One week

I have now been in Cajabamba for my first full week. Time is a crazy and contradictory thing to think about sometimes. One week out of two years is a drop of water in a bucket, but a jam-packed and exciting drop nonetheless. My days here so far have been quite busy - which is the opposite of what I expected. I was (and am still trying to be, just in case) mentally prepared for a slow first couple months at site while I got to know the community and searched for good projects. But it turns out that sometimes those two activities can in fact keep you quite occupied!

Peace Corps advised us that it's a good idea to keep an agenda/calendar and write down what we do every day, so that we'll have a record to help us write our end-of-month reports on our activities. As you probably know, I am 100% the type of person who would do this anyway, as I am quite fond of being organized. However, this suggestion is still one of the most useful pieces of advice I took away from training - it has only been one week, and I am struggling to remember eight of the eight million different things I did in the past seven days. My theory is that this is partly due to the fact that everything is new and thus a bit jumbled, and partly due to the fact that the majority of my activities seem to just happen to me.

To clarify what I mean by this, I'll give you the example of my day on Wednesday. The story in fact starts on Tuesday night when, just before going to bed, I looked at my calendar for the next day and thought to myself, "hmm, pretty tranquilo day - just a meeting with a school Director at 10:45, a meeting with the Vice Mayor at 17:00, and meeting the Director of the Agrarian Agency after that." As I fell asleep I proceeded to brainstorm what places and people I wanted to try and visit during the rest of my seemingly wide-open day.

Of course, in typical Peruvian fashion, Wednesday unfolded very little as planned, but was still a great day:
10:45 Host mom and I head out to our (fully pre-arranged) meeting where she will be introducing me to her friend the school Director
10:50 Host mom's friend the Secretary informs us the Director is not around this morning, so we won't be meeting. Have a nice chat with the Secretary anyway, during which I introduce myself/Peace Corps and we discuss how I might work with the juniors and seniors of the high school there.
11:00 While walking out of the school, host mom spots the previously MIA Director walking casually across the plaza. She flags him down, we chat, I introduce myself/Peace Corps, and we suggest to him that I could work with the juniors and seniors. He smiles and nods and assents that we will talk more about it, then promptly absconds to wherever it was he originally wanted to be (which of course is not at his desk in the school).
11:05 We turn towards home, but next-door to the school is the Cooperative (popular financial institution for savings/loans here). Host mom decides that now is a good time for me to conocer the Cooperative. We march into various departments, I introduce myself/Peace Corps to the heads of Accounting and Marketing. It emerges that my host mom used to be on the Board of Directors of the Cooperative, and I then begin to understand why she knows everyone there and why it is acceptable for us to barge into everyone's offices like we own the place. At our final stop, the Credit department, we plant ourselves at the desk of a very helpful and slightly-taken-aback Credit Officer, and proceed to spend the next 45 minutes asking him questions and learning about how the Cooperative works.
12:00 Exiting the Cooperative, my host mom assures various employees that we will be back another day to meet the Manager, who wasn't there today. En route back to the house, she points out the Library that's run by the city's Association of Retired Teachers, and we go in. I meet Don Juanito, the very kind abuelito who often looks after the library, introduce myself/Peace Corps, and am treated to a disk-by-disk rundown of the approximately 20 electronic resources the library now has. We look around the shelves that line the two-room library, I ask very seriously if the three pre-internet era computers on the desk still work, Don Juanito laughs and says of course they do! Why wouldn't they? I resolve to come back and talk more with Don Juanito as soon as possible, because he is obviously awesome.
Lunchtime and the early afternoon go largely as I had envisioned the night before. I spend a couple hours creating my business card template, explaining to the print-shop how I want them to look, and making copies of some community diagnostic materials.
When five o'clock rolls around, I do indeed get to meet the Vice Mayor. She is a very sweet lady who welcomes me to Cajabamba, listens to me introduce myself/Peace Corps, and tells me that she is there to support me and looks forward to two years of great work together.
17:45 I leave the municipality and call Edwin and Eli, my socios who know the Director of the Agrarian Agency and are planning to introduce me to him this afternoon. We set off on the 20-ish minute walk into the campo towards the Agency, having some nice chats along the way about topics ranging from how to pronounce "eggs" to the similarities between Peru and the U.S.' gap between small farmers and industrial farming. When we are literally 30 feet from the entrance to the Agency, Eli says something along the lines of "uh-oh, Carlos (the Director) just wrote me that he cannot meet tonight." We walk down to the Agency just for good measure, call Carlos, and decide that I will go meet him the next morning instead.
18:05 Eli, Edwin and I spend the next couple hours hanging out at their quail-house, which is what I call the semi-enclosed space where they keep their 600 quails, taking care of that night's feeding/watering/cleaning duties and chatting.
When I arrive back at my house around 8pm, I am greeted not only with dinner, but with two dinner guests: the President of the Beekeepers' Association that I'd really like to work with, and the Regional Facilitator of the Sierra Norte Project, a government initiative that promotes development by working with the region's agricultural associations. Basically, two great potential socios were just sitting in my living room! Naturally I introduced myself/Peace Corps, they invited me to an upcoming meeting, and we talked about how we could work together.

This is exactly what I mean when I say that things here just happen to me. A go-with-the-flow mentality has been my M-O this week, and it has served me incredibly well. This open attitude's utility is in fact topped only by the usefulness of my now-memorized "hi I'm Meghan I'm a Peace Corps volunteer in economic development these are the three goals of my program I'm here to work with you..." spiel - I probably couldn't survive an hour here without that!

But in all seriousness, I pretty much say yes to any invitation I receive, however formal or casual it may be, and just see where it takes me. Every night when I look back at my day, it reinforces the idea that I end up learning a lot of useful information about the community or potential work partners/projects from every encounter I have. This is true even for the most basic of activities, like walking somewhere with my host mom, because we inevitably run into someone or pass by somewhere that I otherwise wouldn't have known. I feel truly lucky to have had such a bustling and positive first week at site, and am so grateful for the many people here who have gone out of their way to welcome and include me. Hopefully this bodes well for a productive two years!