Finding the Right Balance

Social life, work, host family time, Ali time = Health, happiness and productivity .

Trying to find the right balance of all the goings on in my life is a struggle I feel fortunate have. My first few months at site, I had no social life. I worked a lot and I spent ample amount of time alone. I was very productive as a Peace Corps volunteer, but I was also miserable. Then when I started making friends, my happiness went through the roof, but my work output suffered. So instead of cutting back on either, I became a workaholic and a socialite. This combination led to me going on 6 weeks of medical leave. I am doing my best to balance the activities in my PCV life so I don’t burn my candle at both ends.

One of my biggest personal accomplishments so far, has been learning to say no. I got in a bit over my head with the nuns and my other people in my community, because when approached to do something I could never say no. It’s my obligation as a PCV to help out wherever I could, I thought. But then I started getting over worked and taken advantage of.

I have been so fortunate with my placement in Lima as it has allowed to be close enough to a lot of amazing people. My social network keeps expanding, and with it, social invitations. Being a PCV is a hard job for many reasons. One of them, is that we are volunteers who technically don’t have to do a damn thing for 2 years. When you have a 9-5, you don’t have much of a choice as to when you work and when you socialize. We are independent workers who’s productivity depends solely on self motivation. For this reason, I have imposed my own socializing hours so as not to offset the balance of my life.

Generally speaking, work all week and leave social events for the weekends. There are of course exceptions. Next week I’ve been asked by our country director to go into Lima on Thursday night for a meet and greet at the Ambassadors house with members from the US congress. This technically counts as a work and social event and is something I’m willing to make an exception for in rules about leaving site during the week. This is really exciting thing for me and I’m sure the only reason I was invited is cause of my proximity to Lima. RSVPing to this event helped me finalize saying no to other activities I was invited to this week.

Tonight, a bunch of my friends are going bowling. I haven’t been bowling in years and these days, bowling is a marquee event. I was also invited to play ultimate Frisbee at the US Embassy this evening with a PCV in Lima on sick leave. Tomorrow a bunch of ladies from a slew of different countries are getting together for their biweekly lunch and invited me to come along. Friday is Halloween and I would love to go to the US Marine party like I did last year. But so far I have declined all invitations. I am working all week and would have to sacrifice one of my projects for any one of these invitations.

I have however made an amazing Halloween costume. It’s not as creative or unique as my costumes have been in years past, but given the resources I have access to, I think it’s one of the greatest costumes I’ve ever put together. Instead of going to live jazz and salsa lessons like I was invited to do the past two nights, I’ve stayed at site watching Gilmore Girls on DVD and hand stitching my costume. Even if I don’t go to a Halloween party, it will make a great costume for my girls theater group.

Next Tuesday is the election and I will definitely head into Lima for that. So I will be in Lima on Tuesday and Thursday of next week and that throws my balance way off. Rather coincidentally, a few of the international ladies I had lunch with a few weeks back just started a project with an NGO at my girls home Caritas Felices. They have volunteered to paint the school they are building at the home. So for the past few Fridays, my social life as come to me. I’ve been helping them paint during the day, then I take them to a restaurant in my town and we social in my hood for a change

Quarter Century Life Crisis

I turned 25 a few weeks ago and the best way to describe the time surrounding the silver anniversary of my birth, is a roller coaster ride. I've written about the difficulties I've had leaving my 6 week stay in California and coming back to Peru. Since I wrote last, things have improved over all, but I'm still having a lot of lows. At first when I started having these big swings of emotions, I felt out of control and really dumb for not being able to handle them after almost a year and a half in country. The weirdest part was that I was having a difficult time pin pointing exactly what was causing these swings. I turned to a lot of my friends back home, through email and skype, and have been in contact with lot's of close friends from high school and college.

