Light the Fire

We recently had IST (In Service Training) in Pozo de las Ramos, Piura. All of the remaining Health Volunteer and a community partner arrived ready to learn all we could about latrine construction, improved wood burning stove construction, gardens, raising animals, and Early Childhood Development. Needless to say it was a JAMMED packed 4 days of lessons, and my favorite, hands on learning.



I brought with me to the meeting my most active Health Promoter, Andres Huertas Canerio. He was extremely excited to learn all the ins and outs of construction of stoves and latrines, and coming from a background in construction, I just felt he was the perfect match for the meeting--I was totally right! Andres is the guy you call in my town when your water pipe bursts, or you need to build an adobe house, or your bean crop is dying from a plague and you need help. He’s the Tim “the Tool Man” Taylor of Nanchoc if you will. He asked so many questions during the meetings that some of the other people got mad thinking we’d never leave—it may have frustrated some people, but I was as proud as I could be. I think I might have actually found one member of the community who’s ready to light a fire under the rear ends of the people of Nanchoc and get to working!



Now I’m hoping I’m not speaking too soon saying that. I really do hope that Andres and I, together with the Health Post and other Promoters, can finally get some projects going. Now that Andres has actually seen how freaking easy (and relatively cheap) it is to build an improved wood burning stove, he’s ready to build. He even wants one of the first ones we’re going to make. Our new game plan is to build 7 (you buy one big piece of metal that makes 7 stoves) stoves as part of a pilot program, putting them in influential houses in the community—Andres’s house, my house, Carmen (a lady at the health post who EVERYOE knows), Teo (the lady who owns the phone), the soup kitchen in Andres’s neighborhood, and one at the health post, the other slots are still up for grabs. But I’m excited that we seem to have a plan. In this up coming week we will be getting in contact with sellers of the metal we need to find a cheap price and hopefully start building by mid-September if all goes smoothly.

Not only did we get the stove project underway, but I found my new favorite way to grow veggies. The guy who was teaching about gardens happens to live in a city, so he has next to no space to grow veggies in. Seeing as how it’s like his job to teach people how to grow things, he figured it’d be rather hypocritical of him to not grow them himself and started growing plants on a shelf…sorta. The idea is to build a 2 story growing platform. Envision a bunk bed, but instead of a mattress there is a bin to grow stuff in.

Now I took this idea one step further. I’ve been trying for MONTHS to get my host family on board for a garden, and I wanted a bunny. They told me that there was no space for a garden at the house, it’s true, our patio is chock full of trees, so there’s not a ton of room…but there is some, but that I could build a little hutch for a bunny if I wanted. As long as it was just one bunny. So, I took the guy’s idea for the bunk bed system of growing and changed it a little… I’m going to have a bunny house on the bottom bunk, and veggies growing on the top bunk! I know, super great idea Jenny! I know, I’m proud of myself for thinking it up too.

Tomorrow (18th of Aug to be exact) I’m going to dig the holes to put the posts in, and walk about an hour with the donkey and start begging for people to give me 1 or 2 stalks of bamboo to get building. Usually people don’t give away bamboo…it’s like the duct tape of my site, now I know that you can’t tape things together with bamboo, but you can build damn near anything out of it. But I’m hoping my status as a gringa will help me get some for free…and if not as the gringa, as the broke gringa who knows how to build a latrine and is willing to share that knowledge. So here’s hoping that in the next blog I’m talking about my complete bunny hutch/garden combo and putting my focus on planting and buying me a bunny rabbit. No clue what I’ll name him, but if he’s gray I might have to be uncreative and name him Bugs Bunny…and maybe find me a black duck to name Daffy. I mean the neighbor’s cat’s already named Sylvester.

Cowboy Meets Peru

This week I was fortunate enough to have one of my best friends come and visit me in Peru! His name’s Josh, we mostly just call him the cowboy because that’s his job description. It was rather funny to watch a boy who us used to the country life of the United States adjust to Peru—both the city part and the country part.

