Ali in Peru

Whatever happened to Ali's Blog?

2009-05-26T14:52:00.000-07:00

Something happened to me during my Peace Corps service that I didn't foresee happening. This whole crazy experience became my life. I'll explain.

When I first arrived in Peru, everything was different and so new that it was all novel. The simplest activity like going to the store would end up being a hilarious incident that I couldn't wait to come home and share it with those who read my blog. I detailed my day to day life, my vacations, my work, and my ups and downs. Over time, my entries became less about all the stuff that was new a weird around me, and more about interesting events and broad ideas I'd been thinking about.

This was my first venture into the blogosphere, and I learned a lot. I learned that you cannot share every thought and fleeting emotion, unless you are really prepared to have the whole world know about it. The more I got used to my life in Peru, the less I wanted to share publically. All the sudden, the things that really stood out to me when I sat down to write my blog, was not about my next door neighboor and the pig head she gave me as a present, but about the way my boss talked to me and how much it upset me. Now, I couldn't very well write on a public blog that my boss was hurting my feelings. She could read it and then I'd we'd have even bigger problems.

Around January, I started thinking really hard about what I wanted to do after Peace Corps. I figured, all my friends back home would want to know too. I thought many times about writing a blog about what my plans for after I closed my service, but the problem was, those plans changed every week. I didn't want to make my readers go through the same roller coaster ride I was of trying to decide if I would stay in Peru or return to the states. Making a lot of these decisions was deeply emotional, and I didn't want to revel my deepest feelings.

Another big change since January is that I started dating again. Of course, this took over a large chunk of what I thought about throughout the day and also dominated the majority of emotions. I can't think of anything more terrifying than coming home from a date and blogging about it. Writing that I went out with such and such guy and that I really liked him or disliked him, and then having him google me and find what I had written would be mortifying. I realized I'm a lot more private than I thought. There are so many things that are happening in my life that I just don't want shared.

Well, what about things I don't mind sharing? There was a ton of stuff I could have written about while never touch the subject of my future, dating or any other emotion. But when I did write while all that other stuff was going on, it felt like a half truth. What was real and on my mind everytime I sat down to write, was stuff I didn't want the entire world knowing. I instead turned to personal emails. I've been writing a lot to my close friends and family and they have been helping me through the big emotional stuff.

So to the rest of you who do not recieve personal emails, I am sorry you've been out of the loop. I will say that as of now, I plan to finish my service some time in august, travel and hang out for a few months and return to California in the fall. From there, I don't really know what I want to do. The world is literally at my feet and I can go in any direction. I'm not necesarily done with blogging, I may find the whole readjustment back to the US compelling and start sharing more stories. I just know for the time being, I want to figure some stuff out on my own, before I open my life back up to the public.

I heart Frisbee

2009-02-06T08:55:00.000-08:00

It's the simple pleasures in life that make it so enjoyable.

My last quarter at UC Davis, I found myself with an excess of time on my hands. My buddy Vaughn had recently left the Joe-job world in search or his first real job. We seemed to be the only people around not bogged down with school, jobs, theater practice, sports or internships. Because of all this free time, Vaughn and I would find completely useless means to entertain ourselves. Thus, Vaughn is credited with introducing me to my love of Frisbee.

On random week day mornings, as all my roommates where getting ready for their impossibly full days, Vaughn would show up at my door with a frisbee and some form of alcohol. Usually a bottle of champagne or 6 pack of New Castle beer. We would go to a near by park and toss the Frisbee around for hours. It was winter time, so sometimes we would play in the rain. No matter the weather, Vaughn would always be in shorts. Sometimes he would demand we wear funny hats and we'd play with felt lobsters or stove pipe hats on our head. There was no reason behind any of it, it was just fun.

Vaughn was very good. I sucked. I couldn't throw very well, but I could run and catch like a wide receiver. So when I say we "played" Frisbee, what I mean to say is that Vaughn would chuck the Frisbee as far as he could throw it and I'd sprint off toward it leaping like a gazelle at the end to catch it. It was kind of like playing fetch, but I loved it. There are few opportunities at this age where one can just sprint all out as fast as their legs will carry them. It's the most amazing feeling to drop all your inhibitions and run like an 8 year old.

While playing frisbee and drinking all day may seem like the ideal life, it was a relatively torturous time for me. I hate down time and I was bored out of my mind. I was actually jealous that my roommates had so much going on. It was those moments though, when I was chasing after a frisbee that let me get all my pent up angst out.

Once again I find myself in a position similar to my final quarter at Davis, too much down time. I found varying ways to deal with the anxiety that comes from boredom. I'd go to the local gym and participate in crazy 80's aerobics classes, I blogged, I even trained for and ran a marathon. A few months ago, some US embassy employees started a weekly Ultimate Frisbee game. I had heard about it and knew that I needed to get myself involved.

I'd only played Ultimate Frisbee a handfull of times, usually it as a reward for friday's track practice in place of a work out. After all those frisbee sessions with Vaughn, I still couldn't throw very well, but I could run and I could catch. The group that plays at the embassy is mostly men and I'm probably the youngest person out there. I definitely surprised a couple guys with my athletic ability and soon became a staple of the team.

Frisbee is a very simple game. It doesn't take much skill or thinking. You just get out there an run as hard as you can. I'm evening getting better at throwing the frisbee! Frisbee Wednesdays are my favorite day of the week now. It's the one time I can leave it all behind and just run. When I go back to site on wednesday night, I feel more at ease and can better appreciate my free time.

I can't wait to see Vaughn again and show him my new skills.

Overnight Results

2009-02-02T13:01:00.001-08:00

It's a very common experience for a Peace Corps volunteer to arrive in a community and for all the locals to expect that this foreigner is going to teach them English. Most PCVs try their hand in one way or another at teaching English. Whether it's teaching artisans basic words and phrases like "how much?" so they can more effectively sell their products at fairs, helping kids with their English homework, or working everyday in an English institute. Teaching English is almost unavoidable during our two year service.

Luckily, the initial idea that every person you come into contact with that you are going to teach them English wears off after they realize they cannot learn a language over night and without a considerable amount of effort on their part. My favorite is when the host country national blames the volunteer for not being able to learn through osmosis. So unless the volunteer is wildly motivated to teach English or they are magically blessed with enough people willing to put the back work into studying, the volunteer can eventually focus on projects closer to their heart.

I continuously side step working with English. But I have found a similar mentality in another area that I have been unable to avoid. At my girls home I do a lot of different projects. I teach classes on communication, self esteem, sexuality, etc. I have a theater group and mural painting project. But from the moment I arrived at the home, the girls have demanded exercise and aerobics classes. While setting up my summer schedule this year, the girls agreed to all of my proposals as long as I would have exercise classes.

I started the classes just a few weeks ago. Twice a week I show up in the morning, before it gets too hot, and we do a fairly basic routine. We run on dirt roads around the farms for about 20 minutes. Actually, the running only lasts from 5-10 minutes because only about 3 of the 10 girls jog while the others have varying paces of walk/jogging. We get to our half way point where we turn around to go back, but sit and wait for the rest of the girls to finish before we return. At our rest stop a lot of the girls by sodas. I try to explain to them how water is a better choice, but so far no one has bought a bottle of water.

Then we stretch and do simple exercises like squats, lunges, chair dips and push ups. And of course, no day of exercise is ever complete without sit ups and abs. If you remember back to my blogs about going to the gym in Lurin, you'll remember that most Peruvian woman have a muffin top belly and are adamant about doing 2 seconds of ab work to get rid of it. Resources are limited so there isn't much else to do. There are no weights or steps or even a radio to do a more intensive and thorough work out. But the regiment I have complied is certainly enough to help the girls maintain a healthy lifestyle.

If only that were enough.

After two weeks the girls started complaining the the exercise classes weren't working. They weren't loosing any weight and they looked exactly the same. They made comments about my body and wanted to know what I did to look the way I look. It was then I noticed the pattern that is persistent with learning English. The moment I walked through the gate at the home, the girls looked at me and thought that i could teach them to look just like me, and overnight at that. I tried at first to simply brush off the remarks that the girls wanted to know my secret, hopding they would forget about it and just enjoy the classes as they are. But they got quite demanding and I've tried with great difficulty to explain to them than in order to loose weight one must really put a lot of effort in; exercise everyday and change their diet.

But the answer isn't as simple as applying one's self to learn English. I try to explain that they don't need to loose weight, that they have healthy bodies. Not just that. If say, some one really wanted to learn English, they could study and practice and one day, they would indeed speak English. But no matter how hard they worked, they would never look like me. My body type is completely different. Every one is built a different way with different natural shapes and metabolisms.

It's frustrating, cause they don't seem to get it. And why would they? It's no different from the millions of Americans who get suckered into buying quick fix, overnight result exercise equipment and diet fads products. This is a billion dollar industry. I can't really blame the girls that they have a hard time understanding they're not going to transform in a matter or weeks.

But it's hard. There is a girl in my exercise group who was abused and got pregnant at 12. Now she is 13 and has the body of mother. She wants to loose the extra weight around her middle. She wants to look like the rest of the girls. It breaks my heart. She is one of the most dedicated girls in the class because she was powerless to resist getting pregnant, but she is not powerless to loose the weight. This is something she can do and is determined.

One might think that after what these girls have been through, the way their bodies look might seem trivial or that they would want to cover up and hide their bodies after the abuse they have endured. But nothing could be farther from the truth. The female body image remains a point of much interest to me. Thought my exercise classes I am learning how to tackle health issues and self esteem issues. It won't happen overnight, but I have at least until August to make a change.

Update on listening to my body

2009-01-31T15:03:00.000-08:00

I wrote my last entry right before heading out for the evening. In a way, I was trying to remind myself to take it easy and not over do it.

Well, I went to the beach house with 4 boys and we didn't go to bed till 5 in the morning and today my body REALLY hates me. Why is taking it easy so hard for me? I gotta stop hanging out with boys so much because they drink so hard and I always try to keep up.

I swear, tonight I'm staying in! and tomorrow during the super bowl I am not drinking at all.

Learning to Listen to My Body

2009-01-30T17:15:00.000-08:00

Damn being human! Why can't we be robots or at least have a way of engineering the better more efficient parts?

Our bodies are very special and we must take care them as best we can because they are the only one we're gonna get. I swear, I try really hard to take care of my body. I eat right, I exercise, I keep it clean and I rest it. But I also push it. In my opinion, I don't push my body nearly as hard as other people around me. But apparently I don't know when too much is enough.

What I don't get is that I sleep a lot. Being a Peace Coprs volunteer, I'm subject to a 9-5 schedule and I take full advantage of that by getting between 8-12 hours of sleep on week nights. It's awesome. It's not the sleep that's so much the problem, it's how hard I push my body physically when I'm awake. I walk to work and back each day which adds up to around 2 hours of walking a day. At work, I play with mountains of little kids which is exhausting physically, mentally and emotionally. I'm known to party as hard as I work and I push my body to it's limits when I exercise.

This is how I got mono last year. My body had been screaming at me for weeks to take it easy, that it was on it's last leg, so to speak. After a month of being completely knocked off my feet, I promised myself I would take better care or my body and respect it's limits in second year in Peru. Coming back to my Peace Corps life after medevac was tough. It was a slow recovery and I didn't start to feel like my true self again until 3 months after the fact. I climbed the Inca trail and felt pretty good. I started exercising again. But then it started to snow ball. Summer arrived and with it all the out door activities that I had been missing for 8 months.

I started feeling tired and run down after a month of fun in the sun, but I couldn't bring myself to decline a single invitation to go throw the frisbee or swim in the ocean. Finally last weekend I said I wasn't going to go out. My friends were aghast. They wouldn't except it and demand I go out. I asked them to understand that I was still vulnerable from the mono and I needed to take care of myself so I didn't relapse. They weren't the most supportive, so I half to easy.

Sure enough the following monday, I was knocked off my feet again by a terrible fever. I wasn't permitting my body to fully recover, so my body was forcing me. I lay helpless in bed for a few days unable to do anything. I didn't leave my house for 72 hours, maybe a record for me in Peru. I strangely wasn't mad that I was sick, I knew I had it coming. So after a week of being sick as a dog, I'm going to attempt another low key weekend.

Broken Record

2009-01-19T08:40:00.000-08:00

I have been having the same conversations with Peruvians for a year and a half now. It goes something like this

Peruvian: Where are you from?
me: the US
Peruvian: Wow, your Spanish is great. How long have you been here?
me: a year and a half
Peruvian: Wow, that's a long time. What are you doing here?
me: I'm a volunteer. I work in a home for sexually abused girls and home for small abandoned boys.
Peruvian: Are you a teacher?
me: No
Peruvian: Do you like our food?
me: yes
Peruvian: Have you been to Machu Picchu?
me: yes
Peruvian: Do you have a peruvian boyfriend?
me: no
Peruvian: Why not? we're so fabulous. Do you want one?
me: no thank you

I have really been flexing my social networking muscle. Which means, I have been meeting a ton of new people lately and having this conversation more than ever. This past weekend I was at a party and probably had that conversation 20 times in one day. After a very long and fun weekend with a bunch of new people, I headed into Lima on sunday night for dinner with some old friends. It was refreshing to be around people who already know my bio and can have a conversation that is somewhat stimulating.

I was so tired on sunday and when I got in a cab to head back home, the taxi driver started the
"where are you from? You speak good spanish. What do you do? how long are you staying here?" He was a very sweet man who actually seemed interested. It was late, the streets were empty, he probably had been working a very long shift and enjoying having some one in his car to chat with. But I hated him at that moment. The last thing I wanted to do was have that conversation again. I wanted to zone out and be left alone.

This is why they say a Peace Corps volunteers job is 24/7. It can seem like there is never a break for us. We are always on. Sometimes I feel guilty that I made ex-pat friends in Lima and feel the need to escape to the sanctity of their company so often. But in the back seat of that taxi I realized how important my friends are to my sanity. I'm sure the moment I finish writing this blog entry, I will step outside and have to have this conversation again.

deep breath.

ready, set, go.....

I'm Gonna be a Mom!....Someday.....Maybe

2009-01-16T06:49:00.001-08:00

No, no, no, I’m not pregnant.

I was standing, crammed into a combi this morning and all of the sudden I had an epiphany.

Having kids or getting married is not something that passes through my everyday thoughts . I’m certainly asked on a regular basis not if, but when, I’m going to get married and have kids. I always take this chance as a learning opportunity that a woman doesn’t have to be married or have children to validate her life.

I’m 25, single and have no idea what I want to do with my life exactly. How on earth would I know if I want to have kids?

But then this morning, out of know where it hit me. If I ever do decided to have kids and I have the ability, I want to adopt a child from Peru.

For a few months now, I’ve been feeling that all my work with the kids is not enough. I can’t help but have this hopeless feeling that no matter what I do, these beautiful boys and girls are destined to fall back into a life abuse and neglect. I wouldn’t have the opportunity even if I wanted to take home any of the kids I work with. None of them are technically orphans or “up for sale” anyways. But there are so many children in Peru who are.

Last month while I was traveling, I met a Peruvian woman and her beautiful family. She was born in Peru and moved to Paris to study, married a French man and has been living in Norway for the past 8 years. As I had drinks with her one evening, I told her about my work in children’s homes and she confided in me that she adopted both of her children. She came from Norway on two different occasions to adopt her children and told the story of the adoption process and the actual experience of going to pick up her children.

It was a really inspiring, beautiful story. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but all of the sudden I am seeing the great honor it is to adopt a child. Especially from a country that has come to mean so much to me.

I have never understood how people pay tens of thousands of dollars to have their seed and egg harvested into another donor carrier just so their spawn can live on. To me, this is one of the most selfish acts a person can commit. There are so many children out there who need homes. The want to have your own flesh and blood live on is understandable and biological. But by all standards, if you are unable to have a child naturally, surrogacy is completely not practical.

I believe in Darwinism. Even if you don’t and you believe that God created everything and has a plan, maybe God’s plan is that you shouldn’t procreate. I know that can come off a bit harsh. Many women I’m sure would tell me that I couldn’t understand unless I was in their position. Maybe, but I have felt this way for as long time. And now that I work with abandoned children and see just how many need homes, I have become quite passionate against surrogacy.

A woman unable to bear her own children may tell me I couldn’t understand unless I was in her shoes. Well, I’d like to tell that woman before she goes and spends $70,000 to artificially place her spawn in another woman, to come spend some time in my shoes. Come work a few months with all the abandoned and forgotten kids of the world. Then see if conscienceless she could turn her back on them and go create a test tube baby

I feel after I leave Peru, this feeling that my two years wasn’t enough may find it’s relief in the adoption of one child who won’t be forgotten. Again, it is too far away for me really consider. But if someday it ever happens, I will remember the morning in the combi when I thought to myself “hey, maybe someday I’ll adopt a Peruvian child”.

Summer Has Arrived!

2009-01-11T13:32:00.000-08:00

My life basically revolves around two things at the moment; the beach and the girls. What I like about my life, is that I can combine the two on occasion. During the summer months, the boys go off to spend their vacation with relatives so I only work at the girls home. It's great because they have no school and it gives me tons of time to do whatever I want with them. I get a lot of projects accomplished during the summer months because they are all bored and eager to things with me. It wasn't hard to get them to go to the beach with me, and it actually counts as work. Take that corporate world!

Last year I didn't take enough advantage of living on the beach. I feel like I've already been to the beach more times this year than I did all of last summer. I

I've been really active as of late. The tiredness of mono seemed to hang on for months and I didn't have the energy to do much. But now I'm playing ultimate frisbee, swimming and volleyball on a very regular basis and it feels phenomenal to be back in shape. I'm even going to start an exercise class at the home with the girls.

The one major downside to the summer is the staggering heat. Being from the Sacramento valley, I'm used to 100 degree days. But in California I have the luxury of air conditioning, insulated housing and driving in a car. It never gets any hotter than the 80s here, but it's very humid and I have to walk an hour to get to the girls home. When I arrive I'm covered in a filmy sweat and all the dust from the dirt roads. The cement buildings become ovens that maintain the heat even when it gets dark and cool outside. I just lie on my bed at night and sweat. I wake up several times during the night and feel hot and miserable. The one nice thing is that cold showers are no longer painful but actually pleasant and necessary. Some times 2 or 3 times a day.

Thank god I live so close to the beach.

The Travel Log

2009-01-05T08:01:00.001-08:00

The following 10 posts are the account of my 4 friends trip to Peru. It's pretty long and apart from my mom, I expect no one to read it in it's entirety. When I sat down to write a brief summary of my adventure, 12 pages came out and I couldn't bring myself to edit, so I just posted the whole thing. I hope you enjoy whatever fraction of it you read.

Lima: The Arrival

2009-01-05T07:46:00.000-08:00

These just weren’t any friends who were coming to visit me in Peru.

In Lima, I am known as the wild and crazy one by my friends. But in comparison to the group of people that was coming, I am the tame one. I prepared myself for the insanity that lay before me but from the moment they stepped off the plane the Lucchesi brothers, Eric and Ryan, along with their friend Rico ,were non-stop action and comedy. By the time Steph’s plane arrived 12 hours later, the boys had made Lima their playground.

Ryan accompanied me to the airport at midnight while I sent Eric and Rico with some Lima third year volunteers to meet up with the party of the Peru 12 swear in. We had all been drinking since dinner and to save a little money (the last time tried to save any money on this trip) I convinced Ryan to take one of the local micro buses instead of a taxi. I barely fit in the micro buses here and Ryan is 6’6’’. Fortunately for me, Ryan had a great time on the half our trip to the airport. He was excited by the way the door man hung out the window to hail pedestrians and by the crazy manner of driving. He got a kick out of all the people that got in and out of the van, but I think it’s safe to say all the Peruvians got a bigger kick out of him. He kept trying to communicate with them with 98% of the words coming out of his mouth in English. I must admit Ryan’s excitement for all the foreign things around him made me enjoy the trip more than any other bus trip I can think of. It was just a taste of things to come with the group I had assembled for our adventure in the Peruvian Andes.

We picked up Steph at the airport without any problems at all. She looked just as tall, skinny and glamorous as ever. Let me put it this way, I knew I wasn’t going to have to worry about loosing her in any crowd of Peruvians. We took her strait to club to meet up with the rest of the group. We danced and partied till things died down around 4 then we went back to our hostel. Any other group after a long day of traveling and partying would have gone to bed then, but not the Lucchessi brothers. We went up to the roof of our hostel where there was a DVD room with a bunch of bean bags on the floor. It promptly got renamed the romper room and we stayed up till 6 am jumping around and yelling movie quotes at people out the 3rd story window…..in English.

The next day we did Lima right. We started the morning (or more accurately the afternoon) with a lunch of Ceviche. Then we headed to the cliffs to do some paragliding. I had been wanting to try paragliding for the year and a half I had lived in Lima but was waiting for the right moment and the right people to do it with. I highly recommend this experience for any one that comes to Lima and doesn’t suffer from vertigo. It was so neat to get a different perspective of it all and to be soaring around with my friends. After paragliding, we crossed the street and went to the apartment of a guy I know who works for the embassy. There jaws dropped at how amazing and how cheap ocean front rent is here. They not only got a glimpse of the upper crust of Peru (the last they would see of that for the rest of the trip) but some of the perks of working for the US foreign service.

Then we went to the center of Lima and the Plaza de Armas. I got to be a tourist again going to the Catacombs for the first time. The hours of day light we had for our one day of sight seeing in Lima were fading, so we went back to the hostel to get ready for Thanksgiving #2.

There were about 30 people at dinner. It felt like it was the culmination of something amazing, though I’m not sure what. I just felt during the night that those were the moments that made life worth living. There were so many people there from all parts of my life, Lima, Peace Corps, California, that I was just a big puddle of love.

Thanksgiving #2, 2008 was definitely a highlight night in my time in Peru. And while I retired early that evening (I think I went to bed around 2 AM) the Lucchesi boys and Rico were out all night on the roof party that our hostel hosted. I am happy to say that of all the new adventures I provided for my guests, seasoned traveler Ryan Lucchesi experienced his first real stay in a youth hostel and it was more than he ever could have hoped for.

Lima To Cusco

2009-01-05T07:32:00.000-08:00

There may have been some pressure put on Steph and myself for not partying as hard as the boys. Don’t get me wrong, I party with the best of them. I can out drink most guys I know, I can captivate an entire dance floor and I have stayed up to see countless sunrises. But when I’m traveling, I like to take it easy. To me, there is nothing worse than not feeling well while traveling; unable to lay down and the motion of the vehicle adding to the nausea. Not only that, when I am in charge of a trip and am responsible for getting everybody there safe and happy, I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself which can really stress me out. For these reasons, I did not party hard the night before we left for Cusco. Both Steph and I made a good showing, but were in bed by 2.

The flight from Lima to Cusco was named the Death March by the boys who were in a considerable amount of pain after partying hard and not sleeping. I warned them sufficiently that not only were we flying, but we would be getting off the plane at a significantly different altitude which gives most people a headache without an already present hang over. But, boys will be boys.

Is it wrong to say I enjoyed their pain? Even in distress, the boys are light hearted and hilarious. They were the best travel companions because no matter what happened, they were in good spirits and not even a hang over could slow them down (even though sometimes I wish it would).

We didn’t have much time in Cusco, just the afternoon and night, then the trek started bright and early the next morning. Having already been to Cusco with my Parents, I had an idea of what would be the most appropriate for time there. I picked a hostel that was right in the main square of the colonial Plaza de Armas. We explored the square, the shopping and the restaurants and bars that were all within a stones throw. We ate guinea pig and alpaca and the group was able to check those off the “to do in peru” list.

Then what happened next became the standard for every night to come on our trip: Steph went back to the hostel to be alone and rest and the boys and I went out for a drink. After an hour or two and a drink or two, I went back to the hostel to assure myself enough sleep for the following days adventures and the boys stayed out, explored the city on their own, continued drinking and got no more than a handful of hours of sleep. I wish I had the stamina to do what the boys did on this trip. I can understand doing that one or two nights of a vacation, but they did it every night, including the days we were hiking and doing very strenuous amounts of work. Much to my surprise and delight, nobody got sick on our trip.

Day 1: Bikin'

2009-01-05T07:15:00.000-08:00

I already did Machu Picchu with my parents. We did it in the most comfortable way possible. We took the train, stayed in a Luxury hotel and ate exquisite food. This time around, I was going to get an entirely different experience. We decided to hike the Inca trail instead of taking the train. Because we were going during the rainy season, we picked a trek that wasn’t as hard core as some of the others that have you carry all of your stuff and sleep on the ground. Our tour had a wide range of activities we did along the trek so we weren’t just walking non-stop for 4 days strait. We also stayed in hostels in small Andean villages along the way instead of camping.

The first day of our trek we mountain biked. The start of our journey was rainy and cold but within an hour the rain stopped and as we descended from our start point at 4,000 + meters, the air warmed up around us to a point where we actually missed the cold.

We had our only scare of the trip which resulted in a minor injury. My friend from Lima, Dave and his brother Dan who was visiting from Costa Rica were with us as well. Dan was trying to take a video on his camera while biking. He almost fell of a cliff. The video is pretty funny to watch, but only because he didn’t actually fall off the cliff. He scraped up his knee and lost his glasses.

That wasn’t the only excitement of the day. As evening approached, we came upon a road block, literally. A bunch of old drunk men in a small village had barricaded our route to protest the government not paving the dirt road we were riding on. It wasn’t that big a deal, they let us pass but not the van that was carrying all our stuff. So we left the bikes with the van and carried our stuff by foot. When we finally arrived in the village we were staying in, it was dark and we were exhausted. It was an inconvenience that we weren’t able to bike the last portion of the day, but I feel like my friends got the real Latin American experience. Every day there are strikes and road blocks, it’s part of the way of life down here. I’m glad my friends weren’t completely blinded from the real Peru while sticking to the gringo trail.

Dinner was prepared by a local woman. After just a few days, my friends were already complaining about the excess of rice and potatoes they were served. I know I’ve done my fair share of whining about the carb heavy meals here, but it’s a way of life for me. I didn’t see why they couldn’t just suck it up for a week when I‘ve been putting up with it for a year and a half. Stephanie asked me what was and wasn’t okay for her to eat so she could avoid having stomach problems. Being a Californian, we’re so used to eating salads regularly. And while traveling in a less developed country, staying away from salad is safe a way to avoid getting sick the same way as not drinking the water. Having explained this to Stephanie several times before she came, she still asked me every meal if she could eat a salad. And every time I said no, she got mad at me, like it was my fault. Telling her I suffered worse, that I went a whole 3 months without eating salad when I first arrived, didn’t seem to do much to console her.

Apart from the food, the group did a pretty amazing job of rolling with the Peruvian punches. One thing some of the people in the group had a hard time accepting, was the ability to use their credit cards. Coming from the states we have the mentality that we can use a credit card anywhere. My friends were shocked when places like hostels and travel agencies didn’t accept credit cards. Only at one point did someone get really upset that not only did our hostel not accept credit cards, but there wasn’t even an ATM in the town we were staying in. This was completely illogical to this person, but I had to remind them that you can’t apply what you believe to be normal to another countries reality.

Day 2: Hikin'

2009-01-05T07:02:00.000-08:00

I was definitely nervous about the physical demands of this trek. I’d heard the trek on average described as “doable but difficult”. I did a trek in the northern Andes back in July. It was just two weeks after I’d run a marathon and the 2 hike was very hard. I was worried because I hadn’t done any real physical activity since that hike in July. Mono took a toll on my body. Even at the end of November I could still feel the sickness effecting me. The lack of exercise plus left over mono plus the altitude was a big enough threat to make me start running up and down stairs two weeks before the hike. I thought it might be too late to get in shape, but at least I could shock my legs and get the initial soreness out of the way.

It seemed to work because I didn’t have too hard a time with the incredibly steep, never ending mountains. Day two, our first day of real hiking. The hiking part was definitely challenging, but we took so may breaks at first it was manageable. It seemed like every half an hour we resting. And not just taking quick breathers, we were literally taking a load off. The locals have built a whole system around where the gringos take breaks on their treks. There where hammocks and women selling refreshments every mile.

