Soooo…. where to start. First off, sorry for the lengthy pause in the blogging. It’s been difficult to get time online and things have been kind of busy around here. Tomorrow I find out where I’ll be going for the next 2 years, so I’m a little preoccupied with all of that. Also, I think the realization that I will be leaving my amazing host family and incredible new Peace Corps friends is starting to sink in, so I’ve been much more motivated to spend lots of time with everyone here. That being said, I’ve got a ton of shit to fill you guys in on. Hopefully, this won’t be too rambly.
First off, FBT, or Field-Based Training. For my FBT, I went with about 10 other volunteers to the Department of Ancash, known lovingly by volunteers stationed there as “Ancash (is better),” which, after spending a week there, I can attest to the truthfulness of that statement. Ancash is a magical land of devastatingly beautiful natural wonders (snow-covered mountains, glacial lakes, the highest mountain in South America, Huascarán), Quechua, the language of the native people who live in the Southern Andes and death-defying serpentine dirt mountain roads. We stayed at an amazing hostel (shout-out to Cayesh Guesthouse) in Huaraz, the capital city of Ancash, most of the time, venturing out to multiple volunteer sites to do “charlas” (talks) or teach classes during the day. Huaraz sits at about 10,000 feet, which resulted in extreme difficulty walking up any sort of incline or stairs as well as early bedtimes. Our guide throughout FBT was the singular John William Meyer who proved to not only be an amazing example of what a Peace Corps volunteer can be, but also quickly became one of my favorite people I’ve met since starting this adventure.
July 17 - The first day we arrived early in the morning in Huaraz after taking an overnight bus trip from Lima. John took us to the dangerously addictive California Café for my first real breakfast since coming to Peru. I’m talking real French press coffee (not Nescafe), scrambled eggs (not fried) and a delicious cinnamon roll. The place is run by an aging hippy from Berkeley and was a comforting reminder of coffee shops back home. We spent the rest of the day doing what John termed a “leisurely scavenger hunt” around Huaraz to get to know the sights and important landmarks. My partner, Mateo and I proved our prowess as a duo early on by finishing the scavenger hunt about an hour before everyone else and winning the prize: a bootleg copy of “Que Paso Ayer, Parte II,” the Spanish language version of “The Hangover, Part II.”
After the scavenger hunt, the high altitude was taking its toll and we were all exhausted. Unfortunately, since this was a work trip, we had to plan our charla for the following day. Matt and I were scheduled to teach an English class to high school kids in John’s site, Jangas. Instead of simplifying things and sticking with one theme, we decided to go for broke and incorporate three separate and fairly difficult themes into one charla: stress management, self-esteem and English vocab. Seeing as how my brain was fried from only getting two hours of sleep on the bus ride to Huaraz, our planning got a little slap-happy at times. It was during this planning session that we came up with the name “Ojos Abiertos,” which means “open eyes,” as the name for our duo because we were going to open the eyes of the youth through our life-changing charla.
Cue end of first night.
July 18 – We headed to John’s site early to meet his wonderful host family and observe the morning ritual of his local high school (very similar to a military style with flag bearers and recitation of the national anthem). After several hours of observation and interviewing, Ojos Abiertos grand moment arrived. We had about an hour and a half to work with with a 20 minute recess in the middle of our talk, so we figured our topics would take up plenty of time and would of course fuel an incredible in depth discussion about self-esteem and stressors in the lives of Jangas high schoolers…
We kicked things off with a brief introduction and educational talk about self-esteem. As is often the case, the students were hesitant to participate or offer a great deal of discussion, so Matt and I ended up burning through a good bit of our lesson plan fairly quickly and were scrambling to pull shit together. Not looking so good for Ojos Abiertos at this moment. Luckily, the recess bell saved us from crashing and burning and we had a chance to regroup. We quickly padded out the remainder of our talk and went outside to play some fútbol with the students. Upon returning, we had them tear the pictures of their stressors out of their notebooks and throw them up at the front of the classroom where I ran around with the trashcan trying to catch all of the discarded stressors. Then we had them list ways they knew of to manage stress in their lives and lead a brief session on deep breathing exercises. At this point, Ojos Abiertos was in full form. To round out the session, we went in for the life-changing knock-out punch: using Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” to teach English words as well as to reinforce stress management through music. BAM!
With a great deal of assistance from John who kindly printed lyrics in English and in Spanish for us for the students, we had the students read through the English lyrics and tell us what words they already knew. We wrote them on the board, educated them on pronunciation and then played the song for them at which point Matt and I commenced to sing along and encouraged the students to do the same. After going over the words again, we had them look at the Spanish lyrics and played the song again, pointing out the words on the board as they came up in the song and dancing in front of the class. All in all, it was pretty epic and by the second listen, some of the kids were singing along with the “it’s gonna be a bright, bright, bright, bright sun shiny day.” Ojos officially abiertoed. Mission accomplished.