I went to Lima to go and pick him up from the airport, and spent most of the day hanging with the host family waiting on his flight to come in at 11pm. Everyone had a lot of questions about the mystery gringo that was coming to visit. “How blue are his eyes?” “Like how tall is tall?” “Wait, he gets paid to hunt?” “What do you mean he doesn’t speak Spanish??” were just a few of the questions I got to answer. My host brother-in-law and I went to the airport around 11 to wait for him to come out of customs. Now I’m not sure if it was the fact that I hadn’t actually seen Josh in over a year, or just the shock from a few plane-full of gringos walking out of the international terminal doors in the airport…but it was A LOT harder than I thought it would be to find him. I was thinking before I got to the airport that it could only be so hard to pick a 6’2” reddish-blonde haired and bearded guy that’s probably wearing plaid out of a crowd. Apparently I had overestimated my ability to scan a crowd. If he hadn’t been wearing a CAT (Caterpillar) hat I might not have found him until after he had walked around the lobby for an hour.



Once safely out of the airport and all the craziness that is included in that we made it to the Peace Corps crash pad in Lima around 1. The tour of Lima started the next day. Now ya’ll know I’m really not a great tour guide, so I did my best…but we went to go see Larco Mar first, the fancy shopping mall positioned at the top of a cliff overlooking the beach. It was our first visit mainly so we could switch out his US money to Peruvian Soles. I hadn’t seen American money in so long it was kinda a nice memory to see them. I forgot that it was all (mostly) green. And I’m pretty sure they’ve changed the $5 since I left. When I get back to the States I’m sure I’ll be having some real issues. None of the money will look the way I remember. But after Larco Mar I took him to my favorite (funniest) park in Lima: Parque de Amor, the Park of Love. Now before ya’ll get confused, let me explain why it’s my favorite park in Lima. The whole part is built around a HUGE statue of 2 people making out…it’s just one of those things that you stare at much like a car wreck. You’re not sure why you’re staring, but you just can’t seem to pull your eyes off of it.

After the shock of the park, we went to a fair in Baranco that had art and textiles from around Peru on display and for sell along with Peruvian food for sell. Josh tried his first Pisco Sour—the national drink. It’s Pisco (a clear grape liquor) mixed with lime juice and egg whites. I’m not a big fan, but Josh seemed to enjoy his. He wasn’t however able to finish it, they made it REALLY strong and we hadn’t eaten lunch yet…so probably for the best he didn’t finish it or I would have been dragging him around Lima. Once we had had our fill of The Peruvian Culture Fair we went in search of food and ate a light lunch since my host family had invited us to Pollo a la Brasa ( Rotisserie chicken) for dinner. That night after supper we got on the bus and Josh had his first taste of a 12 hour bus ride from Lima to Chiclayo.

Now I can safely say he wasn’t a fan of the bus ride…but then again, I don’t know many people who are a fan. It’s rather hard to get a good night sleep on a bus, even if the seat leans way back and has a foot rest, just because us gringos tend to be larger than the seats. But we made it to Chiclayo and proceeded to pass out sleeping for all of the morning in the Peace Corps hotel in Chiclayo (where I always stay). I gave Josh the tour of town after our power naps. There were a lot more people around than normal because we were there 2 days before the Peruvian Independence day and all the partying had already begun. We went to all the usual stops, the grocery store, the mall like place (hey he may have been here for Peruvian culture, but I needed my American culture fix), and just walked around and saw the sights. We also went to Lambayeque to see the Museum. It was a really good exhibit. It had artifacts found in and around the region of Lambayeque on display, and…MUMMIES! My favorites were these little gold figures about 2” tall.





After the culture lesson we hit up the King Kong fair across the street. I think I’ve explained King Kong to everyone before, but just in case, here we go again: King Kong is the regional dessert of Lambayeque. Its layers of a butter cookie with fillings, the fillings range from chocolate, to caramel, to jellied fruit. It winds up looking a lot like a brick of cookied goodness. While it is very good, it’s also very dry and I would not recommend eating it without a glass of milk or a cup of tea or coffee nearby. We then went back to the hotel to enjoy the last of American TV while we had it (the hotel gets movies and shows that sometimes are in English) because we were heading to Nanchoc the next day.