We had a guide named Luis who led us up the right paths and told us when to take a break. I think their rule as guides is to take it easy on the gringos unless specifically asked other wise. All of the boys were complaining after the first few stops that they didn’t like resting so much. Steph was the only one who admitted she liked all the down time. As far as she was concerned, she worked her butt off all year in an office and only gets two precious weeks off which she was using in in Peru. Since all she does is work, work, work, she wasn’t thrilled that her vacation was strenuous. All the Lucchessi brothers wanted to do was hike harder, drink harder, do everything and sleep as little as possible. All Steph wanted to do was relax, do nothing and sleep 14 hours a day.

The boys raced ahead and Steph took her time with Luis in the back. Luis’ English was okay, but not great. Steph took 3 years of high school Spanish and wasn’t afraid to use it, so they actually had a great time hiking and practicing their language skills. It was really entertaining to her some of the stuff that came out of this girls mouth in an attempt to communicate. I have to love her for trying though. That is the way to learn a language, not to be afraid of making mistakes and just dive in and talk. It was actually noticeable the amount of Spanish she picked up just from two weeks of traveling. Steph is the kind of person I believe could pick up a language in a relatively short amount of time if fully emerged. Luis, our guide, had an English level that passable but relied on the Spanish speakers in the group to help translate. I wonder if they gave us a guide who was still working on his English because they new we had 4 bilingual people in the group. We actually had more Spanish speakers than non Spanish speakers. There was so much double language going on that sometimes I forgot to translate for the non Spanish speakers.

With the boys way ahead and Steph bringing up the rear, I found myself somewhere in-between. For a lot of the hiking I was on my own. I didn’t mind. We were with the group 24 hours a day, a little me time was nice. Especially since given the altitude it made breathing let alone a making conversation very difficult while hiking.

Day 2: Winding down

2009-01-05T06:38:00.000-08:00

Towards the end of the second day, we found ourselves in the valley of the river Urubamba. We had to cross the river in a two person cart connected by a cable. Of all the things we did on our trip, this is the one that made me the most nervous. I have been in Peru long enough to witness many contraptions such as that one fail. And there are no lawsuits or insurance these companies have to deal with, which is in no way reassuring. Plus, the guide told us some had died on it just 6 months ago. After all had crossed safely, I realized it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. And that 400 meters down the river there was a regular suspension bridge we could have crossed. In the end I’m glad I crossed on the zip line.

The day concluded with our arrival at a hot spring. The hot spring was so much better than what I had imagined. It was obviously created for and maintained by the money of tourists. It was one of the nicest looking spa’s I’ve seen in my life, let alone Peru. It was clear spring water in natural rock pools. You could bury your feel in the pebbles that made up the floor. The pools backed up into rock cliffs jetting strait up and the view looking out from the other side of pools was breathtaking. Lush green jungle mountains, high and mighty, mysterious yet inviting. We were in the hot springs as the sun went down and misty clouds settled on the mountain tops.

This fantasy land wasn’t without flaw. Since it was in jungle part of the mountains, there were massive amounts of mosquitoes. I have a personal vendetta against mosquitoes to the point where I actually make myself paranoid. It’s true, there were mosquitoes everywhere and if you stood outside of the pool, they attacked your bikini exposed skin within seconds.

I had this image of arriving at the hot springs on the second day, exhausted and cold. I pictured soaking my aching bones in the warm waters with a cold beer I hand. Not only was not tired or sore from the trek so far, it wasn’t even cold. At home when I’m too hot in my Jacuzzi, I do an in and out routine to keep myself from over heating. But because of all the mosquitoes, I kept every part of my body underwater, no matter how hot I felt. And they wouldn’t let us bring the beer bottles by the pool. So every 10 minutes or so, I would jump out of the hot springs, sprint over to my stuff and dance around while pounding my beer because if I stayed stationary the mosquitoes would bite me.

The hot springs weren’t perfect, but I still loved them.

From the hot springs, we were bused into a small village a few miles away. At the hot springs I had drank two 22 ounce beers. At dinner in the town I had a Brazilian cocktail which was pretty strong . That combined with the altitude and the heat from the hot springs, I was really feeling the alcohol. Right as I realized how much the alcohol was hitting me, I also realized my camera was gone. I had definitely left it in the locket at the hot springs. Luis wasted no time in finding a taxi to take us back. He didn’t seem annoyed in the least that I interrupted his dinner. I was really grateful at how he didn’t make me feel guilty. Since we were the last to leave the place they had padlocked the gate at the lockers. I told the security guard I could jump it and he said if I could I was more than welcome to try. I got in no problem, retrieved my camera and impressed the hell out of the security guard.

Back at the restaurant my food was waiting for me. All the hiking, drinking and camera excitement had left me famished. I was so consumed with consuming my food that as I finished I was surprised by a restaurant workers coming towards our table with a birthday cake with candles and singing. I wondered who’s birthday it was without my knowing and before I could ask, they set down the cake in front of me and I realized everyone was singing and looking at me. Very confused, I looked at my friends and told them it wasn’t my birthday, but they just kept singing as if they knew what they were doing. I thought maybe they told the restaurant it was my birthday to get a free cake, so I didn’t say anything more about it not being my birthday.

Turns out, since my friends weren’t here for my birthday back in September, they wanted to celebrate with me 2 months after the fact. It sounds a like a silly thing to do, and it was. But it touched me so much that the thought even occurred to them to try such an elaborate scheme while doing a 4 day trek. When I went to find a camera, they went to find me a cake.

That night the boys went out only until midnight and Steph and I went strait to bed. That was the only night we had to share with a room with Dave and Dan who made us feel good because they went to bed even earlier than we did every night. That night it was hot. We didn’t want to open the windows cause there were no screens and we didn’t want to get eaten by moquitoes. I had killed seven in the room before I got into bed and knew I didn’t kill them all and the paranoia of being bit in the middle of the night didn’t help when I was trying to fall asleep.

Steph and I shared a bedroom one summer in Rhode Island. It was similar in the nights where it was hot and humid and uncomfortable to sleep. We remedied that by sleeping as naked as necessary. The hottest night of the trip was also the only night we shared a room with the Bullon brothers and so therefore had to keep our clothes on. Even though it was the worst of the night sleeps, it was definitely one of the best days, maybe second only to the Machu Picchu day.

Day 3: Hike Till You Drop

2009-01-04T20:07:00.000-08:00

I smiled so much on my trip that my face hurt at the end of the days. The cast of Characters we had along for the ride should get their own sitcom. I love Steph because she isn’t over sensitive and, like me, can be made fun of all day long and laugh along with it instead of getting upset. Steph totally got the bulk of the teasing on the trip. It started with her packing. I told steph she was gonna need a back pack for the hiking. She said she didn’t have one so I arranged for her to borrow a friends in Lima. Steph arrives in Peru with a huge rolly, red, suitcase. She brought more clothes for a two week trip than I did my two year service, and I am not over exaggerating.

I questioned her repeatedly why she brought so much stuff. She brought 3 different winter coats, 5 pairs of jeans (I don’t even own 5 pairs of jeans), zebra print flats and fancy to the knee leather boots. She got nicknamed Paris right off the bat. But she realized that for the day hikes, she didn’t have anything to carry her stuff. She found a white hefty garbage back and figured she’s carry that up the mountain. She went from Paris to Hobo overnight. Everyone made fun of her for carrying a plastic bag and told her it wouldn’t last, but she showed them. The plastic bag ended up working great.

Eric even switched to a plastic bag half way through the trek but it didn’t work out as well as Steph’s and he complained like everyone thought Steph would do.

The third day was a day of all hiking. After a three hour climb 800 meters strait up, we reached the top pf a mountain and an old Inca watch post where from you could see the ruins of Machu Picchu. We had a sack lunch there and enjoyed the amazing view. The Lucchessi brothers kept things interesting by syncing their ipods to the theme of the Indiana Jones movie and running around the Inca ruins. At one point, Ryan put his Nalgene on an altar rock and reenacted the scene from the movie where he takes the idol by switching his Nalgene bottle with a his lunch sack and then mimicking escaping from several booby traps.

After lunch we descended the mountain finally arriving in Hidroelectica where we took a train to Aguas Calientes. Aguas Calientes is the town at the base of Machu Picchu that who’s sole function in this world is to cater to tourists. The hostel we stayed in was far cry from the $1000 a night luxury eco lodge I stayed in with my parents 6 months before, but it was still really nice. Our room was right on top of a violently rushing river and the sound of water was defining, but still really cool.

In Aguas we were given the fanciest meal of our trip and our last meal with Luis. It seemed like a special night. Our group got along really well and everyone bonded during our 3 day adventure. It was really nice to share that night with my friends. We knew that we had the crown Jewel of our trip the next day, Machu Picchu.

We had to wake up at 4:45 to get make to the ruins for sunrise. This was the one night the boys went to bed early. Just like the last time I was in Aguas Calientes, I woke up in the middle of the night sick and spent an hour in the bathroom. Maybe that night was worse than the one that was hot with the mosquitoes. But I don’t know. After I was done in the bathroom I feel right asleep and slept soundly with the sound of rushing water filling our room.

Machu Picchu

2009-01-04T19:40:00.000-08:00

For some one who spends her peace corps career sleeping in till 9 every morning, this trip was a shock to my system. Every morning we were up at 6, except for the day we went to Machu Picchu when we woke up at 4:45 to try and get there for sunrise. I knew it was silly, cause all the mornings had been cloudy and rainy, but we still rushed out of our hostel like a bat out of hell. The boys didn’t even eat breakfast. When we got there it was raining and clouds were sitting on top off the hills so you couldn’t see anything 50 feet away from your face. When it came to be the hour for the sun to rise, nothing happened. It was just like some one was turning on a dimmer switch as the sky went from gray to slightly brighter gray. I could I have stayed in Lima to see that effect. I was thankful that I had been there in June with my parents to see the sun rise over the adjacent mountains. It was so beautiful and mystical but I was also grateful I could be there in December with the mist and fog on the mountains. That too was beautiful and mystical in another way.

In the morning Luis gave us the tour of the sacred city. It was a better, more thorough tour than I had with my parents in June, so it wasn’t all a re-run. We took about 1,000 pictures. Then the boys and I climbed Wayna Picchu, a steep mountain that over looks the ruins. Me and my dad did it two weeks before I ran a marathon and I remember feeling like my heart was going to jump out of my chest. Even though I was no where near in shape the way I was when I climbed it with my dad, but it didn’t even feel challenging this time around. I credit that to the fact that I had been acclimated to the altitude and was actually able to breath this time.

The sun came out around 9 o’clock in the morning and we enjoyed the rest of the warm day and the beautiful views that revealed themselves after the clouds lifted.

On top of the mountain Ryan pulled out an Almond Joy candy bar that he had been saving since Lima. He went out to a club and danced all night with the candy bar in his shirt pocket and then slept that night without taking it out. There was no real significance behind the candy bar, only that it was ours and we were going to share it as a victory celebration at Machu Picchu. So we ceremoniously feed each other the candy bar because we are complete weirdoes.

We wanted to hike beer up and enjoy a well deserved refreshment from atop Wayno Picchu, but we didn’t get our act together the night before.

All the boys wanted to stay at Machu Picchu as long as humanly possible. We were on the first bus up and they wanted to be on the last bus down. Stephanie however, had no desire to spend the entire day amongst a pile of rocks. Since I had already been to Machu Picchu, I offered to go down to Aguas Calientes and spend the rest of the day doing whatever she wanted.

We had Lunch at the hotel where my parents and I stayed. I ordered a dish that I had been dreaming about for six months, beef tenderloin in a elderberry sauce with a quinoa soufflé. We enjoyed the tranquil setting of the luxury hotel that contrasted the crowded town of Aguas Calientes and it’s slew of cheap hostels.

We decided to top off our Machu Picchu experience by getting a well deserved, full body message. Meanwhile, back at Ruins, the boys were synchronizing their ipods and running around again to the theme of Indiana Jones. They stayed until the last bus back down to Aguas Calientes where we all met up in the evening and recounted how we had spent the rest of the day.

At 6:30 we boarded a train back to Cusco. The landscape was dark and quite and the train comfortable and peaceful. The entire group for the first time on the trip was silent and lost in thought of the days events. Everyone agreed that we picked the perfect tour and the past 4 days had been one of the most unique experiences of our lives.

Since we had been up since 4:45 in the morning and had a day filled of mountain climbing and excitement, one might assume that this would be the night the boys would take it easy and go to bed. No No No. The boys had big plans for Cusco that night. After we got off the train in Ollantaytambo and onto a bus, every one fell asleep except for me, Ryan and Rico who were all drinking beer in the back and obnoxiously quoting every movie we could think of. The fun came to a screeching halt when we got to the hostel in Cusco and Ryan realized he had left his wallet and passport on the train. Operation Get Ryan’s Stuff Back was underway. I made about 10 phone calls and did all I could do for the night. But it was nearly midnight and there we would have to wait for the next day. We would have to put our plans to leave for Lake Titicaca in the morning on hold until we got everything back.

Cusco to Puno

2009-01-04T19:39:00.001-08:00

It’s never fun when somebody looses something on vacation. Ryan had left not only his wallet but his passport as well on the bus. His somberness was contagious and we had all gone to bed a little worried, but hopeful none the less. The next morning all of the phone calls I made paid off. A man brought over all of Ryan’s things in the morning. While the terror one feels when loosing something is awful, the relief that person feels once the items are recovered are so much sweeter.

We had one last breakfast in Cusco with Bullon brothers before we parted ways. The Lucchessi brothers and Bullon brothers really hit it off and were sad to say goodbye. The 5 of us continuing on to Puno had an 8 hour bus ride ahead of us.

Because of the wallet incident, our departure time was pushed back and all of the nice tourist busses had already left in the morning, which mean we had to take a local bus. My friends had the good fortune of seeing a bit more of the “real Peru”. This run down bus stopped every 15 minutes, often times at the side of the road, to pick up and drop off passengers. The people that got off and on were traditional Andean folk, many of them unshowered and lugging on bundles of produce and occasionally animals.

We were in the back of the bus and drinking heavily. At one point, two Peruvian gentlemen filled the last two seats next to Ryan, Steph and Eric, and they offered them a beer and attempted conversation. Rico and I were sitting together in front of them and laughing hysterically at Stephanie and Eric’s attempt to speak Spanish. But I have to give them credit for trying.

The bus stopped so many times it was hard to remain patient. My friends didn’t seem to mind and actually enjoyed their local experience. And finally after a very long bus ride we arrived in Puno and saw the dark outline of Lake Titicaca. Puno is so poor that unlike uber-touristy cusco, we were able to afford a hotel for the same price we paid for a hostel in Cusco. It was after 10 by the time we arrived so Steph went strait to bed and the rest of us went out for a drink.

Lake Titicaca

2009-01-03T08:44:00.001-08:00

6:30 the next morning, we were up and ready to take our tour of lake Titicaca. We were picked up from our hotel and boarded a small comfortable boat. Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable lake in the world that straddles the border of Peru and Bolivia.

We were all so excited to be on a boat. In our trip so far we had taken so many types of transportation: Planes, trains, cars, zip lines, paragliding, walking, hiking swimming, and how we were adding boat.

Just 45 minutes off the shore of Puno, we reached the floating Uros Islands. These Islands have been around for hundreds of years and are made up of reeds that grow all over the lake. Not only are the islands comprised of reeds but the houses and just about everything else on the Islands are made from these reeds too. They even eat them! We got to try them and they are pretty tastey actually.

Eric, could not seem to wrap his brain around the concept of living on a floating island and didn’t understand why these people didn’t just move to the mainland. I tried to explain to him that he was using his US mentality to try to make sense of the Andean culture. To me it was simple. These people don’t leave the house when they turn 18. Their whole life is their family and they stay with them from cradle to gave. Leaving home is mutinous. But still, it seemed to me the Uros existence on the island was no longer about tradition and all about tourism.

After the floating islands we got back on the boat and went into the lake another 2 hours till we got to a natural island named Taquile which has about 3,000 inhabitants. The City of Puno is incredible isolated. It’s 12,500 feet up in the Andes mountains and very inaccessible. These people were living on an island, 3hours away on a modern boat from Puno. This island is probably the most remote place I have ever been in my life. It was pretty crazy.

My group seemed to love Puno and Lake Titicaca. They thought it was mystical and beautiful. I don’t know why, but Puno made me feel weird. I wasn’t a happy, relaxed tourist as I had been in all the other places we had visited. I couldn’t shake the idea from my head that this place was hopeless from a development standpoint. These people lived so poorly and isolated that I couldn't foresee their situation improving in my lifetime.

The original Inca gods are said to have emerged from the waters of Lake Titicaca. For the Andean people, the lake is wrought with folklore and legend. Stephanie loved the floating Islands and Eric was fascinated with the stone arches and history of Taquile island. Lake Titicaca was exactly what I was expecting. And while others were blown away by it’s awesomeness, I must admit that I didn’t find it all that impressive.

There was very little to see or do in the town of Puno. We took some recommendations from our Lonely planet book and went to bars and restaurants. Since Puno was so poor, everything was very cheap, espeically in comparison to Cusco. We ate some of the best food we had on the entire trip in Puno. The boys found their favorite bar in all of Peru there as well.

Saturday night was the boys last day in Peru. They had a flight our Puno at 9 on Sunday morning back to Lima. From Lima they stopped in El Salvedor and finally arrived in San Francisco around midnight. All three of the boys had work that Monday morning. Most people I know, would want a good nights sleep before that, but the Lucchessi brothers. They didn’t sleep at all. Instead, they drank all night long. Ryan knocked on my door at 5 in the morning to tell me all about he was the only white guy in the entire club and amazing his night had been.
They were so drunk at 7 in the morning when the van for the airport came to pick them up. It’s a wonder at all they made every single one of their connections. I was very sad to see them go. There wasn’t a moment with these boys that I wasn’t smiling of laughing. They were the best travel companions I could have asked for.
Stephanie was relieved to see them go so she could start phase II of our trip: the relaxing phase.

The Last Few Relaxing Days

2009-01-03T08:19:00.000-08:00

The next few days with Steph was the complete opposite of the way we had been traveling with the boys. We planned nothing and did nothing especially. We spent a day in the City of Arequipa, a beautiful colonial city that made a Puno a distant memory. We spent our time there reading in parks and sitting in restaurants playing cards.

Then we finally descended down the mountains on an overnight bus and back to the coastal desert. We went to Ica, 300 kilometers south of Lima. Ica is known for the famous Nazca Lines, the Balleros Islands aka the poor mans Galapagos and it’s Peru’s wine producing region. Steph and I saw none of that. Instead, we spent the rest of our trip in a desert Oasis known as Huacachina. We laid by the pool for a few days doing nothing besides reading, playing cards and getting to know the fellow travelers.

One of my favorite parts of traveling is meeting new people. But since we were with such a big group for most of our trip, I didn’t interact with many other people than the boys and Steph. Huacachina provided me with the opportunity to make up for the past week of being antisocial.
On the third day we finally did something. We dune buggying and sand boarding. It was really fun and since it is so close to Lima, can’t wait to go back and do it again.

Our epic journey ended very uneventfully. While I would have preferred a bit more excitement on the last leg of our trip, Steph was content with amount of nothingness that we accomplished. After our trip around Peru, Steph saw Lima with brand new eyes. When she first arrived, she didn’t think Lima was all that nice. But after being up in the Andes and seeing places like the tiny villages outside Machu Picchu and “cities” like Puno, Lima seemed like the hub of modernity. Indeed it is for Peru. I can only imagine how she felt when she arrived back in LA.

As for me, I was very sad to say goodbye. Steph is one of my best friends and I’m so fortunate to have been able to share my time in the Peace Corps and in Peru with her.

Greetings from Arequipa

2008-12-08T15:52:00.000-08:00

I haven`t posted since thanksgiving. My friends arrived on the 28th of November and since then I have been having a whirlwind experience. Right now I´m in Arequipa and heading out on an overnight Bus tonight. I hiked the Inka trail, took a boat around lake Titicaca and went paragluiding off the cliffs in Lima. I have tons of stories and lot´s of amazing picture to share. I will start posting them this weekend.

I can´t believe it December already!

Best Turkey of My Life

2008-11-28T05:45:00.000-08:00

No offense mom, or to any other person who's turkey I've consumed over the years, but this Thanksgiving I had the best turkey ever. I'm normally not a big turkey girl, I'm in it more for the sides: green bean casserole, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie are usually the items that have me salivating come November.

Peru has given me a new appreciation towards proteins. I really do view meat as a luxury now that I live with a family that considers chicken feet a great source of amino acids. But even taking into account my love of consuming things that were once alive, I still never thought I would have the most amazing Thanksgiving turkey here in Peru.

I've been making a big effort to expand my social circle in Lima. I made a good group of friends early on and realized recently that I wasn't making an attempt to meet new people outside the sanctity of my known network. But since coming back from medevac in September I was ready to put myself out there again and expand my horizons. Even in the states I never had just one set of friends. My social circles have always run deep. Especially when living in a foreign country where people are always moving away, it's good to have reserves.

What does all of this have to do with the best Turkey I ever ate? Well, if it wasn't for my recent social expansion, I never would have eaten this turkey. I met a girl named Ryan who is dating the head of diplomatic security for the embassy. Anthony is a big guy, I would guess 6'5'' with buzzed blond hair and some fat tattoos. His demeanor is tough but he is a big softy and is becoming a good friend. He really loves to cook and hosting thanksgiving dinner was his idea. Along with sharing a love a cooking, Anthony and I share another love, sausage. The other week we discovered our shared passion and had an hour long discussion on all things linked. I always complain that you can't find good sausage in Peru and Anthony told me at the commissary at the US embassy sells all kinds of good sausage. Since I am not allowed to shop at the commissary, Anthony has agreed to be my sausage hook-up. Ryan's okay with that too.

Pictured above, Winos.

So Thanksgiving this year, instead of cooking a whole turkey, Anthony got a long, lean chunk of turkey (I don't know what to call it, it looked like a big pork loin) and stuffed it with Italian sausage. Sausage stuffed turkey!! There aren't words to describe the delight I took in eating this masterpiece of a dish. When I have a readily available supply of sausage I will make this incredible meal for my family.

Apart from the turkey, my thanksgiving was lovely. I have spent the night at Ryan and Anthony's before and they are so good to me, that their place is beginning to feel like another home away from home. There is a group of girls I've been hanging out with lately, all of whom were there. I invited Josh, the new water and sanitation PCVC and recent Bolivan evacuee to come with me. Josh reminds me of my friends from home because all he does is make fun of me. It wouldn't be thanksgiving without someone giving me a hard time the whole night. We went through so many bottles of wine and at the end of the night were so full of good food, good wine and good friends.

The best part is that this is only thanksgiving take one! Take two commences tomorrow night at Tania's house. Today Ryan and Eric Lucchessi and Stephanie are all arriving from California. They are going to spend two days in Lima and then we are all flying to Cusco to climb the Inca trail.

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. I am thankful that you care about me enough to read about my life. I miss you all!

Baby Mama Drama

2008-11-24T09:05:00.000-08:00

When I first moved into my current host family’s house, one of the sons named Arturo had recently moved out and was living with his pregnant girlfriend. I didn’t have any sort of opinion about him at first. A little cocky, but he seemed nice enough.

After a few months of living here, Viviana started telling me her opinion of her little brother. As the youngest of all the kids and a boy, Viviana felt her mother coddled and spoiled him. She would defent her son no matter how wrong he was. If Arturo were to kill some one, his mother would say the victim had it coming and that Arturo was still a saint. Viviana said that in reality, her brother is not a very nice person. He is a sloppy drunk who likes to come home and hit his pregnant girlfriend. And my host mom knows about it but says it’s Erika’s (the girlfriends) own fault and that Arturo has every right to do what he wants because he is the man and Erika should learn her place.

Whenever Erika and Arturo would get into a fight, Arturo would come over to our house and my host mom would rant about how terrible Erika is and how perfect Arturo is. From what I know of Erika, I like her. She’s a nurse and Arturo doesn’t work and mooches off his pregnant girlfriend and his parents. I detest the whole situation. The fact that my host mom actually defends him abusing his girlfriend makes me sick.

Their baby was born while my parents were visiting in June. I saw the baby a few times in July and by the time I had come back from the states in September, Arturo and Erika has split up, moved out of their apartment and both of them were back living with their parents. My host mom blamed the whole break up on Erika and her inability to take care of Arturo. Knowing his history of abuse with both alcohol and women, I questioned whether or not I should stay in the house now that he was living in the room next to mine. I didn’t feel my safety was threatened but that it was more a matter of principle. I didn’t want to approve his behavior by remaining the house.

This situation unfortunately, is not uncommon for Peace Corps volunteers to face. Domestic violence is so common here along with the mentality that a man has the right to do whatever he wants to. After a lot of thought I decided to stay in the house. I haven’t had any problems with him, but he is very cold to me. Not in a vicious way, but in a spiteful, immature way. I’m a young girl that has the world at her feet and I’m living in his house taking his attention away from his parents who adore me. He doesn’t like my independence and only speaks to me in a condescending manner.

I had no idea what was happening with his daughter who he had abandoned or how much support he was giving ex. My host mom continued to spit at the mention of her name. Then, Thursday night I went down stairs and the whole family was sitting in the living room having a very intense conversation which I didn’t hear much of except for Viviana screaming “it’s not fair, it’s not fair!” and Arturo eventually got up and walked out the front door. Turns out, Erika is pregnant again! If my math skills are correct, she got knocked up 2 months after the pair split.
My host mom of course, blames Erika for getting pregnant. Her perfect some couldn’t be the cause of doing something so stupid. The family discussion that night was about what they were going to do. Arturo and Erika couldn’t afford another apartment at the moment and my host family wasn’t going to stand by and let Arturo bail on his 5 month old daughter and his pregnant ex. So tonight, Erika and the baby moved into the room next to mine. Ay ay ay! Erika and Arturo do not get along. My host mom does not like Erika and blames her for ruining her sons life.

This is going to be interesting. Maybe after the time I spend in Lima for Thanksgiving and the trip I’m taking with Stephanie and my friends, I’ll come back to my home and they’ll be broken up again and she’ll be moved out. I for the life of my can imagine being in either Erika or Arturo’s shoes. I feel like I should pull out some of my sexuality class material and give them a lesson on birth control.

Congressional Meet and Greet

2008-11-08T11:24:00.000-08:00

This past thursday some of the American staff along with some volunteers represented Peace Corps at a congressional meet and greet at the home of the ambassador. There were 8 congressmen from sub-committee of foreign relations committee. Also invited to this meet and greet were high ranking embassy employees, high ranking military officers, elite members of Peruvian society and economic specialists that are here working on APEC.

The whole idea of a meet and greet is that all the people who are invited stand around and mingle, have cocktails and eat cheese. Other than that, I didn't really know what to expect. I was definitely looking forward to this event and honored I was given an invitation, but I wasn't really excited of nervous. Some of the embassy workers I've been hanging out with lately have been filling my head with all kinds of ideas. They don't really look at these meet and greets as fun social gatherings, but rather a mandatory evening where they are technically still working after a long week instead of sitting in their jammies at home. It's part of the foreign service job to constantly attend events like this, so the thrill of it kind of gets lost. Also, some people have suggested that the congressmen's visit to Peru, strategically placed right after the election, was more for the trip to Machu Picchu than accomplishing political agenda.

I didn't want to be innocently excited, so I played it cool and acted like it was no big thing to be going to this. When in actuality, it wasa huge deal. I am after all, a Peace Corps volunteer. I don't get the excuse to get dressed up every day. I've never met a member of congress before. I got a reason to be out of site on a random thursday night, and there was free food and alcohol. While to most attendees, the night was just mandatory protocol. To me it was very exciting.

It gave me a window into a world I'd only seen on episodes of the west wing. My first reaction was that I was standing in a room that was mostly white men. Everyone was in small groups chatting and my job was to butt in and introduce myself. Luckily for me, I actually knew a handful of non peace corps people who were used to this type of thing and they introduced me to a few people I didn't know until I got the hang of it (or until the pisco sours kicked in and my shyness melted away). I schmoozed with a lot of people and by the end of the night felt pleased with the effort I had put in.

Something that was new to me, was the conversations one has at these types things. It was very standardized and formal. I felt like there were strict guide lines that you couldn't wander out of when speaking. I didn't know what these guidelines were but it became very apparent to me when I stepped outside the lines and said something that didn't conform to the protocol conversation. But I guess that was to be expected by the Peace Corps volunteer who doesn't know any better.

