Seattle in Peru

Javi and Lourdes enjoying coffee from their Seattle mugs :)

English equivocations

Every Peace Corps volunteer in Peru gets asked to teach English. My native language is a hot commodity here - a perceived ticket to the success of a good job, and a mark of prestige. Consequently, I am asked to teach English by pretty much everyone: teenagers, parents of three year-olds, shop owners, farmers, municipality workers, etc. etc. But the most common requesters are by far Cajabamba's school principals. As the language of global commerce, English is a required subject in Peru's public schools, but very few capable teachers can be found in rural areas. As an example, one student told me about the time her English teacher stood at the door to the classroom saying "Between, between," as she welcomed the arriving students. In Spanish, "entre" as a preposition means "between," but "entre" as a form of the verb "entrar" means "enter/come in." A logical mistake for someone who relies heavily on a translation dictionary for their knowledge of English, but one that a trained teacher would never make.

Thus every single principal in town wants to snag a gringa to really teach their students English - they know their current English teachers can barely speak the language, and we Americans are an obvious source of potential improvement. My answer is of course a consistent "no," with an explanation that English is not the work I came here to do, and a reminder that every single school in Cajabamba is in the same situation - I'm not looking for a dozen full-time jobs as a language teacher. The only exception would be an opportunity to teach the teachers themselves - in my opinion a much more worthwhile and sustainable use of time.

What continues to catch me off guard is when a Peruvian counterpart overhears my sitemates and I conversing amongst ourselves in English, and asks wonderingly: "Oh, you all speak English with each other?" Their expression is always one of primarily surprise - although they definitely know we are American and know English - but they're also both impressed and interested in the novelty of it. While from my perspective, it seems that it'd be quite obvious that we English-speakers would speak in our native tongue when in similar company, to people from my town this is far from obvious. We PCVs may well be the only truly bilingual people in Cajabamba, so I guess it makes sense that our linguistic skills would be a source of fascination.

Chirimoyas

Chirimoyas are a fruit native to Peru, and commonly grown in the valleys around my site. Usually they're about the size of a mango, with a green dinosaur-scales-looking exterior and soft white fruitiness inside - so soft in fact, that to open a chirimoya you just pull it apart with your hands, no knife needed! It's currently chirimoya season, so our Sunday market has been chock full of them. But Javi, not to be outdone, brought home some of his own chirimoyas from the farm… annnnd they are almost the size of my head, pretty much the biggest I've ever seen!

Conservation mural, start to finish

One of our projects with the high schoolers during summer camp was to design and create a mural about a community issue in Cajabamba. After brainstorming possible mural subjects, the kids chose conservation and protecting the environment as their theme. From there, we spent a few hours of class time free-drawing design ideas, eventually voting on which ones to include in the mural.

Two of our particularly artistic students volunteered to take the rough mock-up of the design we'd arrived at on the whiteboard and transfer it onto a single coherent sheet (which we would then grid so as to draw it onto the larger mural). When they came back to class the next week with a beautiful, fully-colored, posterboard-sized version of the design, we profesoras were (pleasantly) speechless at all the effort they'd put in:

In the meantime, Linnea, Jess and I had prepped the extremely ugly wall the school board offices had given us to paint (I'm sure their logic was "it can't get any worse!")

The next step was to draw the poster's deign onto the mural wall:

And then it was time to paint. Luckily our wall was only a couple blocks from my house, which gave us an easy solution for where to store all our paint gear. The beauty of being the teacher is that you have many adolescent minions to carry said gear for you :) The photo below shows our typical weekly parade between my garage and the mural:

Painting - how many high schoolers can you squeeze into a 2.5 meter space?

Within seven weeks, the whole thing was done! And now all of Cajabamba is reminded to take care of the environment every time they walk past the school board office, hooray!

The mural's slogan reads: "Nature is life, don't destroy it. If you conserve it, you'll conserve the future."

Carnaval parades

Some photos from the carnaval parades, both in Cajamarca and Cajabamba… first, whether you're a parade participant or spectator, you'd better expect to get wet! Water balloons, squirt guns, etc. are all still fair game.

Cajamarca niños enjoying the carnaval spirit

These parades are all about the costumes of all kinds: colorful, typical, masked, animalistic, local, foreign, etc. etc. Each neighborhood, association, team, workplace, or any other kind of group gets organized to make and present their own costumes, so there's always a lot of variety.

Cajamarca - the tall hats are one of the typical carnaval costumes

Cajamarca

Cajamarca - a colorful and coordinated take on the traditional cajamarquino dress

Cajamarca

Cajabamba - workers of the agency that maintains the roads

Certain parades during carnavales also have car-drawn floats and reinas (teenage beauty queens) - this one's from Cajabamba

And of course, no carnaval event - even a family-friendly parade - would be complete without alcohol. In the first photo below, you can see a Cajamarca dad inviting a shrek-dressed parade participant to a glass of beer along the parade route.

Cajabamba town authorities (mayor plus several administrators) waiting for the parade to get moving again - the wine bottle they were passing around somehow escaped notice in this photo

Our mayor, the leprechaun

Today was the last big carnaval parade in my town, led by the mayor himself. As his lead group paused to wait for the rest of the paraders to catch up, my host mom and I took advantage of the opportunity to take a picture with this local celebrity, who appeared to be ready for St. Patrick's Day a few weeks early!

Lourdes, Wilson the mayor, and me

Carnaval chaos, round two

Year two of carnavales in Cajamarca has come and gone, and it remains one of my favorite times from my entire Peace Corps service. Days filled with water balloons, parades, and incredibly fun city-wide paint fights, and nights of dancing huayno to snare drums, passing calientito (a hot alcoholic drink with maracuya flavor) around a circle of friends, and snacking on anticuchos (cow heart grilled on kebabs) in the midst of the celebratory crowds in the plaza - you can't get any better than carnaval weekend! If you missed last year's blog about carnavales, check it out for more details on what the holiday entails, or just check out the photos* from this year:

My fellow 19ers firing water guns off our balcony as we geared up for paint day

Only problem with shooting off the balcony is that sometimes people shoot back (this is where a water balloon hit the wall of our room)

Leland, Heidi and I leaving the hostel on paint day

In the thick of things - the city kindly sent out a water truck to provide refills to the many super soakers and buckets roaming the streets

Walking the streets (Leland, Betty, Nanda and I)

The aftermath… clockwise from top left: Lindsay, Kaeli, Leland, Jackie, Jackie's cousin, Heidi, me, Nanda, Betty

*credit for most of these photos goes to Jackie, who was brilliant enough to get a water-proof camera to bring out on paint day