October 9 & 10:

              Sunday was an internet work day for me, so Ali and I went in search of internet in Yungay. We could only find one place that would let me hook my own laptop and even then I had to sit in the middle of the room with the laptop balanced on a stool because the cord wouldn’t reach anywhere else :-P Needless to say I got less work done than I would’ve like too. Oh well. Ali and I ended up walking around and looking at the market for a little while and then heading back down the highway. She came and saw my site too. It’s always fun to show people around.

                Monday was a good day. I finally finished giving my survey to all the students in the secundaria……now I just have to get them all counted :-/ I also was finally ready to sit down and talk to my directora about the World Map project that I want to do. I submitted my written request for permission to have the class and paint a wall; she seemed really receptive so hopefully I will get approval!

                Monday is also exactly two months before Mom gets to Huaraz. There is a rule for PCVs that you can’t take vacation or have visitors for the first 6 months in the county. Mom joked forever about how she would be knocking on my door six months, to the day, after I left the county. ……turns out it’s not a joke, folks. I landed in Lima, Peru on June 10, 2011; Mom’s bus gets into Huaraz around 6:30 AM December 10, 2011. She’s crafty, that one :-P

October 8: Fiesta de San Miguel and Happy Birthday, Mom!

           Saturday morning we all got up and went into Huaraz for the Fiesta of San Miguel. My host sister Paula was the Mayor Domo of the fiesta; which means my host family was responsible for providing the food for the party. We went to Mass at noon….having never been to mass before I was TOTALLY lost, but it was interesting to see. After Mass we went back to an Aunt’s house to celebrate. This house by the way is one of the nicest I’ve seen since I got to Peru. It has hot water. I may or may not have stood in the bathroom with my hands in the sink for a while just because there was hot water coming out of the tap :-P There was also an electric stove and wooden cabinets. It was pretty.

Anyway, lunch was rabbit and papas. The rabbit was actually really good; I was surprised, once again, by a new food. I also surprised my entire host family with my ability to carry a tray of drinks and wrap napkins around silverware….who knew my time as a server would come in handy in the Peace Corps, Not kidding, once I started carrying around trays of drinks without spilling them, my host mom started bragging to EVERYONE that I used to be a waitress :-P (speaking of….. shout out to Harry’s, hope y’all are doing well).

This brings me to a cultural….I’ll call it quirk….I’ve noticed. So at these fiestas there is always food, tons of it. There are never tables though and sometimes not even chairs; everyone just lines the walls holding their plate in one hand and eating with the other. This is where it gets tricky. There is SO much food and it generally includes some sort of meat that is still on the bone and covered with sauce. Each person gets one little plastic fork and about half a napkin. Perfect recipe to end up wearing everything you’re eating, right? No. Saturday afternoon (and at every other fiesta I’ve been to) I watched a room full of people turn a plate piled with papas, tamales and hunks of rabbit back into a clean piece of Styrofoam with a bone lying in the middle of it……all with one hand. Meanwhile I’m gnawing on a rabbit leg and thigh that’s about as big as my face; sauce on both hands (which means it’s probably on my forehead at this point too); and my host dad is just cracking up. How do they do this?! I am mystified. Peace Corps needs to add “eating at large fiestas” to its PST classes :-P

October 7: so this time “my friends” actually turned out to be from Georgia

               Friday morning I went to the Municipality to meet with a few people. I’m trying to get plans together for the summer school program that they do around here, so I just decide to start asking questions. I get the feeling they usually wait until later to plan, but whatever; it’ll be good for them to start early :-P After that I stopped by the colegio to try to talk with the Directora about the next project I want to start, but it turned out they were having field day. I ended up hanging out for a few hours to cheer them on. At one point I actually joined in one of the games in place of a teacher who had recently had a baby. It was a race where we had to run across the volley ball court, sit on a balloon to break it and then run back. There were four balloons for each of us and I was actually running barefoot because I was wearing flip flops :-P I won though! Hopefully I have a few more fans at the school now ha ha ha.

                That afternoon Faviola told me some of “my friends” were in town. I think I’ve mentioned this in another post, but all other gringos are “my friends.” Half the time they are tourists from a country that doesn’t actually speak English, but we are all still friends according to my town :-P Anyway, I decided to walk with Faviola and Paula to the bible school class where my “friends” were going to be. Turns out it was a group of Baptists missionaries who actually are from Georgia. Crazy! What’s more, they have a sister church a few towns over, so people from this church actually come down about 3 times a year. I told them to look me up whenever they come back through.  Being as I am the only gringa in residence, it shouldn’t be too hard for them to find me :-)

October 6: Lest I ever forget that I have a very attentive guardian angel……

                So I had my first little battle with homesickness on Wednesday. I was busy for most of the day, so it sort of snuck up on me; but by dinner time I was just flat out sad. I talked on the phone with Mom and Dad for a while though……that goes a long way to help a heartache.

