First weeks in Peru

I’ve been gone for about a week and a half, but it seems like months. I left on the 12th of September to report for a pre-service staging event in D.C. It only lasted for two days and basically consisted of getting to know the other trainees and being inundated with needlessly repetitive information. In all, there are 38 trainees (I think), half of which are health volunteers and half of which are environment volunteers. All of the trainees live with a homestay family and are spread out among four different communities. Currently we are living in the outskirts of Lima in the foothills of the Andes. Here they call them hills but I’m pretty sure they’d be classified as peaks in Illinois.

Last night a bunch of volunteers met up in the “Tres,” one of the communities housing trainees, for a fiesta. It was actually the community’s annual celebration so it was a pretty big event, with traditional music and dancing, lots of beer, and fireworks. I’m sure that sounds pretty typical but that’s because you’re probably picturing normal fireworks. Apparently the Peruvians do things a bit differently which I should have guessed when they started talking about “toritos locos.” Basically, they construct makeshift bulls, plaster them with fireworks, insert a drunken man, and light the fuse. The drunken man, with the bull situated over his head and shoulders, proceeds to run around the crowd, flinging fire and sparks in every direction. Other drunken men in the crowd assure the sane people in the crowd that this is not dangerous.

The biggest news in Peru today appears to be that a young woman was possessed by the devil while using a Ouija board. Never mind that Fujimori was just extradited from Chile…there are more important things going on. My host-mother is now concerned for my soul as I informed her that in the U.S. Ouija is a popular activity at girls’ sleepovers. However, my soul is not the only thing she is worried about. The temperature of my feet also appears to be a source of utmost concern. If I dare step out of my room without socks she begins to fret that I will get sick and basically forces me to put socks on. Of course, going down the stairs requires both socks and shoes. She is also concerned because I apparently can NOT wash clothes by hand. Apparently my inability to apply a sufficient quantity of soap is hilarious. Note that a sufficient quantity means that you should not be able to see what you are washing. After she made me wash one item two times she just took over and started doing it herself…randomly bursting into laughter and making comments to herself about my insufficiencies.

I also just discovered that my host-family’s dog is named Snow. For the past week I’ve been convinced that the dog was called Isnau. I was also convinced that this was a Quechua word for snow because they originally told me that it meant nieve (snow in Spanish). Hence, I’ve been looking like a moron because everytime I’ve encountered the dog I exclaim, “Isnau”. This is clearly not problematic for the Spanish speakers in my family, but I happen to speak English. What’s worse is that when I discovered my blunder and started to call the dog Snow, I was quickly corrected by a visiting relative—“no,no,no, es Isnau”. Thus, I continue to call the dog Isnau while my host-family probably either thinks I’m a jerk because I appear to be mocking them or perhaps a bit slow because I can’t even recognize the word snow.