Oh, the Places You'll Go at Burning Man! (OFFICIAL)

In honor of the blog…..

              So as you might have noticed by now, the title of my blog is “Find the Bright Places,” a line from Dr. Seuss’s OH the Places You’ll Go. Now I have always been a fan of Mr. Geisel’s works; but this book is hands down my favorite. I love the point of the story, I love that it has become a traditional graduation gift and I love that it can be a lesson for young and old alike.                

                I think that’s enough literary analysis for right now, how about a video? I found this while Facebook stalking a friend :-P Burning Man is a music festival that is quite famous for its colorful attendants…..and now a colorful rendition of one of my favorite books.

Friendly warning, this was at Burning Man. Bear in mind that not all costumes are quite as child friendly as the book’s original drawings.

Because some stories just need to be told……

                Paola, the little one, is finally old enough to start school this year. Which means Fabiola, her mom, had decided to finish studying to be a nurse technician. Like with most medically related programs in the world, here in Peru you have to do “practicante” (practicum) hours to qualify as a nurse technician. Basically she has to work every day for three months and then she’ll be done. I am SO excited for her to get back to it. She seems super excited and I think it’s great that she has her eye set on a job. In fact I am grinning ear to ear at the thought…….but we’re going to set that aside for a second as I tell you about the night before her third day of work.

                Fabiola finally had time to go by her nurse’s uniform, complete with the white shoes. When I came into the dining room for dinner she, Senora Norka and Aldo were having a discussion about said shoes. Turns out they weren’t quite the right size; just a little too small and they were talking about ways to make them fit better. I couldn’t really figure out why Aldo was so adamant that Fabiola “use just the newspaper” to try to stretch the shoes until my host mom chimed back in with her idea again. Apparently she had heard that if you covered shoes in “piche” you could then stretch them out. “Piche” is Quechua child speak for pee. She actually tried to send Jean Paul out of the house to pee on his mom’s shoes.

         I just ate my dinner in silence…….silent laughter that is :P 

April: the month I will spell wrong for the rest of my life……

                No really, it’s true. April in English and Abril in Spanish…..which is really just april with the “p” flipped over. What’s a girl to do?

                April kicked off with a bang. And by bang I mean headache, fatigue and dizziness…….but the views were AMAZING. Plus, now we know that I need to prepare for high altitude activities. A huge group of us went hiking for our Semana Santa holiday. Since we were already in Ancash for training we decided to stay-cation around here. Things didn’t really go according to plan so instead of hiking up and over a mountain pass we hiked to our first planned camp site and stayed for two nights. There were a number of us dealing with altitude sickness and the weather got pretty rough, so it just seemed like the safer choice. I was one of the sick ones, so I can’t say it was the most relaxing vacation I have ever taken; but it was BEAUTIFUL and I always have fun hanging out with the other 17-ers. Even altitude sickness and freezing rain can’t change that. After three days in the mountains we headed back to Huaraz and just generally goofed around. It was Brice’s birthday so we celebrated that in style, including an original song written in his honor (Brice you know we love you, Brice you know we care, but if you get too drunk tonight we’re going to shave of all your hair……). We also went to a dance party and had a family potluck……not at the same time, don’t worry. By the time it was all said and done I was about ready to get back to site. A week of training and then 5 days of vacation really cuts into the campo sleep schedule I’ve gotten used to; which is lots!

                The rest of April was spent doing two things, getting my after school classes started and trying to get external hard drive number 2 fixed. The class thing always takes a little while getting everyone on board, but it finally fell into place. I have started my Pasos Adelantes class with the 4^th and 5^th grade of my secundaria school. PA is a personal health focused class. The idea is the kids are going to or have already started making adult decisions and we want to give them all the pertinent information in the hope that those decisions will be made in an informed manner. (Mejor dicho: safe sex- do it like the cool kids!) I am also starting back with my English club to give the kids chances to practice speaking and ask any questions they might have about their regular English homework. It’s still really early on with both classes but I have high hopes. I can already see the difference between this school year and the end of last school year. The kids have had more time to get to know me.

                As for the hard drive, it crashed. It wasn’t a pretty moment in my Peace Corps career. I’m not proud of it, but I cried like a little girl when I thought I had lost all of my photos……like a tiny, little girl. Fortunately three trips to Huaraz, 5 tech guys and a few hundred soles later all is well. I have all my documents back, a hard drive the works again (surprisingly) and a new favorite tech guru.  