There was one congress woman from California who I made an effort to talk to. She was the one member of congress that wasn't going strait to Cuzco, but flying up Cajamarca to visit an American woman who has been in jail for 12 years for terrorist activity. This woman is now pregnant in jail and the case is very controversial. I spoke to her a little bit about the case and being from California. Her district is in LA and I'm so used to people from So-Cal not knowing anything about Nor-Cal, so when asked where I'm from, I usually brush the answer aside with a "Sacramento area/you wouldn't know it" kind of response. But being a California congress woman, she had lived and worked out of Sacramento for 14 years. She knew Woodland, silly me.

The meet and greet was an interesting, exciting and intimidating experience. It was a new perspective look at political and foreign service life and has given me a lot to think about.

Obamanos!

2008-11-06T12:36:00.000-08:00

Just another night in Lima where Americans were being loud and causing a scene. The only difference on tuesday night was we actually had a legitimate reason to celebrate.

Me and my Lima crew have been supporting Obama from the get go. I only knew one PCV and one Lima friend who was cheering for Hillary. Needless to say, there is not a single Bush supporter among us. Like many Americans, we were counting down the days till election night. For the past month, it's been impossible to have a conversation and not have the presidential race come up, even when talking to Peruvians.

This is my second consecutive election abroad. In Spain, there was a 9 hour time difference and my host family didn't have cable so I couldn't stay up to watch the results. I also wasn't a fervent Kerry supporter as I have been with Obama. And as much as I didn't want Bush to win, there wasn't the electricity in the air as there was this time around. The next day, Spaniards were pissed. Some even decided to take it out on me. I was hoping this year would not be a repeat of '04.

There is one American sports bar in Lima where on any given night you are bound to find a group of obnoxious Americans watching a Football or Basketball game. There is always a guaranteed crowd for events like the Oscars or the presidential debates. We had been planning for months to ring in the new era of American politics with our US comrades at this bar. It ended up being the perfect location to watch the results. We ate, we drank, we cheered and chanted. Some cried, some smoked cigars and we all took celebratory tequila shots. It has been the only night so far in my time abroad, that I have made it known to my host country that I am proud to be an American.

For those of us working and living abroad, this election meant the world to us, literally. What the US does effects the rest of the world so greatly and it seems as though most Americana's don't take that into account when casting their vote. Four years ago in Spain, 90% of Spaniards opposed Bush but some how he still got re-elected. The international community has rallied around Barack Obama in hopes that foreign relations with US will improve. Being a Peace Corps volunteer is like being a mini ambassador to the US and so I feel the outcome will effect me greatly. The day after the elections in my site, I had complete strangers walk up to me and congratulate me on our big victory. Come January, I will have a new boss. I really hope the President elect focuses more on peace than on war, and puts his money where his mouth is.

To top off the night, my friends and I headed to the cliffs over looking to ocean and opened a bottle of champagne. It was a night to celebrate and to never be forgotten.

I will add that I came home from downtown high on life only to find the results from California. I have always been so proud of being a Californian. So much so that when asked what I am, I will respond with Californian instead of American. It has been an interesting turn of events now that that has changed. California has always been a leader in advancement and modernity. I hope in the next decade we will see this prop h8ate overturned.

Finding the Right Balance

2008-10-29T16:36:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-20T09:27:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-04T10:54:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-10-02T09:16:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-02T07:25:00.000-07:00

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.

Getting out of Lima......Again

2008-09-24T13:45:00.000-07:00

What is it with me and the September blues? I seem to remember this time last year being full of panic attacks and sad, lonely nights. Things are a bit different time around, but this past week has been one of the more difficult I've had in a very long time. There is a laundry list of reasons why things are effecting me the way that they are and I know I just gotta stick my chip up and get through it. The sun will come out tomorrow....or at least in a few months.

I haven't even been back in country a full week and I'm on an overnight bus to northern Peru for 6 days. I am in charge of running an in-service training that I am incredably unprepared for because of the 6 weeks I've spent on medevac. No matter, I've taken lemons and made lemonade. Instead of heading back to Lima on an overnight bus on my birthday like I'm scheduled to do, I'm taking a few vacation days to hit up the supposed nicest beach in Peru. I hope everything works out okay. Last night I woke up at 4 in the morning in a full on panic attack and ran immediately to the bathroom to throw up.

Why this stuff happens to me I'll never know. Hopefully I won't have any problems on the bus tonight. I'm not taking my lap top on my trip, so when I come back a plan to have stories full of happiness and sunshine. But since I'll be out of Lima, even if I'm not elated with joy, at least there will be sunshine.

Re-enty

2008-09-21T17:37:00.000-07:00

I left Peru for my vacation back to the states on a major high. The two months before I left in early August, were some of the most memorable months of my life. Everything was going great. I was having incredible success at work, I was traveling to awesome places, I had the best social networks in Peace Corps and in Lima, I even managed to find time to run a marathon. I was actually really sad to leave Peru, even for two weeks. Why then, did I feel so afraid of returning after spending 6 weeks in California?

I arrived in Lima late after almost 24 hours of traveling. It was cold, dark (obviously, it was night) and even though I was in a city of 8 million people, I felt alone. I spent my first night back at my friends apartment. Her roommate, my best friend, returned to the states the same day I came back to Peru and the apartment felt strangely empty, quite and cold. Did I mention it's really cold and gray here! I couldn't pin point the source of my gloomy feelings. I settled on the notion that it was probably normal and the feelings would pass after a good night sleep and getting back to my routine.

The next day, I went to the Peace Corps office. All of the Peace Corps volunteers who had been evacuated from Bolivia were there, and it was a zoo. My doctor was so busy with all the Bolivian volunteers that she gave me a hug, asked how I was and then I didn't see her again. Coming off of medical evacuation, it seemed like I should have talked to some one about being back, but I was lost in a sea of more pressing matters.

Going back to Lurin and my host family was not something I was looking forward to, but I was surprised by how good it felt to see them. I sat and talked with them over lunch for a long time and got caught up on what I had missed since I'd been away. Apparently, I'd missed a lot. 3 of the 6 members of the family I lived with had had surgery. My hosts moms youngest son, who's 28, had left his girlfriend and 2 month old baby and moved back into our house. My host mom explained to me the reason that he had left was because “the man is in charge of the relationship and his girlfriend didn‘t know her place and was trying make decisions for herself“. Viviana had told me earlier that he is an alcoholic who would get drunk and beat his girlfriend, even when she was pregnant.

It made me really sad that the family I live with not only excepts this behavior, but actually blames the girlfriend. Well, I only know that my host mom blames the girlfriend. Viviana surely doesn't agree with what is happening and if I had to guess, my host dad probably thinks it's wrong as well. I have to decide how I feel about living with an abusive alcoholic.
Going to visit the homes where I work and see all the kids was really wonderful. There's nothing like a 100 girls and boys that adore you and are thrilled to see you, to cheer you up when you're feeling a little out of it.

Peace Corps informed me that I would be taking on a Bolivian volunteer to train. The evacuated volunteers have the choice of closing their service early or transferring to another country. Peru is taking on as many new volunteers as it can, so in October I will have a volunteer living and working with me for a few weeks to learn the ways of Peru before being sent out on their own. I'm looking forward to this and my host family is really excited to have another American moving in. I hope I get along with this volunteer, I will basically be spending 24 hours a day with them.

As I'm re-establishing my living and work situation, I have found solace in the place where I've always found solace; my friends. I went to a party last night with my friends in Lima. Over the past few months, the Lima crew has been shifting. People come and go all the time in our crowd. While I was gone a few new faces arrived and a few old ones said goodbye. Going out Saturday night was fantastic because it reminded me of all the good times I‘ve had and all the ones yet to come. Not only is our group constantly changing, but it's constantly growing and I find that each week, I have more and more friends. They were all so happy to have me be back and it finally felt good to be back.

Although, I'm still adjusting to the big things. It's cold, the streets are noisy, I look different and everybody stares at me. Things are a bit tougher than I expected them to be upon my return, but isn't that why I love this lifestyle after all, because it's challenging? I know things will get better as I get settled, especially this coming week. There will be tons of volunteers in Lima for several PC meetings, including some of my favorites: Danielle, Rachel and Jah to name a few. I will be in the office a lot working on the training I have this weekend. I'm going to Piura in northern Peru where it's sunny for a workshop. Then on Sunday, it's my birthday! Two Lima friends are flying (obviously they're Lima friends not Peace Corps friends as they are flying where I will be taking an overnight 15 hour bus ride) to Piura to spend my birthday with me. We are going to Mancora which is Peru's most popular beach destination. We get to stay in a nice place right on the beach (thanks mom) and have a really relaxing trip. My birthday last year was kind of rough so hopefully with another week I'll be feeling back to my old happy self. And eventually, I’ll get back to being on that major high I had before I left.

Some thoughts and photos from California

2008-09-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

How do I sum up my trip back home? In one word, perfect. Perfect may not have been the word I would have chosen my first two weeks back when I was sick and miserable. But in the end, I am grateful because mono forced me to stop and take things slowly, as opposed to my normal modus operatus where I cram as many things possible into the allotted time. Initially, my two week vacation was packed with big events like weddings, musicals, tips to LA, hiking with this person, going out to dinner with that person, etc. Instead, I spent most of my time at home with uniform days consisting of waking up late, going to lunch with dad, hanging out with my brother, taking the dog for a walk and having dinner with the family. A little boring at times, but absolutely amazing over all. If it wasn't for getting sick, I wouldn't have had such quality time with my family. Something I feel one can never have enough of.

Since I was so sick when I arrived in the US, I didn't really experience the huge reverse culture shock I was expecting. But the things that did stick out to me were:

Drinking out of the drinking fountain and not getting sick
The traffic--slow, respectful drivers and quite roads (nobody honks)
So many nice cars on the streets
The warm sweet smell of the the california summer air
Air conditioning
Big beautiful trees
My dog--it was so nice to have a relationship with an animal that didn't consist of me throwing rocks at it
California clothing--shorts, skirts, and tank tops. I left my modest clothing in Peru
Attractive boys all everywhere I look
Realizing that all white people DO look alike

I was surprised at how different I felt in california, like my old self again I suppose I could say. It's hard to explain, but I actually feel like two different people: Cali Ali and Peru Ali. And I must admit I like Cali Ali better. I feel I can be more of myself in california, less inhibited. From the style of clothing I wear to the way I behave in public and the rules that dictate my life as a PCV. Being around my parents always makes me shed layers I normally put up with even the closest of friends so everything is exposed and I can't hide any of my emotions. This trip I really got down to my core which was really refreshing. I experienced so many emtions through my six week stay that it was like a detox on many levels.

There was an aspect of my trip that was a bit subdued, but for the most part, it was fun and relaxing. As I got healthier, I was able to do more and more stuff. My recovery and extra time allowed me to do all the things and more I had planned to do on my trip. But I got to enjoy them so much more because I wasn't rushing.

Here are a few photos of things I did on my trip to California

I went to Amber and Dave's wedding and it was Beautiful!

Did some dressing up and got back to my roots

Met up with old college friends in LA for brunch

Spent a weekend l reliving the glory days with my partner in crime, Steph

Went to a wedding with my family just outside of woodland

the wedding was the perfect reunion for all of my best friends from high school

Spent a lot of time with woodland/Davis buddies "Krevan" and their friends

Too Much TV is Bad For the Brain but Easy on the Eyes

2008-09-14T03:04:00.001-07:00

Of the long list of things I wanted to do during my trip home to California, sitting on the couch watching TV was not one of them. But because I got sick and my fantastic list went out the door along with my energy and motivation, I found myself sitting in front of the TV for hours on end. Luckily, I got sick at the perfect time to catch some stuff I definitely would have missed out on if I had been in Peru.

August sweeps started with the Olympics. I sat in the living room every night with my father for two weeks. It's the one time every 4 years our favorite sport, track and field, is in the lime light. Even though I was not a fan of NBC's "prime time live" coverage, I still got to watch all of my favorite summer Olympic sports like gymnastics and beach volleyball. And this year, along with the rest of America, I was addicted to swimming. More specifically, I needed my nightly Michael Phelps fix. Michael Phelps helped revive feelings within me I feared may had gone extinct in Peru. Apart from those feelings, the Olympics bring out a whole bunch of other sentiments that have me feeling like a complete sap. I get so worked up by the emotion of the athletes and relive my former athletic glory days to the point that I actually tear up. I feel so much admiration and envy for the olympic athletes and as I cheer for them, I find that I am cheering for the USA. Then I start feeling this strange serge of pride for being an American and actually begin to route for our dominance over other countries. All the while the Peace Corps Volunteer inside is cheering for all the little guys.

After the olympics were over, I had two weeks of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. I enjoyed watching both parties conventions, but the real entertainment was tuning ever night to the Daily Show and the Colbert Report for the real news. It's been very entertaining for me to watch all the controversies over Sarah Palin. By the way, I watched the season premier of Saturday Night Live tonight, and Tina Fey made a guest appearance to play Palin and I don't think I've ever seen a better political impersonation in my life! I would actually vote for McCain if he picked Tina Fey as his running mate. Also on SNL tonight, Michael Phelps was hosting and I fell in love with him a little mores with each dorky wig they made him wear. What am I going to do in Peru without my regular Phelps fix? I know, screw my previous dream ticket statement of McCain/Fey. I think the ultimate ticket would be Obama/Phelps. You know Michael Phelps has more foreign experience than Sarah Palin. Phelps won over the Chinese with his goofy smile, I bet Palin hasn't ever been to China. The image above is Tina Fey acting as Palin. There's also a more likely chance that Fey has been to China over Palin.

So as you can see, my time in front of the TV has been well spent. I've simultaneously been working on romantic endeavors and the future of US foreign policy. So While watching TV wasn't on my list of things to do in the US, I'm sure glad things worked out the way they did.

A Hiatus from the Blogosphere

2008-08-21T01:33:00.001-07:00

I haven't posted in over a month and with good reason. Since the beginning of July I have been busy, busier than I ever thought a Peace Corps Volunteer could be. I knew the schedule that lay before me was chaotic, but I also felt there was little I could do about it and that I should just suck it up and get through it. Within a two week time period I went a camping trip, climbing and sleeping at 15,000 feet in the Andes. I organized a huge event where a Division I basketball team from the states came to my home for sexually abused girls to give a basketball workshop and hand out shoes to everyone in which I brought in lot's of PCVs and Lima friends. I had friends from high school and college come visit me. I had my one year medical checks and project presentations in Lima with my entire peace corps group. I had to wrap up all of my projects at work and tie up all of my loose ends so I at the end of this hectic two weeks, I could fly home and be in a wedding the day after I arrived in California.

I had run my marathon at the beginning of July right before all of this madness started and I don't think my body ever fully recovered.

I decided before all this stuff started, that I was going to take some time off my blog because I knew I just wouldn't have the time. I meant to write that I was taking a break but I found myself feeling so tired and not having the energy to do something as simple as write a simple blog.

On the plane ride to the states it hit me just how tired I was. My whole body hurt and the last thing I wanted to do was party all weekend long at a wedding. But once again I shrugged off my exhaustion, dug deep and tried my best to be my energetic, positive self. I thought maybe I was just tired from all the traveling. I knew that the past few weeks had taken a toll on me, but I didn't realize how much until the day after the wedding. Finally after arriving at the house where I grew up, I felt the repercussions of what I had been doing to myself. I was sick.

I had been dreaming about my trip to California since before it was even planned. There was an endless list of people I wanted to see, places I wanted to go and food I wanted to eat. I was shocked and deeply saddened by my inability to do any of it. After a few days of rest it became apparent that whatever I had was not getting better and I needed to go to the doctor. I was diagnosed with tonsillitis and Mono. I had to hold back tears or relief when I found out what was making me feel so aweful. Relief that I wasn't week or a wimp, that there was actually something wrong with me. After going to the doctor, I didn't leave my house for days. I slept more in the following week than I probably slept in the month of July. I was happy to be recovering in the comfort of my own home, with my real parents there to take care of me, but I was sad that I was loosing my vacation.

Shortly after getting diagnosed I informed Peace Corps Washington and they put me on medical hold. Meaning, I couldn't return on my scheduled date and could only go back to Peru once I was medically cleared. I was again, both saddened and relieved by this news. I felt relieved that I had time to recover, that it wasn't a ticking clock counting down get better in one week or else. I was sad because I realized how much Peru had become my home and how much I missed my life there and wanted to go back.

So here I am now, the day before I was supposed to fly back to Peru and I'm on Medically Evacuated status. I probably will not blog again until I get back to Peru, which could be another two weeks at least. I'm going to take this time to let my body heal and spend time with my friends and family. I promise I will be back to my old self again as soon as I possibly can. Thanks for reading.

I'm a Late Bloomer

2008-07-21T15:00:00.000-07:00

I've always been a little behind the times. I was still wearing spandex when baggy jeans were popular in the 90's, I didn't go on an airplane till I was 14 and I didn't try sushi until I was 21. I'm probably the most modern and stylish person many Peruvians have ever met, but in some aspects of my life in Peru, I'm the last one to hop on the band wagon.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Most of my Peace Corps friends in Peru have had at least one strange illness or problem. When my parents were here, we took out a girl that had worms, giartia and bacteria all at the same time. Most PCV's have had at least one parasite so far. For the first year of my service, I've been relatively healthy, only having a few food related bouts and a cold or two. But I think my body has finally succumbed to all the evil bacteria around me.

For the past 6 weeks I've been having on again off again nausea. It was never severe enough for me to take immediate action but it became apparent that whatever it is, is not going away on it's own. So today, I experienced a rite of passage for all peace corps volunteers. I pooped in a cup to have my stool tested for intruders. As awkward as the act might sound, it was actually easier than I expected. I have friends who are in the double digits for stool samples, so I feel like I'm entering the game relatively late. The weirdest part was having to carry around my own feces in purse until I could get to Lima and drop it off in the lab. After I had finished, I felt very accomplished.

The other trend I have been reluctant to engage in, is romance in Peru. I have recently reentered the dating pool. I haven't fully submerged myself but rather just stuck my toes in. I've never been some one dive in head first but have always preferred to ease myself into unknown waters. Okay, enough with the analogy. I think I was the last Peru 9er to go on a date, kiss, or have a relationship with some of the opposite sex (or same sex for that matter). In the past few weeks I have gone out with 2 different guys. Neither of these gentlemen are full-on peruvian, but I do get points because they hail from latin american countries. I just had my very first all spanish date and it was an experience I'll not be forgetting anytime soon.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) depending on how you look at it, neither one actually live in Lima/Peru. So, my brief stint in the dating pool may have ended just as quickly as it arrived (hopefully like my brief stint with the parasite or whatever I have). There are definitely some exciting details about both new adventures if you can stomach it. I'll be home in California in less than 3 weeks and I'm sure you'll all get an ear full!

My Mom on Peru

2008-07-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

Even though I have yet to post my Machu Picchu trip and pictures, I am posting something my mom wrote about her trip. My mom is probably my most avid reader as well as my personal editor and I asked her if she would write a little something about her experience. Hope you all enjoy it, I certainly did. My trip to Peru was actually two trips of different natures. The first trip was as a tourist and the second was a visit with my daughter to experience the places and people she serves as a Peace Corps volunteer. There were many contrasts between these two aspects of my vacation and I will try my best to put them into words.
During my two weeks in Peru, I was able to. . .
--experience the grandeur of the Andes and Machu Picchu. . .and sit at a fly-ridden juice cart Lurin town drinking fresh squeezed pineapple/orange juice.
--wander the cobbled streets of Cusco with its historic city center. . .and traipse through dusty streets of Lurin to visit Ali's hogars.
---visit with travelers from England, Australia, Mexico and all parts of the US. . . and meet Candace, Jake, Danielle, Bron, Dennis, and Carrie, Ali's peace corps and Lima buddies.
----watch the sun rise from behind the Andean peaks at Machu Piccu. . .and watch the faces of little girls light up as the screamed "Ali!!
----At the Inkaterra hotel, ponder the query,"When would you like to schedule your massage?". . . and ponder the query from the cook at the hogar, "Would you like chicken or guinea pig for lunch?"
----chug up the amazingly spectacular canyon on the backpacker train to the base of Machu Picchu. . .and jostle and bounce through the streets of Lima and Lurin in exhaust belching taxis and mini-busses.
----shop for Peruvian treasures of silver and alpaca. . . offer to buy Ali anything she wanted to make her life easier and she politely declining every offer.
----marvel at the magnificence of the Incan civilizations, all accomplished without the wheel. . .and understand the respect and admiration I have for my daughter for her humanitarian and loving spirit.

Thanks mom for writing this. And for the record, I didn't refuse every offer. I've been cuddling up everynight with the baby alpaca blanket my parents bought for me and it is awesome!!!!

More Pics from the Marathon

2008-07-13T20:27:00.000-07:00

This is a photo of mostly Peru 9ers and a few other friends posing on the steps of a hotel on the boardwalk in Pacasmayo. The different colored shirts pertain to the different races. The blue shirts are Marathon, the yellow are half marathon and the green is the 10K.

Me and Greg before the race. Greg went on to win the men's marathon. He trained at 3,800 meters. I trained at sea level.

This is the beginning of the race all starting out in a big clump

By the end of the race the only people I saw were people working the water stops. This is me 50 feet away from the finish line. I was TIRED

This is after a crossed the finish line, eating an orange and drinking really really bad champagne.

These are some of my friends from Lima who came down to hang out and cheer me on. They also helped me drink the bottle of really really bad champagne. Such good friends :)

26.2!

2008-07-09T08:26:00.000-07:00

I did it! I finished my first marathon. The greatest part of this picture is that it was taken at mile 23. I somehow managed the energy to jump for a random Peruvian who was working at one of the water stops. I saw him pulling out the camera and something in me told me to do something silly and the flash went off right as I was in mid air, I knew that would be a cool picture but I figured I would never see this stranger again and not get to see the picture. As I was sitting at the bus station to go back to Lima later that night, a guy came up to me with his camera and this picture. So I gave him my email address, took another picture with him and two days later he actually sent them to me!

My whole marathon weekend was amazing. The event was organized by a fellow 9er Peace Corps volunteer at his site. His site is an old fishing town with a pretty sea front, good surf and not much else. The Marathon was designed as a way to bring in visitors and help boost tourism. There were around 150 participants running the 5K, 10K, 21K and marathon. About 50 of those were Peace Corps volunteers. So naturally, the race was especially fun for me, not only because it was my first marathon, but because I knew half the runners and the volunteers working it. Running a marathon is a long process (it took me just over 5 hours), but every two kilometers there was a water stop with a few Peace Corps volunteers there to give me encouraging words and a cup of power aid.

I had been training with a friend in Lima for over 4 months. My friend was back in the states for a wedding for during the Peace Corps marathon, so she ran a race in Seattle. Unlike Lima where we had been training, Seattle was hot and hilly and the race ended up being tougher for her than she would have liked. Lucky for me, my race course was flat and the weather was a perfect, overcast 65 degrees for the entirety of the day. I was rightfully nervous before the race. I had done a really good job training up until the end when I kind of slacked off. I felt great during the race up until mile 23-24. It probably took me 45 minutes to finish my last 3 miles. I was certainly happy to see the finish line.

Aside from lots of PC friends, 4 friends from Lima came down to hang out and cheer me on. When I finally did finish, I had a huge crowd of friends cheering me on. They made me speak in Spanish on the microphone to the crowd a minute after I was done. I had to ask my friends afterwards if what I said was remotely coherent. They said it was, but I can´t remember a thing I said.

I really look forward to next years race. Whether or not I will run the marathon again, time will only tell. I am so proud of steve and ashley, the two volunteers who worked tirelessly to put on such an amazing event and thank them for the great things they are doing their community.

I Do It To Myself

2008-07-04T14:29:00.000-07:00

I have yet to post my Machu Picchu trip. I have it half written and I'm still so excited to share my stories and pictures. I haven't posted cause I have been so busy. I can't believe how overwhelmed I've been lately. It's a good kind of stress but I miss the tranquility of having nothing to do as well.

I got invited to go to the 4th of July celebration at training today. Me being me, I got really excited and said yes before I really thought about it. In order to go, I had to be at the Peace Corps office before 7 AM to get to training, which meant I had to leave my house really early. I realized after the fact that this was probably a really bad idea. Tonight I am getting on an overnight bus for the norther coast of Peru where I will run my marathon on sunday. I realize taking an overnight bus two nights before I run 26 miles isn't the best idea, but I really didn't have much of a choice with my vacation schedule.

I had already been to training twice this week and was feeling so exhausted from traveling around. Last night I could barely sleep. Partly cause I knew I had to wake up early and partly cause I was starting to get really nervous for the marathon. I finally decided around 3 in the morning that I was not going to go to training, and after that I was able to sleep a bit more soundly. I still had to get up and go to the office really early, cause I was responsible for bringing a whole bunch of Macaroni and cheese. Nobody could believe that I showed up so early just to tell them I wasn't going. I went home and slept for a few more hours then spent the rest of the day in Lima running errands trying hard not to think about the race.

Life has been really busy but great and I can't wait to find time to write about it all. My mom wrote a beautiful little something about her trip to Peru that I can't wait to share it as well. I will also of course have pictures from the marathon. I hope everyone had a good 4th and keep good thoughts in mind for me on sunday.

Cuzco(topia)

2008-06-25T17:38:00.000-07:00

Any one awesome enough to know that the title of this entry is a play on the movie "The Emporers New Grove" gets bonus points. The rest of you who didn't know, consider yourselves educated!

Ever since I arrived in Peru, people have been asking me if I have been to Cuzco. The fact that I had been here a year and not been to Cuzco gave me a lot of street-cred with Peruvians. It was surprising to them to meet a gringo who was here, not turning a blind eye to the woes of their country and making a bee-line tour to Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca. I have now lost my edge on other white people visiting Peru. A week ago, I went to Cuzco and Machu Picchu. Not only that, I did it in style.
I was so stressed out when my parents arrived and spent a few days in Lima and at my site. I felt 100% responsible for their itinerary and their happiness. Lima is my stomping ground. Therefore, I knew all the ins and outs and would serve as their travel agent and tour guide. My parents had done next to no research on Lima and didn’t even bring an opinion as to what they might like to do. Cuzco was fantastic cause I was as clueless as they were about what to see and how to spend out time. So I got to sit back, relax, and be tourist just like everyone else.

The last time I had been on an airplane was the one I took to come to Peru a year ago. Since then, all my traveling has been by land, usually on overnight busses that have lasted as long as 16 hours. My parents paid $150 for me to fly with them to Cuzco, an unfathomable amount of money to me for transportation these days. I have flown a lot, especially in recent years. But this plane ride really blew me away. My whole perspective has changed and I felt as if I was flying for the first time in my life. It is such an amazing concept to travel such a long distance in such a short amount of time. A bus ride to Cuzco would have been 24 hours, but I stepped on a plane in Lima and hour later I was 12,000 feet in the Andes mountains in Cuzco. Crazy!

I have traveled to a handful of Andean “cities” in Peru. Cuzco was unlike them all. For starters, it was surrounded by mountains, but unlike the rest of the cities, the mountains around Cuzco seemed dry. They were not green (perhaps they are during the rainy season), and there were not snow capped mountains in sight. The city itself was more spectacular than any other Andean City I’ve seen. I was expecting that though. Cuzco was the capital city of the Incan Empire and therefore home to more beautiful architecture and ruins. The Spanish likewise made the city it’s base for the area, so there is an interesting mix of native and colonial influence.

Most noticeably, the difference between Cuzco and other Andean cities, is the amount of money it has flowing in. Cuzco is the main tourist destination in Peru and the local economy milks it for all it is worth. It seems as though modern day Cuzco was built for tourism. I couldn’t believe how many people spoke English. It was weird to be in a town where the Spanish architecture still looked well maintained. In Lima, the colonial heart of the city is very run down to the point that it feels dirty and dangerous. The main square in Cuzco felt like it was plucked from any city in Spain.

Our Hotel was once the home of a well to do Spanish man. It was a far cry from the high rise, steal and glass Marriott we stayed in Lima. Our hotel in Cuzco was made out of stone with a traditional Spanish plaza and fountain in the middle. It was rustic enough to transport you back to a different time, but modern enough that my dad could watch the US Open on the TV in our bedroom. As always, my favorite thing to do was curl up next to the fire at night time. Cuzco was pretty cold. It sits about 12,000 feet in the mountains and it’s winter time here. But because we’re so close to the equator, the coldest is gets is the 40s.

