Tacabambina Baby: meet my host dad Joel

This week went by a lot faster than I thought it would. My mom is coming to visit next week and I thought it would take forever to get through this week. I did find myself loosing my temper a little more easily than usual and being generally stressed out. I spent the early part of the week finishing up with my first VRF or volunteer report form.

On Wednesday I went with one of the nurses from the health post to do a demonstrative nutrition session with a group of moms in sector 8. The moms are part of a government program called Juntos-I’ve written about it before in pervious posts. There are a lot of sectors in San Juan, but sector 8 has kind of become it’s own independent entity. While the rest of the Juntos moms from every other sector all meet together in a huge group of 180 women, the moms in sector 8 have their own meetings of 25.

I was excited to attend my first demonstrative session and the understanding was that I would pretty much observe to get an idea for how they worked. The meeting started at 9am and went on well past 2:30. The first 3 ½ hours or so were spent preparing and assembling humas. Humas are a typical dish for this time of year when the corn is ready to harvest. If you know what tamales are like then you’ll have a good idea about humas. The difference is that humas are made with fresh corn and sugar is added to the corn paste to sweeten it up.

Humitas are very labor intensive; first you shuck the corn, then you remove the kernels by hand, grind the corn into a paste with a tool that attaches to the side of a table and reeling a handle to move the internal grinding parts, then stuff the corn paste into the husk again with some cheese pressed into the middle, and finally boil everything to cook the corn. The result is sort of like a sweet corn noodle filled with cheese. And for Peruvian food it’s pretty good. The only trouble is that when you make humas it’s a lot of work, so people make a ton of them. Then we eat them for a couple days, and there’s no refrigeration so they get all dried out and sometime they turn a funky color. Hot out of the pot though they are delicious.

On Thursday I did a charla or talk about dental hygiene with the elementary health promoters. It was a lot of fun. They are my favorite to work with. In the afternoon I helped my high schooler health promoters cram for their first charla on sex ed. The previous volunteer Annie, trained a group of high school kids in a sexual education course to get them ready to be peer youth educators. So when I got here I had a ready made group of peer educators and this week they taught their first class with the 6^th graders from the elementary school. It was awesome to see it all come together. The goal is to eventually get these youth health promoters teaching in the high school regularly, but the director of the secondary school is not super into working with me-err dealing with me is how it feels when I am around him (he gets all huffy and is always checking his watch, that kinda stuff) ha!

At dinner on Thursday night I found out my host dad threatened to kick this guy’s ass for me a couple months ago. In January around the time when the new mayor was sworn in I was invited to join a drinking circle one afternoon at the paradero in Bambamarca (where the cars pick up and drop off for my site). I wrote about it in a blog post; how the mayor’s elderly uncle proposed marriage to me while drooling on himself and intermittently falling asleep. I did not mention how one of the newly elected regidores of my community repeatedly showed me his DNI card (Documento Nacional de Identidad-his Peruvian ID) because it said that he was single. He was really intoxicated and I wasn’t. It made me uncomfortable since he was a community leader and at that point I thought I might have to work with him on projects. I mentioned it to my host family and we all laughed about it, but later without my knowing my host dad Joel talked with that regidor. Joel quoted himself as saying (well this is my translation) ‘watch yourself around my gringa or you’ll have to answer to me, and you call yourself a regidor of this town.’

I was completely surprised he did this, but it does explain how the last couple times I have seen that regidor guy he was really quiet around me. Host dad Joel to my rescue! Then another funny thing happened with host dad Joel; I caught him brushing his teeth with soap. I immediately asked him what he was doing and he simply told me they had run out of tooth paste. This was noteable for several reasons: 1. I have never ever seen anyone in my host family brush their teeth before, 2. that tooth brush is the one that sits out by the outdoor sink all the time and I have seen my brother use it to clean shoes among other things, 3. how long has he been brushing his teeth with soap??? It happened to be the day that I had taught the dental hygiene class and I told him that he could use salt or baking soda if he didn’t have tooth paste. I tried to sound friendly concerned instead of disgusted and appalled.

Anyhow, I feel really lucky to have a host family that cares that much.

Chau for now- and my American mom will be here in 4 days, my Peruvian mom and I are so excited for the visit!!!!!