Junin 2: Carhuamayo!

My socio/counterpart Jenny is also my host sister.  I’ll be interested to see how working and living together pans out.  I think it’ll be good because she seems really supportive so far and at least she can’t hide from me.

We got to the house and I met my family.  There are 9 brothers and sisters between the ages of 35 and 11.  Jenny, who’s 30, lives at home and works at the municipality.  Stephanie, 14, and David, 11 also live at home.  There’s another kid named Anderson who is 16 and lives at home, but he was on a graduation trip, so I haven’t met him yet.  The rest work in Lima or go to the university in Cerro de Pasco and they all come home on the weekends.  I got to meet Carlos, Eber, and Elena briefly before I left on Saturday morning.  The mom is a lovely sweet lady without any teeth.  She takes care of everybody and is very cariñoso.  The dad works in construction and is also very kind and plays with the kids and talks to me a lot.  I’m excited to have the experience of a big family.  It’s only been the four for me growing up and my cousins are relatively few and widespread.  I wonder what it’ll be like to have so much going on during the weekends.  They’ve said they want to embrace me like another sister and I’m happy to be a part of it.

I was really excited to find out that my tia and tio (campo host mom and dad) speak Quechua.  I was afraid I wasn’t going to get a chance to learn and am going to ask them to teach me.  Though their Quechua accents and my tia’s lack of teeth makes it harder for me to understand them.

The house is lovely.  It’s on the outskirts of town so it feels like the campo, but it’s only 20 minutes or so walking to get to the municipality.  We’re at the base of a big hill and there’s a good road for running nearby.  I tried it and managed a huffy walk/shuffle, but it’ll get better. 

The house is huge and seems like it was a hotel at one point.  But is has to be big to hold so many hermanos.  All the rooms are upstairs and there’s a big room downstairs that’s mostly empty.  They told me they use it for parties.  Most of the socializing is in the kitchen which is a separate little building in the yard.  They have a green space and little fenced areas for their 4 sheep.  Two are little lambs and the two big ones are going to be Christmas and New Yearspachamanca, respectively.  It takes some getting used to, but I heard from another volunteer that his family is going to eat their cat, so it could be more graphic. 

The latrine is out in the yard.  It’s a hole in the ground with four walls and no roof.  It will be interesting during the rainy season.  But I was already getting used to carrying my TP around and putting on lots of sweaters to go to the bathroom.

The house has no heating, so the cold can feel inescapable at times.  I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but it still felt strange to wear my knit hat and two pairs of pants while eating dinner.

The kitchen is large with a big table for everyone to sit at.  It has a dirt floor and a stove that burns cancha, which is a type of grass.  They also burn cow chips when they’re around.  The have a gas stove as well, but it doesn’t get a lot of use because tia is used to the other one and gas is expensive.  They recently got some guinea pigs, so they run around my feet while I eat meals and make their cuycuy noises.  There are two chickens that sleep in a little box in the kitchen and they let them out during the day.   Below are Tia Rufina with a cuy, Stephanie with a kitten, and David with his puppy Koki.

My tia also bought two kittens while I was there because they saw some mice.  They are super tiny and were really fun to play with.  There are four dogs and one of them is a little puppy.  They roam around in the yard and outside.  They barked at me a lot at first, were slightly menacing, and wouldn’t let me near them.  I followed prima Casey’s example and gave them some bread, and now we’re best friends.  Two of them follow me on runs in the morning and sometimes to work.  All of them give me lots of wags when I come up to them and want to be petted.  It feels so good to be in a house full of animals.

The food was interesting.  For one, when I told Peruvians I was going to Junin, they’d say, “Oh, you’re going to eat a lot of jerky.”  I started to imagine the wonderful black peppercorn buffalo jerky I ate while backpacking and roadtripping this summer and was thrilled.  It turns out that this is where Junin jerky comes from.

There were also more carbs than I have ever encountered for such a sustained period of time.  We’d have bread and porridge like stuff for breakfast.  Lunch is noodle soup then rice with potatoes and some token meat and vegetables.  Once it was fish, another time was sheep intestine which is very chewy.  Snack is bread and tea and dinner is a repeat of lunch.  I felt grateful to be well fed, but my body has a hard time with that diet.  I’m going to see if I cook breakfast and lunch for myself and share dinner to still be part of the family.  I got to try some interesting new things, like sheep intestine.  And dried potato soup.  Friday was the feria market and the food there merits its own post.  I’ll leave you with live toads in a blender.

I also got a taste of some Peace Corps style inertia.  When I got there on Tuesday, Jenny told me we were going to plant trees that afternoon.  We ended up planting the trees on Thursday and in between there was a lot of me sitting around in the municipality writing letters.  But it got people to know my face and is good practice for all the waiting I’ll be doing in the future. 

While I was hanging around in my tree planting pants, they told me I was going to meet the mayor.  I felt unprepared and nervous, but he was very nice and said he wants to support me in whatever I need.  Institutional apathy is a big problem for volunteers, so that was awesome.  I have another socio named Anderson who is the regidor of environment for the district.  He has an environmental radio show once a week that he broadcasts from Carhuamayo.  I went to listen and he asked me for an interview.  So I ended up talking on the Carhuamayo radio for 20 minutes about everything from global climate change to my favorite Peruvian beer.  Again, I was blindsided, but I think it went well and people in other towns were mentioning it to the volunteers. 

