A culture of hospitality

Me, Lourdes, and Javi

Peruvians are known for being a very welcoming and hospitable people, and my host parents are no exception. It takes a big heart to invite a new person into your family, and a sincere warmth to immediately treat that newcomer not as a stranger, but as a daughter. I feel incredibly lucky to have landed with such a wonderful set of papás peruanos, because feeling at home in my Peruvian family makes it easier to be so far from my real home.

In day-to-day life, the normalcy of routine makes it easy to take this hospitality for granted. But last week, I was reminded of how deep it really runs when the 21ers came to visit Cajabamba. When Lourdes heard that there were visiting volunteers, she insisted that they come to our house for dinner. She went and bought food enough to feed all ten of us, being sure to include a wide array of Cajabamba's traditional favorites, and even made a pot of hot chocolate, which is usually only for special occasions. So that evening we all cozied elbow to elbow around our small dining room table, and spent the next two hours listening to tales of Javi's farm, Lourdes' archaeological digs in Machu Picchu, and the family's close encounters with Sendero Luminoso in the época del terrorismo. In the span of mere hours, my host parents made the 21ers feel like they were already part of the family. Everybody came back for dinner again the next night, and by the time they left they were all making plans to return to visit Cajabamba, upon Lourdes' insistence that they'll always have a home awaiting them here.

The whole gang gathered in our living room

Since feeding seven extra people for two nights is no cheap date, the 21ers all pooled some money, and I was left with the task of trying to get Lourdes to accept it. She of course refused, saying that they were guests and she was so happy to be able to invite them into our home. In Spanish "invitar" literally means "to invite," but also carries a much more profound subtext linked to hospitality's important place in Peruvian culture - a host will always invitar you food and drink, even if it means the clothes off their own back. This is one of the most salient and deeply touching aspects of my experience living in one of Peru's poorest rural regions: children will offer me part of their candy bars, señoras that I work with will not let me leave their houses without having eaten or drinken something, and even the most humble of campesinos will invite me to share their family's lunch. This communal spirit of generosity has rubbed off on me - I instinctively offer to share whatever I'm eating with those around me, and always buy a little extra so there's enough to spread around a bigger group - and it is something I hope to continue back in the States, as one small aspect of how Peru has changed me for the better.

But social norms of hospitality aside, I could not let my host family front all that extra food. I convinced Lourdes that the 21ers were required by Peace Corps to pay for their meals while on training trips, and told her that since they'd already left the money she may as well just take it. She eventually relented and accepted their contribution, but not without grumpily warning me: "Meghan, if you try this barbaridad (atrocity/nonsense) when your parents visit, I will not accept! Them I am going to invitar, sí o sí!"

Déjà vu

When I came back to site from Lima on Wednesday, I brought six new 21er volunteers with me: three youth development folks to visit Jessica, and three from economic development to visit me. These brand new additions to the PC Peru family only arrived in country three weeks ago, and this shadowing trip was their first adventure outside of Lima. Needless to say, we've been quite the spectacle parading around Cajabamba the past few days!

Lorena, Lenny, and Alyx with all the veggies one of my entrepreneurship students gave them when we visited her farm

Having the 21ers around has been a lot of fun. They are full of questions, and talking with them has felt like déjà vu. since their uncertainties are the same ones I was wondering about when I was in their shoes a year ago. Being so new to Peru, the 21ers are also still in awe of many of the cultural differences and curiosities that have come to seem normal to me, particularly those found only in the campo. They were snapping pictures of all the burros and sheep walking down the road, nervously tasting cuy for the first time, gaping at the fact that delicious breakfasts of fresh juice only cost a dollar, and puzzling over all the houses with their lead-to-nowhere doors on the second story.

Their wonder and amusement reminded me of how I felt when I first came to Cajabamba, and I enjoyed the throwback to those initial days before this quiet campo town started to feel like home.

A Lima winter

I'm in Lima this week for a GenEq committee meeting, and things are looking a little grey, literally:

But this is normal: it's winter on the coast right now, and during these months Lima is shrouded in a constant fog. A couple days ago, June 21, was the winter solstice in Peru - Google.pe had a doodle of scarves and mittens. That was funny, because in Cajabamba, we're just starting summer. The weather in Peru is a little complicated...

