay a third year. Most volunteers decide to peace the fuck out and head back to their lives in the USA. Well, there are several reasons for this. One is that I wanted to stay because I thought it would be a good chance for professional growth. So far I haven’t been wrong on that account.

I loved my old site in Huancavelica, but my whole first year was basically throwing rocks at other rocks. Literally. There was a rock where I got MoviStar cell service and I got really fucking good at throwing small rocks into a crevice created by two other rocks. I would personally go so far as to call myself an expert. But at the end of the day it’s a pretty stupid thing to be an expert in. so my whole first year felt like one long game of Survivor. Seeing if I could make it in Huancavelica and actually find work. During my first 6 months I spent about 4 relatively severely depressed, until another volunteer, my Peace Corps Volunteer Coordinator pointed out to me that I either needed to be institutionalized or pull my shit together. Luckily I pulled my shit together. As together as any a Peace Corps Volunteer can.

So since my first year was not, let’s say the most productive, partly because of me, partly because of my site, and my site was only 200 people I never got a chance to work on a larger scale institutional level; it’s al little hard when there are only 3 institutions to work on a large-scale level.

I felt that there was still room for growth personally and professionally and personally and if I went back to the states I would have virtually no idea what to do and would be taking a lateral step. I wanted to stay because I felt like there was still something more here for me.

I also wanted to work with my regional coordinator Miguel Angel, who is now in Chachapoyas. For those of you hat don’t know what a regional coordinator is, it’s a host country national that helps to coordinate site development, and security or work issues that may arise in a region and generally help to organize the region. During my 2 years of service he was the regional coordinator for Lima-Ica and Huancavelica. He was a very good person to have as a regional coordinator and helped me to survive my first year in Huancavelica.

So that is a brief understanding of why I became a third year. And so far it’s going well. The adjustment was a bit chaotic, moving to a city and simultaneously starting a job and trying to find and move into new housing. But now that my life has become a little more stable it seems manageable and I am optimistic for the year ahead.