What surprised me, is that practically everyone I talked to was having a similarly hard time with whatever it was they were tackling in their lives at this moment. This past September and October have been particularly hard on a lot of my friends. They are all dealing with different things, but the one thing we all have in common is our age. One friend put it nicely, she called it the Quarter Century Life Crisis. It may seem silly when you first hear it, but if you think about it, it makes sense. At 25 years of age, we feel like we should be full fledged adults. We've had a few years since college to fiddle around and try and figure out what we want to do. By 25 we are either supposed to have a good job or at least be on track to get it. But even for my friends that have the job they dreamed of in college, they are now second guessing if that's what they really want to spend the rest of their lives doing? All the sudden they feel like they are missing out on their twenties and have the urge to quit their amazing job and go wander the globe for a while. Then there are my friends who are wandering the globe and are freaked out that they are behind in life and they're not sure how to catch up.

I have friends who are dealing with break ups and deaths and reversely friends coping with marriages and having babies. It doesn't really matter how things are shaping up in a persons life, we thought things would be different. And even if things are exactly the way we planned them to be, we thought we would feel different. Our trial run as adults has us all reevaluating out lives and our situations.

For me, my life is pretty much where I had planned it to be. What has been scaring me lately, I think, is that I don't know where I'm going after my service wraps up in under 10 months. The world is literally at my feet. I can anything! But how do I choose? What direction do I start? The pull to go back home is strong, I love my friends and family. I love California. But the call of the rest of the world tempting. I try not to overwhelm myself with the question, what do I want to do with my life? Instead, I focus on a little bit at a time. What do I want to do with my life in the next 5 years? So far, I have about 50 ideas, 10 of them I'm seriously contemplating.

To all of my friends out there who are feeling a bit lost in the world, I ask you to stop comparing your lives to others. Almost all of my friends, when talking about the things they struggle with, have said to me they feel bad complaining because it's not like they live in a developing country like I do. They think just because they live in the US that these issues are easier to deal with then mine are. They are not. The Quarter Life Crisis knows no borders. And luckily, friendship doesn't either. So at least the silver lining in this whole crazy mess is that we are in it together.

Even though I am still having a hard time dealing with some stuff, I have definitely been doing a lot better overall. Going back to site after almost 2 months of being away was like finding the calm in the storm. Life is slow and easy going here. It doesn't matter what is happening in my life, the kids and girls are constant. They are always there and even if I disappear for 2 months, they will still love me when I come back. Life seems to make a little more sense at site then it did when I was on medical leave or freshly back in Peru and whisked to Piura for an IST. Life in Lima is anything but boring. Even after a year, I am discovering new things each week and meeting new people. I have a lot of things going for me right now. I am finally an experienced veteran who knows how to navigate her way through PC life in Peru. I am trying to ride this wave cause I know that soon I will be starting a new chapter in my life and will end up starting from scratch once again. So at least for now, it's comforting that I know what I will be doing with my life for the next 10 months.

Photos from IST

This is a picture of me moderating the "Question Game". I'm notorious for being terrible at this. Heather and Jamar on the other hand rocked this game, in spanish no less





One of the many fabulous skits preformed by the volunteers and their Peruvian counterparts.





While the weekend was very stressful and hard work for the trainers, we were given quite a bit of comic relief as shown in this picture by Jamar and Jah recreating and singing a Peruvian music video......Hilarious!









This is me pretending I have any idea what I'm talking about. Thank god Elena was there to bail me out when my Spanish failed me.







The 3 awesome trainers who made it all happen......somehow and I'm still not quite sure how we managed.

25!

Bikini. Sunset. Beach. Champagne. Nailed it.

After my somewhat dramatic and very stressful return to Peru from medevac, for my birthday all I wanted to do was spend a relaxing day on the beach with a few close friends. I doubted whether or not that would actually be possible given my state of my anxiety, but with a lot of love and support I got my birthday wish.