                The last day of April I went into Huaraz to go to dinner with Ali’s parents! They had been off traveling around Peru and came back to Huaraz for the last leg of their trip so a group of us came into town to hang out. Ali’s parents were wonderful to me and brought down the new hard drive I had ordered when I thought my other one couldn’t be fixed. Then they topped the whole thing off by bringing a bag of my favorite potato chips. Thanks so much Mr. and Mrs. Foley!

March: They’re Ba-ack….

              So the primary bit of excitement in March was school starting back. It’s a bit of a continual process around here. Classes started around the 5^th but the meeting to plan most of the classes wasn’t until the next week. Also kids were still enrolling for the first three weeks or something like that. Needless to say it’s a more chaotic beginning then we’re used to in the states. I finally got the chance to enter a classroom regularly though! In the schools here they have something called tutoria. It’s sort of like a study hall, each grade has an hour a week with a professor where they talk about things that are important but don’t exactly fall into the curriculum of the other classes. I started working with the tutoria professor for first grade of secundaria (12-13 years old). I am doing a series of classes that focus in self-esteem and getting the kids to think about what is special in their own lives. So far it’s been going well. The classes are really big, but the kids seem interested and entertained. 

                In the month of March I also went into the secundaria with the staff from my health post to do a health campaign with the kids. It’s an attempt to do an overall health exam with as many of the youth in Mancos as we can. The kids got their teeth and eyes looked at and got a physical from the doctor. My task was to oversee a survey they needed the kids to fill out, but I also ended up serving as the child wrangler / source of entertainment while the kids had to wait. I’m not sure how long this campaign will keep going, but I was happy to see it start. We got a new obstetrician at the health post and she had this whole thing running within her first three weeks, so I have high hopes for working with her.

In other news I bought shelves for my room. This may not seem exciting to you but I was thrilled. I found them nearby in Yungay and then spent the afternoon organizing them. They make my room seem way less cluttered and I’ll leave them as a gift for my host family when I leave,

                We celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with a potluck at California Café. There were actually people from a bunch of the different volunteer organizations around Huaraz, it’s always nice to see the other foreigners, you never know who you’ll run into…..for instance, another former OYP-er. Crazy, but true. I was standing in Cali eating some food and this guy wanders past, says “hey Kelly” and then keeps walking. Naturally I put a stop to that. I honestly was having trouble recognizing him until he told me he had been an orphan in Oliver. Since most of you don’t have my theater career memorized (don’t worry, you’re forgiven :-P) Oliver was 10^th grade for me. Considering that this kid is only 20 or so now he was about 13 the last time I saw him and now here he is teaching English in Huaraz. It’s a small world sometimes.

                It’s fortunate that there was a potluck to distract me, because the same weekend as St. Patty’s was the one year anniversary of Nat and Mark’s accident. Nat and Mark threw a party to celebrate their recovery, complete with truck shaped piñata and I would’ve loved to have been home to celebrate with them. That was not an option for me though so I made Natalie carry around her Iphone so we could talk on FaceTime  during the party! Nat and Mark, I love you guys and I am so glad that my biggest concern was not being able to make it home to your party. Y’all are two lucky duckies.

                March rounded out with the beginning of another training, Plan Design Management / In Service Training (PDM/IST). For this training we each brought a socio from our sites. The idea is that we workshop a project that we’re planning on starting in our town.  There were mixed reviews afterwards, but I actually really enjoyed the chance to work through the planning steps while our trainers were around. And of course it’s always great to see the rest of our group at trainings. By the end I think our brains were a little fried from the amount of information we had received, luckily for us it was time for vacation!

February: I think some other things happened, but mostly there was this paint fight….

               Summer vacation continued through February so my English classes did as well. The last week of summer classes there was a little closing ceremony where all the classes performed a traditional dance and a mission group gave school supplies out as gifts. The dances were adorable and the kids were soooo excited about their gifts.