During the days, we went on tours of the churches in the cities and ruins in the country side. My parents were in heaven with the food, the shopping and the massages. All of which they found incredibly cheap. I on the other hand, was still having a hard time shaking my peace corps frugality and flinched with every swipe of the credit card.

I have been really reluctant to buy much since I arrived in Peru. One, because I don’t make the kind of money to buy much. Two, I know whatever I buy has to fit in two suitcases at the end of my service. But mostly because as some one who is spending 2 years in Peru, I feel the souvenirs I buy shouldn’t be the typical touristy crap. I want to bring back to the states some really awesome stuff that I will use and will last for a while. I have wanted to buy a baby alpaca blanket as one of the few investments I make towards my “worthy Peru memorabilia”. I resisted many of things my parents offered to buy for me, but I couldn’t say no to a blanket. By the end of our Cuzco trip, my parents had purchased five $100 baby alpaca blankets as gifts because I had given my blessing that it wasn’t just touristy crap.

Cuzco I think was the trip of a life time. I don’t think my parents ever would have come to South America and visited one of the new seven wonders of the world if I hadn’t been placed here. Machu Picchu was definitely the apex of our trip but that will be left for the next installment of my trip.

Living La Lima Loca

2008-06-23T17:51:00.000-07:00

It was too hard to blog while I was with my parents. Not because of a busy itinerary or lack or internet. It would have been much easier for me to post while on vacation than it normally is at site. I just couldn't find the motivation to sit in front of a computer and talk about the experience while it was happening. Maybe this means that I'm not a very good writer, or at least blogger, but I needed a little perspective. Having my parents here and taking a break from Peace Corps life was way different than I expected. I didn't think I had changed much and I was really surprised at the culture shock I experienced just being around people who hadn't been living my reality for the past year.

Having my parents here was so wonderful for so many reasons. I am so fortunate to have parents willing to make such a huge and expensive trip down to an unknown land just to see me. I am so lucky that after a year apart, I got to spend a whole week with my parents. Regardless of where we were or what we did, just being able to hang out with them was vacation enough for me. At times it didn't feel like a vacation. I am so obsessed with making people happy, and nobodies happiness means more to me than my mom and dads. So at first, I had a hard time relaxing cause I was so worried about everything and if everyone was having a good time.

Lima isn't the greatest city in the world. Normally, it would never be a place my parents would ever voluntarily choose to travel to. But because it is where I live and it is such a big part of my life, they arranged to spend a few days here. My moms ideal vacation involves beaches, shopping, gardens or theaters. My dads ideal vacation has biking, skiing, golfing or any combination of sports. Lima offered non of my parents comforts. For them, I think this trip was a really unique experience. It was unlike anything they had ever done or any place they had ever been.

For the past year, I had been making a list in my head of things I could do with my parents while they were here in Lima. Out of the list of a hundred or so things, we probably did about 5. My mom didn't like riding in taxis becausethe way people drive around here scared her and my dad didn't like to walk too much cause his knees where bugging him. So we pretty much stayed within a stones through from our hotel. We never made it to the colonial, historic town center. We stayed in the Marriott overy looking the ocean, with a touristy shopping center built into the cliff right in front of us. We ate most of our meals there cause of it's convience. We never walked the streets of bohemian Barranco and we didn't see any of the Inca ruins just a five minute drive from where we were staying.

Instead, we spent our time in Lima the way I spend my time in Lima. To me, being in Lima means being with family. Whether it's spending time with my friends that live in Lima or visiting other Peace Corps volunteers, who are my family here in Peru. Being in Lima usually means going to the Peace Corps office, going to the doctor, shopping, getting a break from the food at site and eating at nicer restaurants. That is exactly how we spent out time in Lima. There happened to be a handful of volunteers in Lima so my parents took them out for drinks and dinner. We spent a lot of time just hanging out together and eating a lot of food at restaurants I can't normally afford.

I realized just how cheap I am since becoming a Peace Corps volunteer. I am even more aware of my frugality now that my mom and dad are gone and I am back on my own dime. While having them pay for expensive food was great, the coolest thing about having my parents and their money here was being able to take taxis. To me, taking taxis has become the ultimate luxury. I thought I would impress my parents by haggling with the taxi drivers and bargaining down a good price. But every time we got in a cab, my dad would ask how much we were paying and insist on giving the drivers more. I think the poverty in Peru really made an impression on my dad and seeing the joy on the drivers face when they got double the amount they were expecting, made my dad feel like he was doing his part to help out.

Lima seemed like a different place when they were here. Now it seems completely different without them again. Of course, Lima was just a small stop over on their trip. The real vacation was Cuzco and Machu Picchu. I will be writing and posting pictures all week from the fabulous adventure we got to share together, up in the Andes mountains. It somehow didn't seem right to me to write about the trip while it was happening. I knew I was gonna need some hindsight to share our vacation. Now I get to relive it all this week as I immortalize it in the blogosphere.

My Parents and My Site

2008-06-15T17:01:00.000-07:00

So my parents arrived with no problems. As you can imagine I haven't really had the time to sit down and blog since then, and don't really feel like doing it now. But here are a few pictures from when they first arrived.

First, I took them to the ruins of Pachacamac which is an archeological site 5 minutes from Lurin. From my old house, I used to be able to look out my bedroom window and see the Temple of the Sun, the place we are standing in this picture. This will be the first of many many ruins we will visit in our trip. It helps get a feel for how long Peru has had modern civilization and lays the base work for the ever more impressive mountian ruins.

After our trip to Pachacamac we went to my site, Lurin. First we paid a visit to our local market. Here are my parents in front of several vegetable vendors. I showed them where I buy pirated DVDs and all the crazy fruits that we don't have in the USA. We also bought a huge bouquet of flowers that we gave to the nuns when we visited the orphanage later in the day.

I showed them all the things all the locals only know about and I took them to all my favorite places and walked them through a typical day at my life in site. This is the fruit stand that is across the street from my house. I go to these guys everyday and get fresh squeezed orange and pinapple juice. Nothings says Peru to me, like fresh fuits and juices.

And They're Off!

2008-06-11T13:00:00.001-07:00

To my Doctor-to-be friends: I love you

I often think about how attractive working as a Doctor would be. I love the idea that no day is ever the same for a Doctor. They are not stuck behind desks but move around all day working up close and personal with a variety of people. Being a doctor is challenging, rewarding, and meaningful. Three things that are most important to me in a career. But there's a small problem with me wanting to be a doctor, I think blood and guts are icky. I can handle looking at flesh, but it doesn't excite me in the way my friends think looking at a fractured tibia sticking out of some one's leg is cool.

Doctors do such amazing work. After reading Mountains beyond Mountains, it makes me wish I could do work that makes such a difference as Dr. Paul Farmer did in the book. But I believe in working with the gifts god gives you. A person will make a bigger impact on the world if they are doing something that they truly love. I think I would have incredible bedside manner as a Doctor, but apart from that, I don't think my natural talents would make me very successful in the world of medicine. Why don't they employ people at hospitals and clinics that walk around talking to patients and making them feel happy? That would be the perfect job for me. Maybe the next president will fix medical care in the US to include this position. Obama 2008!

Thank you to Laura and Amanda for your expertise (or blossoming expertise) on the matter. I will always welcome your two cents on my well being. One can never have too many opinions when it comes medical advice.

Right now I am waiting for my parents to arrive. I just got off the phone with them as they were sitting in their first class seats drinking Pisco Sours in LA before take off. Nice, huh? I'm living the life of a Peace Corps volunteer and they mock me by flying first class. But they're happy and their vacation has already started while I pace around the room trying not to look at the clock too often.

I've been anticipating they're arrival for a while. Last week I told a Peruvian the exact number of days until they arrived. She asked how long it had been since I had seen them last and I told her a year. Then she told me that family wasn't as important in the US as it is in Peru. I was offended down to my soul and got a bit defensive in trying state my opinion on the contrary. I think I must have taken what she said very personally. As if she was telling me that my family wasn't very important to me because I was living so far away from them and didn't get to see them that often. I think I made my case to her and further fulfilled my peace corps obligations by teaching locals about my home and breaking stereotypes. But the idea that Americans value family less than other stuck with me and continued to bother me.

Then, I realized I was being a hypocrite. I didn't like the way in which this Peruvian was speaking about me and US culture as a whole. I regularly discus my general observations about Peruvians and Peruvian culture on my blog and make accusations along the lines of the one I had been offended by. People do this to me all the time though. They will say (never ask, but announce really) Americans are like this or like that. I have heard some crazy stuff like "Americans eat everything out of cans" or "black people are never sad". I usually take all this with a good sense of humor and use the opportunity as a learning experience. But I considered it a huge insult when this peruvian generalized about Americans and Family. It's like insulting someone's mother, which you just don't do in any culture.

I thought about this for a while. Yes, there are differences in the ways which families behave between cultures, but family is one of the few things that transcends borders. Families and our relationships to each other are what makes us fundamentally human. The family is the core of all culture and therefore different as its representative of the uniqueness of each culture. But to say that family is not as important in one culture versus another is just not fair. It's like saying these people are more capable of love than these other people. I think I'm obviously over reacting but this peruvian woman's statement was a learning lesson for me as well. It made me think of family as a more of a transnational concept than as a means to compare and contrast cultures, as I have been doing since the moment I arrived.

I'm going to be redundant and say that I am really excited to see my parents. I would try to explain why having them come visit me and my life here is so important and meaningful but that would sound so sappy and would even venture off into the abstract. I try to keep my blog a bit more grounded than that and less emotional. My next few updates should be about what it's like having them here and their reactions of this fascination country.

Tuberculosis, Peru & Me

2008-06-05T10:51:00.000-07:00

I was cuddled up in bed last night reading a great book, Mountains beyond Mountains. I was about half way through the book about an amazing doctor who was working to alleviate infectious diseases in Haiti. This man had a love affair with Haiti and didn´t have a big desire to spread his focus. That is until, and I quote, "MDR [multi-drug resistant TB] claimed a close friend who had been living in a shantytown on the outskirts of Lima, Peru". That was the last sentence in that chapter. I had to put down the book as I processed what I just read. The process consisted of my inner dialog letting out a big Whooooaaaaaa.

I totally live in shantytown on the outskirts of Lima. I picked up the book and read the next chapter of the Author describing his first experiences with Peru. Here are some exceprts of how Tracy Kidder recounts his first trip.

"I gazed out the car window at hillsides smothered in darkness but doted with twinkling lights, as if by Japanese lanterns, pretty in the night. "Lima doesn`t seem like the third world" I said.
"Oh, yes it is," said Farmer. "You`ll See"
Lima is a vast coastal city, vast and dry. In the daylight the northern neighborhoods seemed like an endlessly spreading slum, the roads chocked with traffic and with motorcycle rickshaws and minibuses that served as public transportation, and the banks of roads littered with broken-down vehicles and garbage, and garbage on fire, and with ramshackle-looking development, like American strip malls that had moldered before being completed...the sun filtering down through thin fog from the Pacific, then through the perpetual ground level strata of dust and hydrocarbons.....The Hovels were perched on the sides of steep, gray-brown hills---giant heaps of sand and rock and nothing growing on them, except for the shacks....The air carried a strengthening smell of urine."

I don´t know if I could have described such a desperate scene so elegantly. I feel like I have tried, but reading this gave my sentiments words. The reason the book turns from focusing on TB in Haiti to Peru is not because of an epidemic or improper health care. The World Health Organization actually claimed that Peru was the most successful of all developing countries at following the recommended proceedure by the WHO to eradicate the disease. The problem they found in Peru, is that strains of medicine resistant TB were more present than the current government would like to admit. This part of the book took place in the mid nineties. And I haven´t finished the book yet so I don´t know what type of treatment they have come up with for MDR TB.

Then I remembered my site visit back in August. My PCV predecessor told me that our doctors informed her she had some kind of TB. This isn´t that big a deal necessarily, she told me something along the lines of having TB antibodies in her, and it wasn´t the full on disease. The doctors were putting her on 9 months of medication to prevent it from turning into anything serious. I didn´t really understand what that mean, and to be honest, I still don´t fully understand it. I know now from reading this book that 2 billion, approximately one third of the worlds population, have some sort of TB in their system. But what I realized last night, is that MDR TB is common in Peru. Perhaps my predecessor had one of these strains that wouldn´t be cured by her 9 month treatment.

What`s even more scary, is that I took her place. During site visit I stayed in her bed and eventually moved into her home and into her life. I lived with the same family and worked with the same kids. TB is airborne and it is likely I have come into contact with whatever she had. I`m not saying I`m terrified, nor am I that worried, really. It`s just something I never thought about. Getting some crazy disease was my worst fear joining Peace Corps. TB is not something we think about much in the US and therefore never even crossed my mind as something I could get. I have my one year med checks in August and will find out then if I have contracted anything. Strangely enough, since I leave the day after my med checks, if they do find something, I will likely be in the states when they get the results. I`d hate to have some fiasco like that guy on vacation in Italy who sneaked into the states through Canada when he wasn`t permited in the country after he contracted TB. Again, highly unlikely, but you never can be sure.

I [don´t] Feel Pretty

2008-05-29T16:33:00.000-07:00

If I had a sound track for my Peace Corps service, one song that would be on it would be "I don´t feel pretty", the classic from West Side Story with a less romantic twist. On the self discovery trip that has been forced upon me since I arrived a year ago, involves an evaluation about how I feel about myself, inside and out. Not just that, it is forcing me to gauge how much I actually care about the way I look.

It goes without saying, joining Peace Corps is not about a glamorous life style or superficial value in ones self. I have always been a very confident person who has never cared and therefore never greatly invested in my appearance. But lately, well honestly I´ve been feeling like this for quite some time, I don´t feel very attractive. There are about 100 reasons for this, may of them are self inflicted. But I´m gonna start at the top and work my way down.

9 months after a horrible peruvian hair cut, my hair is still recovering and I don´t like the length or the style. But I refuse to go back to a "stylist" here and am waiting till I go to the states to get it fixed. I don´t own hair products, a hair dryer, a curler or a straightener. My hair has not been done in over a year. I shower once overy 2-4 days and I have really oily hair so after the first day I look like a grease ball. I don`t wear make up except on occasion in Lima. But I only brought with me a few pieces with me. Again, I don`t shower all that often and my skin is really oily so its always really shinny and scary.

When I packed for Peru I brought along what I deemed to be "Peace Coprs" clothing ie. baggy jeans, tee shirts and sweats. The few nice clothes I did bring have basically been destroyed by the dirt and washing methods. Besides the fact I didn`t bring nice clothes and don´t want to ruin the ones I have, I always try to dress in an unattractive way to divert attention. So many men whistle and yell things at me and I try to take what control I can in the situation and dress in the least provocative way possible. Unfortunately, this does little to deter them. The other day I was wearing old baggy jeans circa 2001, hiking boots, a baseball cap and hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled over the cap. I got harassed as many times as usual. One might think that having men whistling and hollering might raise my self-esteem, but it actually makes me feel worse.

I`m really just complaining, there are many things I could do to make myself feel more pretty. There are volunteers who wear high heals, travel with curling irons and where make up everyday. But all that stuff takes 10 times the effort it does back home. I could buy cuter clothing and wear it (seeing as the men will whistle no matter what I wear), but I feel like there is no bigger waist of money than that. In a way this falter in self confidence is a good thing. It is letting me see a side of me I´ve never seen before, one where I realize my physical appearance actually means something to me. This is a latin culture which values the way a woman looks on the outside which probably effects me as well. But it also helps me keep things in perspective . I didn´t comes here to look pretty and looking in the mirror is a constant reminder of that.

I suppose I could shower more and that would help probably more than anything else. After all, being attractive is really about how you feel. When you feel dirty, covered in dust, sweat, grease and all the germs the kids cover me in, one is bound to feel icky. Not to mention smell a little funky too. Now that winter is here and it is cold again, I don´t think I will be mustering up the energy to be taking frigid showers more often. I look forward to be able to get dressed up again and not feel insulted to have men look at me. And when I get there, I will be able to appreciate more becaues of my 2 years in Peace Corps.

I Need a Vacation

2008-05-27T10:13:00.000-07:00

15 days till my parents arrive
18 days till we go to Cuzco
39 days till my marathon
59 days till Fiestas Patrias (Independence day and one of the few free vacations we recive)
66 days till Amanda arrive
71 days till I fly home

As a Peace Corps volunteer we receive two vacation days a month, 24 days a year. That may seem like a lot to the average American who get a whopping 10 days year, but really we PCV´s get the short end of the stick. We get 2 days a month, period. We don´t get weekends or get Holidays. Yesterday, all of the Peace Corps staff had the day off for the American Memorial day. Earlier this month they had another 3 day weekend for the Peruvian Labor day. I feel very claustrophobic sometimes, not being allowed to leave my site. My favorite past time in the states was taking off on a weekend for a sporadic road trip. Because my parents are coming in June and I am going home in August for two weeks, I have had to save all of my vacation days for these two trips. We also weren´t given any vacation days during training, so it will have been a full year since I have been able to relax and put my feet up. I´d say after everything I´ve been through these past 12 months, I deserve a vacation.

Things have become very mundane at site. I`ve been working very hard, which makes me happy, but also makes me want a break even more. I feel I am looking forward to seeing my parents far more than any 24 year old should. It´s almost romantic how I count down the days and try to contain myself every time I turn a page on the calender.

While I feel very comfortable and even apprecite the down time I have, I spend so much time in my bed reading or at the computer writing friends and blog entries. I´m running a lot getting ready for the marathon and I patiently deal with all the kids on a daily basis. I am so ready for a little excitement, for a change of scenery. With Lima`s weather is changing to endless gray, it is stoking the flame within me to head for the hills, literally. I am very excited to finally be going to Cuzco and Machu Picchu. What I like about my winter plans, is that once my first adventure ends, it´s not long until the next one starts. I am trying to be patient for the first one to start, but after all the patience I have had to muster in my first year in Peru, I don´t know if I can stand it any longer.

A Few Faus Pax

2008-05-22T21:27:00.001-07:00

I feel as thought I have been ragging on Peru a lot in my recent blogs. It's easy to gripe about the negative things in any culture. So this time I'm gonna give Peru and it's citizens a break and pick some one my own size. Specifically, me. I've almost completed a year here and I find myself still committing the same cultural errors on a regular basis. Sometimes they are by mistake and sometimes the stubborn american in me just doesn't feel like doing it 'there way'. There are two things in particular that I habitually screw up. Both of which are aspects of the culture I find beautiful, sweet and sometimes very annoying.

The first is the way Peruvians greet and say goodbye to each other. It is considered impolite not to greet every single person individually when you walk into a room. Likewise when saying goodbye when leaving. Both hello and goodbye mandate a kiss on the cheek and a few kind words. I find this practice lovely, except when there are 30 people in the room. I often pull an American move by walking into a crowded room by waving and saying "hey guys" and thinking that is more than appropriate. But in the eyes of Peruvians, it makes me the rude American. I must say it is a lot less annoying than having to give the Spanish double kiss to everyone. Manners are in the eye of the beholder. It is considered less rude not to greet every one formally than it is to arrive late. That means, in the middle of a meeting when some on arrives late, instead of quietly slipping in and briefly apologize for their tardiness, they have to interrupt even more by going around the table and kissing and saying hello to every one.

I really love the kiss hello but sometimes I just forget. Peruvians are so formal and it makes me feel like I was brought up in a barn. Another beautiful cultural norm I am prone to f***ing up, is sharing. In states, I often received Outstandings in the "shares well with others" category. I had no problem sharing my blocks or jump rope. Although some might argue I'm not very good at sharing a blanket, few would consider me to be a possessive or greedy person. But in comparison to the selfless peruvians who give even when there is nothing to give, I feel like the stereo typical American who hoards all her stuff for herself.

For example, if you are eating something, anything, Peruvian norms stipulate that you invite every person in the room to whatever it is you are eating. If you have a small 4 pack of cookies and there are 8 people in the room, than you offer and split up the cookies accordingly. To me, cookies are a prized possession. If I have 4 cookies in a room with 8 people, the idea of offering some to everyone and only getting to eat half a cookie in the end, is frightening. I am always so surprised to see young girls and boys selflessly offer there special snacks to others. It makes my heart smile and simultaneously makes me feel really guilty seeing I just down the entirety of my special snake without so much as thinking about any one else.

On any given day I am likely to screw up at least one of these cultural norms. Sometimes I wonder if I am just a huge burden on my host family and all my peruvian friends. After many many months at the beginning of my service, I got so tired of always trying to the right thing. It is really exhausting trying not to offend any one with language or cultural slip up. So much so, that I've let my manners slip. Perhaps I will set aside some time to try and make some of these things habits. When my parents come I know I will loose all sense of trying to fit in with my surroundings and relax and just be foreign tourist. When my parents leave I may try and channel my inner potato once again and try to be the best Peruvian I can.

A letter to Peru 11

2008-05-18T11:05:00.001-07:00

Dear Peru 11,

It is nearly 2 weeks till you are scheduled to pack your bags and embark on a 27 month Journey. You are feeling nervous and excited and you feel so in the dark about knowing what to expect that you don’t know if you should be scared for your life or saying good riddance USA. I know the feeling. The one thing I would have liked more than anything, would have been for somebody to sit me down and tell me what to expect. So I offer a few words of things I wish some one had told me before I started my Peace Corps Journey.

First off, don’t worry about being ready. Emotionally, mentally and all the stuff you packed in your suitcase will have to suffice regardless. The Peace Corps knows this and has done a really good job of helping you make the transition to readiness. It starts of course with staging. Saying goodbye to all your friends, family and home is hard. But I cannot tell you how wonderful it is you don’t have to go through all that emotion and step off a plane into an unknown land. You will say your goodbyes and travel instead to a big US city and get put up in a nice hotel. Then you meet your group. Its amazing to be around 30+ individuals who are going through exactly what you are going through. When I tried to imagine my Peace Corps life, I never imagined other Americans or Volunteers much, if any, role. I imagined being alone and only having Peruvians as a support network. It makes a world of a difference boarding a plane and traveling to Peru with a group of volunteers as opposed to going alone. These 30 strangers I met almost a year ago in Philadelphia are now my family.

The next step on the Peace Corps road to readiness is training. Arriving in Peru is not like ripping the Band-Aid off. You are eased into cultural assimilation. The staff tries to make this transition as easy as possible. If you are worried about your Spanish or lack of experience with youth or business, you will be given the tools you need over the 3 month training period to get you ready for the real show. Living with a host family may seem like an unbearable idea if you have been living on your own for years, but the families in training have already hosted 2 volunteers and will be broken in. I unfortunately was with the group who had entirely new families and had a really overbearing host mother who told me I wasn’t allowed to go out at night to see my friends. By now, she is used to the idea that young Americans females are self-sufficient and independent. But again, if you have a million questions about host families don’t worry. The last thing you do before meeting your host family is have a 2 hour panel discussion with current volunteers and you can ask every question you can think of. June 8, I will be one of the volunteers sitting on the panel. You can ask me personally.

I was amazed at how easy life was. I was really expecting to live the worst conditions possible. Things are definitely different from what you‘re used to, but modern enough it won’t be too hard of a transition. This, plus getting to spend everyday with some of the coolest people ever (Peru 9 I my case, Peru 11 in yours), made training one of the most fun times of my life. Training can make you feel like a child back in elementary school. Just try and harness the care-free novice inside you, sit back and enjoy the ride. It’s a whirlwind tour.

Also, don’t worry too much about having everything before you leave, especially not first aid or medications. You get absolutely everything you could need, even some stuff you don’t need. Through out your Peace Corps Service you will receive all pills, ointments and even condoms for free. You will have two of the greatest doctors at your beck and call. Getting sick is real concern. You will get sick. Some worse than others, but you will have the best health care you have ever and will ever have in your life. As far as making sure you have other essentials, don’t feel too overwhelmed. You can buy just about everything you need to here. The only really problem I’ve had is shoes. I wear a woman’s size 10 and that is next to impossible to find here. Also, before you come to Peru there is a lot of literature telling you how nice Peruvians dress and you should bring nice clothes. Peruvians wear jeans and tee-shirts (at least on the coast). I got tricked into bringing my actual nice clothes and wish I had a lot more “peace corps-like”-grubby clothes. Your clothes will most likely be destroyed after 2 years of hard living conditions and the washing style.

Lastly I want to say that nothing anybody can say can make the nervousness or the anxiety go away. Just remember that no matter what happens from the moment you say your farewells, you are a part of the Peace Corps family. And in that, I hope you find solace. You joined Peace Corps because you believed that it’s been working for positive change for 50 years, so they’ve got to be doing something right. Your in good hands, welcome to the family.

Soy Inteligente

2008-05-16T11:11:00.000-07:00

I’ve always surrounded myself with really smart people. As if all their intelligence would rub off on me somehow. Last night I was sitting around with my Lima friends while one of them played Scrabulous with her father back home and the topic of words and the English language came up. My friend playing scrabble online admitted that she had received an 800 on her verbal SAT. This is an amazing feat for most people, but my friend is not a native English speaker and therefore an 800 on her verbal just reconfirmed what I already knew. She is brilliant. I then turned to my other friend and demanded to know her SAT score. She refused at first but finally confessed that she got a 1560 overall. This is not so surprising to me. When I say I hang out with smart people, I mean it.

Maybe I’m a freak, but one of the most attractive things to me in a guy, is intelligence. I think this is another big reason I am not, on the whole, attracted to Peruvians. I am not saying that Peruvians are not intelligent. Far from it. For one thing, where I live the vast majority of people in town do not have a college education. Again, I don’t believe one has to have a college education to be intelligent, but hear me out. The overwhelming majority of Peruvian men I have met, have no idea what’s going on in the world. They probably can’t even pick out Russia on a map. There are different kinds of intelligence. I guess I’m attracted to a specific kind of intelligence though and that kind of intelligence isn’t culturally all that important where I live. A Peruvian man trying to woo me will likely whistle and say “hello baby” as I walk by instead of asking me what I think about the recent US-Peruvian free trade agreement.

This week is a huge international summit in Lima. Heads of states from Europe, Asia and Latin America have taken over the city. A four day holiday was declared and streets and businesses are shut down all over . The Peruvians in my community are thrilled they have four days off of work. But when I tried to talk to them about the economic polices these diplomats will hammering out, they looked at me like I had lobsters crawling out of my ears. I had to go out to dinner with my Lima friends to get my intellectual stimulation on. One of my friends got in to Lima two days ago and was seated next to a diplomat from St. Tropez and told us all about the amazing conversation she had with him

I like having friends that are smarter and better educated than me. I don’t claim to be the brightest crayon in the box and therefore really take advantage of the brain power that’s around me. I like to have things explained to me and I like to have my opinions and thoughts challenged in an academic way.

I look at this as a positive not a negative thing at site. While there are a few people who challenge me in my community, mainly the psychologists at the home where I work, for the more part I am the one who is enlightening others. That’s my job in a way. I challenge the people I live with to think about things in a way they never have. This comes mostly in the form of breaking down stereotypes. One of my favorite things to do is to take out a map or a globe with the kids and just start taking. I’ll quiz them on geography and the questions just start coming. We talk about things like plate tectonics, which they have never heard of even though there are 5 earthquakes a year in Peru. We talk about what kind of food grows in which regions. I explain to them other religions besides Catholicism and which areas of the world pertain to which religion. We talk about our dreams and our fantasies of where we want to go and what we want to do.

I make it a point to be the friend that all my Ivy league, 1600 SAT friends are to me. I try to stimulate them and make intelligent discussion fun. Regardless of the topic, whenever I am talking with kids they always end my explanations with “But, Peru is still the best , right?”.

Getting Around in L-Town

2008-05-13T08:54:00.000-07:00

Taking taxis in Peru, as opposed to other more developed countries, can be an interesting and an infuriating experience. It all depends on a few factors. This entry will not only allow me to gripe about the system and it's drivers, but serve as a helpful heads up to any one who is planning a visit to Lima.

The second week of training we took a field trip to the heart of Lima where are language instructors gave us the tools we needed to survive when trying to get around the city. The first lesson we learned was how to take a taxi. I though it strange at first that any well traveled adult such as myself had to learn how to take a taxi. I quickly realized the importance of knowing how to handle the situation. For any one coming to Lima, here are the essentials you need to know about taking taxis.

