On a positive note today

This is a picture of a group of us at the heart of jesus festical. It was two weeks ago but I just found it on Alex´s blog and thought it was cute. Always good to start with a picture.
This morning I woke up to the bright sun shine that fills my room on the days I don’t have to wake up before the sun is up. I felt well rested and was relieved to hear that the house outside my room was quite. Sunday is the day the whole family sleeps in. Even Saturdays, my host dad leaves for work at 6 in the morning and Ana gets up with him about 5:40. I usually hear pots and pans clanking in the kitchen cause my mom cooks the meals for the whole day in the morning. But today I woke up to peaceful silence, no alarm, no reason to get out of bed before noon, so I grabbed my book from the night stand and started reading. I eventually made my way to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee. I ate the cereal along in the kitchen (I think this was the first time I’ve ever eaten anything alone in the kitchen) and took the coffee back to my room, jumped back into bed and read for another hour.

I thought about how incredibly lucky I am. People pay thousands of dollars to get the language and skills training I am receiving during training. Not only that, they are paying me to better my Spanish and give me the skills I need! They pay for me to live comfortably in a house and have a host mother cook me three delicious meals a day, wash my laundry by hand and clean my room. My host mother is amazing really. Life is a lot harder as the mother/wife in places where most people don’t have a washing machine, dishwasher, car etc. It takes an entire weekend to hand wash and line dry a family of 6’s clothes, sheets and towels. My host mom has to walk a mile to the market everyday . She is the first one to get up and the last one to go to bed, I think she only gets 5 hours of sleep a night. She cooks full meals for breakfast lunch and dinner and does all the dishes by hand. Nobody ever helps her. We live on dirt roads surrounded by giant dirt mountains, but you wouldn’t no that being inside the house cause she keeps everything spotless. She doesn’t seem to mind either. She feels lucky that she doesn’t have to work. Many women work and do all the cooking and cleaning on top of their job. I was talking to Jamar’s mom, and she was saying how jealous she was that my dad has such a good job that Ana doesn’t have to work. What do people here consider a good job? My host dad works at a factory in Lima that makes soccer balls. He leaves the house at 6 in the morning and doesn’t come back till 8 or 9 at night. He works every Saturday and he’s worked 2 of the 4 Sundays I’ve been here. They both seem happy. They seem to have a very loving relationship and a good set of kids. They’re lucky that Jose (my host dad) has a job in Lima which is only an hour away. A bunch of my friends hosts dads work really far away. Adrian’s host dad works in a mine somewhere far away and is only home one week out of the month. Other host dads have to work in different countries and send money home to their families. Unemployment is very high here.

I thought about all that this morning as I lay in bed, reading my book and drinking coffee. I felt lucky that the only thing I have to do in life right now get out of bed in the morning, go to training and have a very wonderful host family take care of me. Life as an American is something amazing and weird at the same time.

Back to more tangible things. We went to La Agraria yesterday, which is an agricultural University in Lima. It was really sweet. We are learning all about organic gardens. To me, the stuff we are learning is almost common sense, but for the people that have lived their life in a city, it’s all exciting and new. I had a lot of fun getting the soil ready for planting and just working with my hands in general. We all have seeds that we planted in pots that we are going to transplant into the ground when they are ready. I’m growing basil. After our class every one took of for lunch, but I stayed with a group of friends to eat at La Agraria. While everyone else that left ended up paying 25 soles for a burger and 20 soles for a long island ice tea at Chiles, I paid 4 soles for the most delicious chicken Cesar sandwich. All the ingredients were fresh from the farm right there. Next time I’ll get a full on salad. We’re not supposed to be eating salad right now cause are bodies aren’t used to all the bacteria and what not on raw vegetables. But half of my group got salads and no one got sick, so I’m gonna try it next week. We went to Jockey Plaza after lunch where the rest of our group already was. I thought Jockey Plaza was going to be an actual plaza, a square with possibly a statue of a horse in the middle of it. But I was very wrong. Jockey plaza is a great big mall with a Nine West shoes, Radio Shack, Chiles, Tony Roma’s, a Merrels store and more. It was weird, like we stepped back into America. I’m glad I was with a group of people that didn’t like being there either. I don’t like to shop. I don’t miss America all that much that I need to surround myself with American stores. Lucky for me, nobody wanted to spend a lot of time there. I did however get a Starbucks, my guilty pleasure. I always observe the people in Starbucks, because the coffee is so expensive that it’s just not practice for most Peruvians to buy a cup of coffee that costs 11 soles. The people in there are usually younger and appear to middle/upper class. In Jockey Plaza there was a group of Peruvian 30something year old women draped in Burberry and Louis Vouton. There was another rich Asian-Peruvian women with her small children. And then there were the tourists. I feel comfortable that Starbucks is my one American guilty pleasure. A lot of people in our group spend the whole day at the mall, soaking in crowded ambiance. I was relieved to get home. Back to the simplicity of non-American Peru.

I went over to 3 de Octubre last night to watch a movie. Something so simple as that is such a big deal in my house. I can’t go anywhere along, ever. The other three people in my neighborhood didn’t want to come which made things difficult. My host mom said she didn’t want me to go. I said, but I want to go and I am an adult and I make my own decisions. Then Heathers mom came over and they started telling all the stories about all the people they knew who knew people that were robbed or murdered. I get it. It’s definetly not like being back home, it’s more dangerous especially since I stick out like a sore, white, tall, gringo, thumb. But every other American goes out alone at night except for me, and there hasn’t been a single issue yet. So my mom took me all they way to 3 de octubre went to three of my friends houses with me and made two of the guys promise they’d take me home. Such a commotion over something so simple as going to a friends house to watch a movie. My host mom told me that I need to stay in more, that I should only leave the house once a week at most. This week I left 3 times. I told her back in the states, I left my house pretty much every single night. She asked how my mom felt about that and I told her that I lived on my own since I was 17 and I didn’t have to ask permission to leave my house. And when I moved back home after I graduated that my parents didn’t care if I went out at night. Back home, parents don’t tell their 23 years that they have to be home by 11. My friends say I need to put my foot down with my host mother, but it’s just not that easy. I don’t want to disrespect her, and I think she is genuinely worried about my safety. This is the backyard of the training center. It doesn´t exactly scream Peace does it? So at least I get to escape from the dirt roads and half constructed brick houses of huascaran for a little blue and green tranquility.