                We also had another costume party in Huaraz, a 1920s murder mystery! One of the other volunteers bought one of those murder mystery kits so we all had parts to act out and secrets to keep. The piano bar let us use their space and we organized a dinner. It was fabulous! Everybody got into their characters and their costumes, it was fabulous…. Did I already say that? I even got mom to mail down my flapper costume! The dress was even more fun because I ended up doing a dance routine with my friend David. During college David was part of a swing dancing group at his school so he taught me how to Charleston and we put together a number….complete with a flip!

                The true crowning glory of February however was my trip to Cajamarca for Carnival weekend. In keeping with the ridiculousness of the weekend, we spent about as much time traveling as we did in the city, but it was so worth it. We left Huaraz on Thursday night and finally got to Cajamarca City about 7 on Friday.  We arrived with plans of showering before going out, but rumors of Pizza Hut being delivered to the bar where everyone was meeting quickly changed our minds. Our hostel was on the corner of the main plaza which fills up every year with drummers, hundreds of drummers and the groups of people dancing around them. So we danced our way through the plaza and then off to meet everyone. Carnival is a pretty big event for the PCVs so it was great to see everyone and meet new volunteers. Saturday morning we got up, found breakfast and started preparing for the main event…..the paint war. We bought water guns, water balloons and two bags of paint. We spent a little while throwing water off the balcony, but by mid-morning there was just a general sense that is was time to go. We went out into the streets armed with paint and water and joined in on the parade through the town. It was about 4 hours of walking down the roads throwing paint and water at anyone you felt like. There were also people on the roofs of houses throwing paint and water down at us. It was AMAZING! We finally got back to the plaza for what I’ll call half time. We got a snack, washed the paint out of our eyes and head out to the concert. At the concert my friend Giselle brought out her last bag of blue paint which we emptied into a bucket and then used to paint our entire group blue. Then we stared painting the strangers around us. On the walk back from the hostel people were actually stopping us to take photos because we looked so silly :P Unfortunately so many people at the hostel were involved in the paint fight that there was not a drop of hot water when I got back. I took a few turns in the cold water to get the majority of the paint off and then decided I wasn’t really worried about the rest (read: there was still some paint in my hair when I got back to Huaraz ha ha). Saturday night continued with more dancing and concerts and Sunday was a parade and a party in our hostel. By the time Monday morning rolled around it was time for us to go……cue 17 hours back to Huaraz. At least we had a few hours to kill at the mall between our buses in Trujillo. We ate lots of pizza and played bumper cars J There is a generally accepted practice among PCVs of not using our vacation days on the same trip more than once, but I’m pretty sure most of us will be back next year.

                My Carnival adventure was truly rounded out when I returned to Mancos. I had just enough time to set down my bags and jump in the shower before I was hustled off to mass with my family. Then there was the parade back with the family cross, where I got a bucket of ditch water poured on me on the way (it’s a bit of a risk leaving you house for the two weeks of Carnival). When we got back to the house I helped my host mom serve lunch to 40 people and then we had a band in our living room for the next 7 hours. All this after two 17 hour bus rides in 5 days and less sleep then most would deem reasonable. Ali tells me I earned a Peace Corps merit badge that day. I’m expecting it in the mail any day now……..

January: meh……

                So if you couldn’t tell by the title, January probably won’t be #1 on the list of things I fondly remember when looking back at my Peace Corps career. It wasn’t bad, it was just frustrating. I spent the first two weeks going round and round with my town municipality to get the summer classes started. Summer classes here aren’t like in the States where you have to go if you’ve failed; it is just a chance for the kids to have something to do during the break. I had started talking to them the previous November and if they would’ve let me I’d have happily planned the entire thing……but no. They told me we would do it later. “Later” ended up being two weeks after the classes usually start and the first week was really spent getting the schedule sorted. Blerg. It turns out that I really enjoyed the chance to work with all the kids, so I just forgot about my municipality and focused on the students. I taught English classes to elementary school students in two of the schools in my district and had about 80 kids all together. I don’t know how much English they’ll actually remember, but we had a lot of fun trying.

                The last weekend in January the Ancash PCVs had an event called Camp ALMA. ALMA is a three day girls’ camp that the PCVs try to do each year in each department. Our focus this year was on the environment so our camp was ALMA Verde. We did nature walks, talked about conservation, did recycled art crafts and even had a fashion show of clothes made entirely out of recycled goods. It was a great weekend and all the girls really seemed to enjoy themselves. A lot of these girls never get the chance to see other parts of the department and meet people from other small towns, so they had a great time seeing a new place and meeting new people.  