1. Taxi's do not have meters and there are no set prices.

2. You have to Bargain the price with the driver before you get in the taxi. If you do not know any spanish, you are in big trouble.

3. Taxi drivers will look at you and know immediately you are foreign and offer you double what you should be paying. Do not be afraid to bargain or refuse a driver who is charging too much.

4. Ask Peruvians on the street how much they would pay to take a taxi to Point A. Again, if you don't know spanish, you are in trouble.

5. Be prepared to have directions to the place you are going. Even if it is a well known destination, Taxi drivers never know where anything is. Despite the fact it is there job to know, they will still get mad at you if you, the foreigner, don't know where you are going.

6. Only get into a yellow or white taxi. Make sure the taxi has numbers painted on the outside. Lima is a dangerous city and it is not uncommon for a taxi driver to take you some where and rob you.

7. Always lock your door when you get into a taxi. If you have a backpack or bag, do not keep it on your lap but down between your legs. People will run by the car, especially if the window is rolled down, and grab whatever is on your lap.

8. If you are traveling with your luggage or other expensive items you don't want to risk loosing, don't take a taxi off the street. Ask the hotel you are staying in to call you a cab. These cabs do have a non-negotiable fee that is much higher than a taxi you would hail on the street. Luckily if you are a foreigner, the price may still seem cheap to you.

9. Since you bargain for your price at the beginning, you don't need to tip them. They are trying their hardest to rip you off, and it can be so infuriating the last thing you want to do is give them a few extra soles for their trouble

10. If you are unaccustomed to transportation in foreign countries, just remember to relax. All drivers will appear ruthless and disregard all common sense and politeness on the road. It is every man for himself and that is just the way things are. Accept it and try and try not to let it you drive you crazy.

11. Traffic rules are more like guidelines than laws. You will see people driving on shoulders and sidewalk, people making right hand turns from the left lane and people going the wrong way on one way streets.

12. The pedestrian NEVER has the right of way. Be careful when crossing the street.

13. In Peru, you don't hail taxis, they hail you. Especially if you are exiting a touristy area, there will be a slew of men bombarding you for their service. If you are simply walking down the street, taxis will honk as they come up behind you letting you know they are there. Often times they will pull up beside you and creep along with you as you walk saying "Taxi? taxi? taxi?". Even if you completely ignore them, will ask repeatedly until you finally say no.

Taking taxis in Lima can be very daunting for a traveler, especially if you they speak no Spanish. Honestly, I have no idea how people that don't speak a word get around. I know many tourists get suckered into paying extravagant sums. The silver lining is that taxis are incredibly cheap compared to the US and Europe. This is why foreign travelers are willing to pay what seems like so much to locals. A five mile taxi ride should only cost 1-2 USD. A 20 minute taxi ride should never cost more than $10.

The fact that taxi drivers never know where they are going makes me very angry. They drive around the city for a living. While the city is big, it is not THAT big. In my experience in taking taxis in large US and European cities, the drivers always knew even the most obscure locations. On occasion they would need the actual address. But in Peru, if you hand the driver a piece of paper with an address, you better have directions to go along with it.

Drivers always trying to rip me off because I look like I shouldn't know any better, is maddening. But what really infuriates me is the manner in which taxis peruse you trying to get your business. It makes sense to me, that if you are looking for a taxi you face on-coming traffic and hail them as they pass. I cannot understand why, if I am walking on the sidewalk with my back to on-coming traffic, that a driver would think I wanted a cab. As if all the honking and screaming he's doing is suddenly going to make me want to jump in and give him my money. But my favorite is when I come into Lima to do my marathon training. In my running attire, it is clearly obvious I am running for sport or leisure. But taxis still creep up beside me, stick there little finger in the air and say "taxi? taxi? taxi?". I am freaking running! Like I'm all of the sudden going to change my mind and hop in a cab.
I hope this information was useful to those planning or thinking about a trip to Peru. And for those who are not, I hope it was enlightening at least.

A New Addition to the Family

2008-05-11T13:31:00.001-07:00

My host mother is a 69 year old woman with diabetes and is the primary care giver for her grown children and grand children. She cooks all the meals every day for every member in her family, even those who no longer live in the house. She alone is responsible for maintaining a spotless house and doing all the laundry by hand for every one. It is an around the clock job that is very physically demanding and she is starting to get to the age where she needs some help. Instead of the husband or the live in sons lending a hand, my host mom has been talking about getting some hired help. The only problem she claims, is that it's hard to find good help these days. Meaning, you have to know and trust a person before you let them into your house. The past two helpers my host mom has had, allegedly stole. So she is constantly on the look out for a woman to help relieve some of the burden of cooking and cleaning.

One morning at the beginning of this week, I went down stairs for breakfast and there was a young lady standing in the kitchen. There are always friends and random family members in the house so I wasn't surprised. But as I was sitting at the kitchen table eating my breakfast of bread and avocado, I realized my host mom was explaining the preparation step by step. It became apparent that my host mom was training this girl to help around the house. I studied her face hard trying to get a guestimate on her age. She looked young and I was praying that she be at least 16 (16 is the age they graduate high school).

I struck up a conversation with her and asked how old she was. She was 12. I got a knot in the bottom of my stomach. Child labor is still very common in Peru and is something I am very opposed to. I did not know if I could live in a house that had a 12 year old scrubbing the bathroom and making my lunch. As we continued to talk, I learned that she had moved with her family from Ayacucho (a poor province up in the Andes) to Lurin two years ago. But because there were so many children in the family and her older sister was pregnant and the dad had left to find work, this girl was being neglected. An arrangement had been made that she, Sara, would move into our house and be fed and cared for in exchange for work.

I spent the rest of the day thinking about my values and if this situation was crossing one of my moral lines. In one aspect, our family was being kind and taking in a needy girl in the family, which is a beautiful act of kindness. But to what degree was she going to be made to work? Was she attending school and how much of a priority would her school work be?

The next morning I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and Sara was cleaning the shower. I was really hating the situation. I worked all day that day and was tutoring until 10 at night. When I came home finally, my 34 year host brother was sitting at the table helping her with her homework. It was a bit of a relief to see the family supporting her school work. I ended up getting in on the study group as we attempted to tackle one of those ridiculous and impossibly hard junior high school assignments. We had to find words that ended with different letter combinations and I challenge any of you to find 5 Spanish words that end in B-L-U.

My host mom has also really embraced Sara. She loves having some one to talk with and adore her. It's also very surprising how happy Sara seems. She is a very sweet girl who always smiles and didn't need any transition time. She likes that I live there and that she is not the odd one out in the family. She is really beloved by all after just one week and I have dealt with the idea of her working around the house. In my old host family, there was 12 year old and a 15 year old. Both the girls helped around the house, cooking and cleaning. It's only natural to help out with chores. As long as she is not treated poorly and her studies stay a priority, I view this as a win win situation

Embassy Games Pics

2008-05-09T16:14:00.000-07:00

Since you are not allowed to take private cameras into the US embassy, these are the only pictures I have to post. This is a picture with a scattering of Peace Corps girls with the US Ambassodor and the woman in charge of the Embassy games. This is not the volleyball team mind you, we are excepting the award for girls soccer.
This is the Peace Volley ball team +some of our cheering crowd proudly posing with all our trophies we won in the tournament. You can see even the kid has on his Peace Corps shirt. I can't wait till next year!

With Every Season, Turn, Turn, Turn

2008-05-06T11:52:00.000-07:00

I was beginning to feel like Peruvian Autumn was really more like spring time in California. In April, we had cool mornings and evenings along with sunny, warm days. Because of Peru’s close location to the equator, we don’t experience seasonal changes like those in the US. For starters, the length of day never changes, not noticeably anyway. Whether it’s July or January, it will be dark by 6:30, give or take 10 minutes. Its tropical climate also doesn’t cause a dramatic change in the foods that are eaten. Unlike the states, seasonal foods such as asparagus, squashes and oranges, are available year round and are always fresh and locally grown.

Walking into the produce department of any supermarket in the US, it might not even occur to a person which foods are in and out of season. What this person might not realize is that the grapes she is buying in December are from the southern hemisphere. Americans are used to getting anything they want, whenever they want it. Bananas, for example, are a year round staple for many Americans. A month without bananas is unfathomable to some. But bananas do not grow anywhere on the continental US and must be shipped in.

Peru has a very different food mentality. You eat what is local and when it is in season. Luckily for us, because of its diverse climates, Peru offers an amazing assortment of local produce year round. I consider myself quite lucky for getting posted in a Peace Corps country with this kind of variety. Many PCV`s world wide are not as fortunate. The average Peruvian doesn’t have the money to buy food that is imported from all around the world and out of season. There are some things they don’t grow in Peru and therefore miss out on. Berries would be one of the biggest things I miss. But as I’ve mentioned before, the list of fruit you can get in Peru that you can’t get in the US, trumps the reverse. And at least bananas are always, ALWAYS in season, and local. I walk past banana trees on my way to work everyday. In fact, I walk past banana trees, potatoes and broccoli, all growing side by side. This country is really unique in some aspects.

I was really starting to get used to this timeless, seasonless place where there are always fresh to greens and amazing tomatoes, as if it were always summer. Then yesterday morning I woke up and came face to face with reality. In Peru, there aren’t really 4 seasons so much as 2. In the mountains, they have rainy season and dry season. In Lima, they have the sunny season.....and the gray. Coincidentally, the mountain and the desert seasons are inversed. While the facebook status messages from all the people living in the mountains are praising the end of the rainy season and the on set of beautiful weather, I am cursing the cloudy heavens "it’s not time, I’m not ready. Please, just one more month!!!!". But alas, instead of the gradual change of seasons inching in and out, I went to bed on a summery sunday night and woke up to winter.

This may seem like an over-dramatization, but as I was recounting my disbelief of the overnight seasonal change to a PCV in northern Peru, she said that the exact same thing happened to her on the same sunday night. I look back at my first three months when I arrived at site and remember them being cold, dark and lonely, and I’m not even talking about the weather. The Lima gray just reflected the way I felt inside. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that my spirits and life all seemed to improve with the weather. I cannot believe the clouds have come back so quickly. By my count, we only had 4 months of sun. Looking ahead to 8 months of gray skies, especially with what I associate them with, gives me an unsettled feeling.

But at the same time, I cannot stop aching for the coldest months to arrive. Very cunningly, I planned my biggest escapes and best vacations for the dead of winter. The unsettled feeling that pours over me is quickly washed away when I think that in just one months time, my parents will arrive and we’ll be off to Machu Picchu (up in the sierra where the weather is inversely sunny). Then in July I will go to the northern part of Peru to run my marathon, which I hope will be some where between cool and warm weather. At the end of July I have free vacation for the Peruvian Independence Day and escape from Lima yet again.

August is shaping up to be my most eventful month yet. Right after my independence day vacation, my friend Amanda will be coming to Lima for a few days with some med school friends before they hit up Machu Picchu. Then All of Peru 9 will be coming into Lima for our one year medical checks. After this week of having all my friends in town, I fly home to the states for 2 weeks.

My poor friends are receiving relentless emails about how excited I am and all the things I want to do with them when I get home. Thinking about California in August is the only way I can get a warm smile on my face after looking up at the gray sky here. So to all my friends who are being bombarded with a ton of over zealous emails, I’m sorry. But I beg that you humor me and all my warm weather fantasies. I’m sure as the departure date draws nearer, I’ll not only submit my friends through private emails to the trivial things I am obsessing about going home, and start annoying my blog readers with all the things I want to do in the very short 2 weeks I’ll be home.

Old Habbits Die Hard

2008-05-04T09:52:00.000-07:00

This weekend was another intense sporting weekend comparable to those of my teen years. Friday morning I ran 15 miles for my marathon training. Friday night I had volleyball practice followed by a volleyball tournament on Saturday. This sporting combination in one weekend was once considered lethal, at least to some of my coaches. When I was a freshman in high school, I chose a club volleyball tournament over a high school track meet and my track coach called me the morning of and told me if I didn't get to the meet, I was off the team. I can't remember if that was Mr. Jones of Mr. Miles who made me to collapse into tears that morning cause I knew I would never get to the meet on time. I was terrified I would be kicked off the team and still look back at that phone call as completely as unnecessary and inappropriate.

But the scare tactic worked as track ended up wining out on my event calendar for the next 8 years. It is nice to not have sports ruling my life anymore. In college every quarter, I had to schedule all of my classes around a three hour chunk of time in the afternoon for track practice. It killed my social life for indoor and outdoor season every year. There's a reason our conference track party was one of the most well known parties in the whole school. We worked so hard for so long that when it was finally over, we went absolutely nuts (and got absolutely naked to run a mile relay).

Somehow, now that I'm free after years of sport slavery, I have voluntarily gone back to sacrificing nights out on the town for early morning runs and tournaments. Last night I went to a potluck dinner and everybody left to go out dancing. There was no way after 15 miles and all that volleyball, were my legs gonna dance till dawn. So instead I came home and skyped a few friends. I didn't have my phone numbers with me, so I ended up just calling friends who have their phone numbers posted on facebook. It was a random sample of friends because of that, but I couldn’t have been happier than to have talked to these people.

We ended up loosing both our volleyball games on saturday. We got 4th place over all in the tournament, but Peace Corps took home more trophies than any other department. Our assistant country director got first place in Tennis. Two other male staff members got first and second in the chess tournament and we won the girls soccer tournament. The teams we played in volleyball yesterday were really good. We played well in all of our games and if we had been able to practice together more as a team, we would have been a lot better. Regardless of loosing, I still had an amazing time and everybody is already buzzing about next year. I brought along some of my Lima friends this time to join the cheering ranks. They were really impressed with the size an the intensity of the tournament. It's nice to offer my Lima friends something on wow-scale. It's usually the other way around. I come to Lima as a poor Peace Corps Volunteer and they take me to some fancy country club or event which blows me and my life at site out of the water. I never get to take them any place cool and really wow them.

But they had never been the US embassy before and thought the day was really cool. Every one on the Peace Corps staff wanted to know who my friends were and how I had met them. By the end of the day, Peace Corps had signed up my friends to give microfinance talks to the incoming business training group and sit on a panel discussion at the up coming Close of Service conference.

Now that I am an adult and don't have to let coaches who believe the sun and moon rise for high school sports (don't even get me started on high school football), I am able to enjoy sports for what they are. Recreation. There are nights before runs that I have to sacrifice going out, but in turn I get to take my social life to my sports. I really think my Lima friends will remember the day they went to the volleyball tournament at the US embassy in Peru more than they would any random night going out and dancing. I know I will.

In my Defense

2008-04-30T13:09:00.000-07:00

My mother was kind enough to point out in my last blog entry, that I used the word accountability where I should have used the word accounting. Now, I have never claimed to be a champion wordist. A proper handle on grammar and spelling of the English language has always seemed just out of my grasp.

But that is my excuse this time. It's English! My primary spoken language these days is Spanish. A lot of volunteers say the more Spanish they speak, the worse their English gets. I don't know if this is true of not. I think my comprehension of this romance language has actually helped me make sense of the English language. But I have found that I am increasingly forgetting English words and have had to stop and think about such common words like avocado and mattress.

My accountability/accounting mix up is just one example of how the languages in my head are running together and no matter which one I am speaking, it often comes out as spanglish. You see, the word accounting in Spanish is contablilidad. And I wrote the blog entry moments after I had come back from trying to help that old lady with her US taxes and racking my brain for accounting jargon in spanish.

I know my English isn't great, but cut me a break. I struggle enough with one language and here I am trying to juggle two. I think my writing errors just give my blog entries my unique personality: far from perfect but they try really really hard.

Volunteer or Doormat?

2008-04-28T08:14:00.000-07:00

There is a fine line between being a volunteer and a doormat. For every volunteer that line is different, but we are responsible for setting our own boundaries for what we are willing to do to help others. Peru is a society that is used to hand outs and NGO’s. A lot of people are looking for some one to come and solve all their problems for them. So as PCV’s we spend a lot of time explaining our role in the community and the services we are willing and not willing to provide.

Things constantly come up and I have to decide what I am willing to do for others on a day to day basis. It doesn’t matter what type of volunteer you are: Youth, Small Business, Health, Environment, most volunteers are sought after to be one thing, an English teacher. Whether the teaching is formal or informal, Peruvians somehow expect you to teach them English overnight without having to put any real work in.

I draw my line here. I will offer to help kids with there English homework, but have successfully avoided teaching English in a classroom setting. By reading my blog you may notice that I don’t exactly have a master on my native tongue and therefore don't feel confident teaching grammar and spelling.
But the other night a friend in town asked me if I would be willing to help an old lady translate some forms she relieved in the mail. He said she needed to fill them out but didn’t understand any English. I figured this type of service didn’t fall on the doormat side of my boundary.
So this morning I went over to the old ladies house, who graciously sat me down at her kitchen table and brought me a stack of papers. There on the top of the stack was a 1040A US tax form. And beneath it was a whole mess of other tax forms and papers explaining how to do it. I couldn’t believed I was suckered into doing some old ladies taxes. She gave me her peruvian ID and pen and told me to start filling it out.
I explained to her that it wasn’t quite as simple. First off,
“what’s your social security number?” I asked her.
“My what?” she replied.
“tu numero de seguro social”
Along with all the sheets of paper she had handed me, where a whole bunch of translations for all the technical accounting terms and even translated proper names.
“okay, let’s back track. " I said "Why are you even filling this out anyways? Did you earn any kind of income from the United States in the past year?”
She said no, her husband did. But her husband was dead.
In the marital status column, there isn’t even a box to mark for widowed, filing for your deceased spouse. And instead of a W-2, there was some other form I had never seen before that was all in Spanish and contained the numbers necessary to fill out the 1040A. I shuffled through the papers reading the English and Spanish forms that explained how to manage everything.

I didn’t even fill out my own taxes this year. My dad wanted our family friend and accountant to do it seeing as things were a bit more complicated now that I’m living and earning my income abroad. And I’m pretty sure I’ve messed up my taxes every year I’ve ever done them on my own. Accountability is so not my thing. And the papers spread out on the table bewildered me. I tried to explain to her that I had no idea what to do and that she should call a professional. But she wasn’t’ haven’t that as an answer. She wanted me to figure it out right then and there and get her taxes done.

I did try to figure it out. And I think I could have if I worked on it for several hours and had access to the IRS website. But this was officially way past my boundary of things I was willing to do in the name international development. After a half hour of looking over documents I basically told her I couldn’t do it and was going to leave. She was not very happy with me and wanted to know to do then, if I couldn’t’ figure it out. I told her to call an accountant. or better yet, her son who lives in the states. So even though I thought I was doing a neighborly thing by translating a few documents for an old lady, I think I may have made more of an enemy than a friend. Out of all the things I imagined doing as a peace corps volunteer, filling out IRS tax forms was definitely not one of them.

Don't F*** with Peace Corps!

2008-04-26T18:44:00.000-07:00

Of all the branches of the US foreign service, the Peace Corps doesn’t have the toughest or the coolest reputation. Every year, the US embassy in Peru has a sports tournament, and all the different departments of the embassy play each other. Every Saturday for 4 weeks, employees (and in my case volunteers) along with their family and friends go out to the sports field at the embassy and represent for their line of service.

I didn’t know this tournament existed until today. On Tuesday , I was in the office working on an in service training, and I was recruited. The fact that I had any volleyball experience at all, automatically made me a starting player. When I agreed to play, I had no idea what I was in for. I thought it would be a low intensity game where each teams biggest challenge would be just getting it over the net. I thought it would be so easy going, that I even though I had practice Friday night and games Saturday morning, I scheduled my 10 mile marathon training run at 7 in the morning before the tournament started.

Only a few people showed up to practice Friday night. We ended up playing two on two for the first hour and three on three for the second. Every one was pretty good, so that the two on two matches were really fun. But I forgot how exhausting they are. I am in good shape, but my body is so not used to the anaerobic, jumping and lateral movement that is volleyball. The next morning on my run, my legs were moving as if they were made out of stone. I was seriously regretting my decision to marathon train the morning of the tournament.

Within the US embassy there are a lot of different departments. Some are made up all US citizens and some are comprised of all Peruvian nationals. There was only one other volunteer playing on our Peace Corps team, and apart from us, we were the only Americans. Because of this, Ryan (6’3’’) and me (5’9’’) were the tallest people on the team. We’re both skinny and athletic, but not in anyway intimidating. Our team would best be described as scrappy. We even had the accountants mom playing with us. Don’t get me wrong, that 50 year old woman had a more banning body than most 20 year olds I know and was the best server on our team. But's that's what I mean when I say our team was scrappy.

As we headed over to the court, I saw a group of adults that all looked like they had been bred in bio chambers by the US government. I turned to one of the PC secretaries and said with fear behind my voice “that’s who we’re playing against??!!!”. She told me not to worry. Not to worry? Our first game was against the DEA. The Drug Enforcement Agency (all American, of course). You want a department that hasthe reputation as cool and tough? Look no further than the DEA. There were 4 men on their team and 2 women. The women, while clearly very fit and attractive, didn’t scare me. The 4 men on the other hand, were all 6’2’’ of taller and looked like they could bench press out entire team. There guys were BIG.

To make matters worse, we were playing with the net at women’s competition height. Much as I suspected, the DEA started womping the Peace Corps. The giant men would just stand at the net and smash anything we sent over. To make the best out of what seemed like a done deal, all of the loyal Peace Corps staff got on their feet and started cheering and chanting so loud, they drowned out the noise of the crowd watching the more popular soccer game. And while we were killed in the first round, we came back around to win the second. Wouldn’tcha know.

I 100% accredit our win to our cheering crowd. Pretty soon the enthusiasm spread and over half the crowd was cheering “Peace Corps, Peace Corps!”. But really, doesn't it just seem wrong to route against the Peace Corps? The Drug Enforcement officers seemed a bit frazzled by all this. There was this one really big black man, that for some reason always ended up guarding me at the net and vice versa. He was really into the game, and started to show his fanatical side when he realized he was loosing to, Peace Corps??? He started to get really intense and the rest of his team had to keep telling him to calm down. That this game wasn’t really that big a deal. Let me just say, I can understand where he’s coming from. If I was this big scary drug enforcer and some little peace corps volunteer kept blocking all my manly hard hits, I would be embarrassed too. That’s right, I stuffed that guy like a thanksgiving turkey 4 times! And if felt good. In all fairness, he had some great blocks against me too. But come on, he’s got 6 inches on my plus he’s a genetically engineered super human.

We ended up winning the 3rd game too, therefore winning the match and advancing to the next round. Players and spectators alike, we were all so proud of our underdog victory. I never got a sub the whole game and could feel my legs starting to buckle underneath me as the adrenaline was wearing off. In a way, I almost wished we had lost so we wouldn’t have to play another game that day. Luckily, after watching the USAID (USA International Development) play against the MOA (Military Operations A….. to be honest, I really don’t remember. Why does the US government insist on so many acronyms?). We won our second game on a forfeit as the Embassy Custodial staff didn’t have enough people to man a team. I was so relieved. Even though the all Peruvian team sounded like they could have been easy to beat in volleyball, they dominate the soccer tournament. And if I had had to play another match, I might have had to be carried out on stretcher. But both my Peace Corps doctors had turned up to cheer us on too, so I knew I was in good hands at least.

I had such an amazing experience and I’m so excited out team advanced and I get to come back next week and do it all over again. Next week though, I have 15 miles to run. But I’ll be sure to schedule it for after the tournament or the next day.

The day was so much fun. It was the first time I had even been inside the walls of the fortress we call he US Embassy. I was so proud to be a part of Team Peace Corps. We are so different from every other branch of the US foreign service and it shows even in things like a volleyball tournament. To us, love and support, a positive attitude, and working together are the ways we choose to confront a challenge. Not by sheer brawn and force. The moral of the story is, at first it seemed the power and muscle would over take the scrappy foreigners and volunteers, but in the end, what finally won out was love and Peace Corps.

Just The Right Ticket

2008-04-24T08:15:00.000-07:00

A big part of living abroad is living far far away from everyone you know. So naturally, in my two years of service, there will thousands of miles logged between people who come to visit me, and me going to visit home. This past week was taken over by my quest to get a ticket home. This process ended up being far more complicated than I would have liked. For starters, my departure date out of Peru is nonnegotiable. One of my best friends that I have non since the second grade is getting married August 9th, a Saturday. The whole week prior to the wedding, I have my one year reconnect, med-checks and project presentation that I cannot miss. I already had my boss rearrange the whole week so I would be able to miss Friday. But leaving a day earlier is out of the question.

So some how I had to find a ticket that would go either Thursday night or Friday morning and leave me enough time to get to the wedding and not be completely disoriented and exhausted. This will be the first time I will have been in the US in 14 months, and I have no idea what kind of culture shock and jet lag I am in for. Oh and by the way, I am in the wedding. I can't really just show up, sneak into the back of the church and then be anti-social at the reception. Not only do I have to worry about bridal party responsibilities, but it puts added pressure to get there early so I can attend the rehearsal.

I found myself between a rock and an expensive place. After days of searching online, the cheapest tickets I could find were around the $1200 mark. And those were flights going through Florida, which I didn't have time to do. There are direct flights from Lima to Los Angeles which would get me into California on schedule, but those were gonna cost $1500. Refusing to settle for what seemed like the inevitably expensive fare, I started checking out travel agents. They didn't have any better news for me. But again, I just absolutely refused to believe I couldn't make this work for under $1000. I had easily logged over 24 hours of searching on the internet and in travel agents office. Finally, a man found a flight to Fort Lauderdale, Florida that left early enough for me to potentially arrive in CA Friday morning. It only cost $550. I was certain I could find a ticket to the west coast for just a few hundred dollars, and thus, achieving my goal of getting home for less than a thousand. After going home and checking out the flights, I was so excited by my finds, I called my parents a relayed some good new, finally.

The next day, the travel agent wasn't in his office. The day after that, the $550 plane was all booked. I almost cried. I then sat with him for another 3 hours while we went over every single flight that left Lima in my allotted time frame. It looked pretty grim. But finally he found a ticket to Panama, and a ticket to Miami for $610 that had me arriving in Florida at midnight on thursday. I booked it immediately not wanting it to slip away. The travel agent figured this was a better flight anyways cause Miami is more or a prominent airport than fort Lauderdale and thus, would be easier and cheaper to find flights to California. The man had clearly never traveled in the US before, where the more obscure airports have the cheaper deals.

Sure enough, the flights out of Miami were more expensive, but I was able to book a direct flight from Miami to San Francisco and arrive in the bay area at 10:25 in the morning. I have to spend the night in the Miami airport, but I figured that was a small price to pay in comparison to the alternative. Getting back to the east coast to catch my flight back to Lima was the tricky part. I once again spent hours in front of the computer screen and on the phone trying to find something that would work. Finally, I called a former Peace Corps volunteer who now lives in Miami and asked her if I could spend a day and a night with her on my lay over. She was ecstatic at the prospect of seeing me again, so I booked the flight. Getting to see this girl is such an added bonus for reasons I cannot say on my blog. Let’s just say, it makes this whole long process worth it. Like it all happened for a reason, just so would get to see her.

So finally, after countless hours, I have a ticket home and back again. It wound up costing me $1002 exactly. In the end, I could have gotten it for cheaper, but did sacrifice some money to do a multi-destination ticket. I will be flying into the San Francisco airport because the wedding is in Berkeley, but then flying out of the Sacramento airport, which is literally a 15 minute drive from my house. I have never had a more complicated travel itinerary. But being able to fly out of Sac will save 2 hours off on already complicated and long few days of travel.

My advice to anybody else who is looking for a cheap deal in an impossibly expensive situation: if you have the time and patience along with the flexibility to fly on a less than perfect travel itinerary, you can find something. Like anything else in life, you just have to work hard to get what you want.

The Beauty that Makes Life Worth Living

2008-04-22T19:11:00.000-07:00

This is why every single one of you needs to come to Peru. If you have ever met me, there is no need for me to explain this picture.