My very good PCV friend, Jah, has talked about nothing else for the past year than how great Piura is. Piura is a northern department which boasts warm weather year round and the best beaches in Peru. Jah never misses an opportunity to rub it in my face that Lima is cold and gray for most of the year, while he never has to wear so much as a sweater in Piura. I have been scheming for over a year of how I was going to get to Piura and take full advantage of those beautiful beaches I'd heard so much about. I was very surprised when I found out that our IST would not only be in Piura, but it would end on my birthday. The best part about it was that since it was a Peace Corps Sponsored event, they paid for my transportation to and from the northern desert. Not just that, but since the training ended on birthday I not only got a free vacation day but got to see many of my PCV friends on the actual day.

My mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday. Realistically, I should have said nothing since both my parents were incredibly generous to me when I was home on medevac for 6 weeks. But there had been something I had wanted from them for my birthday for a long time: a paid stay in a nice hotel in the beach resort town of Mancora. Luckily, nice hotels right on the beach don't cost as much in Peru as they do else where, so I didn't feel too greedy asking for this present.

The problem with Mancora is that Piura has one of the largest concentrations of PCVs in Peru and whenever one person plans a trip to Mancora, half of Piura shows up for the party. Normally, I would be down for a huge fiesta with lots of people, but I really had my heart set on a small, intimate vacation with no partying and lots of resting. I didn't invite any of my PCV friends and instead invited just a few close friends from Lima. Tania and Dave have a project in Piura that they were able to swing it so they could be in Piura and take a few days off to go to the beach with me. These two probably needed the vacation more than I did so I was extra happy to provide them with a stay in a hotel we wouldn't normally splurge on (by the way mom, they say THANKS!!!!!). There they are taking full advantage of not having to work on a mondy with an afternoon nap outside our room after a long day of playing in the sun.

After lots of Birthday hugs and farewells from the volunteers at the IST, the 3 of us were off. It was just over a two hour ride from Piura city to Mancora. My goal was to make it in time for the sunset and we got there in the late afternoon with plenty of time to settle in and get cozy for the sun to go down. I'm so happy I opted with staying in a nice place as opposed to the hostel where all the PCVs always stay when they go. The actual town of Mancora isn't anything special. It's very small but busy, dirty and has the feeling of a run down spring break destination. Our resort was 2 miles down the road on a private beach. Even though it is set in the desert, the place was manicured with lots of green grass and palm trees. It had two pools and even a water slide. Since we were there on a random sunday in september, the place was practically empty and we had the whole resort to ourselves.

Tania, Dave and I get along really well. We spent our whole trip playing in the sand, the ocean and the pool. We went for for a walk under the stars after the sun went down and noted the difference between the constellations in the northern hemisphere and the southern. Then we went and sat next to a big bon fire the resort had lit and played cards. I had a birthday Pisco Sour and from the moment I arrived, all my stress had melted away.

It was really the prefect birthday. No trip to the beach in Peru is complete without fresh ceviche and a cold beer enjoyed with your feet in the sand. I soaked up all the sun shine I possibly could and was sad to say goodbye to it. But I knew that after two months of being out of site, it was time to return and restart my life. Since Tania and Dave have real jobs, they were able to fly back to Lima while I, the PCV, took an overnight bus. Since Peace Corps was paying, I chose the super nice, expensive bus and slept even better than I slept on the ride coming to Piura. I slept so well, that I even slept through the drama of our bus breaking down in the middle of the night. Some one had to tap my shoulder to tell me we had to switch buses.

A new goal for the next 10 months of my service is to go back to Mancora. I don't know if I'll be able to stay in as nice a place as this, but my parents can always give me a christmas present......

The warm thoughts of the view from our room will have to keep me warm until then.

IST in Piura

I'm back in Lima and after sleeping something like 18 hours yesterday (no exaggeration), I'm able to process this past weeks events and I'm feeling pretty good. For me, the trip started the night before I left, the night I spent throwing up. I had to drag myself to the Peace Corps office the next morning to do some last minute cramming for the in-service training I was leading. My boss decided she would take the morning off and not have her phone on and left me to do all of her work on top of my own, all while not feeling well. This would be the general theme of the IST.