                Then Thursday morning, in between trips to the school to hand out my survey, my host sister knocked on my door to tell me there was someone at the front to speak with me. When I got to the front door, much to my surprise, I found a mail carrier. A little background at this point: There are maybe three post offices in all of Ancash, two on my side of the mountain and only one that I know of on the other. More than that, I have not been able to find three people in this town who actually think there ARE mail carriers that come to our town (or mail carriers in general….). However, this nice lady asked me to sign for two packages. Turns out that it was stuff Natalie sent to me in Lima almost two months ago! The main office in Lima found them and forwarded them to the only address they had for me at the time. I have no house number so the address written on the package was the family name, that the house is located next to the school and the name of my town……and the packages actually got to me :-P So after spending a full 24 hours missing home I suddenly had cards from Nat and Mark, Starburst, Jellie-Bellies, and pizza goldfish that weren’t even crunched up. “Oh yeah,” says the Cool-Aid man.

October 4: some days the highs and lows have just a little bit more distance between them…..

         Tuesday was a bit of a rough day for me. Something went wrong with my stomach and I ended up spending most of the day either lying in bed or running back and forth to the bathroom…..not so fun. What was worse is that I had agreed to teach a class for one of my friends while he was on a trip to the jungle and I had to cancel on him. Bummer. So 4 o’clock roles around and I’m still lying in bed, but at least I’m starting to feel a little better at this point. My host brother knocks on my door to tell me that some students are at the house to talk to me. Turns out they had actually listened when I said I would help with English homework and they had come looking for help! It was so cool. We sat down at the dinner table and I helped them with an English reading assignment. Yay! They even said they might come to the English club the next week…..we shall see. 

October 1 & 2: it’s like every time I turn around I’m in another month

  Ok bit of an exaggeration, but really…it’s already October and in just a few days I will have been in Peru for 4 months. That’s longer than some celebrities stay married.

                Saturday morning I woke up and counted a bunch more surveys. I’m going to have statistics coming out my ears for a little while, but I think it will be a big help when it comes time to actually write my work plan. I also can’t help but wonder what the answers would look like if I gave this interview to my old high school…..I doubt some parts of it would be very different at all. Saturday night I went back into the city. Poor planning on my part having to go twice in one week, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t love hanging out with everyone. I ran some more errands and got lots more copies of my survey made. I was particularly careful to buy more candy too; it’s amazing how a small bribe can go so far when collecting information. :-P I also remember to get some photos printed. I’ve decided to just collage my walls with photos and keepsakes (see the post from September 22 if you would like to participateJ). And Claire, just so you don’t have to wonder, the inflatable guitar has already been hung on red yarn and added to the wall. It might be part of a Halloween costume too, but we’ll have to see about that.  Sunday morning I used the internet at Cali for a while and then headed back to site. Spent some time with the host fam and then got myself organized for the coming week. 

We interrupt your regular programing …..

           Sandra Ann Smoot “Where the Wild Things Are” Tucker has purchased her ticket to Peru! That’s right, ladies and gentlemen; Christmas is coming early to this small Peruvian town…..December 10 to be exact. Get excited!!!

September 29: they actually showed up!!!

               Thursday afternoon I had the first meeting of my English club at the secundaria school. Ok, actually it’s the second, but the first time there was a bull fight in the next town over and no one came…..but really, how can I ever expect to compete with bejeweled Spaniards? So this week is the first one that counts and people actually came!! They showed up late, so I had just long enough to start feeling bad for myself…..and then wait, doth mine eyes deceive me? Six Peruvian children wandering across the volleyball court to get to my classroom. It was so cool! And I am SUCH a nerd :-P

                In other news I started giving out my youth survey in the school on Thursday as well. Let the counting of respuestas begin. Fortunately I had the brain wave to bring candy to the classes, so I think most of the completed both pages. Watch out community diagnostic……. 

September 27 & 28: I’m officially part of the knitting club …..I still only have half a scarf though

               Tuesday morning I went to the primaria school to teach English classes to the 5^th and 6^th graders. I realized that these kids would be moving up into the secundaria school during my time in Mancos, so I should start to get to know them. Also the primaria school doesn’t have a regular English teacher so they were really excited for me to come. The classes went well; younger kids participate SO much more than the older ones :-P

                Tuesday night I went into Huaraz to meet up with Ali and Giselle before they went to Lima for a few days. I needed helping editing some things I had been writing and Ali’s Spanish is way better than mine, so we decided to take our computers to dinner with us and enjoyed pizza while editing my work. The next day I used the internet for a while and then made copies of the youth survey I had been working on. There are just over 300 kids in my secundaria school so I needed to get started.

