Minor Details

Everyday I meet someone new. Whether it’s walking to the school, to the municipalidad, or to the tienda, I run into someone who decides they want to say ¨hi¨ to the gringa they’ve come to realize has been here for awhile and shows no signs of leaving. 

“So you’ve come here to teach English?” they ask.

This is my cue to start “the speech.”

One of our first weeks in language training we were given this tiny slip of paper in Spanish that reads, “Me llamo_______ y soy una voluntaria de Cuerpo de Paz,” (My name is______ and I’m a Peace Corps volunteer) and continues on with minor details of my program, Desarrollo Juvenil (Youth Development). I had no idea that little slip of paper would become my daily mantra, the base of every public speech I give, and become so memorized and part of me that I can repeat it like I would my name, birthdate, and social security number.

I am so used to constantly telling people what I’m doing and why I’m here (even the people who I spend time with on a regular basis and have come to consider friends and co-workers) that I didn’t realize I have made quite the oversight in my blog.

So many people from back home are so encouraging and positive, constantly telling me, “You’re doing a good thing over there!” that I didn’t realize what I am doing isn’t exactly clear, until someone from back home recently asked me,

“So, um, what is it exactly that you do?”

I realized that in my blog all I have is the standard speech—I work with kids in areas like healthy lifestyles, goal setting and future planning, and leadership in their own community.

Well, hold onto your seats, cause now I’m actually going to tell you what I do as a volunteer in Peru.

I only wish I had more things going on to tell you about.

As I’ve talked about before, my first 10 weeks here in Peru I was in training in the department of Lima. On August 19^th I swore in as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and the next day was on a bus headed to my new home in Lambayeque. And since then, it has been the ever cliché rollercoaster which has been the only way to properly describe day to day living in Peace Corps Peru.

I probably haven’t talked a lot about day-to-day living because everyday is different. I have an extremely loose schedule that changes because of the simplest things. And actually, I’m not supposed to have a die-hard schedule right now, because our first three-months in site are supposed to be dedicated to integration into our community and working on a Community Diagnostic. A CD is basically what it sounds like—a huge research paper on my town. At the end of this month all of my fellow Youth Volunteers and I are meeting for Early In-Service Training, where we will all present our diagnostics and get help on how to prepare them to later present to our communities. This is how we will actually identify the needs and projects we want to work on in our communities. People would love for me to start working gung-ho on projects right now, but I constantly have to tell them I am not supposed to start any big projects yet because of my research. Research can be anything from formal interviews with community leaders, to hanging out with a local mom in her home drinking coffee and talking about the weather. The main goal is to find out what is important to people, what resources they already have, what they’re lacking, and who would be reliable to partner with me on projects.

I was actually stretched pretty thin the first month I was here. I woke up every morning around 6:30 or 7 am and got ready for the day of simply walking around town and introducing myself to people. Because the municipalidad is a big counterpart of mine, I spent a lot of time there getting to know the workers and asking questions about the community, which I then used as a lead for my next outing. I did a “Quien es la gringa?” (Who is the white girl?) presentation in both the primaria (elementary school) and segundaria (high school) where I talked about who I was, why I’m here, and Peace Corps in general. I handed out four-page surveys to all of the high schoolers that had questions ranging from “what kind of sports do you like to play?” to “do you know what contraceptives are?” I have about 150 of those and am still crunching numbers on the responses (damn me and my desire for information!). Essentially every Monday I woke up with maybe one or two things planned for the week, and by lunch time my schedule for the week was completely full with meetings, presentations, and interviews. I also took a lot of naps (you wouldn’t believe how tiring it is just being here). And that is generally what any PCV is supposed to do in their first three-months—putting themselves out there for the community to see.

As time has gone on, I have fewer and fewer meetings I have to attend and I’m spending more time at home writing my community diagnostic. I have been doing a couple projects though to help with integrating into my community, and also so I have a reason to get motivated from day to day to get up and do something out in the community instead of hole myself up in my room (which is very tempting, believe me).  Let’s just say, I don’t wake up at 7 am anymore.