I spent a bunch of time wandering around town and talking with the folks that approached me.  I also went to a parent’s meeting at David’s school and got roped into designing their diplomas.  I played soccer with kids and chatted up tienda owners.  The tree planting in the plaza was really fun and successful.  It felt amazing to work hard with my body after so much lethargy.  Folks would stop to oogle and ask questions.   They may have been looking at the tiny hat I had to borrow, but the sun is fuerte and style doesn´t count for much in the campo.  Or they could have been staring at how we loaded all our trees into a mototaxi to go from the nursery to the plaza.

Women from a mother’s group and from a community group called Vaso de Leche came to help us plant, so I made some good contacts with them.  It seems like there are a ton of projects and a lot of environmental interest as well as a lot of support.  I feel like there’s the potential for me to do some good work.  Everyone says that the number one problem is a lack of environmental consciousness, so I’ll go for that first.

I’m excited to teach vacaciones utiles classes when I get back.  I’m thinking an environmental club, a few English classes because everyone asks for them, and ultimate frisbee. 

There’s only two more weeks of training.  I can’t wait to see everyone tomorrow and hear their stories.  All the veteran volunteers say that this period is basically a huge bender because everyone is over training.  I’m not necessarily looking forward to that part, but I’m going to try to go out more.  This is my last chance to build my gringo relationships before we disperse for good. 

Here are some fun photos to leave you with.  I played futbol with these guys and was the worst one.  My hermanito David is in the center with the red sweater.  And don´t judge me for wearing the same flannel in every picture.  It´s hard to pack for ten days in one backpack and I didn´t bring a lot of diversity of long sleeves.

Junin 1: Regional Field Based Training

We just got back from Regional Field Based Training and site visits in Junin.  It was incredible and I feel really lucky to be going there, though climatically and comfort wise it won’t be the easiest site to have.  But comfort is the antithesis of Peace Corps, right?

We took a Peace Corps van up to the city of Junin in the department of the same name.  It was beautiful to go up through the Andes.   The second photo is Grant with a mine and our potty stop.

We ended up at over 13,500 feet, so we had mandatory rest time during which we cuddled in warm clothes and watched the last Harry Potter movies. 

Nobody got seriously ill from altitude sickness, but it was rough for all of us in one way or another.  We were really tired, winded, headachy, and sometimes nauseous.  It made me think that maybe that’s what it feels like to be really old.  We were all slow for the first few days and content to sit around and eat snacks.  Glucose helps with the altitude symptoms so we all trudged around with cookies or hard candies in our pockets.  And popped a lot of Tylenol.

The city of Junin is pretty ok.  A volunteer named Riley is there.  We explored around and climbed up the central spire of the plaza.  It was scary because it’s pitch black and there are ladders and platforms to negotiate.  Here’s us as a totem pole with the plaza tower in the background.

We had some delicious food there.  The most famous thing in the region is a tuber called maca.  They make it into all sorts of things.  The most popular is to put dried maca, hot water, milk, this molasses like substance, honey, and an egg in a blender and serve it up.  It’s incredible and tastes like fall and they all talk about how it’s a tonic and makes you strong.  I read that as having lots of calories.  Pampa breakfast of champions.  There is also fresh unpasteurized milk that is delivered from a few miles away.  Those are the main highlights of Junin cuisine.  The rest is potato. 

The weather is something else.  It’s super cold in the shade and in the mornings and evenings.  The sun feels really hot if it’s out.  There’s so little atmosphere between us and it.  I reapplied my spf 60 sunscreen four times a day and still burned.  We had some rain and hail.  The rainy season starts soon and will go through March. 

I had a little language barrier misunderstanding with the climate. So we have the rainy season coming up.  Then folks were telling me how there is “caye hielo” literally “falling ice” during the winter months.  I thought I was doomed to rain half the year and hail the other half.  Fortunately, it turns out that cayehileo means frost.  Hail is granizo.  The way it works is that it’s not so punishingly cold during the rainy season because of the cloud cover insulation.  During the dry season, it’s blazing during the day under the sun and freezes at night.  Chevere.

Anyway, we had a bunch of activities during RFBT.  We helped a volunteer named Will with his recycling buy.  It seems pretty easy and effective once you get it rolling.  We also helped out at an environmental camp for girls that some volunteers were running on the edge of lake Chinchacocha. 

It was incredibly beautiful.  There is a flat basin where the lake is, then rolling hills, then mountains, then snow covered mountains.  I can’t wait to explore all around.  There aren’t any trees and only ichu grass that is golden now with the end of the dry season.  There are vicunas, which are wild camelids like llamas, running around and tons of sheep and alpaca all over.  Did you know that flamingos migrate from Chile up to Chinchacocha?  I had no idea and it was so strange to see them there.

