Merry Christmas to All

Sweating in my room at 7:45 at night fighting the invasion of crickets, moths with rash-enduing dander, and the frogs determined to help remedy the situation it doesn’t feel much like Christmas time. The official countdown is 2 days on the American clock, 1 day on the Peruvian. Here we celebrate more the 24th. Well, to be more specific, we stay up until midnight, toast to Christmas with a “champagne” like substance, eat paneton (sweet bread with dried fruit inside, like a good fruitcake), drink hot chocolate, and devour a turkey. Yes, just as you are all thinking to yourself, no that’s not the most conducive to then going to bed and getting a good night’s sleep; so of course we then spend the next few hours drinking (for those who drink, I do not at site), talking, laughing, and all around remembering what a good year it had been.

While the signs of a Peruvian Christmas are starting to show up, here in the campo there’s none of that commercial crud to ruin Christmas. People have put up cardboard decorations on their doors. The most comical to me are the ones depicting a fir tree (we most defiantly don’t have anything even remotely resembling a fir growing near Nanchoc) and the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. When I asked the family with our red nosed friend on their door if they knew who it was, their response, “a rare breed of deer that live in New York City,” oh yes, I’m not in Kansas anymore…not that I ever was. My family’s one up-ed the neighbors thanks to having kids living in Lima, we have a fir tree that LIGHTS up. Yes, it’s red and green with lights that flicker in different patterns. I thought it was just a little to tacky when it first showed up…then my Peruvian campo side came through and now thinks it’s the coolest thing in the whole town. I’ll let ya’ll decide on your own if my Peruvian campo goggles have tainted the coolness:

PICTURE

This Christmas is going to go by a lot faster than last Christmas for a few reasons. The main one of which is that the rainy season has been slowly starting, rather than dumping on us like last year. So this means I’ll more than likely (now watch me go and jinx it) have electricity this year to celebrate the big day! Also, I’m counting down to more than Christmas, the 28th of December my parents and my brother, yes the rest of the Schwartz family, is flying to Peru to see me!!! So while I’ll be spending my second Christmas away from home, I’ll have the good fortune to celebrate the New Year with my family in Lima--A New Year in a new country for them. I’ve almost forgotten how much I hate Lima (especially after how much time I’ve spent their recently) because I’m so excited for their arrival.

Now I just have to decide if I trick my brother into eating food that he’d not normally eat…

Graduation Day

Today marked a very special day in the lives of the kiddies I work with. It was a day of great importance, grand celebrations, and as with all childhood rituals, a healthy pinch (or rather heap) of embarrassment. Today the 6th grade class graduated. Now I had never been to or seen what a Peruvian graduation ceremony is like…so needless to say I had no idea as to what I was in for.

Peruvian Graduation Ceremonies can only be described as a combination of a Quiensienera (Mexican rite of passage for women on their 15th birthday) and the prom from Hades. All the girls were dressed in matching Barbie doll dresses (just wait for the photo) with their hair done by a Dolly Parton-inspired hairdresser who lives in my town. The boys were all dressed like boys should be dressed for a graduation, black pants, dress shirt and tie. Simple. Go figure that they’d make the girls look like bad Barbie dolls and the boys get to retain some sense of self respect. Then again, my point of view could be skewed by the fact that I hate anything pink and frilly. Some of the girls actually seemed to have liked the dress they were wearing.

All of the girls except Jenny that is(Second girl from the left). If you read the earlier blog then this should not be a surprise, but just in case I’ll fill ya’ll in: Jenny is a now graduate from the 6th grade who is basically the Peruvian version of me, a tomboy at its finest, anything but girly, and extremely awkward in a pair of heels. She is a girl after my own heart. So as you can imagine, she was less than happy to be the in the new “my sized Barbie” dress. She takes the credit for the quote of the night: “Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, one of the plagues shows up.”

So what had happened was, about 30 minutes into the ceremony, right when we’re getting into the full swing of things, the crickets show up. Apparently every 4 rainy seasons or so we have a slight problem with our chirping friends, they appear in such amounts as to confuse them with rain. It started out as slightly bothersome. A cricket would land on a girl’s foot, she’d squeal and then it’d move on the bother the next guest until someone finally caught it and slammed it into the ground (the preferred Peruvian method for killing a cricket). But soon it because evident that there were far too many crickets to smash. I, as the resident photographer, had at least 5 climbing down my shirt while I was trying to take pictures of the poor girls in Barbie dresses posing with their families attempting to smile while screaming on the inside because there were 5 crickets crawling down their dresses. Next thing you know our little chirping friends are crawling in and around the snack food, the cakes, and getting trapped in the Pepsi bottles of the little ones causing both a ticked off 6 year old and an even more so ticked cricket. For those of you are thinking well “this sounds like when the party died down and everyone went home”…you’d be mistaken.

