Its not all work and no play.

I just had an opportunity to thaw out. We had a regional meeting in Cañete, near Lima and right on the beach. It was totally worth the bus ride through swerving mountain paths and cliffs to just be able to feel the sand in my toes and hear the waves crashing again. And to be warm! I can’t say enough how much the sun helps a person’s overall well being. The meeting went well, there was a lot of discussion about the upcoming Builders Beyond Borders group that is coming to that area to help the Water and Sanitation volunteers build some cool projects. Sadly us Yauyos folks won’t be able to participate because we’re a little to far to travel easily back and forth, but its still neat to hear about high-school students caring enough to volunteer in other countries already. Later, of course I ate plenty of good food and was able to drink some beers with all the other Peru 14er’s I haven’t seen since Swearing-In, and in the end I realized how amazingly therapeutic the trip was for me mentally. This whole process is totally like training for a marathon where you stair step your way up, back-off the training a bit and let your body recuperate, then stair step it up some more. After just speaking English freely, relaxing, and swapping war stories with the other volunteers I really felt ready to get back to site and take it all on again. It’s amazing how much a process living life is; there’s the beginning stages where it’s all new and novel, the stage where that starts to wear off and things start repeating, the stressed out stage, the release and relaxation, and then we head back to start it all over again. And during this entire process we are building our bodies and minds for something greater, and we understand that we are part of something greater as well…so as you can tell by my positive mindset I’ve obviously been at the beach. I also met some volunteers in the Peace Corps Response Program. From what I could gather they volunteer for 3-6 months tours and usually in disaster areas or just generally with the Red-Cross or other organizations. Of course you have to be a completed Peace Corps volunteer before you can apply for the Response Program, but it seemed like a really neat thing to do, especially for someone that’s finished up the Peace Corps, wanted to head home right afterwards and after a few years realizes they want to volunteer again and signs up for the Response Program. And this brings me to another point; what really motivates me to complete my service here in Peru. The motivation comes from the idea that after these two years I’ll be part of a global fraternity of RPCV’s (Returned Peace Corps Vols.) for the rest of my life. I’ll have the college assistance like the Fellows program available to me, opportunities like the Peace Corps Response Program, and even just the camaraderie that will constantly surprise me, starting from the day I get back and lasting forever. I’ll have that secure feeling for the rest of my life of knowing that I belong to something great.

So as you can tell, the trip was great and I’m ready to take on the upcoming project in my town for a landfill and trash management system. I’ll be coordinating, promoting, getting dirty, and sharing technical information with my town and SERNAP who’ll be overseeing its execution. SERNAP wants to excavate a landfill for each town in our protected area that will last 6-8 years and hopefully help stem the problem of the towns just throwing trash in natural caves or the river. Its an ambitious project, especially because they want to get done by the middle of this year, but its totally do-able. Right now the Peace Corps volunteers have been asked to start house-hold trash accumulation surveys to get an idea how much trash is produced in each site, so that should keep us busy for a bit. The only hard part now is trying to find level ground that is far enough away from the river…I have a feeling that after some frustrations I’m going to have to barrow the “Iraqi Okay” slogan I adopted during my deployment and use it for our landfill’s placement; “so what if its not exactly 50 meters from the river,” its still “Peruvian Okay.”

Whistling actually does help while you work

I want to propose a question to those still reading my blog. How do you think people should define themselves? Do you think it’s better to let the experiences you’ve had in the past speak for themselves? Or is it better to be a person that defines themselves with their present situation? The reason I ask is because I’m being reminded of what “work” truly is and I have to constantly quiet the voice in my head that says to me “you’ve had enough manual labor in the past to fill a barn, why do you keep looking for situations that give you more!” This was especially the case as I climbed up the side of a mountain the other day carrying PVC pipes with my host family to an irrigation canal over 4000m (about 13,000 ft). I thought about how all my farming experience, college experience, and even Army experience were merely words on a resume and wouldn’t be able to help me during the grueling moments. What did it matter that I had dug ditches in the past or carried tons of heavy loads miles upon miles on my back or in a wheelbarrow; I was faced with the present situation of the mountain, burning leg muscles, my will power, and some PVC. Does a person ever reach a point where they’ve gained enough life experience to feel like they can stop climbing mountains of achievement? Should a person ever want to stop? Are our experiences in the past simply words on a resume or do they slowly build us into the person we hope to be? So I ask again, is life for you a culmination of what you’ve done? Or is it simply being happy with what you’re doing in the present moment?

