Merry Christmas

by Alisha

Our second Christmas in Peru has come and gone. We celebrated with our host family with a dinner, presents, panetón (traditional Christmas bread), and hot chocolate.

Christmas is a low production event here in Peru. Families that can afford to exchange gifts usually give a few things to the kids, but generally presents are not exchanged between adults. There aren't shopping crazes, overly decorated houses or Christmas music that starts playing in November. Decorations are simple except for nativity scenes that can be found in many homes and businesses and can feature hundreds of little figures.

While it has been nice to spend Christmas with our host family from training last year and our current host family this year, we will be looking forward to seeing our families and friends next year. So bring on the Griswold family decorations, the holiday traffic, the never ending Christmas music, and the snow!
Wishing all of our friends and family a very Merry Christmas!

Lajas!

by Alisha

After living in my site for over a year, I finally made it to Lajas where my friend Julie, a health volunteer, lives. I'm not sure what took me so long to visit her site since she is only a 30-minute car ride away. In true Julie style she wasted no time and took me on a death-defying hike* to a series of small waterfalls about an hour outside her site.

* only a minor exaggeration

Poetry as Inspiration

By Alisha

While Micah is spending time with his family in the States, I’m in the midst of end of the school year festivities. School is ending this week and students will have summer vacation during the months of January and February. That means graduation ceremonies and other end of the year celebrations are keeping me busy. I was even invited to be the godmother of one of the students in our youth group for his high school graduation.

Yesterday I attended an event in one of the communities outside of Chota where we have a youth group. The communication teachers put together a really interesting event. The teachers and students honored an elderly community member by putting together a poetry recital using the poems written by the community member. It was a really great idea to use poetry composed by a community member in order to inspire the students to write poetry and express themselves though art. It was also really touching to see the joy it brought to the author to see his poetry preformed at the local school. The poems were simple and about daily life and struggles. Topics included the corn harvest, discrimination, corruption, and tuberculosis. If I can get my hands on some of the poems I'll try and post them.

Very Bad News

by Micah

I am very sad to report that I am back in the U.S. for a short stay because Kim, my new stepmother, was killed in a car accident on December 3. Peace Corps was kind enough to to give me two weeks of emergency leave and pay for my trip home. I've been back for a little over a week and will return to Peru on December 20.

This is a very difficult loss for my family, especially for my dad. As readers of this blog know, he and Kim were married in October, so their time together ended almost as quickly as it began. That we lost my mom to cancer seven years ago and now Kim is devastating.

I did not have a great deal of time to get to know Kim, but I can say that I grew to love her in the short time she was in my life. Part of the reason for that is that she and my dad made each other happy, and to see my dad lose that is crushing. I wish I could express the essence of what made Kim such a wonderful person, but I don't think I'm ready to do that right now. If you follow this blog, please keep my family, especially my dad, in your thoughts.

World AIDS Day

by Alisha

World AIDS Day (December 1^st) has arrived in Chota. This year Micah and I wanted to do several activities to bring HIV and AIDS awareness to our community. Where we live there are presumed to be a low number of HIV/AIDS cases; however, reliable data isn’t kept for our region. While HIV/AIDS are thought to be of a greater program in coastal areas and in jungle regions we felt strongly about bringing more attention to these diseases. Especially necessary is more information and education in the areas of prevention and understanding that this is a disease that can effect anyone not just certain populations.

Activities started off with a parade of health workers and our youth health promoters. We handed out information on HIV/AIDS.

On World AIDS Day we ran an art contest at one of the high schools and asked students to paint pictures depicting the prevention of HIV/AIDS or something representing that people living with HIV/AIDS should not be discriminated against. We had some really great submissions from which we choose winners and finalists who will receive sets of art supplies. All of the artwork will also be displayed in the local cultural center through the month of December.

Today our group of youth health promoters presented a play to around 200 students from their school. It was great to see how each of them improved as we prepared for the shows today. All of them took pride in the endeavor and tomorrow they plan to present the play at the local jail.

