Once upon a time there was a Rooster....

I love reading my fellow Peru 9er’s blogs. Less than half have one, and only about 10 people actually update there’s regularly. Sometimes I feel a bit detached from the real Peace Corps Peru. While no two Peace Corps experiences are alike, my service is infinitely different than all other Peru volunteers because I live in Lima. I know this doesn’t make the work I do any less valuable, but I still enjoy reading what life is like for the 9ers who live a bit further away from modernization.

Reading the blogs of my fellow volunteers is so much more than hearing about their funny and interesting experiences. Because I don’t have many volunteers around me, it helps me feel like I am not alone in what I‘m going through. When I talk to my friends on the phone, every one always says they are fine and everything is great. I have felt that I am the only one who struggles and that I have a harder time than any other 9er. But in reading their blogs I realize we are all feeling the same thing.

There seems to be a general theme for every one’s blog. When we first arrived at site, every one updated their blogs regularly, describing all the new crazy aspects of life. Slowly, the entries become less stories about things that happened, and more thought out, personal accounts. Around the 3 month mark, most people have an entry apologizing for their lack of entries and attribute it to the fact that all the events of daily life that once seemed exotic and blog worthy, are now common place and are hardly fazed by the once bizarre and zany occurrences. And even though people seem to be settling in to their new norms, almost everybody has a blog entry on how, even after 7 months in Peru, life is still hard and every one misses home from time to time. It’s good for me to know that I am not alone in my experiences and not weird for still having bad days. Thanks all you Peru 9ers who are brave enough to wear your heart on your sleeve and share your experiences with everyone back home and those of us who are just down the Pan-Americana.

One anecdote I particularly like from a fellow 9er, was posted by Sick Boy (before he got pulled from site and placed in Lima until he was medically cleared). He compared his life, 13,000 feet up in the Andes mountains, to that of the old TV series Little House on the Prairie. In his allegory, he of course plays the role of Robert Langdon with a Peruvian campo twist. He couldn’t help but wonder, if life in the Peace Corps, was just some kind of new reality television show, and he was the hapless star. Only at the end of our “reality” we don’t walk away with million dollars and 15 minuets of fame, but rather a $6,000 stipend and a lifetime supply of respect from our friends and families.

But even though bizarre and zany things seem common place to me, it doesn’t mean they are any less fantastic to ya’ll back home. So I’ll leave you with the story of the rooster….
About two months ago, my family got a baby Rooster. They put it in a cage and placed it right in front of my bedroom door. Everybody knows roosters crow at dawn, right? Wrong. Roosters start crowing hours before dawn. And Baby roosters have a high pitched, nails on a chalk board cock-a-doodle-do. So for the first week, I was being woken up at 4:30 in the morning to banshee-like crows. I managed to learn to sleep through this though. And after about 3 weeks they took the rooster out of the bird cage and put in a pigeon-like bird in it‘s place. Although it was only a few weeks after that I saw the pigeon-like bird lying lifeless in our kitchen garbage (better than lying lifeless in my soup for dinner) they never put the rooster back in the cage.

Instead, they put it on a leash. How do you put a rooster on a leash? You tether it’s leg with a rope. I thought this was hilarious and I should have taken a picture of it. But then today, as I was sitting in my room reading Harry Potter (in Spanish!), I started to hear screeching from a bird. Now, there is no such things as silence where I live. 5 minutes never go by with out some animal making some horrible or annoying noise. So at first, the bird screams didn’t faze me. But the screeching was really bad and I finally thought that it might be our rooster that was making the noise, so I went outside and sure enough, our dog was attacking the rooster. I went down stairs and told me host sisters, but they said “no, their just playing”. So I went back upstairs and watched in amusement as the dog proceeded to kill the rooster.

I might have done something to stop it, but I didn’t like the rooster. I always stepped on it when I was hanging my laundry up to dry. So I went back down stairs and told my sisters that the rooster was dead. They were really upset, but I told them the dog was attacking it and they did nothing, so my conscience is clear.

The only thing I am afraid of now, is that the family will get another baby rooster and I will have to deal with the high pitched cock-a-doodle-dos again. I am also a bit worried that what is left of the rooster, will end up in my dinner tonight. Oh well, at least I will be served more protein than usual.