After coming down from the high of changing young lives, John walked us back to his house where a slaughter of cuys (guinea pigs, in case you had forgotten) had previously ensued for the purpose of feeding us lunch. I luckily was not there to see there little throats get slit, but I made a valiant effort to try a piece of cuy, but I just couldn’t, especially since the cage holding about 100 adorable cuys was right next to where we were eating dinner and I could hear them making little cuy noises. Sorry, maybe next time.
After lunch we went and played dinamicas with some little kids from a youth group that John started. We then proceeded to take a tour of an amazing site located in Jangas called Artesanos Don Bosco. It is essentially an apprenticeship live-in school that teaches local youth how to do extremely skilled craftsmanship, such as carpentry, painting and sculpting. It is run by an amazing Italian ex-pat who took us on a tour of the entire place. At this point, it became clear to all of us that John pretty much got the bomb-ass site of all sites. Cross your fingers for me on Wednesday.
July 19 – Tuesday we traveled to Tumpa, sandwiched in between the Cordillera Negra and Cordillera Blanca, to visit another volunteer up in the mountains outside of Huaraz. This was our first view of the mountains outside of Huaraz, termed “negra” and “blanca” because one side is beautiful dark mountain peaks and the other side is beautiful glacier-capped mountain peaks. This was our first up close view of the jaw-dropping beauty of Huascarán, it’s glacial peak obscured by clouds. I felt a true sense of peace here just sitting and staring at the cordilleras.
Once again, though, we had work to do.
Ojos Abiertos was scheduled to give a charla on recycling with one of the Environmental volunteers stationed close by. We initially thought we would be working with much younger kids, but learned when we got there that we would instead be working with high schoolers, which requires much more than simple dinamicas. Luckily, our Environmental volunteer, Kathleen (I think), was awesome and helped us rapidly adapt our dinamicas for an older crowd. Our first dinamica involved having one person standing in the middle of four other people and this person represented the Earth. The other people surrounding her were things that protect the Earth, like recycling, natural resources, etc. Then, we had another student be pollution and his job was to tag Earth while the other students protected her from him like bodyguards. Each round, we removed a protection from around Earth until she was the only one left and had no one to save her from pollution. Pretty self-explanatory.
Then we handed out trash to the students and had them all guess how long each piece of trash took to decompose and educated them on the real amount of time each took. Lastly, we taught them about the Recycle, Reduce, Reuse triangle and had them break up into three groups to discuss ways they could incorporate their part of the triangle into their community. Afterwards, we had them present in front of the class. The kids were really knowledgeable about recycling as a result of Kathleen’s work getting a recycling program started in the school. Some of the other volunteers from my group gave a charla on brushing your teeth and were surprised to find out that some of the kids had never brushed their teeth before in their lives. They were excited that some of the kids reacted strongly to their charla and were motivated to start brushing their teeth.
After eating lunch, we headed out to Monterrey to hop in some thermal baths, which sounds pretty cool, but essentially are scummy tile bathtubs filled with dirty brown water. When we got there, they were being painted, so we weren’t allowed into them anyway. Instead, we opted for a swim in the equally disgusting looking warm thermal pool. Once we got over the sickening diarrhea-brown color of the water, we were able to enjoy ourselves.
July 20 – On Wednesday we headed to Carhuaz to spend some time in the local market and locate resources. We reconvened for lunch and then headed out to Amashca, the site of another volunteer, Elke. When we got to her site, her neighbors were sacrificing two lambs in front of their house for a funeral ceremony. It was pretty interesting to see a custom I’d only heard about before being performed in front of me. After looking at Elke’s awesome room, we headed to her school for an amazing day of dinamicas and volleyball. We joined the students for a tournament of volleyball and my team, Los Payasos (“the clowns”) almost won the tournament except that we choked in the last game and came in second. Nevertheless, teaching school kids and playing volleyball with a breathtaking view of Huascarán in the background was one of the absolute highlights of the trip. Afterwards, we headed to Caraz to spend the night.
July 21 – Thursday we headed out to visit with Colleen, a Youth Development volunteer. It was at her school where I made my acting debut in front of a classroom of teenagers portraying the baby of a teenager in a socio-drama promoting safe sex practices. I’m not gonna lie. I pretty much went for broke on this one, so I’m talking full out arms flailing, screaming, throwing a tantrum on the floor. When I watched the video one of the members of my group took later, I was pretty fucking disturbed. Apparently, everyone else found it extremely hilarious and I think we got the point across to the students, which is all that really matters. Then I attempted to play soccer with some kids. However, playing soccer at high altitudes is what I imagine soccer will be like when I try to play in my 80s (no offense Furman). Still, it was pretty fun and the view from that school was probably one of the most beautiful panoramas of the Cordillera Blanca out of the whole trip.