I met the new volunteer who had been evacuated from Bolivia and we, along with Ari who was also leading the IST, hopped a 14 and a half hour bus to Piura city. Talking with the Bolivian volunteer was cool. Not only had she been through some pretty crazy stuff with the evacuation, but I got to hear how Peace Corps was run over there. I always just assumed it was pretty standard across the globe, but it turns out there are huge differences in policy and program from country to country. Some of the stuff I heard made PC Peru sound rather draconian in policy compared to other places. One of the craziest things I think, is that the Bolivian country director had transferred from Georgia after it had been evacuated and had only been in Bolivia one month before being evacuated for a second time. Peace Corps Washington is supposedly freaking out cause they have had 3 evacuations so far this year: Kenya, Georgia and Bolivia. It's interesting that this has happened all over the world and definitely something to think about.

The bus ride ended up going smoothly, with no panic attacks or middle of the night tummy aches. In fact, it was probably the best bus ride I ever had. I usually travel alone, so I'm sure having to wonderful people there helped. I also find traveling incredibly relaxing. Well, maybe not the act of getting to the airport, checking in and all the hassle that goes with it. But usually once I am on a plane, bus, train, you name it, there isn't an ounce of anxiety in my blood. I fell asleep almost immediately and did not wake up until we arrived in Piura. I have never slept so well on a bus. I'm sure the lingering effects of mono played a part in that as well.

The relaxed, well rested Ali vanished the moment she stepped off the bus. Operation IST was underway and every thought and movement revolved around it. An IST has never been given by volunteers before. My boss Kitty, rounded up a team consisting of me, Ari and Elena to teach a 3 day training workshop to youth volunteers and their Peruvian counterparts. Normally, ISTs are given by our program directors and other professionals they hire. I felt like having volunteers teach the workshop wasn't a new, innovative way to pass information along as my Kitty would suggest it was, but her way of getting other people to do her work.

And work we did. Elena, Ari and I would start working at 8 AM and finish sometime around midnight each day. If my doctor back home knew I was pulling those hours so soon after being medically cleared, she would have freaked out. This workshop was stressful, torturous and incredibly frustrating. The three of us could not wait until this stupid thing was over. The amount of effort we had to put into making this workshop seem effortless was made all the more difficult buy our lack of resources like internet or even power point. All of our presentations had be drawn out by hand on giant sheets of paper. Our boss kept pawning off more and more of her responsibilities on us at the last minute. And did I mention the whole thing was done in Spanish?

While this event was like pulling teeth for those of us putting it on, the end result for those who participated was great. Ari, Elena and I were showered with praise for putting on not only an informative but fun and interactive workshop. Indeed it was fun for us at times as well. The volunteers and counterparts who came really committed to their participation. The group didn't act shy or reserved and provided some really entertaining improvisations and skits.

On top of all that was happening with the training workshop, I was still feeling very stressed about other uncertain factors in my life. Even after the IST was over and a wave of relief washed over me, there was still a bit of anxiety boiling in the bottom of my stomach. I hoped that my birthday would be stress free and the beach would wash away the rest of my uneasiness. Every one's response after the IST was so positive, I couldn't help but feel proud of myself and extreme gratitude towards Elena and Ari, who did so much work while I was out on medevac. I think all the work and stress was worth it. I really feel the people who attended got something great out of the workshop. It also did me good to see the volunteers who attended. I think one of the things that was causing me anxiety upon my return to Peru was a sense of having not done anything and being useless for 2 whole months. I felt so accomplished after the weekend that I felt I fully merited my trip to beach and could therefore really enjoy it, cause I had earned it.

I did a great job of scrambling at the last minute to make myself prepared for the IST. The one thing I forgot was my camera. There were lots of pictures taken by other volunteers so I am waiting for them to post some and I will copy some onto my blog.