We're in the southern hemisphere, so technically it should be winter now. And it is - on the coast. But because Peru's so close to the equator, "winter" temperatures rarely fall below the mid-50s. And the mountainous regions don't even have a winter! We have summer during the coast's winter, and rainy season while the costeños are sweating it out in 90+ degree heat. The temperatures are pretty much the same throughout rainy season and summer, with the rainy season being a bit more temperate and summer bringing bright sunny days and chillier nights. It never snows in Cajabamba, despite the altitude of 8,600 feet, but in higher mountain areas there's snow year-round. This variety of weather was one reason why packing for Peru was so difficult - outfits for everything from sweltering desert beaches to snow-capped peaks! But having such a variety of climates is also one of the reasons why Peru is such an awesome and unique place to explore.

Telling it like it is

In Peru, as in many other Latin American cultures, talking about a person's physical appearance does not carry the same social taboo as it does in the States. For example, you can straight-up tell someone, "you look like you've gained some weight," and they will not think you in the least bit rude. This particular comment is actually one of Peace Corps' Peruvian host moms' favorite compliments to give volunteers - according to our mamás, we all arrive in Peru waaaay too skinny, so if they can get us to eat enough of their delicious cooking to put on a few pounds, it's a great success.

I'm not sure of the roots of this cultural difference, but it's extremely marked: if you told your average American 20-something girl that she's looking a little chubbier, you'd likely be met with a horrified face of gaping disbelief (that you actually just said that), and a highly awkward situation as she either blushes, cries, or stammers in search of what she can possibly say in response.

From what I've experienced, the two most salient characteristics that we as Americans skirt around while Peruvians dive right in are weight and race. Describing someone as "el gordito" (the fat one) is totally okay; a person's weight is seen as a basic fact of their physical appearance, so why avoid it? The same goes for "el negro," "la gringa," and other racially-based descriptors. Everyone in town describes me as la gringuita, because that is the easiest and most obvious way to refer to me - I am white, and everyone else is Peruvian. But I'm not the only gringa in Cajabamba: our town's biggest bakery is called Panadería Las Gringas, because the three sisters who own it are lighter-skinned than most cajabambinos. Peruvians have no qualms about talking about a person's skin color or racial background: "the Chinese-looking one," "the darker-skinned one," etc. In contrast, the U.S.'s racially charged history has left race as a more socially sensitive topic.

I don't think that one way or the other - the straight-talking Peruvian or the tactful American - is better in its own right; each fits perfectly in its own cultural context. Rather, it fascinates me how un-transferrable these behavior norms are: you couldn't act like a weight-indifferent Peruvian and win many friends in American social circles, and Peruvians would think it strange how the gringa tried to avoid talking about her friend's skinniness. Each particular society has its norms for what's acceptable, but we often don't recognize how non-universal those rules are until we're exposed to another way of doing things.

Clay oven construction

My host family is in the process of rebuilding our clay oven, after the original collapsed a few months ago. Clay ovens, which are typically about the size and shape of an igloo made for a two year-old, are quite common in this region of Peru. They are used primarily for bread-baking, but are also known to cook large roasts of meat, cakes, or cookies made by enterprising Peace Corps volunteers.

While I had seen our oven in action several times before it collapsed, the re-building has been equally interesting (though significantly less delicious), because I've been able to learn how it's made. First my host dad, Javi, dug holes in the dirt floor, then mixed cement to support the two upright wooden logs that serve as the base.

Phase one

Phase two involved laying and securing wood planks in the form of a table, which will later be covered with thick clay to form the bottom of the actual oven.

Host parents posing mid-construction

However, as my host dad informed me, this particular wooden frame is much stronger than your average table - his exact words, said with a fair amount of pride in his construction skills, were: "an elephant could stand on here!" Not sure we'll ever have the opportunity to test that claim, but I don't doubt that it's a well-built oven base. This wooden starting point is as far as the construction process has gotten so far, but once the clay has dried and hardened, the final product should look like this:

Fire burning in the old oven as it heated up to bread-baking temperature

What's interesting about these ovens is that at the time of actual baking, there's no fire burning inside. Instead, the baker lights and resupplies the oven fire for a solid five hours or so before baking time. Once the desired heat level is reached, you scrape out all but some coals around the edge, and the clay dome traps the heat while the food cooks. Although definitely not as time-efficient as simply twirling your electric oven dial to 350 degrees, I can attest that these more traditional ovens make for some seriously tasty bread.