I was just waiting for when the guests would get tired of fighting the crickets. We fought the crickets through the ceremony. We fought the crickets through the picture taking. We fought the crickets through the required dancing (photographer not included in the dancing). We fought the crickets through the eating. And then this here gringa-photographer decided that she’d fought the crickets long enough and headed home to the safety of her room (cricket-less as of this moment…knock on wood). I figured everyone else would soon follow suit. You know how it goes, no one likes to be the first one to leave a party, but I figured maybe I’d have started a trend of surrendering to the cricket army and calling it a night. Well 2 hours after my departure they’re still blaring cumbia music, probably slamming crickets into the pavement with the beat in an exaggerated dance move. I may have been the only one who surrendered to the little chirping ones…but at least I still have my pride. I wasn’t in a pink frilly Barbie dress.

Home Sweet Home

December 1, 2008, 3ish pm I stumbled, quite literally off the bus from Chiclayo and landed in Nanchoc, Cajamarca. The bus dropped me off in front of the Health Post with my 2 bags each weighing way more than they should have (this is hindsight talking, at the time I thought I didn’t have enough) and left me in the dust. I was faced with the rather daunting task of hauling these bags the 10 yards to my front door all by myself. It was in that moment that I realized I was actually in the Peace Corps. That concept seemed to have evaded me during the 3 months of training suddenly smacked me square in the face. I managed to drag my bags to the front door to find the door locked and the house empty—damn. I then dragged my bags the 10 yards back to the Health Post all the while trying to remember at least ONE name of a Health Post employee or how to explain that I’m locked out of my house in Spanish. I walked into the waiting room and interrupted a training activity with all of the surrounding Health Posts. 15 pairs of eyes immediately turned on me and I resisted the urge to piss myself or run screaming for my mommy. I was saved by the OBGYN Dr. Emma who raised her arms over her head and belted “Look its Yennifer! How was your trip?” I then preceded to thank whatever higher power there might be for her giving the explanation of who I was and why I looked so lost to the 15 other health workers.

Looking back that seems so long ago. I now know almost all of those 15 eyes by name (a few left the area before I could learn their names), I better than to ever travel with that much crud, and I can talk my way out of almost any awkward situation. I consider myself lucky to actually feel at home in this place, I get homesick for Nanchoc when I’m doing a lot of Peace Corps traveling. Before my mother can breakdown crying let me state for the record that Durham, North Carolina is and forever will be my home and I miss it more than words can say. I know from talking to my fellow volunteers that actually feeling at home in your site is a rare commodity. I am fortunate enough to have real friends here and a host family that genuinely care for me. Aside from the baking heat and the pouring rain I couldn’t have asked for a better community to live in…ok well I could ask that they come to a few more meetings, but we can’t get to picky now can we?

I didn’t until recently realize how much I like this place. I went to Lima for medical checks and came out with a half cracked open tooth. Long story short I had a cavity that would put most bear’s winter house to shame and in the dentist’s efforts to excavate the cave-like hole he broke my tooth in half…without pain killers. So we can just sum that day up as an all around bad day. The day was then made worse by red-tape. We had to send x-rays and images to Washington to decide the next course of action, aka to fix the tooth or not to fix the tooth. I will admit I was distressed over my tooth-- I have a giant hole in my mouth currently being covered with a temporary paste that would freak out the most normal person. But I wasn’t getting all riled up over the in-limbo state of my tooth as much as I was about the possibility of missing my town’s 51st anniversary. The town’s anniversary is celebrated December 1-3rd, This wasn’t just the town’s party, I wanted to celebrate my 1 year in site milestone. This celebration was marking many a moment and I was in no mood to be in Lima in red-tape-limbo missing the soccer and parades.

We are lucky in Peace Corps Peru to have amazing doctors Suni and Jorge working for us who care about not only our health concerns but our personal dramas. I was all but expecting them to tell me that I was going to miss my town party and my 1 year mark in site and be stuck in Lima doped out on pain killers after a root canal. I was however surprised to find that Suni completely understood, we worked out a compromise: It was obvious that I need to have a root canal and a crown put on, even Washington agreed (thankfully!), but it was also equally as obvious to her that I couldn’t miss this moment in my site. So I was given an extra coat of the temporary cave-plugging paste and sent back to site to celebrate the 51st and the 1st anniversaries and will be returning to Lima in a week to enjoy more dental health adventures in Peru.

And as I write this I’m listening to the thumping of the base and the singing of a Cajamarca-Huano cover band at 11pm sunburned from a day of cheering on our horrible soccer team and watching the kids march in the parade. The day could have only been made better if my camera battery hadn’t died and I had it all on film…Oh well, we can’t have it all. But I can still cross my fingers that the band will go home by 1am so I can get some sleep…