Trash Man

I don’t know if you know this, but Peruvians have more patience then oak trees and rocks combined. You can see this with their farming methods, food preparation, and even overall everyday conversations. I saw it once again when my town had a “meeting” last weekend. It consisted of the 30 or 40 people that have actually stayed during the rainy season, and was intended to go over all things concerning Miraflores and future projects. Maybe I should mention this simple meeting was actually three days long; from 8 am to 8 pm with only a one hour break for lunch each day! As with all Peruvian meetings it was purely a round robin discussion over every miniscule detail imaginable and surprisingly, with unfaltering patience (mine broke the first day because I had to leave for the capital city), mostly everyone stayed until the end. I couldn’t imagine a meeting lasting more than 3 hours in America without a cry for a break, let alone 36 hours! So to say the least, my town is incredibly dedicated to its posterity and future, and I am being shown what true patience really is.

The upswing to all this is that I was finally able to present to my town as a group! I think I finally completed the cycle of introductions that started almost two months ago when I first showed up at my host parents’ front door barely speaking Spanish. Of course as I presented myself my Spanish was horrible, (I felt as nervous as I did in Iraq when I presented the medical evacuation plan to a room of Iraqi generals), but the Mayor and some other guys I’ve befriended backed me up with some more in-depth descriptions of my work. The final result was some affirmative head-noddings, a few confused looks from the older folks, and a list of people that want to start a trash management programs in their homes. I felt pretty good afterwards, especially since I have another concrete project to work on (even if it is only digging a 1m x 1m x 1m pit for trash in each home), but also because the one person that invited me into town (the Mayor) actually showed me that he knows why I’m here.

I began my “micro-relleno” project by digging one for the health-post’s head nurse (a micro-relleno is a fancy word for trash pit, and, coincidentally, a papa-relleno is an incredibly delicious snack), and afterwards I started talking to the other health-post workers about their overall trash management system. This opened up a huge can of worms. It turns out that my health-post (and we think all the others in this zone) throw their medical waste in with the normal trash, which is all collected and thrown into a really deep cave! Yes, that’s right; all medical waste is thrown into a cave. It seems like such a contradiction; to have a country advanced enough to even produce medical waste and have a health system, but backwards enough to think throwing trash in a cave is a good waste management system. So this will obviously be on my agenda for some time while me and the other volunteers try and figure out something a little better than throwing trash on the heads of gnomes…or possibly a bear…or even a Peruvian patiently out-waiting the rocks that surround him.

One last thing, a bit of practical advice for those of you still seeking some from this blog. Having expectations about the title you receive from the Peace Corps my not be incredibly prudent. For example, I talked to someone who was supposed to teach English in Africa and ended up doing water treatment instead. And now as I head into my second month in my site the prospects of me being an “Agro-forestry Promoter” are slowly being shadowed by the trash management needs of my community. Will I still put Agro-forestry promoter on a resume? You can bet your ass I will. But can I, ironically, use the cliché phrase of “my recruiter lied to me” for both the Peace Corps and the Army? Hilariously, and not surprisingly, yes!