El Niño effect, Star Wars, and my grandma's most impressive reproductive abilities!

Not much has happened this past week or so.  I’m still doing my English classes in the mornings from 8:30 – 12ish and in the afternoons I am supposed to be working on my encuestas (aka surveys).  I thought we were in rainy season before, but ohh no-it’s just the beginning.  Now, the rain is day and night.  It’s not really strong rain all the time, but it’s enough that clothes never dry on the line, creeks become rivers, everyone is cold all the time-because they can never get completely dry, everything is reduced to mud (including the floor in the kitchen), and the ceiling is leaking.  Not that I’m complaining, but this rain is making it awfully difficult to continue procrastinating writing my community diagnostic report.

My host dad Joel says that the rain is the El Niño effect.  Which sounded very familiar, but I felt the need to google it just for good measure.  Sure enough northern Peru gets extra rainy during the summer on years of El Niño effect.  The rain is not only interrupting my very important encuestas; ‘have you or anyone in your family had diarrhea in the last 2 weeks?’, but it also is really bad for the crops.  As a non-farmer I would have thought it was a good thing to have extra rain, but actually it is killing crops.  And in a community of subsistence farmers like mine-it’s pretty serious.

(pretty good online map: http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/climate_impacts_of_el_ni_o_phenomenon_in_latin_america_and_the_caribbean )

This weekend my host uncle came to visit from Cajamarca city.  My host mother’s youngest brother is 22 years old.  Only 1 year older than my host sister-it’s a borderline Father of the Bride situation.  I was astonished that my host grandmother Nicida had babies for a span of 20 years…my family found my astonishment to be very funny.  I got them back though, when I showed them Star Wars episode IV.  It took a while for them to get into it, but after the aliens and violence really picked up they were all convinced that Star Wars is awesome.  I bought a dubbed DVD in Chota a couple weeks ago.  It has all 6 movies on one DVD!  Ya, gotta love Peru if for nothing else but the abundance of ripped off DVDs for only 3 soles.

I started a croquet project- I am making a ‘fondillo’ to wear underneath a skirt.  The women love that I am learning to croquet, they think it is so funny.  I get a lot of ‘look at the gringa croquetting!’  They also all find it very funny that I am planning on wearing the same kind of skirt all the ladies wear, but I figure I’m going to be here for 2 years I should give the Peruvian way a shot. 

This week I attended a meeting with a Ministry of Health sponsored program called Juntos for Peruvian moms with kids under the age of 15 or so, who live below the poverty line.  They asked me to start a biohuertos or garden project to help with the malnutrition problem in my town.  I can’t help but be a little skeptical about the value of another garden project.  Everyone in my town farms and they know much more than I do about planting and growing crops.  After 4 years of the previous 2 volunteers’ garden projects, why does no one keep a vegetable garden?  If these people have been continuously inundated with projects for growing vegetables to promote nutrition and they are not continuing their gardens, than I am left with the pessimistic sour feeling that they don’t really want to grow gardens they just want free seeds.  They can most definitely sell veggies in the market in Bambamarca-and when I go door to door with my surveys the response to my question about ‘how often does your family eat vegetables?’, is typically once or twice a month.  I need to get myself to see it in a different light, but I guess with all this rain I am only seeing the cynical side of things.

I can’t start my gardening project until the rain settles down, because the earth is just mud right now.  I guess I better get going writing my dreaded diagnostic report.  I realize it has been over a year and a half since I wrote a paper like this; it is supposed to be about 25 pages (and it’s in Spanish, good grief). 

Now I just need to get a hold of some Star Trek and see which ones the Peruvians like better, that would be really very enlightening.

Chau for now,

kb