My Life at 6 Months

Today I celebrate 6 months at site. It`s really amazing to think how quickly the time has passed and how far I have come. My day to day life is no longer scary and strange but it is none the less challenging. Having recently moved from the campo house of Buena Vista into the small town of Lurìn my home life has drastically changed. I no longer spend every moment at home alone in my room, although spending time in my room is more enjoyable in new my new setting. I can only get to my room by entering through Viviana`s which has so far not been an inconvenience or annoying. Both our rooms needed a new paint, so the other week we went to the hardwear store to pick out our colors. Vivi asked me what colors I would like my room to be and I pointed out modest hues or green, blue, yellow and purple. I don´t know why she asked if she was just going to pick the colors she liked. She asked me what I thought of this certain color combination right off the bat. I hated it, but since it is her house I said it was fine and after an hour of looking at colors and vetoing all of my suggestions, we got a very bold Blue and Gold. This pasted weekend Vivi`s cousin came to paint out rooms. I now say I live in the UC Davis room. This is me in my freshly painted room in front of my mountain of stuff. After the paint dried I was able to do something I haven`t done since I arrived in Peru: buy furniture. Even during training my room was empty except for a bed. I have have literally been living out of my suitcases for 9 months. I didn`t realize how annoying it trully was until I had furnitute once again. Check out my new desk/bookshelf. Look at all the books and work material I have. I know it may not seem like a lot, but considering I only came to Peru with 2 suitcases, I have aquired so much. And in my old houses all this stuff was piled in stacks on the ground. Since I live in a dustbowl worthy of Steinbeck, these books needed a serious cleaning every month. Not to mention moving was a total pain with all this extra weight. At least when I go back to the states I can leave a good 90% of this stuff here.

This is the street that I live on. It`s full of street vendor which wouldn`t be too terrible if there weren`t two competing vendors on opposite corners right across from my house that sell pirated CD`s and therefore blast blast contrasting music all day and well into the night. To get to work I walk out of Lurin and through the country for a half hour to an hour depending on where I am going. This is my usual comuter traffic. Local farmers taking their goats out to graze. It can be really annoying when there is a huge bunch of them. Whenever some one tries to make fun of me for living in Lima and being a "Peace Corps Lite" volunteer, I just scoff. Sure, I don`t live too far outside the main city, but I put up with just as much stuff as people in the most rural of sites.

Today I took 10 kids to a pool at a local ranch with a volunteer from Spain. Taking a group to the pool is always a lot of work, but seeing as not a single one of the 10 kids knew how to swim, it was 10 times the effort. I was converted from a play pal and a life gaurd to full of water taxi. The hardest part about the day was not that the kids didn`t know how to swim, it was there mentality that they couldn`t learn how. The general Peruvian mentality is "I can`t". This is a complete contrast to the US mentality where we grow up with the little engine that could chugging "I think I can, I think I can" all through our childhood and well on into our adult life. We believe that we can acheive anything with the right mind set and hard work. This is one of the big reasons developing countries like Peru have such a hard time advancing their economic status. The average poor peruvian feels they are a victim of life and are helpless to improve their situation. This is the mentality we try to combat as Peace Corps volunteers. And what better place to teach a can-do attitude than in the pool. The older kids seemed already stuck in their ways of not knowing and not trying. So I focused on the youngest kids who`s minds have not been corupted with helpelessness and where still relatively fearless. It was a great example for the older kids when the 4 year old boy was jumping from the side of the pool into my arms. Now I just beed to carry the momentum of the tiny successes the kids had in the pool to everyday life.