These things keep passing…… I think they’re called months.

               Yikes it’s been a long time since I wrote anything. In my defense there have been long stretches of relatively uninteresting days in my life lately; turns out December is slow for business in the Peace Corps and then January is still slow for youth volunteers because it’s the beginning of summer break. However, there have also been some excellent days in between the boredom and I should be writing about them. Let's take a look back at December, shall we?

               Madre mia came for a visit. I realize that seems like a whole page or two of its own, but I’m not really sure how I would write it. We spent a lot of our time sitting around visiting (and a little bit of crying), which is exactly what I wanted it to be.  Six months is the longest I’ve ever gone without seeing her. We did do a lot of site seeing as well, I’m a good little host. We stayed in Huaraz mostly, but we also saw Caraz, the ruins at Chavin and my site. In Mancos Mom got to go with / I dragged her to my English classes in the primary school. All the kids had the chance to ask mom questions. At this point I would tell you all a story about her trying to describe a plane flight to my students (with me translating of course), but Mom says I tell it wrong. There was a lot of arm flapping involved though, that’s all I’m going to say.

                Christmas Eve was yet another cultural adventure for me.  Here is tradition to eat a whole other meal at midnight to ring in Christmas day. We went to mass before dinner to have the little baby Jesus blessed so we could add him to the nativity scene at midnight as well. There were also firecrackers and the exchanging of gifts. Four full meals in one day was a little rough, but it was a fun version of Christmas Eve.

                Christmas Day I woke up and opened Christmas presents on skype with my family. Mom brought presents when she came down and I actually waited until the 25^th to open them. Impressed? That morning I headed into Huaraz to meet up with everybody. We cooked dinner and watched Ernest Saves Christmas. I was great. Keren’s parents were in Huaraz as well. Her mom made Hanukah doughnuts and latkas as part of our dinner. They even brought dradles and chocolate coins for us the play with; so much holiday fun! I ended up staying the 26^th as well. Jeff, Brice and I hung around the hostel for the day. Jeff started teaching me the art of betting in Blackjack. I’ll take a run at Vegas when I get home…….

                Continuing with the massive amounts of celebrations in one week’s time; I celebrated my 25^th birthday a few days later. We had lunch at my house. Kait, John William, Kyle and Johanna came over to help me celebrate. My host sister Paola and I tried to cook a birthday cake as well. We aimed for a two layer cake, both layers stuck to the pan and crumbled when we tried to turn them out. Never fear……Paola and I just decided to smush the crumbles into one pan with some peanut butter and mold our own cake. Surprisingly it actually held together and formed a cake, unsurprisingly it was a little dense :-P Later that night was the graduation party for the seniors at my school. It was good fun for a while, but by 4:30 in the morning I was really ready to be in my bed. 

                Rounding at the week of festivities, and December as a whole was New Year’s Eve in Huaraz. We all donned our yellow for good luck and had a potluck at California Café. Complete with card games, dancing, fireworks and Elke spinning fire poi. We stuck around the restaurant until the midnight count down and then went dancing until all hours of the morning. It was great fun and a great way to ring in the new year. 

December 6: Oh dear, I’m sensing there might be a problem…….

              I don’t like Paneton….gasp! While those of you living in Peru take a moment to overcome your shock, I’ll explain myself to our friends in the States. Here in Peru there is one big holiday tradition, just one. It’s Paneton and hot chocolate. Paneton is this loaf like cake, with bits of dried fruit baked into it. They sell them everywhere and it is an inarguable staple of a Peruvian Christmas. Now that December has started all social groups and organizations are starting to have their own chocolatadas, which is a fancy word for a Paneton and hot chocolate party. I went to one with my knitting group and we each got a fourth of a cake to ourselves….a fourth! Now the hot chocolate is quite tasty; melting chocolate, evaporated milk and cinnamon mixed with boiling water. Great idea. The Paneton however is sort of like dry sponge cake with raisins and some type of neon green dried “fruit” that I feel certain can’t be found naturally on our earth. Getting through the next three weeks of December may have just gotten trickier.