And what a surprise we had waiting for us at the bus terminal: THE NEW COMBI!!! Rojas, the family that runs the bus system at my site FINALLY bought another bus. So we got to ride back to Nanchoc in the big new shiny bus! How fun (at least for me, I don’t think Josh was that impressed). When we were on the bus Josh got mistaken for the volunteer that lives above us in Bolivar by Michael’s 11 month old host sister. She spent the entire bus ride staring at him or crying because her mom wouldn’t let her go sit with Josh. Once in Nanchoc my work officially began. And not my Peace Corps work, the government moving up vacations had killed any and all chances of working this week, but my work as a translator. I’ve decided becoming a professional translator is defiantly not one of the more entertaining jobs in the world. It’s rather frustrating and complicated and leads to one end: The loss of ability to talk intelligently in either language.

But once in Nanchoc, I think Josh realized just how…not jam-packed…his vacation would be. Since the school vacations got moved up there was no option of doing the fun cool things I had planned (giving a lesson on teeth brushing, and playing soccer with the kids, or working in the garden) so I just had to improvise—which is a hard thing to do in the middle of nowhere Peru. We managed to find a few things to do. We went fishing with a cousin and his family and my best friend in site (the nurse) down at the river in Tinges. Josh managed to catch his first Cash-Ca (that ugly fish I was talking about in an earlier blog), which is a good thing, because I don’t think he would have stopped fishing until he caught one. Let’s just say he’s got a bit of a competitive streak in him, and the other guys catching 11 and his none just wouldn’t have done. I think the visit would have been even more fun for him if he could speak better Spanish. Tito, the cousin, is an avid hunter and had a ton of stories to tell and questions to ask Josh—the only problem, I can honestly say that my Spanish vocabulary on hunting terms is not up to par. They were impressed that Josh new a few words that I didn’t, to his credit he did work in a hunting camp in Texas and Mexico, so he had practice—I had no idea what they were talking about. I just filled in the gaps in their conversations when it went to hunting. I can talk all day about most things in my site…hunting is not one of them. But Tito has invited Josh back to Nanchoc to go and hunt deer and mountain lions…doubtful that Josh will actually come back, but the gesture was really nice.






In addition to catching fish, we went to go and see some ruins at my site. There is a spot that has rocks with engravings of animals and people and symbols along with these huge holes in the middle of nowhere (more so than my town). We went one day to try and find them ourselves. And I have found (once again) that Peruvian’s aren’t really that good at giving directions. I found where I thought the rocks probably were, but we just couldn’t find a way to get up there to them…2 days later we went back with our guides (local kids) and I’ll be damned if we didn’t get taken right back to the same spot I tried to get us to before. The only difference, they knew how to get to the top…dern. But we had fun walking around the rocks and looking for all the engravings. We’re not sure what most of them are, they are really worn down from all the rain that we get in my site. But I plan on going back with paper and crayons and taking rubbings of them—maybe that will help.

And that about sums up the gringo’s visit to Peru. I’m about 99% sure Josh was expecting to do more on the trip…I mean Peru has so many cool things to do…but it was just a bad time politically to do much of anything. The president had moved up vacations and cancelled most big Independence Day celebrations. To that cramped most of my plans. Hopefully he doesn’t regret his trip to Peru. I mean, he can now at least say he’s eaten (and not really liked) a Guinea Pig, the strangest (and worst by American standards) cuts of pork, and yucca. And if nothing else maybe I’ve finally convinced him to learn a little bit of Spanish for his next hunting gig down by the boarder. Who knows, I was happy to have the American visitor and to get to speak a lot of English for a little while. Not to mention catching up with a friend. Maybe I’ll get another non-family visitor from the states during my time here, who knows.