Remember Tobby?

by Alisha & Micah

Last weekend, we went on an outing with our host family to a popular place to have a picnic lunch. Tobby, the puppy you may remember from a few months ago, joined us and here are some pictures of him in the countryside.

Camp VALOR

A group of participants and volunteers at the camp's closing ceremony

by Micah

Every so often, Peace Corps volunteers from a given department get together to plan and execute a youth leadership camp. Last weekend, volunteers from Cajamarca put on a camp called VALOR for boys aged 13 to 18 from all over the department. The camp was held in Baños del Inca, which is just outside of the city of Cajamarca, and Alisha and I decided to take three boys (Frank, Alex, and Roel) who live at the orphanage that we've been working at since we arrived in Chota.

Frank, Alex, and Roel

The camp was great. In addition to activities and talks on teamwork, goal-setting, healthy lifestyles, sexuality, and ethics, the 30 boys who attended participated in a vigorous debate session so that they could put their knowledge of ethics and argumentation abilities into practice. For a number of the participants, this was both their first time in Cajamarca and their first time hanging out with other boys from different areas of the department. I'm very glad that Alisha and I were able to participate, and we hope to plan a similar camp for girls in May or June.

Alisha and I making fools of ourselves

Jenga was a HUGE hit

And so was Scrabble

Wedding Crashers

With our host parents César and Milagros

By Alisha

October was a month of weddings for Micah and I. First our host parents decided to tie the knot after being together for around 15 years. Even though Peru is around 85% Catholic our experience has been that many couples do not get married before living together and having children. This may be due to a lack of social pressure to get married or that idea that many men do not want to be tied down my marriage.

The Peace Corps Volunteers from our area at the wedding

We then traveled back to the States to visit family and because Micah's dad got married! We had a really nice time visiting friends and family in the States. We drove through Missouri, Nebraska, and South Dakota seeing as many people as we could in the 10 days we were back. Congrats Jim and Kim

Jimvasion!

Crazy gringos!

by Micah

This is the first of several long overdue posts. In September, Alisha and I went to Lima for our one-year medical checks (we're both fit as fiddles) and some project meetings, and we had also planned for my dad to visit us since we would already be in Lima. So once all of our medical exams and meetings were over, Alisha, my dad, and I went on a five-day trip to Cusco, which is located in the southern Andes. The vast majority of people who travel to Peru do so almost exclusively in order to visit Cusco and Machu Picchu, and now I know why this is such a popular travel destination. We visited Machu Picchu, saw lots of small towns and archaeological ruins in the Sacred Valley, and did a great deal of walking around the stunning city of Cusco. Here are some pictures:

Machu Picchu

Alisha and her new friends

Dad at Sacsayhuamán

After spending several days in Cusco, we headed to Chota so my dad could see where we live and work and meet our host family and friends. Dad accompanied us to all of our normal activities, and I must say that he was an absolute hit with everyone in Chota. He danced circles around everyone at a birthday party in the children's shelter where we work, helped us do some playacting in an English class, and generally brightened people's day. It was great to have him in Peru with us.

Expectations

By Alisha
Before coming to Peru the thought of Peace Corps stirred up images of small communities, rural living, lack of electricity and lack of running water. Micah and I were placed in a site of more than 30,000 people, with electricity, widely available Internet (including wireless), cell phone service and a large daily market filled with fruits and vegetables. We have water service daily, but only for about 2 hours in the morning. The realization of living in a large community with many amenities was a shock to what we had expected our experience in Peru to be and while our community is somewhat isolated there isn’t anything that we need that can’t be found in our site. There are of course advantages to having so many amenities in our site, but sometimes I find myself wishing I were living in a small community where everyone knew who I was and everyone knew what I was doing.