                On a totally unrelated note, I finally have conclusive evidence that perceptions of body sizes down here are TOTALLY different. While we were all sitting around eating brick size chunks of Paneton, the knitting ladies started asking me how much weight I had gained since I got to Peru. I told them that I still don’t understand kilos, but it’s a good bit. They were surprised to hear that I am normally skinnier. Then I was surprised when one of them said “oh aren’t you so glad you’re here then, wouldn’t you hate to be all skinny again? You’re getting so pretty.”  Whaaaaa?!

November 27 – December 4: Early In Service Training

           Our E-IST was in Olmos, Lambayeque.  It’s the site of Spear, a Peru 15 youth volunteer, and it was mostly what you’d expect a PC training to be I think. A few of the highlights……

We each did a short presentation of our community diagnostics and turned them in (finally). Mine went great and the group I presented to commented that my Spanish had improved a lot since training. EXCELLENT!

We had the chance to participate in the World AIDS Day celebration that Speare had organized with his kids. It was great to see an event first hand and of course one of our assignments for the week was to come up with skits and participate. We wrote raps, original songs, staged games shows and even had a dancing condom.

The last day of the training we were divided into small groups to go visit other sites in Lambayeque. I went to Eten, right by the beach. We worked with a group of youth health promoters, visited a great town library, and had ceviche on the beach. It would be no stretch of the imagination to say that I have a little bit of site envy over Eten. It was a great town.

The day that training ended we hung around for a night in Chiclayo, the capital of the department. It’s one of the old colonial towns in Peru and feels enormous to me in comparison with Huaraz. There are so many things there that haven’t made it to Huaraz yet. We had Mediterranean food for dinner, hung out at the PC hostel and went salsa dancing that night. We had most of the next day to wait for our bus so we went to the mall! I had pizza hut and wandered around the Plaza Vea just looking at stuff. I also tracked down a King Kong cake for my host family. Before you even ask, I have no clue about the name. It’s a layer cake with various fruit fillings and apparently Lambayeque is known for them. I don’t actually think they taste very good, but my host mom asked for it by name so I made sure to bring one back with me. 

November 23 – 26: Trujillo and Huanchaco…..it’s time for Thanksgiving!

               Wednesday was the first day of my first vacation as a PCV. I absolutely love my site, but oh man was I ready for a trip to the beach :-). Wednesday Ali, Keren and I spent the afternoon working in a café in Huaraz. The plan was to finish up some writing before we caught the bus to Trujillo, but truth be told, we were all so excited to get on the road that we got very little done. Oh well. Wednesday night we took the overnight bus to Trujillo- 10 hours; 8 of which are spent just crossing the mountains. It’s really only two hours from Chimbote, the coastal city of Ancash, to Trujillo. However, the Andes Mountains are in between Huaraz and Chimbote and it turns out they are kind of tall…..who knew?

                We spent Thursday in Trujillo. Almost all of Peru 17-YD came for the holidays, as well as a bunch of Peru 15 & 16 who were on the way to their own Thanksgiving events. We went to the mall, ate a ton of pizza, window shopped around the city and generally enjoyed hanging out with our training group again. That night we all went out to a salsa bar and danced the night away. Friday morning the 17ers started cabbing it over to Huanchaco, the beach town about 25 minutes out of Trujillo. Ali and I decided to go to an artisan market in Trujillo before we left so we didn’t get to the beach until that afternoon. The PC hostel in Huanchaco is amazing; there is a huge patio and the beach is exactly across the street. After getting ceviche with Ali, I immediately changed into my swimsuit and began two days of lying on the beach and wandering around looking at all the little beach shops.

 Saturday was our Thanksgiving celebration and it was an impressive feat if I do say so myself. We got permission to use the hostel restaurant kitchen, but we could only use it from 3-5; which is their break between lunch and dinner.  So we prepped a thanksgiving dinner for thirty-five on patio tables; used a camp stove to boil potatoes; then we cooked everything AND cleaned the kitchen in two hours. We had pollo a la brasa instead of turkey, three types of mashed potatoes, stuffing, sweet potato gratin green bean casserole, baked mac and cheese, sautéed veggies, fruits salads, veggie salad, baked apple crisp and no bake cookies. It was D-elicious. 