Gettin' Down in Funky Town

2008-04-20T10:42:00.000-07:00

Here are the foto's (Spanish spelling) of me cutting’ a rug with Peruvian men, young and old, short and tall. This picture on the right is moments after I walked into the wedding and was forced to dance with the groom who I had never met before, on the first dance. Notice the bride in the back round? I didn't even introduce myself, the only words I spoke to him were "yeah, I'm tall" or for those of you who a speak a little Spanish, the exact quote was "ya se, soy muy alta". The picture on the left is me dancing with one of the many old men who would not let me sit down. Literally, every time I tried to rest, a man would walk over and offer his hand. This is something that just doesn’t happen in the states. I'm so used to dancing in a circle with a group of girls and if a boy wants to dance with one of the girls, he has to shimmy his way over to the circle and some how successfully infiltrate the group and then widdel down the dance space so that he is finally dancing one on one with the girl. It seems very silly the way young American dance norms have evolved, but I like it better because you aren't forced to give a harsh and direct no to the man offering his hand, but instead you can passively electric slide your way in the opposite direction from him.

The day after the wedding, every one in the town who was at the wedding told me I was a crazy dancer. I still don't know if this is a good thing of a bad thing. It's good in the sense that Peruvians get a big kick outta the Gringa who bounces up and down in stead of doing a rhythmic two-step. I definitely felt a lot of eyes on me as I was dancing and it makes really uncomfortable. I just want to cut loose, have a good time and not care what other people think. But that is very difficult when you are the whitest, tallest person in the room that apparently gets down like James Brown. I know I have a very unique style of dancing. So much so that people can imitate me dancing to a T, and watching this makes me bury my face in my hands. I am such a looser.
One thing that would be so cool to get out of living in south America for two years would be to learn how to dance like a Latin. Salsa lessons are very popular amongst PCV's. I always look so enviously at people who clearly know what they are doing on a dance floor. I have this fantasy where I will come back to the states after my service and magically be able to move my hips like a Shakira.

On a completely different note, I swore off coffee. I knew I wasn't addicted and I don't believe that drinking coffee is bad for you. I just wanted to try it. I think this is a result of having entirely too much time on my hands and having to find new ways to amuse myself. I've been off coffee for 4 weeks now. And while I swear I'm not physically addicted, it was kinda hard at first because I like it so dang much. It's not so much the actual taste nor the caffeine I like, but it's the social act of sitting down with a cup a joe in the morning and reading, or taking a coffee break and enjoying a cup in solitude for 5 minutes while 20 children are running around and screaming outside. It hasn't been too hard for me though, cause I just switched to drinking more tea.

Peru has turned me into a liquid fiend. It seems like at any given moment in the day, I am drinking either water, tea, coffee (well, not anymore) juice or alcohol. Every day I drink 2.5 liters of water. On top of that I am probably putting down 4-6 cups a tea a day. In the morning I go to a fruit cart across the street from my house and get fresh squeezed orange juice or fresh squeezed pineapple juice. I'm also a huge fan or their blended juices here, where they take a fruit like mango or banana, put it in a blender, add milk and batta-bing, a fresh fruit smoothie. And of course on the weekends there is a ritual alcohol consumption. All this liquid intake, I believe, is just another byproduct of having far too much time on my hands. But I'll tell you one thing, I feel healthy and hydrated which is pretty much all one can ask for while training for a marathon. And really, running a marathon is all just a farce to stay in shape so I can bogie wall night with old Peruvian men.

Wedding Crashers

2008-04-14T15:48:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I got a last minute invite from an American friend to go to a Peruvian wedding. Not knowing a single person at the wedding except for the American girls who crashed with me, was hardly an excuse not to go. We weren´t quite sure when to show up because Peruvian events never start on time, except when they do. And it`s impossible to tell which will be 2 hours late and which are punctual events. We ended up missing the nuptials completely and arrived at the after party right in time for the couples first dance. In Peru, there is one song and one two-step that every does as their first dance. During the dance, mothers, fathers and close loved ones cut in to dance with either the bride or the groom. Within 3 minutes of arriving, the mother of the groom was quite literally pushing me out on the dance floor to dance with the groom, who I had never met before in my life. It was a bit awkward, especially since I was at least 6 inches taller than he was and I felt like I was back in Jr high. The only words I spoke to the groom were "yeah I know, I`m really tall". At least the dance was easy enough I didn´t have to look like a complete idiot.

It was my first all-peruvian wedding and gave me a good look at the differences in traditions and ceremony. In order to show case the biggest contrasts between my experiences with weddings in the two countries, I borrow from comedian Jeff Foxworthy: You might be at a Peruvian wedding if......

You are the only female that doesn`t have sequins or rhinestones on your dress of pants suit.

Instead of doing a toast with a flute of champagne, you do it with a half ounce of pisco sour in plastic shot glass

Instead of being offered chicken of fish, you are given a hunk of pork fat that still has hair on it

The pregnant bride is drinking

There are no tables. Every one sits in chairs along the peripheral of the room and eats with a Styrofoam plate on their lap

Instead of champagne, you pass around one plastic cup between 4 friends and share beer served from 1 liter bottles

The groom invited his girlfriend to the wedding

Instead of throwing rice, rice is served as the main course

There are no soft love songs played, just latin big band blaring so loud on the speakers you cannot be heard even if you are screaming at the person next to you

You get 6 wedding proposals by fat, drunk men twice your age who will not leave you alone all night

If the wedding starts at 6, it is considered distasteful and even offensive for leaving as early as 11

There are mothers subjecting their very small children to the defining music and drunk people until 4 o`clock in the morning

And last but not least, you might be at a wedding in peru if you are the tallest, whitest person in the room where the boys stare at you lustfully and the girls stare at you spitefully. But as long as you don´t mind drinking really cheap peruvian beer with 5 other peoples germs on it, it can be a pretty fun time

A few more Ancash Pictures

2008-04-09T21:36:00.000-07:00

I'm still waiting on more pictures, but living in the Peace Corps can be like living in the stone age some times. I'm not even going to explain this picture. But rather take suggestions as to what you think may be happening at the very moment the photo was taken. Regardless of what your imagination can come up with, it's all pretty typical behavior of how us Peru 9ers like to spend our precious time together.

This picture on the other hand is a bit more traditional . This is the group that spent easter weekend together up in the mountains. There are two little Peruvian girls in this picture, which is pretty typical peruvian kid behavior. We were hiking around the lake taking pictures, and the girls saw the cameras and started pleading to have pictures taken of themselves. Vishal and I were the only youth volunteers in the group, so we knew better. We immediately started shooing them away but the business volunteers got sucked in thinking the girls were cute. Big mistake. Then of course we couldn't get rid of them the whole time . And while some people in our group got a kick out of them, Vish and I were a little annoyed because we felt we could never get a vacation from our jobs as human jungle gyms. So naturally when we told them we wanted to take a picture with just our friends, they jumped in at the last minute like the disrespectful little gringo-abusers that most kids their age are. I think they finally got scared off when there was a dare made and, well, let's just say some clothes came off. Suffice to say, this alone did not scare them off. Their mom came looking for them and once she saw what were doing and that her kids were watching, she called them away. That is, only after she took a picture on her camera phone of the debauchery. Only a select few will get to see the pictures not appropriate for my blog. Let me know if you're curious enough to see the x-rated (okay more like PG-13) pictures. I'll email you one.

A Desperate House wife

2008-04-04T20:21:00.000-07:00

This is my 100th post on my blog!

As I write this, I am sitting in the guest bedroom of my friends apt in Lima drinking boxed red wine and eating a 60% coca Intense Dark, Ghirardelli, Mint Bliss chocolate square. I'm hiding out in the guest bedroom cause my friend needed some privacy to have a talk with a special man friend.....God knows how long I will be stuck in here. I came in today to get my long run of the week for my marathon training out of the way so I won't be super tired tomorrow night to celebrate my friend’s birthday. I finished my run about a 2 hours ago and am all showered and iced down. I only mention this because it is such a stark contrast to the nights I spend at site which usually involve a heavy carbohydrate meal instead of chocolate and wine, and a good book instead of wireless internet. Things have been pretty crazy on the home front anyways, so it's nice to escape and relax for the night.

I'll start my family affair with a scene from this afternoon. We didn't have any water for a good 36 hours. So when the water finally came back on around noon, I brought down the dirty mugs that had accumulated in my room to wash. There were 4 mugs in total (I've been on a big tea drinking kick lately). When I entered the kitchen, my host mom offered me some grapes and then sat down at the table. As I was washing my mugs I heard her start to cry. My first reaction, besides feeling extremely uncomfortable, was to listen closely to figure out if she was trying to conceal the tears so I wouldn't notice or purposefully sob louder and louder until it got my attention. If I could decode her tears, I would know the correct way to respond. After the 4th mug was washed, it became clear to me that she was crying to get my attention. I wanted to flee. I knew why she was crying, I knew that she wanted me to ask why she was crying and then she would proceed to talk for 30 minutes and tell me the same thing she's been telling me for the past week. But I just wanted to leave. Washing the mugs was the last thing I had to do while cleaning me room. And after I cleaned my room I was going to go to the market and take care of some errands. But I took the plunge instead. I asked her if she was okay and if I could get her anything. She said she was fine and then went into a very tearful rendition of same song she's been singing to any one who will lend an ear. One thing was clear. I had finally been fully immersed into the family and at the moment I felt I was in over my head.

It all started a week ago when Viviana told me she had decided it was time for her to move out of the house. I met Vivi at the gym and since moving in with her and her family, she has been my main source of friendship and sanity at site. This announcement was quite a shock to me, I had no idea she was even thinking about it. But she explained and I completely support her decision. Vivi is a single, 34 year old woman with a son who will turn 18 in June. She has lived with her parents her whole life. She has a good job and is smart, modern woman. Now that her son is fully grown, she feels that it is time that they go out on their own for both of their benefit. Like I said, I fully support the decision.

Viviana's mother on the other hand, does not. The woman has been down right hysterical over the situation, and examining her reaction provides an interesting dichotomy of the life of a house wife and the differences between generations and culture. Vivi's mom is not too terribly upset that Vivi is leaving, but that she is taking her son, Bruce. In the words of her mother, Bruce is not ready to leave the house. He doesn't know how to cook or clean. This is a funny statement to me for two reasons. The first being, he won't be out on his own. Bruce will still be living with his mother. The second being, when most 18 year olds leave for college in the US, they don't know how to cook or clean either.

The fact that Bruce will be living with his mother doesn't mean anything to the 69 year old house wife. In her words, Vivi has a job and doesn't cook or clean. Who will take care or Bruce? Since Vivi always lived with her parents, the grandma feels like she is more Bruce’s mother than his actual mother because she cooked for him and did his laundry his whole life. She actually said to me that Vivi was only his mother when he was still on the tit and since then, she has been the one who has cared and nurtured him. In her tearful tale at lunch today, she pleaded with me to talk to Vivi, to convince her into letting Bruce stay at least until he is 18 so she can teach him the necessary things he will need to survive. But they're not moving for another few weeks. Why is she so busy crying and not busy teaching him how to do laundry and cook a pot of rice? It only takes a few weeks to teach some one the ropes. But at the base of it, that's not really the problem. The problem is my host mother is an old house wife. She measures her self worth in caring for her children. She said today that all her other children are grown and don't need help. She is just going through the empty nest syndrome.

I did also mention to her, how in my country, it's very common for boys and girls to move out on their own, the majority of whom are not entirely "ready". I tried to explain to her the concept growing and learning through new experiences and how it will make him a better person to be more independent. It will make him a better husband and father someday because he will be able to help out around the house and not need to be taken care of by his wife, like another child. This idea left her speechless. Then the next day, she was talking to some of her other kids. I wasn't even in the conversation and all the sudden she snapped at me saying "I know that may be how they do it in your country, but that is not how we do it here!" and then she just kept saying "he's not ready, he's not ready, he's not ready". Again, I would like to reinforce that he is not moving out on his own but he will be living with his mother, and they are only moving 3 blocks away! I'm sure Bruce will just bring his laundry over to be washed by his grandma. But this even this statement will not calm my hysterical host mother.

Everybody else in the house supports Vivi's decision to move. Her mother is desperately trying to get me on her side so it's putting my in a sticky situation. Now my host mom is getting mad at me because I won't go on her side. There are just so many concepts that she fails to grasp and it is so frustrating for me to try and get her to see things from a different angle. Needless to say there is a lot of tension in the house and therefore my run, wine and chocolate feel especially good tonight. I try to be understanding of where my host mom is coming from, but she makes such a spectacle of it all. I didn't know 69 year old women could be such drama queens. It brings a whole new meaning to the term desperate house wives.

7 Month Itch

2008-04-03T11:27:00.000-07:00

About a week ago, Peru 9ers celebrated their 7th month in site. On this day, one of the most laid back, happy go lucky guy posted on our group list serve, that he was having a bad day. He acknowledged that his complaints were merely gripes and was keeping in mind the bigger picture, but was really needing to vent. It was a simple list of things that were bothering him: the micro buses are made for people that are 5’6’’ or shorter, after 6 months people are still mispronouncing his name, people only call him cause they want something etc.

After he posted this, about 10 other group members including myself, responded with the same replies of being fed up with this or that, and providing a story of something that has really been annoying us lately. It is my observation that we have hit the infamous 7 month itch. The honey moon faze is well over, we’ve settled into our lives and learned to adapt to so much, but we have found the elements of society that truly disagree with us. There are just some things that we can’t adapt to and will inevitably follow us through our service. And come August 2009, it will be these things that when asked what are looking forward to about leaving Peru, saying goodbye to grievances A, B, and C will be a top of that list.

Machismo is usually at the top of the list for most females. And indeed, many of my frustrations stem from this cultural strong hold. But some of the things that are topping my list, don’t have anything to do with humans. One of the most maddening things I’ve been experiencing is mosquito bites. If I were to guess, I would say I have roughly 20 bites at the moment, and that’s been pretty standard over the past 4 months. They always attack in the middle of the night. I wake up around 3 in the morning ready to jump out of my skin at the 5 or more bites swelled to the size of golf balls I have just recently received. I don’t need to wear body lotion any more because my skin is now generously moistened daily by bug repellent and anti-itch cream. I was given a mosquito net that I could put up over my bed, but I spend so much time on my bed doing work and watching movies on my lap top that I decided instead of putting it around my bed like a cage, I cut it up to make a screen for my window thinking it would have the same effect. Well it doesn’t. Every night before I go to bed, I do a check for the tiny, menacing devils but I never find them until it’s too late. Hopefully this is seasonal and the mosquitoes will be gone with the sun shine.

The other non-human annoyance in my life are the dogs. I apologize now to any dog lovers who may be reading this. I really don’t have anything against dogs and I think dog lovers would have an even harder time dealing with this topic than I do. There are so many stray dogs that roam the streets. A lot of them aren’t even stray, they are like watch dogs for shops and vendors. But they are allowed to wander about and harass poor innocent passer-bys like myself. These dogs are untrained, dirty and probably disease ridden. There is a reason we are given rabies shots. As I lay in bed, I can hear the dogs fighting. The sounds of growls, screams and the sound of impact from massive 10 or more dogs in a viscous rumble. It’s very disturbing to listen to. And listening to this, I can’t help but wish they would just kill each other so I wouldn’t have to deal with them any more. I know that sounds harsh, but there is real animal control problem here. Unfortunately, stray dogs is not a priority on the long list of problems the Peruvian government needs to deal with.

March was a very fun and care-free month for me. I was feeling on top of the world as I played with my friends. But now that March Madness has settled down, I’ve had some pretty big calls back to earth as the reality of Peruvian society comes crashing back around me. So in contrast to my sing-songy blog entries of march, my next few blog entries will focus on a but on the darker side of the things I experience. This does not mean I am spiraling down into an endless dark abyss of pessimism or depression. It just means I will be sharing both sides of the story. The world is far from perfect and I hope you are able to use my next few entries as food for thought about your life as an American and the unjustness that exists on every continent. Stick with me through my seven month, and 10 million mosquito bite, itch.

Ancash Money

2008-03-26T10:43:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I went to the City of Huaraz in the department of Ancash. Huaraz is probably no more than 300 miles away from Lima, but it took me 10 hours on a bus to get there. Part of the reason it takes so long is because Huaraz sits at 12,000 feet up in the Andes mountains and it was raining for most of the steep climb

As PCV's we get 3 weekends a year that we don't have to use our own vacation days to travel: thanksgiving, Easter and the Peruvian Independence day at the end of July. So when the time came to start planning what to do with out precious free vacation, every one started suggesting different beaches up and down the Peruvian coast. I live on the Peruvian coast and as much as I bitched an moaned about the weather all winter long and how I couldn‘t wait for beach weather, after 3 months of Summer in Lima, I was ready to high tail it outta there for fresh mountain air.

Lucky for me, there were a few other PCV's who live in the desert and were ready for some cool mountain love too. There are three 9ers who live in the department of Ancash. All of them are male and, to put it simply, are crazy bitches. They call themselves "Ancash Money" and I think it is safe to say, live up to the name. One member of Ancash money, Sick Boy, decided to check out of the altitude and into the beach for the weekend. But the other two boys stuck around to entertain the ladies of the desert, so I was able to observe the boys in there natural habitat.

My trip to Ancash was exactly what I was looking for. The mornings were fresh, cool and sunny and the afternoons and nights were rainy and cozy. Since Huaraz is located at the base of Cordiera Blanca and the Cordiera Negra (white mountain range and black mountain range) it is the starting base for all major Andes trek‘s. And therefore, there is a decent tourist population. But not the kind of tourist population you would find in Cancun or even machu picchu for that matter. The tourists that come through Huaraz are hard corps explorers and mountaineers. So for a white girl who lives in Peru, it was the perfect balance of local and non-annoying tourist attractions. That being said, I spend almost no time at all hanging out with locals or at local spots.

I stayed in a hostel/lodge run by an english man. The hostel had grass and pine trees. This alone would have made my trip amazing if I had never left the hostel. There were two coffee shops that are run by ex-patriots where I literally spend half of the time I was awake. I liked them both but fell in love with one of them. It was a two story loft/cafe that felt like a ski lodge. It was wooden and rustic yet modern enough to make it seem like you weren't in Peru (this is most evident in the bathroom). It caters to an almost all tourist crowd with a great English book and magazine library and familiar menu. And it had a fire place! I spent hours every single night drinking chai tea (which is almost impossible to find in Peru) sitting by the fire and reading. This to me was a vacation. This to me was heaven. It truly may have been heaven if there was skiing around. But because the Andes are a tropical mountain range, the snow level is too high (18,000 feet) for skiing.

But we did get to hike. I was really curious to see how my lungs would hold out at such high altitude. The boys live at that height so they were well adjusted. All us girls live at sea level, but I am training for a marathon and was hoping this would somehow make the transition easier. I did indeed have less trouble than the girls, even to the point where it seemed that I was breathing less heavily than the boys, but still, I could feel the thin oxygen. We did a really cool hike to a glacial lake with the most brilliant colored water I have ever seen.

We of course hit the bars and the clubs at night where we all proved that altitude makes alcohol hit your system faster and harder. I really love how amazing all of my Peru 9ers are. Every one can party till dawn and then get up one hour later to hike at a crazy altitude. I will post more pictures as they get sent to me by the rest of my friends.

March Madness

2008-03-24T17:25:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted much in the month of march. Normally I will let up on frequent updates when I feel like life has slowed and there's not much to report. In contrast, this whole month has been crammed with non stop action, I have found very little time to sit and write out my thoughts. Here is the list of things I have done since the beginning of this month.

I had an in service training in Lima for a few days for center-based youth volunteers

There were a bunch of other meetings in Lima in which several Peru 9ers were in town for over the course of 2 weeks. These two weeks of course, were filled with debauchery and the slogan for one of the weeks was "best spring break ever" as so named by the boys who reconfirmed the sexual benefits of being a male PCV in Peru. This is me and two of my favorite 9ers pre-gaming before a now infamous night.
I went to 3 going away parties
My host mom had her birthday and we had a big party that lasted till 5 in the morning in our house. There were a bunch of relatives from out of town visiting and staying and I'm pretty sure my host moms brother (roughly 65 in age) hit on me relentlessly.
I went to a wedding shower and a wedding. Bianca, my PCV predecessor just married her Peruvian boyfriend of 2 1/2 years. It was my first wedding in Peru and really fun
The kids went back to school so once again I've had to figure out a new schedule
I went on vacation for semana Santa (or holy week or spring break) up to the mountains in Ancash for 4 days. It was amazing and I'll post pictures and stories soon.
I started training for a marathon. Last Wednesday I ran 9 miles! I have an 18 week training program and the race is scheduled for 4th of July weekend
I celebrated St. Patrick's Day with an old friend from Spain/UC Davis. We went to an English pub which only had Peruvian beer on tap. We searched all of Lima for an Irish car bomb but were sadly let down.

I've been going to the beach every free second (which unfortunately there aren't too many of) trying to soak up the last of the sun before the gray comes back. The weather's already starting to change and I'm scared....... That's me and Dennis Lee. He's a third year and lived in the town next to mine. He just closed his service on wednesday and he'll be flying out soon. Lima just won't be the same without him.

So this is just an overview of a few very hectic weeks. And there is still a full week left in march! I remember when my biggest fear about Peace Corps was too much down time. Now, I'm so busy I need to take a vacation from all the vacations I've been having. This past weekend in Huaraz, one of my male PCV's said that joining Peace Corps was the best decision he ever made. Then he paused and said "wow, I've never said that before, I must really mean it". This past weekend amongst mountains and friends I too realized how incredibly happy I am and that joining Peace Corps was the best decision I ever made as well.

I am the Queen of Sexuality

2008-03-17T19:44:00.000-07:00

Today we had a going away lunch for two of the 3rd year volunteers dropping the total number of volunteers in Lima go from 7 to 5. At this lunch in Lima, I was seated by my country director Michael Hirsh. He said to me at some point during our meal that he's been keeping on my blog. This is a very scary concept to me. I still live under the delusion that only close friends, family and maybe strangers read this thing. And then I thought maybe he just says that to all volunteers to scare them, until he said "for the record, Jesus was circumcised". Proof that he actually has read it. But then he confessed that he doesn't normally follow it. He couldn't sleep one night and so he read all the blogs of all the Peru volunteers he could find. I thought maybe as a Jewish man, Michael would know that Jesus had been circumcised, but he told me that after he read about me girls question, he was curious so he goggled it. Apparently it says in the bible "on the 8th day, he was circumcised". Well, that takes care of that.

When the orphanage got wind that I was doing sexuality workshops in the girls home, and asked if I would do them for the kids there. So basically half of my work will sexuality. Which is really ironic to me. I remember all of the people that came in through out my scholastic career to teach us about "human development" and thinking they had the worst jobs every. The subject was always very uncomfortable for me and I hated the idea when first posed, of me teaching sexuality. Turns out, I have actually learned and grown even more than probably most of the girls I have been teaching. My workshops have kind of been my coming of age/coming to terms with my insecurities about the subject. So much so, that I have been carting my materials around Lima giving impromptu lectures to my friends and even complete strangers by demonstrating on a cut-out, felt vagina and penis.

Being a Peace Corps volunteer, or any gringo in Peru, gives you a certain amount of notoriety. I feel like there is no better place in this time in our lives to be single and in the Peace Corps. Both men and women have the option of being a playboy. Even the people who may not have gotten the most attention back in the states and would not be considered a "player", find the opposite sex throwing themselves at them. Because of this, any group gathering turns into a boys/girls night out on the town. These nights out produce some of the craziest sexual escapades stories that rival even the craziest stories from college. I often feel that socially, peace corps is just an extension of college and the older we get, the more the ante is upped. But it probably has something to do with the fact that 95% of our time is spent as mature, hard-working young adults in small communities, so when we do get together in the modern big cities with close American friends, it's naturally pretty intense. I really wish I could share some of my favorite stories, but even if I left out names and genders, I still feel they would be inappropriate to share.

One may wonder where I fit into all this sexual tomfoolery. After 9 months of being Peru one would find it natural, especially with the frequency in which I go out, that I myself may have a crazy story or two. Well, me and my friends have been watching a lot of Sex and the City. Every girl tries to pick which character they are most like. This past week I had a sexual epiphany of sorts (brace yourself, these don't come around everyday). I never felt I fit the mold of any of the 4 leading ladies exactly. I supposed I was more like Carrie than any other. But, she was too neurotic and nothing about her interests or life really matched mine. All the sudden it hit me. I'm Samantha! For those of you who do not follow the show, Samantha is most commonly referred to as the slut. She is someone who as a lot of unattached, unemotional sex and doesn't feel bad about it and doesn't care what anyone says. Now I am very very far from a slut. For this reason, it never crossed my mind that I would we fall into the "Samantha" category. But I was basing that solely on the number of romantic partners the two of us have had. When it comes down to it, Samantha and I have a lot in common. We are both strong, self confident women. Neither of us feel we need a man or a relationship to make us whole or happy. Samantha is not afraid to take what she wants out of life. For her, that means having a lot of sex and not caring what people think. For me, it's not having a lot of sex and not caring what people think.

Believe it or not, I feel there is actually a stigma now, about women who don't frequently engage in sexual endeavors. Because of sexual role models like Samantha, women aren't supposed to be afraid to be sexual and unihibited or be branded as sluts. Apparently I am not a modern woman if my sexuality isn't out there for every one to see. But that's the thing. I am like Samantha because I am not afraid to be a prude and I don't care if I am labeled as one. I find it strange that I feel the people who judge me and tease me the most about not sleeping around, are women not men. However, I do get my fair share of ball busting from the boys. I think this dynamic is really interesting and that the idea of sex for women in American culture has completely changed in the past 10 years, thanks in large part to Sex and the City.

So here I am. An American girl in Peru, teaching sexuality. Sex is all around me so it's hard to ignore and I feel like I'm not telling the whole truth if I never discuss it on my blog as part of the whole experience. Maybe this is all too much information. But if it is, maybe it will scare my country director out of reading my blog.

Peruvian Humor

2008-03-15T13:32:00.000-07:00

My new host family finds me hilarious. I’m quite used to having Peruvians laugh at me, but for once it’s not because I am making a mockery of their language ie instead of saying what I shame! I say what a penis! Highly amusing mistake, I know. But these errors had the locals saying ’what is this gringo doing here?’ and unfortunately at times, had me thinking the same thing.
But now with my new found comic audience, I am celebrating my master over the Spanish language (in the simplest way possible). I will give you a few examples now of my new found comic genius.

My host mom is very concerned as to whether or not I will like the food she has prepared. Despite my constant reassurance that not only is she a great cook, but that I am not a picky eater and very easy to please, she asks me after every meal if it pleased me. Yesterday she asked me if I liked the meal she had prepared. I told her it was terrible and I didn’t like any of it. The whole family saw that my plate was licked clean of even a grain of rice, and exploded with laughter. Have you ever heard anything so funny in all your life? The gringo said she didn’t like the food, but clearly she did because she ate everything!

Another side splitting example of my new knack for whit was when I came home from the beach today. I have been trying to soak up every last bit of sun before Lima reverts back to desolate months of endless gray. My host mom commented on how tan I looked. I agreed that I am quite tan for my naturally pasty self. But I told her to wait until July, where I will be white like a ghost. My host brothers started a minute strait of knee slapping, belly jiggling laughter, stopping only to breathlessly repeat the punch line “blanca como una fantasma!” I had no idea nursery rhyme metaphors translated into standup comedy.

I think I am just now understanding the full magnitude for Peru’s meek sense of humor. I don’t think I have ever laughed more in my life than I did my 3 months of training. I do remember feeling my first month at site that I missed laughing (and basically any sense of relaxed happiness) terribly. But I never made the simple jump to conclusion that, from my cultural perspective, Peruvians aren’t as funny as Americans. One thing us white people from the north agree is on, is that Latinos in general, don’t do sarcasm. And since Americans are arguably some of the most sarcastic people on the planet, there have been many a story-worthy misunderstanding between PCV’s and Peruvian associates.

And since these silly miscommunications are the anecdotes that make my blog worth reading and my Peace Corps service worth serving, I continue to roll with the punches. I may not understand why my family thinks the things I say are so funny (maybe they just think I have a silly accent) but I’m sure happy they get a kick out of me. That means that they like when I’m around. And feeling like I am wanted in the house is worth every embarrassing language slip up I have ever had.

Canadian Softwood

2008-03-03T05:21:00.001-08:00

Anyone who gets the title reference (Kristen Schroer, Gus Caravalho and possibly Eric and Amber) hang tight, I will get back to that....