Monday and Tuesday I teach English in the primaria to the 5^th and 6^th graders. The primaria doesn’t have English classes but they will have to study it in segundaria, so I teach them the basics like colors, numbers, the alphabet, etc. Honestly, it’s not my favorite thing to do. I am so glad I didn’t get my first invite to the Caribbean as an English teaching volunteer (no offense to the volunteers out there teaching English, I’m sure you have awesome projects that have nothing to do with English teaching). For me it is more of a means to have face time with the kids and for them to run home and tell their parents about the gringa who teaches them English and is going to live in town for two-years. For the kids, it’s an hour of having a different teacher, dancing around and singing songs, and hopefully learning a little bit of English. It’s kind of difficult for me because I’m not a real teacher with a curriculum or grading system, so there’s no way to make them do homework or study. I have four classrooms I teach an hour of English in each a week, and they somehow think they’re going to be fluent by the time I’m done with them.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve started working on the Peru map project in the segundaria. All over the world PCV’s work on the World Map Project, where they get a group of kids together to create a huge mural of the world and work on lessons involving geography, culture, etc. It’s a good team building activity, excellent starting point for lessons, and from what I hear they always turn out great. Well, because the school year is quickly coming to an end (second week of December, then it’s summer vacation) I decided to start with the Peru map project. Much smaller, quicker, and no Peruvian can resist a project that promotes patriotic pride. I’ve partnered with one of the teachers at the segundaria and we’ve been working on the project together creating lessons for the kids based on history, geography, and cultural aspects of Peru, and this next week we’re actually going to start painting on one of the walls in the school. I’m in the segundaria almost everyday working on this and doing preliminary lessons for the kids. I’m really excited about it, and the municipalidad is supporting the project by providing all of the supplies needed for painting.

Remember the dance group I have been hanging out with? Well, there is a youth group in town that is part of the municipalidad that is comprised of kids ages 17-22 who meet five-days a week to practice different dances for community events. They’re the closest thing I have to friends in my town. They’re a really neat group of kids and they were getting frustrated with me for not attending every dance practice they had every night of the week so I could watch them and hang out. Well, as much as I would’ve loved spending every evening sitting and watching them practice the same dances over and over again, it wasn’t exactly the best use of my time. I mean, I was missing my favorite telanovela every night! (Just kidding. Kind of.) So now we’ve changed things up, and they have dedicated every Monday night to Orientación Vocacional charlas with me instead of dancing. On average about 15 kids show up and we work on things like communication, self-esteem, goal setting, life-planning, relationships, applying for jobs, etc. So far the kids really like it, and it’s my favorite part of the week. I much rather prefer small group settings where people are friends and are there on their own accord than I do classroom settings. It’s a lot more laid back and everyone is comfortable and open to discussion, but well behaved enough to stay on task.

Otherwise, my time is spent going to whatever meeting I’m invited to, volunteering time to helping different groups in town with their small projects, and watching way too much Dexter. I have a lot of down time.

And while I’m not done with my diagnostic, I can tell you what kind of projects I do want to work on in my community over the next couple of years:

• I’m hoping to partner with the health post to work on stronger sex education in the segundaria, as well as more education regarding drugs and alcohol.
• I want to work more with parents in the community with the escuela de padres to discuss what the kids are learning in school and how they can work on those same things with them at home.
• The mayor claims to be putting more focus on environment, so I’m hoping to start some more in-depth recycling and trash management habits in the schools and community.
• There’s an abandoned library in the municipality I’m hoping to help revive, and hopefully I can have a libros y amigos club (books and friends club) to promote reading for fun.
• There’s an escuela de lideres (leadership group) in the segundaria that I’m hoping to get involved with peer mentoring type programs in their school as well as in the primaria.
• I really want to start a girls-only healthy lifestyles youth group. We would work on everything from nutrition and exercise, to self-esteem and personal girly stuff. Girls Rock!

These things are, of course, overly ambitious. I know that many of these projects have good odds of falling flat or never getting started. This is not me being a pessimist, but a realist. Even in my short time here and working on the few projects I’ve started I have come to realize the very big roadblocks ahead of me. Let’s just say, I really want to do all of these things, but I will not be surprised if they don’t happen. Many volunteers in the field have the simple advice of, “take your expectations, cut them in half, and then expect even less.” The reality of it is we have more working against us than with us. And since I am the first volunteer to ever be in my town the odds are stacked against me in making any major ground on projects. In many ways, my main goal should simply be spreading the idea of Peace Corps and laying the groundwork for the next volunteer so they can really advance projects. Change takes a long time, especially when it goes against cultural norms. This doesn’t mean I am resigned to accomplish nothing and that I won’t try to do the absolute best I can. Absolutely not. I just understand my place in the big picture—I am a link in the chain, a cog in the machine serving a purpose greater than me. We all make a difference in our own way, as long as we put ourselves out there. Right now, I´m accomplishing more of a cultural exchange than anything. It’s still hard to feel like I’m not doing anything, I definitely still feel lost and wonder what the heck I’m doing at times. But, it’s not all for nothing. So I try to keep my head up and smile, even if I’m being asked for the 100^th time, “Who are you, and what are you doing here?” I just remember the speech:

“Me llamo Amanda, y soy una voluntaria de Cuerpo de Paz.”