I was one of the kitchen crew and have now earned a totally undeserved reputation as a great cook. I just got lucky :-P My plan was to cook Mom’s baked Mac and Cheese (it’s the best in the world), but it’s not always easy to find the same ingredients down here.  Basically sharp cheddar cheese is more expensive than meat here, so Kat (la captain of our Thanksgiving adventure) just bought tons of different cheeses and told me to make something up. The final result was a cheddar, mozzarella, edam, cream cheese, queso fresco mixed with garlic, parmesan cheese  madness…..and that madness tasted good :-). I also made the no bake cookies. You just melt everything together, stir in the oatmeal and form the cookies. It is SO easy and all of us have the same recipe because it came out of a PC cook book, but I made them for the host family party at the end of training and now everyone thinks I’m the only one who can. They actually bought the ingredients without telling me, because someone else in the group had asked for the cookies :-P So there we are 30 minutes before we’re supposed to be out of the kitchen and I’m just throwing things in the pot. Luckily the recipe is pretty hard to mess up. We didn’t have time to form all the cookies so we just poured it onto sheet pans and had cookie cake/pudding because it didn’t have time to set either. Would you believe the pans were still basically licked cleaned? Guess it just goes to show that rarely will mixing peanut butter and chocolate go wrong.

                All the food was amazing and there was more than enough for everyone. In the end we started inviting the other guests at the hostel to eat with us. I know we all missed our families in the States, but the truth is that this Thanksgiving was spent with family, a new one. 

November 22: Being part of a host family means being there for the “sad” as well

                Tuesday was a sad day for my host family. Fabiola’s uncle passed away, so my host mom and I went to Huaraz to accompany her to the funeral. It turns out I don’t really know the right Spanish words to express condolences yet, but hugs mean the same thing no matter what language you speak.

                As a cultural experience the funeral was actually very interesting. They have different customs here in Peru than in the States. Most notably we walked through the streets of Huaraz throwing flowers on the coffin and the pallbearers took the coffin by the uncle’s house to say good bye. It seems like a nice tradition. 

November 19: Fortunately they like the Gypsy Kings; it’s the only Spanish music I have.

              Saturday morning I woke up and continued working on my diagnostic, I write way slower in Spanish so this paper has been more of a process that I am used to. After about an hour though Paula (the older one) knocked on the door and asked if I wanted to cook with her. So I brought my laptop into the kitchen to play music while Paula and I cooked lunch. Or more accurately, Paula and I tried to cook lunch and Fabiola kept a close eye to make sure we didn’t screw up :-) We made aji de pollo and it turned out great. I also really enjoyed spending time like that with the girls in my host family. Poco a poco I’m starting to feel like I’m building more of a relationship with my host family and its great!

                After lunch I went up to Caraz for a few hours to hang out with Jeff and Keren. We were all going cross eyed from staring at our diagnostics so a break was in order.  There’s nothing like ice cream and people watching from our balcony in Caraz to brighten up a week. 

November 18: a green take on the blues

              So I have officially met rainy season. The locals were in a fit because it came so late this year; being that I have no crops of my own, I was lesson concerned, although I understood.

                I still have no crops, but I’m starting to understand a little more now. It’s like those whale sharks in the Atlanta Aquarium ….once you’ve seen them, you’d know if they were missing. Rainy season here is not a slight spritz around the 3 o’clock hour nor is it a sudden deluge either, it’s an event.  Each afternoon the clouds roll in across the mountains, the wind picks up, then drizzle starts and slowly increases. It could last a few hours or it could last all night. And the locals certainly expect it to happen every day.

                From a practical standpoint I see the usefulness; the agrarian culture here depends on it. From a nature standpoint I can even see the beauty; I had a great time thinking of a way to describe it to you, even though I came up with nothing. However, from a personal standpoint I’m slightly worried. I’ve been thinking a lot about morning glories this week. Yep, I mean the flower. A morning glory is a flower that closes up each night and reopens with the sun each day. I’ve never lived somewhere with a rainy season before and I’ve only been in this one for about a week, so I don’t have a lot to go on; but I’m starting to worry that I’m a morning glory. Or maybe an afternoon not-so-glory. This week, each day when the rain started I just wanted to stop. I’m hoping it was simply a blah week that happened to coincide with the arrival of rainy season; but if not, what do I do? The sun may be out in the mornings, but there are a lot of afternoons between now and March.