The project I’m working on these days is helping my community plant over 3000 pine trees and installing an irrigation canal of PVC pipes; and like all projects in my site, its happening on the side of a mountain! It starts with a 45 minute hike uphill with all of your tools for the day, and usually ends about an hour after the rain starts pouring. *Practical advice note: remember to bring a good poncho, a rain coat doesn’t cut it.* The work is fulfilling, like all hard work is, and I’m just happy to know that I’ll have some good success stories under my belt after all is said and done. I also went to visit our town’s annex, Piños, which was a breath taking view of massive valleys and mountain sides covered with terraced farming. So many times I’ve felt like I’m living on the set of Lord of the Rings! The sad story about Piños, and so many other towns in Yauyos (Miraflores not excluded), is that all the older teenagers are leaving to start working or going to university in the bigger cities after highschool and these small mountain towns are shrinking. Towns like Piños only have 30-40 people left, mostly either over 35 or under 16 years old. All the really old townsfolk talk of how beautiful and full all the terrace farms were in the 70’s and 80’s, but now you can see the majority of them overgrown and eroding. And of course on top of all this you can see a basic disappearance of the towns’ cultures. All the younger generations see the “good-life” they could be living on something their parents didn’t even grow up with; TV’s. Now I’m the last person to condemn TV, I love TV and I love progress and I wish a happy and progressive life for everyone. But when thinking about preserving culture and small rural areas like Yauyos (and any number of small rural areas across the globe) I think in 20 years many of these small pueblos will be ghost towns and the one’s that remain will be the one’s with the best reception.

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!

The Holidays

So what do cray paper flowers, crates of beer, two hour speeches, 80 year old women dancing, and marching bands have in common? You guessed it! A Peruvian Christmas and New Year’s fiesta! Along with those interesting sights and sensations there was also the burning of lots of stuff, eating lots of alpaca and panneton (Peruvian fruit cake), and men in Negrito costumes dancing to the same song for days on end. The New Year’s celebration is actually 3 days long in my pueblo and was actually going on as I typed this out. I think what was most interesting for me was to see all the family members that have left this pueblo to work in Lima or other bigger cities returning to celebrate in a much cherished tradition. You can see fathers teaching their sons the traditional dances and wearing the traditional costumes for the Negritos. You get to see family reunions after one or more years apart. You also get to see the just how different Americans and Peruvians experience life; simply put time just moves slower here.
As another year passes I, like so many other people, did a double take as the clock struck 12 and looked back at how this last year has been a combination of almost every emotion available. From the intense satisfaction of getting my Peace Corps acceptance letter, the anxiety of skinning my way out of the military’s grasp, and even the relaxation spending a summer at home provided me. And now as I begin another march towards next December I wonder how my service in Peru will pan out. I want to teach classes, create clubs, reforest entire mountains, and have a trash free community by the time I leave; but these are my goals and not the goals of my community. I’m seeing more and more that sustainable projects start with seeds planted months before the final product and that’s kind of where I see myself right now, little by little planning and planting seeds of motivation for projects in the future. One of the biggest problems we have in Miraflores is the high turn over rate of people. Most committees and social groups only last about a year, sadly, and most projects end when the person that started them leaves (doesn’t look good for my projects in two years!) But there are ways around this problem, and with the help of the NGO’s here and some of the wiser, more traveled folks in my community, I’m beginning to understand (through broken Spanish) just exactly how to work successfully with this tiny town of 300…And yes I’ve made the movie connection and totally consider myself a Spartan of Miraflores!

Its really just a piece of cake...or banana bread

So my weeks have been passing fairly smoothly. I’m looking at one month in site already, and I have had several opportunities to feel integrated and even slightly purposeful in my community. I’ve also found some time to see some of the other sites around my area, and in fact just returned from Brad’s site called Vitis which is about 15Km’s away. Of course to get there it’s a 6K (3.6 mile) hike to the main road, where I catch (hopefully if one hasn’t missed it) the only passing vehicle to Vitis. And luckily this time I did get to the road in time to hop on the bus otherwise it’s another 9Km hike straight uphill to Brad! Brad’s site is literally situated on a mountain outcrop, and is aptly named “El Cuidad de los Vientos,” or like our own Chicago, “The City of The Winds.” Once I got to Vitis I met up with Brad and we ate some of the local delicacy, fried trout; a fish that isn’t native to Peru, but has become a symbol of pride for many rural communities because they have started their own successful fish farms. Afterwards we met one of the environmental and tourism promoters in his site and we headed up the mountain to post a “Do Not Throw Trash” sign near the trails to some of the local archeological sites, and then headed back down just before the rain started….
.....Now let me pause a moment and let me inform you that putting up a small 3’x 2’ sign with such a simple and common message as “Do Not Throw Trash” is a monumental success for sites like Brad’s and mine. I can imagine its surprising when you think a simple sign like this can be made and hung in one afternoon by visiting Lowe’s back in the states, but when you’re faced with the challenge of living in communities where you may not even know you have an environmental and tourism committee until after 6 months in site and the supplies alone take another 2 weeks to procure, you can begin to imagine how volunteers take their successes, no matter how small, as giant steps forward….
So after the hike and sign hanging we bought some bananas, slightly browning, for what Brad and I considered the next great achievement of the day; making banana bread in his newly purchased oven! We followed the recipe as best we could, mixing the batter in chipped bowls and dented pots, and using guess-tamation to preheat the small gas oven that was lacking temperature gauges. We substituted some ingredients with others, and added our own flavors like roasted peanuts and honey that was made at Brad’s site. We popped our makeshift stew-pot/pie-pan into the over, and waited patiently listening to Christmas music on Brad’s computer, passing the time like usual during the rainy season with conversation and tea drinking. After an hour had passed with frequent checking, our masterpiece was complete and a total success! Two inspiring volunteers, lacking all proper materials were able to improve the quality of our community’s environment by promoting proper trash management, and even more so, we were able to amazingly produce outstanding banana bread at over 13,000ft in elevation with a small gas powered oven in the middle of Brad’s room! Now if that’s not ingenuity and embodiment of the Peace Corp experience, I don’t know what is!