On oranges and blueberries

The other day I came across one of those linguistic gems that gets a bit lost in translation: "buscar a su media naranja." Literally, it means "search for your half an orange," but the idea is similar to English's concept of finding your other half or your soulmate. I just thought the orange-half imagery was a fun and unique way to express an idea that's present worldwide.

In other fruit-related news, I have recently been struggling to explain the concept of blueberries to some cajabambinos. I am uncertain as to whether blueberries exist at all in Peru, but I've definitely never seen them in Cajabamba. Blueberries are probably my single favorite fruit; a summer treat of which I can easily consume an entire carton in a matter of hours (or maybe even just one hour). Unfortunately I'd temporarily forgotten the Spanish word for blueberry, so I was left to try and explain that my favorite fruits were these small, round, blue... things (also forgot the word for berry) that grow in summer and are delicious. Sadly, there were no smiles of recognition or shouts of eureka from my Peruvian listeners. The collective response was instead, "ah, you mean sauco! Or capulí!" These are two varieties of small berry-ish fruits native to Cajamarca's mountains, but they are decidedly not blueberries.

Sauco

Capulí - these aren't even blue!

Although they are pretty tasty berries in their own right, especially when made into ice cream, sauco and capulí are in my opinion a far cry from the pure deliciousness of blueberries. Maybe I'll have better luck on my fruit quest in Lima next week...

Good grief, a grant!

Our Peruanas Poderosas grant is finally online, woohooooo!!

A real live website!

Now that we've taken care of that initial excitement, let me explain my enthusiasm. Peruanas Poderosas means "Powerful Peruvian Women," and it's an annual project organized by PC Peru's Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment (GenEq) committee, of which I am a member. The project's main component has always been a calendar that profiles awesome female Peruvian counterparts in PCVs' communities, with the goal of highlighting the impact of women leaders. This year, we're aiming to make the project even more effective by designing the calendar as a tool to help high school teachers create vocational orientation programs in their classrooms. The 2014 calendar will feature 12 women from different professions, and each month will not only have information on that field, but also corresponding lesson plans and materials to teach a certain skill needed in the world of work. We will then organize community events and regional workshops to celebrate the role of Peruvian women as professionals and to teach PCVs and their counterparts how to use the calendar's resources. On a big-picture level, we hope that Peruanas Poderosas will: 1) promote gender equity by dispelling the machismo myth that only men can be professionals; and 2) empower teachers to better prepare students to pursue higher education and professional careers (skills like résumé-writing, communication, and goal-setting are not part of the standard high school curriculum here).

While the project is led by the entire GenEq committee, one person has to take charge of writing the grant. So way back in February, I volunteered as grant-writer, because Peruanas Poderosas is a project I'm passionate about and grant-writing is a skill I wanted to gain during my time in the Peace Corps. Four months later, I can affirm that it is indeed as tedious a process as everyone claims it to be. But I'm glad to now have experience in writing a grant, and am excited to get moving on all the big plans we have for this project. If you'd like to support us, please click on this link to our website to make a tax-deductible donation - thank you!

Campo style

Cajabamba's an interesting town, because while it's big enough (relatively speaking) to have urban comforts like internet, electricity, and running water, it's smack in the middle of Cajamarca's agricultural heartland. This means that although residents of the town itself tend to wear jeans and sneakers, half the people walking down Cajabamba's streets are campo farmers who still keep to the traditional dress of the sierra. 

Campo men are easily identified by their ever-present baseball caps and sandals made from recycled tire rubber, called yanquis or ojotas. The campesinos wear these simple yet hardy shoes through thick and thin, and in every kind of weather. 

The women's version of the sandals comes with a little rubber flower attached to the top strap, but the ladies split their footwear choices between the sandals and a basic black loafer (which also looks like it's made out of recycled tires). Although the shoes are much the same, the rest of the woman's traditional outfit is much more eye-catching than their male counterparts'. 

Peruvian campesinas are not afraid to sport beautiful and bright colors - a single outfit is often composed of various vibrant hues that the fashion police might not call complementary, but somehow it works. The traditional campo ensemble includes: a pleated skirt, with an underskirt fringe peeking out under the bottom hem, a button-down blouse, a hand-knit cardigan sweater, a wide-brimmed straw hat, and a wool blanket draped over the shoulders. Those blankets are one of the most multi-purpose tools I've ever seen: the señoras use them to cover their legs for warmth, to fold and sit atop when the ground is uncomfortable, and to carry everything from babies to alfalfa.