We took the girls for a hike up a hill and all of us newcomers were wheezing.  But it felt so good to move my body a bit.  We also taught them about compost and I was surprised how into it they were and how much they already knew. 

Then we came back down and tried to enjoy some chicken foot soup.

We went back to Junin to relax and watch more Harry Potter.  I had some charrango time. 

The next day we went for a drive around the lake and were tourists. 

We stopped for pachamanca in Carhuamayo, which was delicious and exciting.  Though it turns out that sheep isn’t my favorite meat.  There’s a town called Huayre with a plaza that looks like it came from Dr. Seuss and a huge maca monument that you can climb.  We also went to the reserve for the battle of Junin and saw some inca ruins. 

After all that touring around, a few days had passed and it was time to split up and go on site visits.   Our socios came to collect us.  I was more emotional than I thought I’d be.  I was really excited, but suddenly felt exposed and alone when all the other gringos left.  I had thought it wouldn’t be a big deal, but I missed them instantly. 

Where you at?

We got our site assignments yesterday!  I remember thinking at the beginning that it was so far away, now I can’t believe it’s time.  I’m going to Carhuamayo in the department of Junin.  I’ll be living close to Chinchaycocha, which is the second biggest lake in Peru after Titicaca and a protected area.  There are also endangered giant frogs.  And vicunas.  The town is north east of the lake in the northeastern corner of the department.  Sorry this map is so busy, it was the best I could find.

I got a little folder with some info about Carhuamayo.  It’s in the altiplano, which are high plains.  Diego told me that I’m on a plateau and can see high mountains in the distance.  I’m only a little ways away from the highest volunteer in the world.  It’s cold as heck most of the time and the rainy season is January through March or so.  It rains every day from 2pm into the night.  I’m not sure how big my town is.  It has a primary and secondary school, so it must be an ok size.  Though I’m definitely out there in the campo.  I have electricity and water, but it’s not clear if I’ll have a toilet or be “hole shitting” as Diego says.  There’s also internet in the town, so I won’t be totally disconnected.  I’ll have to see if my cell phone works.

Wikipedia en español has an article on the district of Carhuamayo, so I don´t know how applicable it will be to where I am.  But the district has 8,400 people over 220 km squared.  Is that spaced out?  It seems like it. I´ll bet a lot of folks are in the town with rural outskirts.  It´s at 4,126 meters above sea level which is 13,536 ft for you gringos.  High as hell.  When we visit the department this week, we have a mandatory two hour rest when we arrive so we don´t throw up or pass out.  Whenever I visit the coast or go back home, I`m going to challenge everyone I see to races up hills.  My hemoglobin is going to be off the hook. 

It’s a new site, which comes with its own advantages and challenges.  I won’t have anyone to live up to and there won’t be clashes of former working styles.  I’ve heard that some volunteers get called by the previous volunteer’s name for a year.  But, it’s hard to break in a new site.  No one will have any idea what Cuerpo de Paz is and I’m sure I’ll explain it the entire time I’m there.  They’ll probably be mystified by this gringa who runs around and tries to talk to them about the environment and seems to lack basic survival skills.

My family is big.  The info form says that there are 11, but that includes those who come and go regularly.  I have a mom and dad, two brothers, and a sister.  The hermanos are all in their early 30s so maybe part of the 11 are spouses and kids?  Can’t tell.  The first thing Diego said when he gave me my assignment is that my family is really great.  My sister works for the municipality, so that’s a great in to start working with the government and get projects off the ground.  I’m looking forward to having a house full of activity and comings and goings.  I think it will help me meet people and integrate better. 

I’ll be in a pretty big cluster of volunteers.  Laura, Grant, Alison, Nicole, and Kryssa will all be reachable for a weekend thing.  Matteo is 6 or so hours away.  Some are closer by than others and we’ll have to see how it shakes out.

All of those mentioned above are going with me for Field Based Training on Thursday morning.  We’ll go up to the city of Junin and tour around other volunteer’s projects and do other things I’m not sure of.   Then we’ll split up and each have three days at our sites.  What happens then all depends on our families and whether or not socios (counterparts) have planned anything for us.  I don’t know who my socio is or what he/she does.  So mysterious!  I’m really excited to go and find everything out.  We spend those three days and then I think we have to find our ways back to Sta. Eaulalia on our own.  Then it’s back to training until the end of November.  I wonder what it’ll be like to go and come back. 

We're going to get to site a month before school lets out and the rainy season begins.  I think we´re going to spend our first bit of time getting to know the place and then doing some "vacaciones utiles" classes, which are like productive things for kids to do during their breaks.  We´ve heard that many people leave their towns during summer vacation and the rainy season, so it will definitely be interesting if I´m there for a month and then it becomes a ghost town.  That will be a good time to think about my master´s project and maybe take up knitting. 

The town is right on the edge of the Preserva Nacional de Junin around the lake, so I´ll be working with SERNANP as well, which is like the Peruvian Forest Service.  I´m really looking forward to that.

So much speculation!  I´ll have more real things to talk about when I come back.  I haven´t spent a night away from my host family since I arrived.  It will be interesting to be gone for so long and then reunite with everyone.  I can´t wait to hear all their stories.