slow week

What did I do this week?  I know it is not necessary to write on my blog every week, but it makes me feel important to imagine that my family and friends are reading what I write.  Life here in the sierras often feels kind of dull, but when I try to look at it from my Ann Arbor, MI perspective I like to pretend it’s all really interesting.

These past 2 weeks I’ve been working on getting my surveys done in the community.  I spend my mornings and afternoons going door to door asking people: ‘do you have a moment to do an encuesta with me?’  First of all, houses out here in the campo are not along a main road with sidewalks and driveways.  I’m walking through fields and hoping that the women are at home, because often people spend their days out of the house in their fields or up in the mountains in the Haulca.  The Haulca is this other region I hear a lot about it, but I don’t really know much.  It seems to me that the majority of the people in my town have second homes (more like summer cabins; without electricity or water) and additional fields up in the higher altitudes of the Haulca.  My family apparently has potato fields up there and this week my brother, cousin, one of my sisters, grandpa, and aunt went up there to harvest or plant or something.

Anyhow, I walk from house to house hoping to catch someone at home to survey.  I have learned that it is campo courtesy to call to the house from a certain distance to alert people to your presence.  Not only is it a courtesy, but it also often helps with the dogs.  If I call up to a house the owners will call their dogs off and I won’t have to use my umbrella to smack any dogs in the head.  Some of my peers also swear by traveling with a pocketful of rocks, but I have found that when it comes down to it I’m not such a good shot when a dog is barreling towards me.  Some women; and it always seems to be women that are home during the day, are noticeably startled to see a gringa on their property, but others are very excited to see me.  I guess when you live out in the campo spending your days doing a lot of physical labor and hanging out with your kids, a stranger walking up to your house and asking to talk with you would be kind of exciting. 

My surveys are pretty boring and I wrote them to be very simple, because I knew that the majority of the adults in my town did not finish primary school.  Many women are illiterate and pretty much anyone over the age of 50.  However, even in my attempts to make it simple I didn’t take some important things into account; words like auto esteem, early childhood stimulation, and even a question like ‘with what frequency does your family eat meat?’ throw them for a loop.  It could be my accent or it could just be the vocabulary words I chose.  It’s hard not to think in English before writing something like that in Spanish and besides I’m not fluent yet in campo Spanish.

My favorite women to interview are the old ladies who can’t understand me very well, but they just want to talk to me.  It’s frustrating, because I want to hurry up and get on to the next house and at the same time I find it so humorous.  I catch myself making small talk with Peruvian grandmas outside of their homes usually sitting on wooden benches, while grandkids, cats, dogs, and guinea pigs scatter.  I sit on my bench and smile to myself while I look into leathery kind faces, missing teeth, and unwashed clothes and hair are a given.  Even though we sit close, she can’t understand my accent and I hers.  Sometimes if I’m lucky an older grandchild will have gathered around as our audience and can help translate my words for her grandma.  She’ll say the exact word that I had just said, but without fail grandma now can magically understand.

Sometimes the women like to offer me food; usually gross food.  I ate cold potato soup, cold milk (which is a no-no because it means it hasn’t been boiled i.e. campo pasteurized,  this particular mug of milk must have been really fresh, because I pulled a cow hair out of my teeth as I walked away from the house, no kidding!), a bag of radishes, and some bread -just this week.  Almost always I receive open invitations to visit anytime, which is very encouraging.  Last week I was invited to lunch on Saturday and another man invited me to go visit his bee hives he keeps a little further down the mountain.  It’s funny how often people ask the same few questions; ‘are you accustomed to Peru yet,’ ‘where are you from,’ ‘are you related to Annie?’ (the PCV that lived in my community before me).  On the whole I feel like I am getting to know more people and I also know the community a lot better. I’m trying to memorize names and which families live in which sectors of San Juan.

On one of my house visits for the surveys I met a woman named Yaggie.  She is the same age as me, with 2 little boys, a husband, and a big field of potatoes and corn behind her house.  It freaked me out slightly.  I’ve also met mom’s that were younger than me, but she and I are the same-yeeeeeeesh!  It’s the grandmas that are truly my people, not these girls my age with kids.  Is that really judgmental of me?  I guess if I had to put words to it, these women make me feel like I should be back in the states working on getting my career and ‘real’ life started, not bumming around Cajamarca on my Peace Corps excursion.

Next week I get to start teaching English classes, but apparently the solicitud that the primary school director and I presented in Bambamarca has not yet been approved.  So the other classes that the vacaciones utilies were supposed to include might not get funded.  I’m still going to teach though, because I wasn’t going to be getting paid anyway.  I bought my crayons, markers, and chalk-I’m ready.

This week I also visited Flor, the woman who the health post asked me to look out for during New Years weekend.  She apparently had her baby on New Years Eve; just her and her mother.  I’ve visited twice this week, because the health post is too busy to go visit her.  She and the baby appear very healthy.  It’s a girl named Rosita Melina.  It seems that everyone in the community knows that I have been paying special attention to Flor and her baby.  It’s a relatively small community so there is a lot of gossip.  Women come up to me on the street to ask me about Flor’s baby; ‘what’s the baby’s last name?’ is a popular question.  Flor is scandalously unmarried and the gossip is that the father of the baby is a married neighbor man of hers. 

So that’s what I did this week.  I spent a lot of time sitting around asking people if they had had diarrhea in the past 15 days and trying to explain ‘self esteem’ with my limited Spanish vocabulary.  I officially-in the eyes of the community-have befriended the town home wrecker Flor and baby Rosita.  I read a really good David Sedaris book.  And I also washed all my bedding with bleach water in an effort to mass murder the bed bugs or fleas or whatever it is I have.  It was a slow week.  Hopefully English classes will prove to me more noteworthy. 

Chau for now!

kb