It's crazy how heavy of loads these ladies can stuff into their blankets and still walk up mountains!

But if I had to pick one item that defines the campo wardrobe, it'd definitely be the hats. While more common in women (since men now have the baseball cap option), men sometimes wear the wide-brimmed straw as well. I love these hats for many reasons. For one, they are a mark of the community - although campesinos in other mountain regions of Peru also wear straw hats, the shape and color varies. The hats are also a manifestation of pride in being a serrano (mountain) farmer: one hat costs between 300 and 1,000 soles! At an equivalent of $110-$365, you might not bat an eye, but when you're a rural subsistence farmer make a living off selling vegetables at S/.1 per kilo, even 300 soles is an incredible investment. Consequently, these hats are prized possessions, worn daily from sun-up to sundown. Although it cracks me up that the campesinas won't remove them even when they're blocking neighbors' views in meetings or knocking seat-mates ears in crowded combis, I'm glad that the hats remain an integral symbol of Cajabamba's campo community.

Cultural lenses: gender equality

Probably my favorite topic for workshops/trainings here in Peru is gender equality. It's something I wholeheartedly believe in, it is a hugely important subject that is relevant in any context, and it is not discussed nearly enough, especially considering the prevalence of machismo in Peruvian culture. So when I have the chance to talk about it, I get excited. But it's also a difficult workshop to lead, because I have to be constantly conscious of how my own cultural lens affects my views on gender equity, and how incredibly different the participants' cultural context often is. 

Not only did I grow up in the United States, where machismo has come to be far less socially acceptable than in Peru, but I was raised by parents who taught me that all forms of discrimination are wrong and assured me from day one that I could be anything I wanted to be. That is the lens through which I see the world, and the result is that I look at certain Peruvian social norms and want to get on the radio and shout about how unjust and unequal they are. For example, the fact that women are expected to not only cook lunch 100% of the time, but that it is then those same women who serve every course while their male relatives remain seated at the table - the idea that an extra pair of hands would make the process easier on everyone, which to me is blatantly obvious, does not fit into such traditional gender norms.

However, these gender norms are deeply ingrained in Peru's culture, and I want to avoid any sort of "your-way-is-unjust-and-my-way-is-better" sentiments - for one, that won't help bring about positive change, nor is it fair or right to pass such judgement. Nobody's culture is perfect, especially from an outsider's point of view. So I remember to bite my tongue when I'm about to say, "it would be better if men and women both washed the dishes," or, "cat-calling women in the street is horrible and offensive behavior," because I know that every woman in my audience is in charge of washing her family's plates, and every man listening has whistled at at least one woman in his lifetime. They were raised in a culture that sanctions and normalizes those practices, and my workshop is possibly the first time they have heard the inequalities inherent in machismo culture be named as inequalities. 

So that's what I try to focus on: simply raising awareness. We do an activity to highlight the difference between sex and gender, and highlight that most of the things we associate as being "male" or "female" (i.e., pants, blue, and soccer vs. skirts, pink, and volleyball) are not actually an inherent part of being a man or a woman - women can play soccer too! 

Once that basic difference is established, I raise questions about why doing laundry is a task associated with women, or why decision-making falls into the man's realm. By the time I get to the question, "are men and women's roles equal?" no one has ever said yes. But enabling participants to arrive at that conclusion on their own, rather than getting on my soapbox and preaching about the vast gender inequity in Peruvian society, is a better method for so many reasons.

In the gender-equity training I led today, I was also reminded of two oft-overlooked points: that machismo culture can unfairly affect men as well as women, and that while machista norms dominate Peru on a societal level, they are by no means promoted by every individual. My friend Alberto told a story about how his grandma-aged landlady once found him washing his clothes on the patio: she asked him, "what are you doing? Don't you have a wife to wash your clothes for you?" He replied that he did not, and that seeing as he had two hands (and the option of local laundromats), he didn't plan on getting married based on the need for a washerwoman. But the landlady insisted: "no, joven, you don't want to have to go to a laundromat, you need a wife!" This anecdote, while amusing, is proof that men who break traditional gender norms often meet with just as much resistance as do women. Hearing Alberto tell this story also made me smile, because the fact that he recognized it as gender inequity and responded as he did means that there are Peruvians whose examples will help gender equality really take root here, more than my workshops ever could.