                Wednesday afternoon I got back to site in time to go to knitting class with Faviola. I was super excited to show all the ladies the work I had done on my scarf; I had almost two feet finished. I barely had the scarf out of the bag though when their eagle eyes started finding stitches I had done wrong. So I sat there and watched them pull the entire thing apart, literally. I walked in with two feet of scarf and within 20 minutes I had a ball of yarn again :-/ So I started the stich over and got a few lines done, but then they took it out of my hands and took it apart again! I nearly cried. The professor finally turned up though and restarted me with this one stitch and I was actually able to finish almost a foot before the classes ended. Towards the end of the class the women started voting on what color to make the group sweaters for the district parade that’s coming up. They actually invited Faviola and me to officially be members! I told them I doubted I would ever produce much to sell, but they said that’s ok. Of course then they told me I had to knit my sweater for the parade by the end of October…..we’ll see how that goes.  

September 25: I start walking your way, you start walking mine…..

       Sunday morning I went on a hike with Elke, Vero and Kaitlyn; three of the other volunteers that live near me. I caught a car up to one of the little towns in the mountain above me to meet up with Kaitlyn and Vero, and then the three of us walk for about 2 hours, through the mountains to meet up with Elke. We met her in another volunteer’s site so we had to walk another 2 ½ hours or so to get to her site. The whole hike was just us meandering through fields on the mountains between the two towns. It was SO beautiful. At the end of our hike we caught a car down from Elke’s site to Carhuaz. We got some lunch and went to the market for a little while. Not a bad way to spend a day! 

September 23 & 24: so…..it turns out altitude sickness is real

      Friday was “Dia de la Juventud” here in Peru. Most of the schools went on paseos for the day and my directora invited me to go along. The plans for what we were actually doing changed a few times though out the week, but I was still going where ever it was. The last my host nephew and I heard we were going to a petrified rock forest to have a look around and enjoy our picnic lunches in the sun. Accordingly I put on a pair of jeans and my converse. For those of you who have never owned converse of your own; they have ZERO traction…..we’ll get back to this later.

When I got to the school they told me we were actually going on a hike to a lake, but they said the walk would only be about 40 minutes from where we park the car, so I hardly noticed the change of plans. When we finally got into the vans the driver told us we were going to a different lake. I don’t remember the name he said, but it doesn’t much matter because it turns out that it doesn’t exist. We finally ended up at Lake Churup . Once we got there we realize that three of the vans from our school had actually gone to some other lake, so we didn’t have the school director or a third of the kids with us……..I know, right? And we’re not even out of the vans yet. 

So Lake Churup is up in Nevada Churup in the mountains on the other side of Huaraz and it sits somewhere between 4500 and 5000 meters of elevation. The drivers tell us we need to be back to the vans in three hours, which is fine because the lake is only 40 minutes away. At least that part of the plan didn’t change, right? Wrong! After an hour of climbing straight up hill my legs started getting weirdly tired; after two hours it hurt to breath; around 2 ½ hours my fingers started tingling; then around 2 hours and 40 minutes my vision started to tunnel out…..oh wait that’s me laying across a big rock to keep from passing right out. At the same time course I am trying to figure out how to explain that my house isn’t much higher than sea level in the United States. To help increase the likelihood of remaining conscious, I decided it was time to start making my decent. Not surprisingly once I turned around to head back about 40 or 50 other students decided that wasn’t such a bad idea either :-P I think at least half the kids didn’t make it all the way to the lake.

The way back down was still very slow because it’s so steep, but at least it was getting easier to breath.  No one was going to make the 3 hour dead line at this point and we were the closest to the bottom anyway, so my little group decided to take a snack break. While everyone was gathering their things to keep moving, I stop to wait on one of the many boulders that we had to climb over to get back down. Suddenly all the little tiny pebbles and broken rocks started to slid off, with me on top of them. There was nothing nearby for me to grab and no way for me to get my traction back (remember the converse?); so I did the only thing I could think of…. turn to face back up the hill, throw myself down on the rock and try to hang on so I don’t slide sideways down the mountain. Needless to say I was ready to be done with the hike :-P Fortunately we all made it home in one piece.

Saturday afternoon Jeff and Brice were both in Caraz, so I went up to meet them for a little while. We had some ice cream and used the internet…….the basic out-of-site activities :-P On my way home that day I had another one of those “life is different now” moments. It gets dark pretty fast around here; so even though I left Caraz in the day light, it was dark before I got back to site. Right about the time I was getting off the combi my host sister-in-law called my cell phone looking for me because they were all SO worried about me. Turns out they don’t think I should even be out on my own after dark…..even though, in this case, dark was about 6:30 pm. I keep forgetting I don’t quite have the same independence here that I have in the States.