We seem to have found a solution to wanting the experience of a smaller site as well and for the past 9 months or so, we have been working with youth groups in two communities outside of our site doing a variety of activities and are currently teaching a weekly vocational orientation course. We hike about an hour and a half to reach one of the communities and about 45 minutes to the other community. These projects provide me with a sense that we are reaching a group of youth who on average are more disadvantaged than those living in the city. We have also seen a big difference in the youth groups. Most of the youth in the community farthest away from our site wear traditional clothing and are much more reserved than youth we have worked with in the city or in the other youth group. I feel a sense of accomplishment just getting to know these youth and have seen many of them open up more and more as we have developed a trusting relationship with many of them.

I also look forward to our hikes out to these communities. People we meet along our route are likely to greet us as we pass and express interest in what we are doing in their communities. We also get this interest and reception in our community, but it’s a difference type of experience that is hard to explain. Many times the interest people have in us in our site revolves around us teaching them English or doing some other type of activity with their children. It is hard to continually explain that while we teach some English we aren’t able to teach English to everyone. In contrast, when we meet people along the routes to our youth groups people have a general interest in us and want to ask us a few questions about the United States. There are few requests for programs or for English classes. It can be refreshing to have a nice conversation with someone without a request for something.

In a few days we will complete one year in our site. The groups of Peru 13 (we are Peru 11) will start their service next week and Peru 14 will arrive in a month. With most of Peru 9 finished with their service this month and Peru 10 finishing in November we will soon be the next group getting ready to close our service.

Tobby

By AlishaThe newest member of our host-family. Tobby (pronounced Toby). He's a month old and he's awesome.

I smell a rat...

by Micah

At the beginning of June, when Alisha and I were preparing for our trip to Ica and Arequipa, Alisha was getting some luggage out of the top compartment of our closet (which is built into the wall in our bedroom). Since only luggage and other things that we don’t use very often were being stored there, we hadn’t opened that top compartment for a while. So we were unpleasantly surprised to discover that everything was covered with mold, serious amounts of mold. Since then, we’ve been keeping both the upper and lower compartments of the closet open let them air out. This piece of information is crucial to the story that follows.

On Tuesday night, Alisha was awoken by a series of loud noises in our room: a box of pens and pencils being knocked over, scratching sounds, and the like. I, a heavy sleeper, didn’t notice a thing, but Alisha simply couldn’t get back to sleep because of the incessant noises. In her sleep-deprived state, she imagined that some large animal had invaded our room and her slumber. After several hours of anxiety, she woke me up, so I started hearing the sounds as well. It honestly sounded like there were multiple rats in our room, which is an unnerving thought at 4:00 am. Alisha spent about 30 minutes panning the room with a flashlight, but we couldn’t catch a glimpse of our little friend. Alisha couldn’t take it anymore, so she decided to go to the living room and try to get some sleep. I stayed in our room trying to locate what I assumed to be a rat. After a while, I heard some plastic bags rustling, and I suddenly remember that we had several plastic bags stored in the top compartment of our closet, which was open. So I jumped out of bed, turned the light on, and stealthily approach the closet. I rustled one of the bags with my hand, and it rustled back, so I knew the rat was in there. I shut the closet doors, turned out the light, and climbed back into bed to listen for more rat sounds, just in case the one I trapped in the closet had brought friends. Fortunately, the only sounds I heard came from the closet’s upper compartment.

We couldn’t deal with the rat right away because we had some work to do Wednesday morning, but when we were finished, we went back to the house. María, a family friend who happens to be an expert rat killer, was there. So the three of us went to our room to exterminate the rat. Well, it wasn’t nearly as simple as we all thought it would be. I’ll spare you the gory details, but you should know that it took 30 minutes, several small wooden boards, a broom, and iron rod, a broken television antenna, and an umbrella (wielded by Alisha, who was screaming and jumping up and down on the bed for the duration of the ordeal) to eliminate this ferocious beast of a rat, who, by the way, measured about seven inches in length (without the tail!) and had a vertical jump of at least four inches. We’re still traumatized, and we don’t know if even time will heal our wounds, but at least we’re sleeping well.