Perspectives on problems

I'm currently teaching a volunteerism class to the seniors at one of Cajabamba's all-girls high schools. When their social studies class was learning about what it means to be a volunteer, these girls invited me to come as a guest speaker. After hearing them ask so many questions and seeing their interest in the idea of volunteering, I asked their teacher if she'd be interested in delving deeper into the topic, and thus the project was born.

In five or six sessions, we'll cover the basic steps of planning a volunteer project: identifying a problem, analyzing its causes and consequences, brainstorming possible solutions and choosing the most effective and feasible, planning the steps of the project and acquiring the necessary resources and support, the importance of monitoring and evaluation of results, and of course actually implementing the project.

Drawing problem trees to analyze causes and consequences

The classes are going incredibly well so far, with lots of enthusiasm from the girls. One of the most interesting parts from my point of view has been the day we identified problems that the students see in their community. Some of the issues the various groups of students have decided to tackle include: negative interactions between different groups within their school (teachers, administrators, different sections and grades of students); domestic violence; child labor (not the young factory workers Americans tend to envision when we hear this term, but rather the all-too-common occurrence in the Peruvian campo of rural children not completing a basic education in order to help their families with farmwork); alcoholism; and abortion.

Abortion is a choice that I don't think you would find among the identified problems if this project were assigned to U.S. students. This is not to say that no student in the States believes abortion is a problem; on the contrary, we are taught to be conscious of the fact that abortion is a very polemic issue about which many Americans hold strong and opposing opinions. For that very reason, students (and their public school teacher) would avoid defining the availability of abortion as a problem in the context of a group project - most likely, not all members of the group would be comfortable with that assertion. Peru, however, is a ~97% Catholic country where abortion is still 99% illegal: all abortions except those performed out of necessity to save the woman's life or prevent serious harm to her health are punishable by law. In this cultural context, it is perfectly normal for students at a public school (which despite being public, is run by Catholic nuns) to identify the practice of abortion as a problem in the world. So while I helped the girls analyze their "problem" as I did all the other groups of students, this evidence of such difference in perspectives between countries was some interesting food for thought.

Getting down to business

After eight weeks of solid learning, the class portion of my youth entrepreneurship class (Somos Emprendedores Somos Peru) has come to an end. From an initial attendance of over 30 students, the workload whittled down the group over time, leaving me with six committed all-stars when all was said and done. Now that they've acquired all the necessary skills to create a business plan, it's time to actually sit down and write. 

Young entrepreneurs hard at work

I have been incredibly impressed with these students throughout our time together: they have taken many hours out of their busy lives to complete this business plan course, driven purely by their own initiative and desire to learn and become more successful entrepreneurs. Particularly inspiring is one student who has completed the class having only received a 6th-grade education. Reading and writing are slow and taxing processes for her, and she needed a refresher course on how to add and subtract numbers with decimals, but she never gave up. Now she's halfway through typing her business plan, and eagerly learning the basics of Microsoft Word while she's at it - awesome!

While at first I was disappointed that more students didn't follow through and attend the whole course, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Having fewer students meant I actually had time to work with each individually during every class and help with problems as they arose - if I'd had 30 kids during the financial portion of the course, we'd have had to spend weeks on cost analysis to give me enough time to review everyone's calculations! A smaller group also resulted in the students really forming new friendships with one another, and it's fun to watch them chat and help each other as we go along.

At the end of this month, the six of them will submit their business plans, and one will be chosen to travel to Lima with me in August and compete in Peace Corps' nation-wide business plan challenge. It's exciting to watch their ideas come together, and I'm hoping that whoever I take to Lima wins some start-up capital and we can continue collaborating to make the plan into a real live business.

School days

I spend a good amount of time teaching in Cajabamba's six high schools (all of which are public), and the differences between the American and Peruvian education systems are interesting to note. First of all, all Peruvian public schools (and most private) require students to wear uniforms. While the color schemes vary a bit between schools, the basic concept is always the same: grey, black, or navy bottoms (pleated skirts for girls, dress pants for boys), a white button-down shirt underneath a solid-colored sweater on top, and black dress shoes. Boys cannot have too long of hair, and girls are encouraged (or in some cases required) to have their hair tied back. On the one day per week that each grade has P.E. class, the students wear their track suit uniforms, which are always in the same school colors as the normal uniform.