After that, we went to Colleen’s house where she taught us the joys of cooking snickerdoodles at high altitudes (not easy, but still delicious). After lunch, we headed back outside Caraz to witness what has already gone down in our FBT group as the greatest charla ever given. It was facilitated by Christie, a Youth Development volunteer who is wrapping up her service in less than a month. The charla was for the parents of kids in her community, lasted over three hours and covered a stunning array of topics (safe sex practices, building self-esteem in their children, homosexuality, HIV/AIDS), all of which we thought were previously extremely taboo topics to bring up around Sierra parents who we were previously told were extremely reserved and did not talk about sex. It was absolutely inspiring to see how the parents responded openly to Christie’s statements debunking common myths or misconceptions about AIDS and homosexuality. We interacted with the parents, performing sociodramas highlighting more supportive ways they could interact with their children and offering options for broaching the topic of sex with their children. Christie’s socio (“community partner”), Elsa, was equally amazing. She’s a psychologist who lives and works in Caraz. I spoke with her at length later in the night about the state of mental health in Peru.
We ended the night by randomly finding a fair around the corner from our hostel and promptly boarded the spinning wheel of death parading as a Ferris wheel. It looked like it had been abandoned in the 70s by some carnival in the States. The carriages were large metal spheres you climbed inside of and could spin 360 degrees as you were being raised and lowered at a speed not seemingly within any safety standards I’m familiar with. And yet they wouldn't let us get on the trampolene because we were "too big."
July 22 – The day before, our awesome TEC Trainer Anna Maria agreed to let us stay an extra night in Caraz so that we would be closer to some glacial lakes we wanted to go to. As if glacier-capped mountains weren’t stunning enough, the pristine beauty of pure glacial lake water was just unbelievable. Of course, in keeping with an Ancash Peace Corps tradition, we promptly made use of the isolated location our combi driver chose to park for a quick “dip” in said glacial lake water. No matter what you might think about thrusting your entire body into a lake of previously freezing water, there is no way to describe the feeling of absolute, unadulterated aliveness I felt after getting out. I highly recommend it.
After the swim, we stopped at another glacial lake to buy some food being prepared over an open fire by two Sierra women. I bought a cup of delicious hot apple cider/gelatin concoction with quinoa floating around in it. It was perfect at the time because the wind was tearing across the lake and we were all freezing. I found a path that lead to a stunning view of the top of one of the snowcapped mountains with clouds sliding across it. I brought several friends there and we all stood and watched for about 30 minutes. Afterwards, we took the seemingly longest combi ride ever and stopped at Chavin to meet John’s college mentors and his “Sueña” mentoring group consisting of a large group of small children from Chavin. We read children’s books to them and played dinamicas. Afterwards, we returned to Huaraz for our final night in Ancash.
Since our entire FBT was required to be without alcohol, we had planned on making a night of sober karaoke after dinner. I of course was in favor of this idea until just before dinner, the cup of seemingly delicious apple cider stuff decided that it no longer wanted to be inside my stomach. I spent the rest of the night in bed, but luckily after puking a few times was able to pass out for the night. I know there’s some moral here about not buying food from some ladies cooking over an open fire next to a lake, but hey, I’m in Peru.
July 23 – I woke up feeling fine and even had a decent breakfast without incident. We were scheduled to accompany a group of youth health promoters on a tour of colleges to promote interest in post-high school education. Everything was seemingly fine until the first lecture started and I started getting super dizzy. I promptly excused myself and headed back to the hostel for some shut-eye. At some point later in the day, I woke up feeling better and helped everyone prepare an epic potluck dinner for our last meal in Ancash. After saying our tearful goodbyes to John we all boarded our overnight bus back to Lima.
El Fin.
I’m sure I’m leaving a ton of stuff out, but I’ll be amazed if anybody reads all of this. I just needed to get all of that out because it really was a life-changing trip. By the second or third charla in front of high school kids, I was feeling much more comfortable and confident in my role as a future Youth Development volunteer. I genuinely enjoyed our time with the students and felt a clearer sense of just what the hell “Youth Development” means. I’m still hoping to steal some pics from my friends because words can’t quite capture the pristine beauty of Ancash. If that happens, I’ll throw them up here, rest assured. BTW, I got a new camera, so I’ll be adding some new pics of my own soon. Take care all!