All Systems Are Go

I probably struck pay dirt with my site, I honestly couldn’t have been luckier. First of all, I live with a host family where my mom is part of the Recursos Naturales Comite and my dad is president of the PTA. I met an environmental/English teacher that is super excited to get me in the schools to teach enviro-education and a full immersion English class to the chicos. The governor of my town is super motivated to start a trash clean-up program with my help. My mayor is super motivated in general which is hard to come by in such a small town. There are two, yes two, agricultural/forestation promotion organizations near my site that make regular visits to my town. And, I have two community partners that seem much obliged to work with a gringo on just about any project! So to say I’m grateful is an understatement. During training we heard horror stories of people having tons of problems in every area I just mentioned, and in some cases not making these breakthroughs until half-way through their service! I won’t be shy in saying a lot of the early breakthroughs I’m making are partly my on doing by just getting my face out in the community; but honestly the majority of a volunteer’s success is totally dependent on the communities attitude, and even more just purely circumstantial. So once again, to say I’m grateful is an understatement. I still have those times when absolutely nothing happens, when the rain is pouring and all you can do is wait. But when part of my “integration,” (which I might add is supposed to be the hardest part of the two years,) is going fishing all day with my host brother in some of the most scenic places I’ve experienced thus far, I consider myself pretty lucky.

Also, my family is really starting to warm up to me. It’s a small step forward when they invite me to watch the one channel television with them, but its such a big success in my mind considering they’ve never experienced a volunteer (even more so, a gringo) living with them. You learn to count your blessings no matter how small when you’re this far from anything you once knew as comfortable. I think what I’ve truly learned to appreciate is how much warmer a room can be with other people eating and laughing can be when there is a freezing rain outside. The idea that you depend on other people for your comforts is really new to me, as strange as it sounds. My time in the Army showed me I can survive and endure strange situations, but now that I’m in the Peace Corps I’m finally learning to enjoy those situations as well.

Its been 2 weeks already

So its been two weeks already and since my town has electricity today I´m going to bang out a blog on the Municipalidad´s ¨full speedy¨ internet...
I´ve pretty much spent the last 2 weeks realizing that things just seem to fall into place in this backwoods, rural town of Yauyos. It must be that ¨country living¨ type of mindset you hear so much about on the country station but never have the slightest idea what thier singing about. I can literally leave my house with one goal in mind, randomly run into someone I wanted to find the day before, end up making an appointment for tommorrow, and then realize that I still haven´t met my goal but I understand that if I go to the appointment tommorrow (which will probably fall through) I can achieve it then! If you can understand that, then you´re ready for the Peace Corps. Honestly my best advice for future volunteers or anyone wondering how to cope with a similar situation, is just stay out of your room and roam around the streets or just make spanish small talk (no matter how horrible your spanish is.) Each day i´m talking to new people, or even visiting the same small shops and having the same small conversations, but from what we were told in training, its the best way to intergrate yourself.
So far by just randomly walking around or asking the silly question of ¨Do you have plans today?¨ I´ve helped with some potatoes, milked some cows, dug an irrigation ditch, was taken on a tour of the nearby ruins, and even participated in a monthly meeting of all the park guards here in the Yauyos Reserve. I couldn´t have done these things if I was only watching the 3rd season of ¨The Office¨ in my room, cursing the afternoon rains. Sure it was a shock to arrive here, and i´m still learning to cope with it all (especially the cold...especially the cold and how Miraflores has yet to upgrade to insulation or indoor heating,) and yes, I do spend time in my room. But overall, as my ¨go, go, go¨ American mindset slowly settles into the rhythm of life thats seems so much more fitting for a rural life-style, I am learning to appreciate being in the moment, and realizing that this experience is going to go by just as fast even if I´m taking it slow....
So practical advice in sum: If you can´t sit still for longer than one hour while you watch your host family prepare a scarf for weaving while its raining cats and dogs outside, once again re-wetting your clothes on the line that you washed 3 days ago, and being out spoken by your 3 year old host sister (atleast for my level of spanish), then I you might want to re-consider joining!