midsummer update

Sorry for the recent drought of meaningful posting, although for those of you that hate reading blogs it must have seemed like a welcome respite. Of course, if you hate reading blogs you are in the wrong place. I hope that all the photo issues have been taken care of and that all have access to the photos at this point. Again, if you have trouble viewing the photos or accessing the facebook website (now available through the convenient link to your right, yeah, I did it) please email me directly. Anyway, I have finally figured out how to write a blog – I never seem to have the time to get to it in the internet cabina (a cabina is like an internet café without food or drinks or ambience, just computers and wooden dividers to encourage what I guess must either be the guilt-inducing complete waste of time crap that we all do on the internet or bolder porn viewing) so we are now writing them at home on the old laptop. Thanks Todd! This will either hoist the blog to new heights of eagerly awaited creative expression or bring it crashing down in the flames of cobweb-covered vanilla self-indulgent, seemingly-endless descriptions of my relatively boring life here. Let’s hope my 22 years of formal education and four years of doing other stuff have provided me with the tools to captivate your attention. The other day, Angela hurt her back carrying a big bucket of water early in the morning. Our morning routine every other day or so is to carry water in from the fountains out behind the house. Tecapa does not have potable water piped into the homes (nor does it have a waste water system of any kind – waste water is emptied into buckets which are dumped into the street), but luckily it does at times have a system of conveniently located communal spigots (grifos – fountains) that provide “potable” (still not to be drunk without boiling by white people, but not from the irrigation ditch) water delivered from the towns large elevated cement tank daily between the hours of 6:00 and 7:00am. “6 am,” some of you lazy Americans might mumble to yourselves, “gee, that’s early.” Well, its not. Most Peruvians, and more so in the country, have been up for a good hour or two by 6 am. And I kinda dig it. The mornings are beautiful and cool and there is no point in going anywhere outside our mosquito-proof room after nightfall so that pretty much makes 9pm a late night for us. So if you are up and doing stuff around 6 am you don’t feel so crazy to be stuck in your room that night because you don’t dare risk getting eaten alive by mosquitos because you are really ready to go to bed. Anyway, we were up early and working it the other day because there had been this rumor that the committee in charge of the potable water was going to cut the potable water to the whole town in a show of force to convince the people to start paying their weekly bill (consequently, if you do not have water piped into houses but instead into communal spigots, it is incredibly difficult to restrict a person’s access to water regardless of whether or not they choose to pay their bill). So we were filling everything that had a hole in it with potable water. Angela picked up a not that full washing basin to move it somewhere else in the always incomprehensible shuffle of basins and buckets and tubs that precedes any morning water fetching, and heard something rip in her back. Needless to say she was in a sorry state for the rest of the day and I had to carry in all the water that morning and again two mornings later. Luckily the injury wasn’t too bad and the same day we were able to successfully have our afternoon site visit with some of our Peace Corps bosses – the PC Peru Country Director and the Head of Security for PC Peru. It was one of our two recent site visits by bosses and both went well – they affirmed our frustrations and gave us good advice to keep working. So with some over the counter muscle relaxants (thanks, Peruvian pharmaceutical system – who needs doctors?) and a night of me laughing so hard that I fell on the floor when she gingerly rolled over onto her stomach and then started yelling at me because she was stuck and wasn’t able to roll back over onto her back she was still moving slowly but no longer in pain. God that was great fun. And she’s healing well. Our community diagnostic rolls on and the days are moving by quickly. We have been in site now for over two months and in Peru for almost five months. Our diagnostic should be coming to a close in the next month and we will cease diagnosing and start . . . doing something else. It remains to be seen what exactly it will be. The more time that I spend here in Tecapa the more I see basic community organization as the primary struggle. I am unsure of what form it will take, but what I will probably be working on the most (as with many volunteers, I assume) will be creating and or fostering organization and participation (to whatever end I can find to entice people) among the people. The hard part is finding something to get people interested – I have no money, I am not a doctor or agricultural engineer, etc. Therein lies the rub, and that will be what I have to try to put my creativity and/or man-hours toward. But Angela and I are becoming incredibly comfortable here in Tecapa. Even though it is quite warm during the day and the mosquitos are absolutely frightening (thank god there is no dengue fever here and almost no malaria or any other of the various mosquito-born tropical diseases– the little bastards laugh at our slathered-on repellant and my stifling long-sleeve shirt and pants barely slow them down, though thank god the mosquito net over our bed works) in the evening and all night, it is still absolutely beautiful. The sunrises and sunsets are consistently breathtaking. The stark desert browns and tans contrast beautifully with the green algarroba trees of the dry forest and endless rice paddies as well as the blue skies – pale in the mornings and later ominously dark with afternoon rains in the far-off mountains of Cajamarca. If the rains ever make it here they come at night or in the early morning and do not last long (except in El Nino years like 1998 when the whole northern coast of Peru floods), though Angela and I love them for their reminders of Texas and for making it so pleasant to lay in bed early in the morning. The rain is a mixed blessing – cooler temperatures and refreshing, but it creates humidity to mix with the heat and brings even more insane amounts of mosquitos. In other news, I got a huge stack of Newsweek International Editions and have been catching up on the goings-on of the rest of the world. It’s crazy out there. Be careful. Oh yeah, not to give the wrong idea of what I’m doing here, but I am buying a used surfboard in the next couple weeks. I met this shaper in a town on the coast outside of Chiclayo and he’s hooking me up with a cool, thick, 80’s board and a used Boz wetsuit for when winter comes. Angela and I are living less than an hour from the coast – a town called Pacasmayo – and the incredible Peruvian waves. Also, we are within a day trip of so many good beaches on the northern coast that I figured I couldn’t pass up this opportunity. Even if I only go out once or twice a month I will save money over renting in the long run, and it’s a lot more convenient to have my own board and suit because rental is restricted to only a couple beaches in Peru. So I’m gonna keep learning to surf. So before I go any further I will stop in the name of general taste and a deep understanding of the business of other people’s lives. There is so much more that has been going on, though for the most part it is incredibly mundane. I will try to hit the blog with an update more often. Friends and family are in our thoughts often, and things here are pretty much on the track we thought they might be on – complete chaos and uncertainty. But we are loving every minute of it, and rest assured that it is a very safe and enjoyable kind of chaotic uncertainty.