Peruvian Good Reads

By Alisha & Micah

Work has kept us relatively busy, but there are always rainy days, time spent waiting for meetings to start, and generally more time to read for pleasure than we have ever experienced before. While we both enjoy reading, Micah is an avid reader and up to this point has read over 60 books. Our host sister loves joking with Micah about how much he reads and has coined the phrase, “Sácate la nariz de los libros y goza de la vida.” (Meaning: Get your nose out of those books and enjoy life).

We thought it would be interesting to review some of our favorite books written about Peru or by Peruvian authors.

Alisha’s Top 3

The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics
By Orin Starn (Editor), Ivan Degregori (Author), Robin Kirk (Author)

This book is an excellent collection of articles, short stories, poems, and photographs that provide the reader with an overview of the diverse history in Peru. I found it especially interesting because of our time spent living in Peru. One of the articles focused on the region where we live and the development of a community justice program (rondas campesinas) that continues today. While it may help to know a bit of background information about Peru, I think that anyone interested in Peru or planning to travel to Peru would enjoy this book. Peru is so much more than Machu Picchu and other popular tourist destinations and this book can provide the context for curious travelers who really want to understand Peru in context while visiting.
War by Candlelight
By Daniel Alarcón

This collection of short stories by Peruvian born author Daniel Alarcón, left me intrigued and wanting to read more by works by this up and coming author. Alarcón (who writes in English) was raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and later returned to Peru to live in one of the poorest parts of Lima while studying on a Fulbright scholarship. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of Lima and the story “City of Clowns,” which first appeared in the New Yorker Magazine.

Lost City Radio
By Daniel Alarcón

I just finished reading this book, and I enjoyed it immensely. Written by the same author as War by Candlelight, this is Alarcón's first novel. The story is based in a fictional country (the closely resembles Peru) following a war. The main character, Norma, hosts a popular radio show that helps reunite family members separated by the war. While she provides the voice that calms and reunites the nation, she is tormented by the disappearance of her husband. Norma then meets an orphan, Victor, who may hold the clues she needs to understand what happened to her husband and what role he might have played in the war.

Some of Micah’s picks
La ciudad y los perros
By Mario Vargas Llosa

This is the first novel that was written by Peru’s most celebrated author. It tells the story of several students who attend a military high school for boys in Lima, which provides and harsh, violent, unforgiving, and morally ambiguous backdrop for adolescence. It is an important novel in Latin American (and world) literature, not only because it is a piercing meditation on power and the abuses thereof, but also for its innovative narrative techniques. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. For those of you interested in reading it in translation, you can find it under the title The Time of the Heroes. I’ve read several other novels by Vargas Llosa and have enjoyed them all.
Un mundo para Julius
By Alfredo Bryce Echenique

This is the first novel written by Peru’s second-most celebrated author (who I walked by in a neighborhood in Lima one day). It narrates a few years in the life of Julius, the youngest child of a very wealthy upper-class family in Lima during the 1950s. Julius is a curious, sensitive boy who would rather spend time with the army of household servants employed by his family than do anything else. In this novel that tells the story of a very wealthy family, we catch glimpses of the “other half” that give us the feeling that the world inhabited by Julius and his family is only very tenuously connect to the rest of the world’s reality. To me, this novel’s enchantment lies in the narrator’s tone, which strikes a perfect balance between sarcasm and tenderness. The English translation is called A World for Julius.

Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro
By Iván Thays

Iván Thays is a young author from Lima, and this is his most recent novel. It uses the aftermath of the brutality of the Shining Path conflict (in this case, in a small town in Ayacuho, a place called Oreja de Perro) to tell the story of a journalist who is experiencing unimaginable personal losses. It is a very sad story that is told with a great deal of tenderness. Unfortunately, it has yet to be translated into English.