I don't have a terrible amount of stuff in common with my friends in Lima. Sure, we all work for international development agencies and went to school in the US, but apart from that, our backgrounds and experiences are very different. But the reason we get along so well I think, is because we share a love of people and being together. Clearly, my friends are very open and generous with their house, as they gave me my own set of keys and let me stay over whenever I want. They not only extend their warm welcome to me but to any one passing through Lima. This past weekend, the small ocean view apartment which usually houses just Tania and Candice and the occasional peace corps refugee (me), played home to 7 people. It went from being a cozy home to a busy home base where people were constantly coming any going. Tania described it managed madness I call it organized chaos, but we all agree it was a lot of fun.

So with all of these out of town visitors, I tried to help my friends by taking the tour guide burden off their hands for a few hours and took 3 people to my girls home Saturday evening. I brought along a fellow youth PCVer, and the girls couldn't get enough of his goofy, lovable infectious personality. I brought the other out of towners who had never seen a Peace Corps site so I was further fulfilling my job as mini ambassadors. My friends even helped me and my counterpart out with the community meeting, which not only reflected well on me but allowed for lot's of cross cultural exchanges.

Afterwards, we met up with the rest of the group at a club on a beach 10 minuets away from my site. It was such a neat club I can't believe it took me so long to discover it. I spotted my friends across the way and noticed a tall, white boy I had never seen before with them. I made my way over and went to meet the new face but before I could even say hi he said "you went to UC Davis didn't you?" I immediately replied I did and he said he was an international something or other grad student there. I thought for a moment that perhaps he had been one of my TA's or maybe I had met him through all the other grad students I was hanging out with before I left for Peru. I didn't even get a chance to ask when he said "I recognize you from the bars". I was shocked. There are 30,000 students at UC Davis, how the heck did he remember my face, especially considering I haven't been there for 9 months. I interpreted this as me going to the bars way too much. But if this was true, if he recognized me from the bars, that means he must have gone out a lot too.

The next day I couldn't quite get over the fact that I was that big a party girl in college. It's true I did go out a lot, but I didn't recognize him at all. Then I let myself play with the idea that maybe I was so dang cute, he picked me out of the crowds and has remembered me since. To my surprise, the next night when we were organizing a dinner with the same crowd we normally hand out with, Tania had invited the UC Davis guy. I was excited, cause I had a couple a questions for him. I wanted to know exactly why and how he remembered me. I started out by asking if he recognized me, would he recognize any of my friends? If he could pick my face out of a crowd, than he could surely do the same with Steph and Sandra. He asked if I went to Sophia's a lot. I said, sort of. I played trivia there every tuesday. And there we found our answer. He said he was a regular, that he was on the team Canadian Softwood. Canadian Softwood?! I screamed at him with way too much enthusiasm. Of course I remember Canadian Softwood! They won all the time. I even went up to them at one point and told them how good they were.

This may be one of the weirdest coincidences I have had to date. I cannot believe that in some crazy beach bar right by my little site in Peru, I ran into a trivia tuesday regular. After dinner we ended up playing poker and we decided we needed to get a hold of some sort of trivia game in English and have a trivia night. Or maybe i should challenge him to a game in Spanish. He was on the best team back in davis, but maybe he's not so tough in Peru.

My Life at 6 Months

2008-02-25T13:18:00.000-08:00

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.

I Want to Rock and Roll All Night

2008-02-20T17:14:00.000-08:00

Part of living in another country is having to adapt to with the norms and fads that are different from your own. One defining characteristic of almost of any country is it´s music. I thought that Peru would listen to more of a Latin or even South American blend of music, much like Euro pop or something. But I was very surprised to find out that most Peruvians only listen to Peruvian Music. Sure, Shakira and Enrique get a decent amount of air time, but in general the average Peruvian only knows made in Peru.

This is supposed to be one of the fun parts of expereincing a new culture. And at first it was fun. Within the first week or two of training I could already recognize some of the popular songs and even begining to learn some of the words. Now, 8 months later, I know all the words to all the songs. And that was cool too, 5 months ago. I`m not sure if it`s because there is limited variation of music because Peru is not the largest country or if it`s because Peruvians flat out dislike things that are new, but he same 20 songs that were repeatedly played when I first arrived in country back in June are still being blasted on every radio station. I`m not insiuating that there have been 20 songs that have been so popular they are still topping the charts, I am saying that it`s that they don´t play any new music. It`s like being stuck in a time warp. Maybe it`s just a cultural difference. In the US the music industry is so competetive that every day 50 new songs and artists come out. The US pop scene may be easy to criticize for many reasons, but at least there is no lack of variety on the music scene.

I made this comment to a Peruvian friend who has spent time in the states and he got very defensive and told me it was the same way in the US as it is in Peru. He said that we play the same 20 songs over and over again. I agree with this statement but I am sure the same 20 songs that were being played in June 2007 are not the same 20 songs that are being played right now. Which makes me wonder, what the heck kind of music is popular right now back home?

My friends defensiveness over the the repetitive music in Peru stayed with me. I wondered it I was just being close minded or rejecting the music here because deep down I really missed the music from back home. But last night I confirmed that it is indeed the music, not me that has issues.

I went to a town celebration with Viviana last night. There was a big concert in the town statium with some really big name bands. There were thousands of people there and it was so exciting for because now that I live in Lurìn there is stuff like concerts and festivals to attend. We got there around midnight and the band that was playing was a hip rock and roll all male band. It was great, all the band members were cute and really loved their music. I couldn`t figure out why I hadn`t heard more of their music. Followed by the the rock band two different cumbia bands played. Cumbia is a type of latin. big band style of music with a full orchestra and several singers. These bands are also always all male. The last band to play is really famous in Peru. Of course really famous in Peru means they have the same number of followers at a good underground band in the states. But, this band sings 5 of the 20 songs that are played on the radio. This band started playing at 3 in the morning and were still going when we left at 5. After the first hour they had played all their popular songs which I new all the words to. Then I couldn´t believe it, instead of playing new stuff, they just played the same songs over again. And I seemed to be the only one bothered by this. How hard is it to fill two hours of different songs! But it just confirmed that Peruvians just like the music that they know.

The night was really fun, but like I said, we didn´t go home till 5 in the morning and it was a tuesday. Lucky for me I am vounteer and am able to control my schedule. I didn`t get up until noon today. But the group I went with all work at city hall and only got an hour of sleep. While in general, I classify Peruvians as having a monatenous taste in Music they can party like rock stars.

My New Digs

2008-02-18T16:46:00.000-08:00

I`m settling in quite nicely into my new home and family. The house is much nicer than my previous and my family is exactly what I was looking for. I`ve traded in the compo for the for a house on the bussiest street in Lurìn with a window that opens right out onto the noise. Instead of baby roosters waking me at 4 in the morning I now have two booths set up on opposite corners selling pirated CD`s. They each blast contrasting music all day long so it is never quite in my room. But so far that is my only complaint. I can´t put into words how thrilled I am to have a bathROOM as opposed to the very non-private seatless toilet seperated from the kitchen by a flimsy shower curtain. My new toilet even flushes, except between 10 PM and 7 AM when the whole towns water supply is shut off. That also can be a little bothersom when it`s 11 at night and I need to wash my face. But it`s really not a big deal. We keep buckets of water all over the house to accomidate for the waterless hours.

My new family has been great so far. First of all, no kids. While the street outside the house is busy and noisy, inside the house is calm and quite. And the family doesn´t all pile in front of the television all hours of the day. They go out and do things and they even invite me along. And since I´m living in Lurìn, there is stuff to do. I went to my first community festival last week with Viviana and I finally felt like I was getting the Peruvian Community expereince. My host mom cooks more than just rice and potatoes. They all talk to me and we have interesting and stimulating conversation. So it seems that everything I wanted, I got. Plus, one totally awesome bonus is the house has cable television. I get to watch CNN in english instead of the mind dumbing programs they dare to call news programs on the Peruvian channels.

I`m hoping everything stays good and the transition period goes by quickly. I know there is no such thing as a perfect living situation but if anything it is an improvment over the last.

Friendship Day

2008-02-15T13:36:00.000-08:00

In Peru, Valentine's Day is more commonly known as Friendship Day. This makes me quite happy. Not because I'm single, but because I dislike the "holiday". And whether you believe it or not, I don't dislike Valentine's Day because I am a disgruntled single. Quite the contrary, I actually prefer not being in a relationship on Valentines Day. I've had my share of wonderful boyfriends. Every year when February rolls around I tell them I don't want to celebrate it and I don't want any presents. Of course, non of them believe me and feel it is some sort or trick or test. The truth is, I don't need a holiday to show some one that I care about them. I especially don't like that Valentine's Day demands that one show love through material goods: flowers, jewelry, expensive dinners. And let's not forget balloons. Nothing says I love you like a bunch or helium inflated red latex. The expectations of Valentine's day are just as inflated and overpriced as the heart-shaped balloons. There is a direct corelation between money and love. According to Valentine's day law (written by See's, Teleflora, Morton's Steakhouse and Tiffany's) the more money you spend on a Valentine's Day gift, the more you love some one. It is this reason that I do not like Valentine's Day and genuinely mean it when I tthe man of the hour that I don't want any presents.

However, when I am out of a relationship, I'm rather fond of the day. "Single Awareness Day", as I've heard many a bitter single woman refer to it, is an awesome excuse to get together with all of your friends and have a party. And since Peru appropriately calls it Friendship Day, me and the girls did not waist the opportunity to do what we do best: get together and have a good time. I had originally planned with Candice, a very simple and relaxing evening. It would be a nice lite, homemade dinner followed by desert and champagne while watching Sex and the City (the single girl's bible on DVD). Some how my simple plans evolved over the weeks without me knowing. When the rest of the girls showed up they brought with them all sorts of red decorations, red devil horns,a pinata filled with all the escencial V-day goodies, alcohol, chocolate and of course red heart balloons.

We decided if we were going celebrate, we were going to do it right. So we got all dressed up and as we waited for the last of party to arrive, put together a whole air-band/lip sync performance to "The Summer of 69". So we danced and sang, ate and drank and went outside and beat the crap out of the pinata. It was a laid back, rockin party. It's the way Valentine's Day should be.
And as we settles down with a few episodes of Sex and the City, we celebrated not our singleness, but the love we had for ourselves. All of my friends in Lima are either volunteers or working for an NGO. We are all living in a foreign country and are doing something we are passionate about. We are independent and strong and do not need the crutch of a man. They say before you can be happy in a relationship, you have to be able to be happy alone. So yesterday, we celebrated being happy above all else. Being in Peru has been a challenge like no other and there have been many days and nights were I have felt sad, scared, alone and lost. So finally having found my way in life again and feeling like a stable, happy girl was my real reason to celebrate. I didn't need a day on a calender to reflect and express my emotions, but I never miss an opportunity for a great party!

Starting Over

2008-02-12T10:36:00.001-08:00

Before I begin my starting over entry, I want to share with you just how clever my girls at the home are. I was giving my sexuality workshop today and we were going over the anatomy and physiology of the male and female reproductive organs. When we got to foreskin, the psychologist asked one of the girls to pay close attention because she has an 8 month old son and it is very important for her to know how to care for it. The psychologist also mencioned that certian cultures and religions have the foreskin removed for various reasons. The girls asked for an example and I told them that most jews have the foreskin removed in a religous ceremony when they are babies. One of the girls chimed in and said that Jesus was Jewish and then asked if Jesus had foreskin or not. The Psychologist and I just looked at each other and she finally said that that would be a great question for the head nun. But seriously, I´m really impressed that my girls are thinking critically. ¿Did Jesus have foreskin? Hopefully I won´t loose too much sleep thinking about this one.

Anyways, starting over.......

Starting over is a way of life. Wether it is by choice or circumstance, it is an unavoidable stage in life. We all start from scratch various times through out our lives in a million different ways. It can be by starting a new job, breaking off a relationship, the death of a loved one, moving, having a child or simply taking a new aerobics class at the gym. Some people self impose life changes regularly while others get into their little nitche in life and only start anew when forced to. Whatever the circumstance, starting over is hard.

I seem to fall under the self imposed catagory. Every year or so, I like to pack my bags and embark on a jounrey unlike those I have had to date. Peace Corps is about as extreem as one can get to starting over from scratch. I left all my friends and family, a relationship, my native language, my car and basically everything else I knew to live in a strange new place. And it was hard. Anytime some one starts over, you go from being secure and confident to not having a clue what you are doing. For me, there is notihng worse than not knowing what I am doing. Yet I keep doing to it to myself over and over again. I think I am some kind of a masecist.

Case and point: last night was my first night with my new host family. This is now my 5th host family. I don´t think it ever gets any easier. Even though I knew this family coming in, there is still the usual awkward "Hi, I live in your house now". I have to retrain a new host mohter to leave me alone and not treat me like I am 6 years old. At the base of it, I really hate living with a host family. I understand the benefits of living with one for a little while so one can better learn the language and culture, but making it maditory for 2 full years is a bit extreme.

So, I´m in my new house now and it´s good, but I couldn´t help but wonder as I was laying in bed last night, why i keep putting myself through this. My new house and family should be better than the last, but I felt so out of my element for the ump-teenth time. All the new and different things were strange and I found myself missing my old home. Crazy I know, considering how badly I wanted to get out of there. But you can never under estimate the power of comfort and the terror of the unkown.

Despite my aprehension about starting over again, all and all, things are going really good right now. I spent the last two days at the beach with various friends. The water has magically become not disgusting and actually a really pretty blue. There still is a decent amount of trash but if you swimout far enough its not that bad. So I`ve been in the water a lot, and I couldn´t be happier. I took the day off from the beach to go back to work. Lucky for me, it was totally worth it because of the whole jesus/foreskin question. I hope all of you find this as humorous as I do.

The Deputy Directors Visit

2008-02-07T09:51:00.000-08:00

I was told it was a big honor and a big deal that the Deputy Director for all of Peace Corps would be visiting my site. I don’t think it was the Deputy Director coming that made me nervous so much as the Country Director and Assistant Country Director of Peru visiting my site. I never have to see the Deputy Director again, but if I let down the team, I would have to face the shame every time I visited the Peace Corps office in Lima. I finally dealt with the stress of the visit in the same way I dealt with the stress of feeling like the worst Peace Corps volunteer in all of Peru: I threw myself into work. Because of that, I felt ready and proud to present my projects. It was also nice that I knew I didn’t have to present a polished, perfect picture. All of the directors are former PCV’s and so they understand the circumstances in which I work.
I had hoped to have my theater group curtain ready, but after our last practice on Thursday before I left, only 2 of the 10 girls, could do the play without a script. But I figured it would probably be more interesting for the directors to see a dress rehearsal than the final product, that way they could see the actual work being put into it. I also had organized a few games for all the adults to play with the girls. But I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to fill the allotted two hours of the visit.

In the end, the visit was a blur and there wasn’t enough time to do everything I wanted to do. I should have known better. The tour of the Hogar, which I estimated to be 5-10 minuets lasted a half hour. All the young girls attached themselves to any and all of the free legs and hands of all of my directors. So moving from place to place was difficult cause all the little girls wanted to be part of what was happening. The attention starved girls probably had the most dramatic impact on the directors. Once upon a time it had that same effect on me, but I’ve learned to push through the need to hold every little girl’s hand. If I did that, I would never get anything done.
The Deputy Director’s assistant was so excited that we had a baby llama. She may have taken more pictures with the llama than with the girls. Then we left the youngest girls behind finally for our theatrical presentation. The girls were amazing. They did so well, I had to hold back tears when they were all done. Then we played our games and the girls and directors seemed to really enjoy themselves.

Afterwards I sat down with all the directors and they asked me mountains of questions about the home and my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer. It was really overwhelming. I was nervous. When I’m nervous I can’t stop smiling, even if it’s a very serious subject and I sound like a complete idiot. I make a lot of grammatical errors, in English, and my brain moves so quickly I can’t make well thought out statements. I literally had 6 people bombarding me questions. I know they were just curios and they genuinely cared about what I had to say, but it felt like an intense interview. I had the spot light on me, but the time was zooming by. I found myself wanting more time with them. Everyone was asking questions about me and my work, but I really wanted to talk to the Deputy Director and ask her about her experiences and her work. I know very little about her other than she was a Peace Corps volunteer in the 60’s in Tunisia and has a PhD in international development. In short, she is some one I strive to be like.

They whole visit went well until the end. The group was supposed to eat lunch at the Hogar, but the food wasn’t ready in time and the directors had to get moving to see the site of the business volunteer next to me. I felt horrible, they all must have been starving. But I didn’t feel as bad as the head nun. “Oh the shame, the shame” she kept saying to me. I told her not to worry. that the directors were all very pleased with the visit. Of course they only had amazing things to say to me. I don't want to use the term "blowing smoke up my ass", one because it's crude and two, because I think they were all being very geniune. But it did feel a bit like the afformentioned phrase. It’s funny to think that just a month ago I felt like I was the worst Peace Corps Volunteer in all of Peru. Moral of the story? Work will set you free. That is, if your work is as challenging and rewarding as mind.

The Deputy Director said a few words to me personally, but in front of everyone, so it was kind of awkward. She told me how proud and impressed she was with how I interact with the girls and work and inspire and all that stuff. I was bumbling idiot with a big embarrassed smile on my face and tears in my eyes. The Deputy Director made me feel flattered, humble and proud. But the real reward was seeing how good the girls felt after successfully performing their first play in front of such intimidating adults. Every one in the Hogar felt honored for having received such important guests.

At the end of the visit, the directors were taking pictures with me and the girls. The local police who always come to the hogar to eat lunch, jumped up and starting taking pictures of us with their camera phones. That’s how special everyone thought my directors were.

I’m glad I was able to not stress out too much about the visit. I knew it would be great, because I have been working really hard. And after all the preparation and my crazy trip to Carnival, all followed by a visit from 6 very important people, I was so relieved to have it over with. Me and my counterpart breathed a huge sigh of relief. But tomorrow I’ll be back to do my sexuality workshop, so my relaxed state will be short lived, cause in just a few more hours it’s back work. And just when I thought I was done with site visits for a year of so, I just got an email from my doctor saying next time I’m in the Lima, to stop by his office so we can plan a time for him to come out and check out site. I guess it never ends. But as long as I keep up the hard work, I shouldn’t have much

Carnival!

2008-02-06T08:49:00.000-08:00

Cajamarca and Carnival were both amazing. Cajamarca is the capital of the mountainous province with the same name. It is situated 9,000 feet up in the Andes and is famous historically, for being the location where the Inca king Atahualpa, was captured by the Spanish. In order for his release, the Inca’s had to fill a room once with gold and twice with silver. It took them over a year, and in the end, the Spanish killed him anyways. And so, the city, of maybe 100,000 people, is a unique mix of Spanish and Incan tradition.
After a long and frustrating trip, I finally stepped off the bus and breathed in the fresh mountain air. I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. It was so good to get out of the desert and Lima. The mountains shot up in all directions from the Cajamarca valley, and they were green. There weren’t many trees, just lush, bright, green grass covering every inch of the ancient sierras.
I had seen so many pictures of Cajamarca and other mountain towns, it was so amazing to finally be in a part of Peru that looked to incredible to be real. Immediately, I felt a pang inside. I thought how different my life would be if I wasn’t a Lima volunteer. Cajamarca was always the image I had in my mind of how I would spend my two years in Peace Corps. My whole trip, I couldn’t shake the “what if” feeling. Especially because in my first month of service, I was offered a site changed to a mountain town in Cajamarca, which I turned down. But I didn’t spend too much time thinking about the way things could be. Within 5 minuets of hoping off the bus, I was at the hotel and regaling new stories with follow PCV’s in no time.

I invited my Lima friends up to celebrate the festivities with us. One of my friends is a former PCV from Ecuador and all of my Lima friends were so excited to meet all the volunteers who I never shut up about. I think all my fellow 9ers were taken aback by how much my friends knew about them already. There must have been at least 45 volunteers. We filled a whole hotel and then some. So Friday night, every body hung out at the hotel catching up until it was time go out and party.

Saturday morning I woke up bright an early and went with Team Lima (all the volunteers from specific departments have cool names, aka “Ancash Money“ and “Arequipin’ it real”. Since I was representing Lima solo, I gave me and my friends the name Team Lima) to the Banos del Inca. The Inca Baths are natural hot springs that they have channeled into private baths and swimming pools. Tania and Lauren opted for private baths and me and Candice hit the pool. It was the most spectacular setting. A steaming natural pool surrounded by bright green mountains. Even though it is so high up in the mountains, it’s tropical, so when the sun is out it’s quite warm. It was strange but awesome to be in a bikini at 8 in the morning at 9,000 feet. The sun was hot but the air was still mountain morning crisp. Being in the water felt amazing, being out of the water felt amazing. I could have stayed there all day. But I knew the tranquility of the morning had to end. It was Carnival. Craziness was about to ensue.
I had heard stories about what to expect. It was clear who the veteran volunteers were and who were the rookies (rookies featured bellow in picture). Peru 7 had shirts specially made and others were dressed in a wide array of get ups. I was wearing my high school basketball shorts, sandals from Costco and a Cajamarca Tee-shirt I bought at the hot springs. Cajamarca is famous for it’s completely, out of control, water and paint fights. We all started drinking and in a huge group we took to the streets to take on the locals at their own game. We were instant targets cause we are white (and black and asian, but definetly not Peruvian). Every person that saw us attacked us. When we finally arrived in the town plaza we were COVERED in paint and water. So we danced in the plaza with each other and locals as we continued to be nailed by balloons and buckets from all sides.

This may sound awful to some of you. But I assure you, with the right mind set and the right group of people, it is such a great experience.

One thing about Cajamarca, is that every house and building has a balcony. So you can’t walk down the street without people dumping buckets of water on you. So after we were done with the war in the Plaza, we headed back to the balconies of our hotel to continue attacking anyone that passed. The picture on the left is after we had all been attacked in the streets so we're up on the balcony of the hotel with a water baloon launcher

When late afternoon hit, we were all tuckered out. Some volunteers headed to the Inca Baths to recharge. Me and Team Lima went and passed out for two hours in our room. The nights in Cajamarca are chilly, so when we woke up we got some hot soup and yummy tea which hit the spot after our incredible day. Team Lima went back to the room after dinner and took advantage of the cable TV and I didn’t see them the rest of the night. I spent the evening in the common area with Peru 9ers, drinking beer and catching up on all the good stories from site. Afterwards we went and danced the night away at a club.

By the time I surfaced Sunday morning, a lot of volunteers had already left. I decided to go check out the parades with Team Lima. Saturday is the official paint day, the rest of the days are just water. We thought we would be fine. But we were four white girls in a sierra town. We were attacked, and unfairly. But I guess we should have expected that. We always get way more attention than we want. And when the men who normally whistle and holler as you walk by them have water balloons and buckets of water, of course they are going to attack us instead of the tiny, 40 year old village woman standing next to us. In this picture, you can't really tell, but Tania (to my right) is alraedy soaking wet head to toe. As you can see the streets were filled with people, but everything about us makes us stand out.

I learned my lesson from my trip from Lima and gave myself plenty of time at the bus. I settled into to my seat that I would be occupying for the next 14 hours, and I slept better than I ever slept on an overnight bus. Between the Inca Baths, the friends, the paint wars and the green fresh mountains, Saturday was one of the best days I’ve ever had in Peru. I woke up in Lima ready to take on the summer desert once again. But I had something bigger on my mind than the heat. The deputy director for all of Peace Corps, the country director of Peru, the assistant director of Peru and my program director were all arriving at my site hours after I did. I tried very hard all of Carnival not to think about this visit and enjoy my vacation. I did a good job of keeping it out of my mind. But it was time to move it from the back burner to front and center. Did all of my plans fall apart over the weekend while I was partying and playing? Or was my visit a gran exito (big success)? Tune in tomorrow for the

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Carnival

2008-02-05T09:57:00.000-08:00

A lot has happened over the past 5 days and I want to write all about it, but I have broken it up into three parts. I have started with the trip to Carnival because it is too classic to ignore. I have all the stories written and will post it in 3 parts.

I travel a lot. But like the vast majority of my trips, there were a few bumps in the road this past weekend. And I use the term, bump in the road, because my travel hang ups always seem to revolve around transportation. I have had some truly awesome travel catastrophes. My dad always thinks he can one up all of my break downs and strange “Benicia triangle” mishaps, but my dad has never pushed his broken down car across the Mexican border, alone. I’m also pretty confident my dad doesn´t have anything quite as unique as my trip to Carnival in Cajamarca.

It’s my fault, I admit it. I was all ready to leave on my 13 hour, overnight double-decker bus up to the mountain town of Cajamarca for Carnival. I had planned on meeting over half of Peru 9 as well as a bunch of other PCV’s from different groups for the famous festivities of Carnival, way up in the Andes mountains. But due to a big misjudgment in Lima traffic, I arrived at the bus station just in time to see my bus role out of the station. Now, my bus was supposed to leave at 7 PM. Nothing in Peru is punctual. I have never been on a bus that has left on time. But of course, Ali’s law says the one time I am running late is the one time a bus leaves on time in the history of Peru. I arrived exactly at 7. If they had waited just one minuet more, I would have made it.
Since Carnival in Cajamarca is popular, and most of the overnight buses had already left, I was certain if I stayed in Lima I was not going to make it Cajamarca in time. So I hopped on another overnight bus to Trujillo, which is 8 hours north, thinking the closer I got, the easier it would be find an empty seat. I called just about everyone I thought might help me. I had two friends leaving out of Trujillo that night. They checked with the bus line they were traveling on, and the 4 busses they had leaving on Friday were all full. My situation was looking grim, there was a good chance I was going to wake up in Trujillo and be stuck there. I had to talk myself down from a panic attack telling myself that I’d been in way worse situations than this. But it wasn’t so much about being stuck and not knowing what to do. It was just that this was my first real vacation I was taking in Peru. It was my first time in the Andes mountains. It was all my friends. It was Carnival! And it was looking like I wasn’t going to make it.

I arrived in Trujillo at 7 in the morning. I went to 9 different bus stations, and nobody had seats. It was beginning to look hopeless. But finally I found an open seat on a bus leaving at 10:30. But the catch was it wasn’t on a “reputable” bus line. Peace Corps gave us a list of busses we are supposed to travel on for our safety and our sanity. Now I know why. This was a seven hour bus ride with no bathroom and no air conditioner (the first 3 hours of the ride were through the desert). I’m not entirely sure what happened, if they oversold the bus or what, but there were more people on the bus than there were seats. I was one of the first people to board and there was already a woman with her two daughters in my seat. I told her she was in my seat and she said that it was all the same. I told her actually, it was not all the same, that I had elected that seat in the very front, next to a window because I get sick. I thought she would pack up her family and move to a different seat, but she just moved over to the aisle seat. She lifted the arm rest in between the two seats and put her two daughters in between us.

I realized then, that this woman had down the classic Peru tradition of buying one seat for the whole family and that I had to compromise my space because of it. I was already in a pretty bad mood having missed my bus the night before and being terrified that I would be miss Carnival all together. I may have been a bit more tolerant of the situation if it wasn’t for my already foul disposition. But because there were other people raising huge to-do’s about having paid for a seat and not getting one, I found the courage to put down the arm rest. I literally put down the arm rest on top of one of the little girls and said “oh, excuse me, excuse me”, forcing the little girls to move over. The woman gave me a look like “what do you think you`re doing you incredibly rude, white girl?”. This was definitely a difference in culture. In her world, it was totally expectable to buy one bus ticket and put three people in it. But in my, totally annoyed world, this was absolutely unacceptable. So when she gave me a look, I gave one right back. And it was settled. She knew she was in the wrong. So the arm rest stayed down the rest of the trip as she tried to balance one girl on her lap and squeeze the other one into her leg room. Of course she immediately wandered over to my leg room, and the rest of the trip became a personal space tug of war.

I felt bad, I was totally being bitchy about my space. But I kept saying to myself “you paid for this ticket, stand up for yourself”. But then the Peace Corps side of me kept reprimanding my behavior for being selfish and unsympathetic. Both the girls and the mom were all so sweet. Once the mom realized that I wanted my space, she was very respectful and polite about keeping her girls on her side. And the girls offered me some of their cookies and soda. But I still proceeded to be annoyed for most of the trip.