The upshot of this is that when kids are in uniform, you know immediately which school they belong to - when the bell rings around 1pm everyday, Cajabamba's streets flood with students, and the color-coded uniforms are a huge help when I'm trying to spot my students. However, this also means that when I see my kids outside of school hours and they're wearing normal clothes, I have to do a double-take to recognize them without their typical outfits.

High schools here are also structured quite differently. Each grade will have two or three "sections," for example 1st grade A, 1st grade B, and 1st grade C. The students are randomly divided into these sections their first year of high school, and then stay with their same classmates all the way through senior year. Instead of students changing rooms after each class period and everyone having different schedules, all the students in each grade study the same set of subjects, and it is the teachers who change rooms after each period. This leads to another amusing (at least to me) difference: when a teacher enters the classroom, all the students stand up and chorus, "¡Buenos días!," and they will not sit down again until the teacher gives them permission. When I was first getting used to this, I would often forget to tell them to sit down again, and to this day I still feel an odd mix of strange and special when they all stand up when I arrive.

Another huge difference between schools in the U.S. and Peru is the schedule: Peruvians only study in the morning. Since lunch is the big meal of the day here, it would be illogical to have kids eat lunch at school. So instead, the schools run from around 7am to around 1pm. Then everybody (teachers included) goes home for lunch, and then afternoon activities like sports, music, dance, etc. start again around 3:00.

Every Peruvian public school begins the day with what's called "formation." The kids arrive at school at a certain time, but do not head straight to class. Instead they line up in the central patio (every school has one), with one line for every section.

Formation at one of the all-girls schools

Formation is always a strictly organized affair, and in some schools it can take on a near-military nature: there are always at least a couple of posture commands involved (e.g., "face left," or "stand at attention"), the lines must be stick-straight, and silence is strongly enforced. The students who arrive late are not allowed to join their designated line, but rather must wait in a group in the back and receive a stern talking-to about punctuality once everything's over. The content of formation is generally just a series of announcements and reminders - watching the students standing through all of them often makes me appreciate the more casual American style of sitting, non-uniformed, and chatting with friends in the comfort of my homeroom chair while the principal makes his announcements over a loudspeaker.

Huamachuco

To celebrate one year in Peru, I decided to make a long overdue day-trip to visit Huamachuco, the site of PCV friends Lindsay and Chris. Huamachuco, which is a 1.5-hour drive away from Cajabamba, is actually the closest PC site to Cajabamba, despite the fact that it's technically in another department (La Libertad). However, although the two towns are close in terms of distance, Huamachuco was a significant change from Cajabamba in two key aspects: it's colder, and it's bigger. At an altitude of about 10,500 feet, Huamachuco was noticeably chillier during the day, and absolutely freezing at night - my visit definitely made me appreciate Cajabamba's more temperate climate, and the slightly-less-than-icy water that comes out of our sinks (vs. Huamachuco's finger-numbing water). In addition, with a population of 60,000, Huamachuco felt more like my regional capital of Cajamarca than my town of Cajabamba. The city has a huge plaza (see photo below), substantial motor traffic, enough inhabitants to support a handful of quality restaurants (real pizza!), and covers a much larger area than my little campo town.

Huamachuco plaza

The plaza was filled with plant sculptures, including, of course, a cuy

None of these differences are necessarily for worse or for better; it was just really interesting to experience such a marked change such a short trip down the road. The highlight of my visit was definitely our excursion to Marcahuamachuco, a sprawling mountaintop site of pre-Incan ruins just outside the city. Not much is known about the people who inhabited the site, but it's thought that the buildings were constructed between 400 and 800 A.D., and that Marcahuamachuco was one of the region's most important political centers, prior to its conquest by the Incas. It took us the better part of a morning to explore all the ruins, as we puffed for breath at 12,500 feet and were buffeted by some serious winds, but the hike around and down from the site was beautiful.

The Marcahuamachuco mesa from afar

View of Huamachuco from the ruins

Ruins of two ceremonial burial towers

An old circular building

The "castle" sector of the site - wildflowers were growing everywhere!

The doors were not exactly gringa-sized

One year later

Today marks day 365 in Peru - the big one-year milestone has been reached! Time (for the most part) feels like it's flown by, and it's crazy to think about where the past year has taken me. Twelve months ago I was soaking up every minute of my last days at home with family and friends, saying some tough goodbyes, and trying to pack everything I'd need into two reasonably-sized suitcases. I had very little idea of what my new Peruvian life would be like, but I got on the plane anyway and started the daily struggle of figuring it out. One year later, I'm still doing some figuring out, but the struggle has come to feel normal.