When we got close to Cajamarca, the bus started getting bombarded by buckets of water and water balloons. Since there was no air-conditioning, the windows were opened and we all got wet. I actually found it really cool. Welcome to Carnival, I thought to myself. But the little girls did not have the same response. They started crying, which of course annoyed me even more. I couldn´t wait to get off that bus and arrive.

But finally, finally, finally, 24 hours after missing my bus in Lima. I arrived in Cajamarca. Was it all worth it? I’ve rambled on too long already to pour into the high jinx of this wet and wild weekend. So I will post pictures and stories tomorrow about carnival

Movin` Out

2008-01-29T08:25:00.000-08:00

I love having a blog. I like it better than sending out mass emails, but at the same time there is a down side to posting things so publicly. There are a lot of things that happened, some even life changing, that I have been unable to document publicly. So for the people I don`t talk to you apart from my blog, you`re only getting half the story. I´m not sure how many people read my blog. As far as I can tell, it`s just my mom and my friends from high school. But then I´m always surpirsed when random people I´ve never met recount stories of my life to me. So in order not to offend and keep other people`s lives private, I have to be really careful with what I say.

Something I`ve been reluctant to talk about on my blog, is my living situation. A lot of people are not happy with their living situation, and therefore move after the 3 month trial period. But I´m a replacemnt volunteer and the girl I replaced lives an hour away. A situation unique to any other volunteer in Peru. And while I´m fairly miserable with where I currently live, the girl I replaced was not and comes to visit often. I hate this. I really don´t know if my feelings have merit or not. I just know I`ve been trying to break free of the mold cast by the previous volunteer, and changing families just seemed like it would make the world of a difference.

The family I live with now is not bad, their just not for me. There are a lot of people in a little house, and I just feel like I don`t fit. For example, two days ago something happened that almost never happens in the house. Nobody was watching TV. Usually, the TV is on from the moment the first person wakes up at 5:30 to the time the last person goes to bed at midnight. They air a hodgepodge of Americans shows. During the day they have Bonanza, Bewitched, Moeisha, Smallville and Full House (all dubbed of course). In the states I wouldn´t normaly watch any of these shows, but there are times here that it would be nice to come out of my room, sit on the couch and watch a show. The only thing my family watches are aweful telenovelas. I hate them, and they run all day and all night. So then two days ago I jumped on the chance to watch something I wanted to watch. I found the movie "Alexander" and had just gotten into the plot when my 12 year old host sister came inthe front door and sat on the couch. She sat for about two minuets, looked at me and saw I had the remote, and without saying anything walked up to the TV and changed the channel to a novela and sat back down on the couch. She didn´t say a single word. Just acted like I wasn´t watchig. Really, she was acting as I didn´t exsist.

This is the same 12 year old that relentlesly asked me for money the first month I lived there. She still owes me 4 soles. Recently, she started asking to borrow my Zune, well, she calls it my radio. One night she was standing out in front of her room when I walked by and asked too borrow my radio. I looked at her and said "you have a radio, it`s playing in your room right now, I can hear it!". But she just made an action with her fingers to her ears indicating she wanted to listen to the radio on head phones. After two weeks of non stop asking, I finally told her I was never going to loan it to her beccause it´s really expensive and something happened to it she wouldn´t be able to pay for it. And lately she has been picking my brain about how to loose weight. I think it´s histerical actually. She hovers around me whenever I´m in the kitchen and asks a 1,000 questions. And then she watches me eat. She just sits there and stares at me. As if watching me eat healthy is going to make her loose weight. She drives me crazy. I understand that she is 12 and that`s an awkward time of life and everyone is annoying when they are 12. But I work all day with girls like her, I don´t want to come home to it too.

And it´s not just her, there´s 10 people in the family, all of whom drive me crazy in one way or another. So after months of looking, I have finally found a new family. I spent all last weekend getting my new room ready and spending time with my new family. I can´t move in officially until some one from Peace Corps comes and okays it. But the family already calls me their daughter and my host dad grew up with Peace Corps volunteers in the 60`s. No living situation is ever perfect, I know this. But I just know the one I am in right now is not right for me. I have been reluctant to say anything up till now cause I guess I didn´t want to jinx it. But hopefully Peace corps will find no problems with my new house and I should start moving when I come from Carnivan next week.

Hot and Cold

2008-01-25T06:12:00.000-08:00

The summer in Lima is not all that hot, it's the humidity that is difficult to deal with. Being from northern California, I can handle high temperature, but at least the 100 degree days of the Sacramento valley are dry heats. There are a number of factors that contribute to my already uncomfortable hot and sticky state. First, I cannot run around in shorts, skirts and tank tops like I so desperately would like. I wouldn't feel comfortable showing any kind of skin in front of the nuns and personally I do not like the harassment I receive from men when I walk down the street even when I'm wearing my most baggy unattractive clothes. Peruvian woman were a lot of tight and reveling clothing (at least they do in Lima). So when I am suffocating in jeans that are stuck to me from all my sweat, I remind myself it's my choice I suffer.

The second thing that makes being hot hotter, is all the hot food Peruvians eat. In the middle of the afternoon, in an unair-conditioned room, they will sit down and eat hot soup followed a hot entree like fried chicken and rice. And, they won't drink anything. If they do drink something, it's usually got a ton of sugar in it and is almost never cold. It is a pretty wide spread belief that drinking cold beverages makes you sick.

So today around noon I started feeling hungry, but the last thing I wanted to eat was something hot. I found myself craving Ceviche, something I thought I would thought I would do. But it is cold and filling without being greasy and heaving. Every time I have eaten Ceviche, I've always been terrified that it would make me violently ill. There are a lot of horror stories out there. And considering how easy it is to get sick in this country, eating a big plate of raw fish is not the most comforting feeling. But I decided that the odds were in my favor and nothing else seemed as fulfilling in that moment.

I went in to one of the little restaurants in Lurin. The lady working there recognized me from the gym and asked me if I was going tonight. I told her I planned on it. It was then I realized, that I had started to be recognized all over town by women I didn't know. Turns out, joining the gym really was the best thing I did to help integrate me and get to know people in the town. So I ordered my Ceviche and a bottle of water. As I sat there, I couldn't help but feel the same nervousness I always feel when I eat ceviche. I noticed a sign on the bathroom door that read "peeing only". I got a big kick out of that. What if you have to go? You can't stop it. I ate my Ceviche and thought about all the classic stories about PCV's who couldn't hold it and while it was probably painful and embarrassing at the time, in the end it was totally worth it for the great story.

With in 2 hours of eating my stomach was turning. A very familiar churning. Luckily I didn't get sick. I just had to go to the bathroom 10 times the rest of the afternoon. That may be the definition of sick to some of you, but to me, that's just another day at the office. It's not sick until it really hurts or it starts coming out a lot more places than it should. So unfortunately I did not make it to the gym tonight. Instead I stayed in the house where they were celebrating my pregnant sisters birthday. There were about 30 relatives in our tiny little house, which was totally awesome cause we don't have a flushing toiled and our "bathroom" is separated from the kitchen by a flimsy shower curtain. So basically the entire party was aware of my condition. In any case, my body probably got the rest it needed. Just when you think you are finally starting to get life under control, nature takes it's course and reminds us that no mater how powerful we may be, we are still at the mercy of our bodies and the environment.

The Good Kind of Stress

2008-01-23T08:50:00.000-08:00

I haven´t updated in over a week. There have been several interesting events since my last blog, but I have been pretty busy and everytime I find myself at a compter with internet, I´ve had to take care of more pressing matters. So, what´s new?

Well, I was feeling really icky at the begining of this month, especially after my talk with the head nun. I was feeling so unblievebly stressed out and there were nights when I felt like the worst peace coprs volunteer in all of Peru. So I decided to take action. Since things felt like I had hit a momentary dead end at the orphanage, I turned my attention and energy to the home for sexually abused girls. I figured there was no better time to start my workshop on sexuality. This is a hard subject to touch with any teenagers, but teaching a group of girls who have all been sexually abused....I felt a bit out of my league. Since the closest thing I have to expereince in this field is hours listening to Dr. Drew on loveline, I started working very hard to prepare myself. I have spent a lot of time with my counterpart from the home, the psychologist. She is young, smart and down to earth. It was such a refreshing change from the old nun. I have successfuly completed 4 classes, and I think they are going well. But it´t hard, you can see the shame in their faces when we start to take about the really serious stuff.

So I still have quite a bit of stress in my life right now, but it´s the good kind, I think. Yesterday I had my site visit with my youth development program director. I was originally nervous abouth is visit, but the time it rolled around, I had bigger things to be nervous about. We sat down with the head nun, and my program director defended my situation and we talked a lot of stuff out. I hope things will impove. But at our little meeting, the head nun announced she was stepping down and her replacement nun will arrive in 2 weeks. So we´ll see if this works in my favor or not.

The new big stress in my life is February 4. My country director informed me that that was the day he and Deputy Director for all of Peace Corps was going to be visitng Peru, and specifically my site. So he asked me to prepare a few hours that day to entertian the deputy Director. As if that isn´t stressful enough, I had already planned a vacation (my first real vacation at that) for the weekend before the visit. I am arriving from my Carnival vacation the mornign all the big wigs are showing up. So I started a theater club with the girls so we can put on a show for a ll my bosses. The only problem is that the deputy director doesn´t speak any spanish, so the girls are all going to memorize their scripts in english. So we have been working over time. We just finished writing the script and now we have to start rehersals. I think it will all work out and the important people will be impressed.

In between all this work I have been up to my old antics. I have some pretty good stories and observations from the past 10 days, but once the moment passes I loose the inspiration to relive the expereince in my blog. Who knows, maybe I´ll find my voice some night in my room and write it all out in my lap top and bring it to the internet the next day. Only one way to find out, stay posted.....

January in Peru

2008-01-14T12:42:00.000-08:00

January is an interesting month. I always considered January a “filler” month. A month where nothing ever really happens and is usually marked with my winter time slump. For the majority of my life, January was associated with going back to school and I‘m always happy to turn the page on my calendor to February, the short and sweet month. I’m still in the phase of my service where I celebrate every month that passes as a month I survived and being that much closer to completing my two year stint. So everyday, I wake up and mentally cross off one more day until the end of my least favorite month.

This year however, things are a bit different. For starters, it’s not winter. Since I arrived at site during the relentlessly gray and cold August, I have been looking forward to the arrival of summer. I loved the idea of spending my overwhelming amount of free time at the beach, reading, taking long walks, getting a tan so I would not look so gringo. But summer is here and it is not at all what I expected. The heat has arrived, along with a muggy humitity, but there is still no sun. That’s an exageration. The sun does come out, but most of the time, it is still cloudy and grey. My friends have a beach house in Punta Hermosa, the town right next to mine. I’ve only been to the beach when they are down, and both times I have been have been without sun. Yesterday I went and spent a few hours on the beach reading Harry Potter. Candice and Tania decided to go in the water. Tania, who has lived in several countries all over the world, said that it was the dirtiest ocean water she’s ever been in. This provides me with little motivation to be a beach goddess for the next few months.

So summer has brought a whole new slew of things that bother me. It goes without saying, that the heat can be overwhelming. Sitting in my room is like sitting in an oven. There is no airconditioning anywhere and my family took the fan that was mounted on my wall the first day of summer (just one more example of how they´ve made me feel welcome in their house). All the houses are opened aired and cannot be closed off, not to mention screens also are non existant here. And since we live right on the farm, the flies have become part of the family. I am not exaggerating when I say there are hundreds of flies and bugs in our house. It is ridiculous. I do my best to keep flies out of my room, but it is an all uphill battle. I usually spend a half an hour a night killing flies right before I go to bed. It is so annoying to be woken up every 5 minute to a fly buzzing in your ear and landing on your face.

Last night I successfully alleviated my room of flies and fell asleep earlier than usual. Around 1 in the morning I woke up cause I was so hot and uncomfortable I couldn’t sleep. I made the sleepy decision to open my door for a little while to let the cool night air in. About a half an hour later I woke up with my door still open, and covered in mosquito bites. Lesson learned. On top of that, I woke up an hour or two later to the sound of rain. RAIN! I live in the desert and all through the winter and fall it didn’t rain once. It only lasted a few minutes but enough to make the dusts stick to the ground this morning. I’m told it’s La nina. That summer is not usually this grey and cloudy and that would explain the strange rainfall.

Another thing I find interesting about summer in Peru, is that my family still eats soup for both lunch and dinner. I don’t understand it. I can barely drink my morning coffee I get so overheated. But hot soup twice a day? Just another example of the never ending list of things Peruvians do that don’t make any sense to me.

Stress

2008-01-10T15:58:00.000-08:00

Yay, look how happy and fun loving I look in this picture! Well, this picture was taken weeks ago and I don´t think I have felt that relaxed since then.
I have been absurdly stressed out these past two weeks. Even before the nun sat me down and told me everything that was wrong with me and my work, I have been uncomfortably taut. I’ve even had a few minor panic attacks, but nothing compared to my first week at site. I guess, now that summer is here and all the kids are gone, it feels like I’m starting from scratch all over again. the root of all my stress is my uncontrollable need to please every one. So one of my informal new years resolution is to not be so obsessed with pleasing people. My formal new years resolution is to read the entire Harry Potter series in Spanish. I like more tangible resolutions, like the year I decided I would learn how to do the splits. I can honestly say I put in a decent amount of work on that one, but in the end I had to give it up. Turns out, I just don’t bend that way. Like the splits, I fear that retraining my body not to be so anxiety ridden, goes against nature and it will be an all uphill battle. So instead of focusing on the physical characteristics of my stress, I will concentrate on the causes of my anxieties.

Speaking of manifesting sress physically, my Doctor informed me today I have TMJ. I sent him an email a few weeks ago about the progressively worse symptoms, and he let me know his diagnosis by showing me a power point presentation about TMJ he had made, which featured my email as the second slide. He said I was a textbook case and is using the symptoms I stated in my email as a learning tool for others. Apparently, it is more common in women and is also hereditary. I mentioned in the email something about my mom telling me she has similar problems, so thanks mom, for the gift that keeps on giving. And just like she told me last year when I first started to notice that something was wrong, my doctor says there’s nothing I can really do about it. Unless things get really bad, then I have to have jaw surgery. And considering what a baby I was getting my wisdom teeth out, jaw surgery is not something I would like to have this lifetime.

As far as tackling the source of the stress in my life, it´s going to be a tricky matter. There is no such thing as a stress free life, but I’m just looking to cut back to 1 pack a day. I spoke with my APCD (boss-lady) today about the whole nun issue. We have arranged a date for her to come down to the orphanage and explain my role as a volunteer to her. I think this will be a good thing, but I’m preoccupied now with the things the nun will tell my boss and am mildly teffified my boss will side with the head nun. While that likely hood of that happening is slim to nun (no pun intended), I still worry about my boss being in my site. Even more stressful than my boss seeing first hand my work, is the prospect of the vice-presedent of all of Peace Corps coming to my site. I passed my country director today as I was in the office and he informed me that the big-wigs from Washington were coming to check out the program in Peru. And since my site is so close to the office, I was on the life of places they were going to visit. That will really help my stress level and need to please every one.

Another way I’m trying to get rid of stress, is to step up my work. I am working right now, on a bunch or project proposals for both Hogars. On Friday I have a meeting with the psychologist from the girls home to lay out my work plan for this coming year. Since it is such an important meeting, we have selected a serious setting to discuss the important matters of the sexually abused girls. So naturally, we are meeting in a McDonalds, in the most touristy part of Lima. This may seem like a very strange place for any one who hasn’t spent time in a developing country. Like many countries other than the US, Mc Donald’s is an upper middle class, modern, even classy establishment. This is a country where KFC is still called Kentucky Fried Chicken and has plasma screen TV’s. In Peru, the coffee at Duncan Doughnuts is considered expensive and gourmet and Payless Shoe Source is store where only an elite percent of the population is able to purchase uncomfortable, crappy shoes. So, Mc Donald’s is the location of my big important meeting. But I guess it’s probably a good thing, cause how can anybody be stressed out while they are consuming a McFlurry?

And I leave you with a very tranquil picture of the sun setting over the ocean in Lima. This is the few from my friends apartment where I go when I need to unwind. Not to shabby.

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

2008-01-05T12:05:00.000-08:00

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.

A Change Of Season

2008-01-04T14:20:00.000-08:00

This past weekend I went to the beach at my site for the first time. Well, I have been to the beach before, but this time I actually wore a bikini as it is finally beach weather. It was New Years Eve weekend which is apparently the biggest beach weekend here in Lima. I went with a male friend named Coco who lives in Lima. He took me to a little beach town, which is right next to the town I live in, but had never visited before. It was a super cute little beach town with such an awesome atmosphere that almost made me feel like I was in a BoHo beach town in California. Of course the ambiance probably had something to do with the entirely young population of beach goers that were there for the weekend for the sole reason to go to the beach by day and party by night.

The majority of the beach goers were middle class and from Lima, although I spotted a handful of Americans. It was very easy for me to distinguish the Limenos from the local, poorer population. And I was shocked to see so many pregnant teenagers. This is just the town next to mine and I feel I haven’t seen any pregnant teens in my site. But in one day in Punta Hermosa, I must have seen 7 pregnant teens, who were clearly locals.

I knew teen pregnancy is a big problem in Peru. Something like 65% of the population is under the age of 24 and it is easy to tell. There are kids everywhere and it seems like every other woman I see is pregnant. Half the time I am lucky enough to snag a seat while riding the micro-buses, I end up having to give it up to either a pregnant woman or a woman with a small child. Speaking of which, I just found out one of my host sisters is 3 months pregnant. I can’t even imagine that come June there will be another baby in this house. But at least with all the kids running around, it makes me feel like my job is important as a youth development volunteer.

So my friend Coco is my first male Peruvian friend. Of course he’s from Lima. I can’t imagine having a legitimate male friend at site, the rules are just different here about male/female friendships. Coco was educated in English and has spent time in America we‘re on more of the same page then the average Peruvian man. He’s actually leaving for California in February to visit his American girlfriend in San Francisco and our friendship unfortunately will end. He quit his job working for the Peruvian government and is traveling around the states for months. After that he will be starting Grad school in California. He applied to the Latin America studies programs at UCLA, Cal, UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara. I’m pushing for San Diego because then he would be in the same program as Emily Erickson. They would totally know each other and that would be so crazy to me. But even though he speaks perfect English, we speak Spanish 80% of the time. I love having Peruvian friends because I do most of my learning with them. It’s especially nice to have a Peruvian who speaks perfect English cause they double as a dictionary.

So I have a lot more free time on my hands now that the kids from the orphanage are on summer vacation and I only have my work at the other Hogar. It’s weird, I don’t really know what to do with myself and lately I have been having overwhelming feelings that I am the worst Peace Corps volunteer in Peru. I recently posted the difficulties I’ve been having with the nuns at the orphanage. On Tuesday I stopped by to drop off some paper work. I sat down with the head nun for what I thought was a simple chat, but turned into her just ripping me apart for an entire hour. I was stunned by the horrible things she said about me, essentially calling me lazy, irresponsible, unproductive and even a liar. Dealing with the things she said to be have been difficult. But I was talking to a friend and she reminded me that I am hear to make a difference and that requires change. In order to create change you must challenge the system and people aren’t always going to be happy. All the criticism I received was just the nuns way of trying to bully me into coming in more days a week and conforming to their traditional methods, I think. Whatever her motives are, she definitely has the catholic guilt thing down.

I will continue to maintain my main principals but will also try to be flexible and adapt to what I can with the nuns. I want to work things out and have a smooth relationship with my counterparts. If things don’t get better the only ones who will suffer will be the kids and that is the last things I want. So within the next two months I hope to develop a proper work plan that will please both the nuns, the Peace Corps and of course me and the kids.

Feliz Ano Nuevo!

2008-01-02T15:41:00.000-08:00

I am so ready for 2008. Normally, it’s always sad for a year to end and scary how quickly the time has passed. But this year, I am happy to be moving on from 2007. Not that ‘07 was particularly bad, I just feel like 2008 is the year I am going to really come into my own and thrive here in Peru. I am happy to be stepping away from the beginning stages of Peace Corps life and entering one of the most unforgettable times of my life.

The first five months of 2007 were some of the easiest of my adult life. I lived with my parents and had little financial responsibility. I worked at the cheesecake factory which paid well but also allowed me a lot of freedom and flexibility so I was able to travel and gave me a lot of free time to spend my remaining months in the country with family and friends. While this time was relatively care free and fun, I felt I was in a sort of Limbo. I was waiting for my peace corps assignment with out any sort of certainty as to where or when I would be leaving, and then once my assingment came at the end of March, I was living for the count down. It was also not a particularly gratifying time in my life. The time I was able to spend with my family is invaluable, but I felt like I was wasting my time by not doing anything to better myself or the people around me. Somehow, serving overweight people a 1200 calorie slice of cheesecake, did not make me feel like I was benefiting society. When June came, I was ready to embark on something a bit more meaningful.

The second half of 2007 is what I had been working up to for years. The first three months were a walk in a park. I loved training, it was more like summer camp than work. I was with an amazing group of people who made me laugh more than I have ever laughed in my life, but at the same time I was gaining the skills I would need to get through the next 2 years out on my own. By the end of training the Peru 9ers as well as the Peace Corps staff had become like family. A family I would greatly rely on over the first months to help me get through the daily difficulties. This was the time that patience and frustrations became a way of life, sickness and safety became a daily threat but personal growth and making a difference in the world are the life long benefits. 2008 just feels right. The sun has finally come out in Lima, and akin to this, it is my time to shine.

It was all yellow (and rainbow chips)

The tranquility and uneasiness of Christmas was made up by my rockin’ new Years Eve! I once again did make any plans. I was even contemplating just spending staying up till midnight with my family and then going strait to bed. But a fellow 9er suggested that that would probably make me feel very sad, alone and I should celebrate some how. It also happened to be the birthday of the girl I replaced and one of my non peace corps volunteer friends. I didn’t feel mentally in a party mode and I definitely was still feeling off physically from being sick all of Christmas week. But I excepted the invitation to ring in the new year at a 3rd year volunteers house in Lima with other 3rd year volunteers and sick boy. I brought along my non peace corps friend as it was her birthday and most of her friends were away for the Holidays.

--a quick side note observation, 3 of the third year volunteers brought along their Peruvian significant other and I’m concluding the number one reason volunteers take a third year is because they are dating a host country national.--

Before the dinner I went to Candice’s (non PC friend) house cause she has an oven and I wanted to make cupcakes to celebrate the new years and the birthdays. My mom had sent me rainbow chip cup cake mix, rainbow chip frosting and even cupcake tins for my birthday a few months ago. I had been waiting for months for the perfect occasion to make them (plus I don’t have an oven). Rainbow chips cupcakes are my favorite in the whole wide world and you cannot find them anywhere here. I only brought half of them to the party so I could hoard the rest to myself, but they were a huge hit. The dinner itself was really nice with about 12 people, but still low key.

One thing I love about Peruvian New years is that the lucky color is yellow, so everything body where’s yellow and all the party themes are yellow. My favorite color is yellow and it’s such a happy, wonderful color. It’s definitely a tradition I will bring back to the states. So every one was wearing some sort of yellow and at mid night we lit off fireworks (the good kind of sparklers, the ones that are illegal in California) and had a champagne toast.

After that the group headed toward the bars and the discos but Candice and I decided to check out a house party with some Peruvian friends. Going to this party was the best decision we could have made. It was such a fun and new experience that notonly made my New Years Eve, but really my whole holiday season. It was at a big mansion/estate no too far from where our dinner was. There was a big tent set up in the back yard with tables and a dance floor, a lot like a wedding party. There were catorers dressed in tuxedos walking around with trays of champagne and of course, everything was all yellow and gold. We ate a second dinner at 3 o’clock in the morning ( I know that sounds weird but that is very typical in Peru to be served a meal at a party very very late at night) complete with grapes as it is Peruvian tradition to eat 12 grapes at midnight for good luck.

I was wearing an outfit that looked like something I would have worn in 1988: a black cotton dress patterned with white stars and a turqiouse ribbon around the waist, complete with black leggings underneath. It is not something I would have gone out in by myself but Candice picked it out and encouraged me to go out like that. So topped off with yellow earinings and a yellow plastic lei I hit the dance floor. I got a second wind thanks to the awesome mix of music. They played Michael Jackson back to back with Huayno (pronounced Wino, and is traditional Andean music). I put on quiet a show for the all Peruvian crowd who got such a kick out of the white girl rocking out to their traditional music along with rock and pop. I buggied all night. I was twisting and shaking to "Grease Lightning" and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” with a 60 year old Peruvian woman with a wicked under bite, at 5:30 in the morning.

I literally danced till the sun came up. It was such a wonderful evening highlighted by the fact I got to spend it with such wonderful people. By the time I hung up my gold party hat at 7 in the morning it was 2008. Thanks to all the yellow I wore and grapes I ate, it’s gonna be a good year.

Defining Christmas

2007-12-26T08:21:00.000-08:00

I think this Christmas will go down in the books as the only Christmas I ever lost weight.

This is the first Christmas where I was basically on my own. I didn't have any family get togethers, cookie exchanges, Christmas cocktails or white elephant parties. Once all the pomp and circumstance is taken out of the picture, once you're in a place that is far removed from Santa Claus, you are forced to get down to the root of it. What does December 25th mean? I found myself asking my friends "What should we be doing to celebrate?" and "How can we bring some of our traditions to Peru?". After lot's of head scratching we realized, in order to answer any of these questions, we must first figure out what Christmas means to us personally. The easy answer is family and being together, and then a long list of christmas traditions like stockings on christmas morning, eggnog, dinner on Christmas Eve. So when being with family is not an option we concluded we should try to recreate some of the things from our long list of traditions.

Being sick definitely spoiled a lot of plans I had made. I wanted to spend Christmas Eve with some of the families from training and the volunteers that came back to visit. But because the Peruvian tradition is to wait until midnight to eat and then start celebrating, I would have been in pain and miserable trying to stay up late and party. I made it into Lima, where I ended up going to a friends house. We listened to Christmas music (streaming online from a Sacramento radio station) while we cooked a christmas eve dinner and baked cookies. I even made eggnog from scratch, everybody loved it. I called up Sick Boy, cause he is still stuck in Lima and invited him over. He had no plans, and I didn't want him spending Christmas Eve alone. We had a simple dinner but it was very sweet. We decided we didn't want to miss out completely on the Peruvian Christmas tradition. At midnight, Peruvians put the baby Jesus in the manger, then they go outside in the streets and light off fireworks. Since my friend lives right on the cliffs, we decided to take a long walk along the cliffs and watch the fireworks being shot over the ocean.

It was far from the crazy party I had imagined it would be. We saw next to nobody on our walk. But there were a lot of fireworks at midnight. The night was beautiful, I've never seen Lima so tranquil. Everything was so lovely and the company was so wonderful that we ended up walking for hours and didn't get home until 3. In the end, it was very difference than I imagined the night would be, but I will always remember it warmly.

Christmas day very simple as well. I ended up excepting an invitation to the house of my asistant country director of Peace Corps for a christmas meal. I am so happy I went. Marco is such a wonderful man and his family is so beautiful. Being there satisfied the longing I had for a traditional family get together. But what was ironic to me about this holiday meal is that it felt more like the forth of July than christmas. One of Marco's high school friends (they're from Mountain View, CA by the way) was visiting with his family. So all the kids were playing on the big trampoline, the slip n' slide and the pool. We ate out on the patio and it was a nice summer day. The kicker was that we were eating turky, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and green bean casarole. So it was a traditional american holiday meal set to the backround of a summer BBQ. But being at Marco's really made my Christmas. It gave me what I was missing and afterwards I felt like I had successfully completed my definition of Christmas.....almost

I was feeling really stressed out at the end of the night. More than stressed, I was feeling o lot of anxiety. I was thinking too much about the next year and all the challenges that lay ahead of me. So my friend and I went out to a very posh bar built into a cliff and had a christmas cocktail. It was the first alcohol I had consumed since before falling sick. So, two American girls sat in Peru on christmas night, drinking Pisco Sours, reflecting on 2007 and talking about our hopes and fears of 2008.

I hope that next Christmas I will be healthy and also more at east with myself and how I feel about where I am. But I also hope I will be fortunate enought to have as peaceful and blessed Christmas as I did this year.