Last summer I was a Peace Corps newbie, spending my days alongside an awesome group of 19ers as we tried to get a grip on what Peace Corps was going to be like and how exactly we were going to operate as real volunteers. During training, I learned such useful things as the Peruvian national anthem and the 4 P's of marketing, but when swearing-in day rolled around, I still had some serious unanswered questions, most of which centered around the principal theme of "how am I supposed to do this job??" Peace Corps is, if nothing else, a baby-bird type of experience: in your early days you're fed and coddled in the safety of the nest while your mom tells you a bit about the ways of the world, but then the day comes when it's time to learn to fly, and all of a sudden, sí o sí, you're kicked out of that comfort zone and it's either flap your wings or become a splatted pancake.

So I swallowed the lump in my throat and headed to site, armed with three broad program goals that my work should ideally help achieve, and not much else. I spent my first few months meeting people, introducing myself and offering to work with anyone and everyone who might be interested, and eventually I got some projects started. I feel incredibly lucky to have been placed in Cajabamba, where both my host family and the community in general have been so welcoming. My "work" doesn't often feel like work, because it's interactive, constantly changing, and often just plain fun. Over the past year I've taught vocational skills to high schoolers, painted a world map mural with some enthusiastic kiddos, helped cuy producers understand basic marketing concepts, started five community savings and loan banks, taught accounting to farmers, held leadership workshops for women, and much much more. I've also taken full advantage of one of Peace Corps' biggest benefits: awesome international vacations. But despite having done so much, I feel like I'm only recently hitting my stride in terms of work. Having been in Cajabamba almost 10 months, the community now knows me and I've been able to more effectively work with socios to make my projects more sustainable.

Hitting the year mark also means there's a lot of change on the horizon: a new group of volunteers (the 21ers) arrived in Peru last night, and in a couple weeks I'll go to Lima to help train them, and then bring a few back to my site for a "shadowing trip" that will hopefully give them a better idea of a day in the life of a PCV. The 17ers (the group of volunteers that's been here a year longer than I have) are gearing up to leave Peru - people who have been a huge part of our Cajamarca family will soon be back stateside, so there's some goodbye-ing to be done. Instead of counting up the months I've been in Peru, I'll soon be counting down to my Christmas visit home, and then to the end of my service - that is crazy. But between now and then, there's still a year+ of work and fun to be had, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

No class = normal

Today I showed up at one of Cajabamba's high schools to teach one of my regular weekly classes - this one is a volunteerism project with seniors at an all-girls school. When I arrived at the school, it was immediately clear that I would not be holding class: all the girls were gathered around the central patio watching as each grade level put on its own performance of songs related to caring for the environment. I found my supposed-to-be students, and they explained to me that today the school was holding a class competition in honor of "environment day" (pretty sure they invented this particular holiday).

Unfazed, I sat down with the girls and watched for a little while, and then went along my merry way. Occurrences like this, i.e., random non-academic events that interrupt significant amounts of class time, are completely normal in Peru. Not only are they normal, but they are frequent: at least one of my classes is randomly cancelled at minimum once a month, and often more than once. The past month has been particularly full of such examples: yesterday the last two hours of school were cancelled because the teachers had a training; last week my volunteerism class didn't happen because the girls were attending some assembly at another school; the past three weeks there have been multiple kids missing from any given class due to the swearing in of the "school police," various school anniversary parades, and during-school-hours practice sessions of the sports teams competing in the inter-school olympics.

In addition to these seemingly random interruptions, Peru's schools also celebrate the country's inordinate amount of nationally sanctioned holidays. The Friday before Mother's day, 100% of Cajabamba's schoolchildren were occupied in putting on honorary shows for the moms. A significant portion of the two weeks leading up to said shows was also shot to hell, as the kids of course had to prepare and practice these maternal spectacles. This coming Friday is the national "Day of the Flag" - apparently four days of independence day celebrations in July is not sufficient; Peru also needs a specific day just to honor those special red and white stripes. As it so happens, the town of Cajabamba also celebrates the town's own founding day and flag day - two additional days without school and work. Anyway, you get the picture. All these ceremonies are just part of the Peruvian reality, and all you can do is go with the flow and sit back and enjoy the parades.