I am currently typing this while two different people are playing the same song but one is about 5 seconds faster than the other. So, if it sounds like I am having trouble concentrating that’s probably because I am! I am going through the point in my Peace Corps experience we will call ´floundering.´ I was going to call it ´completely pissed off and frustrated´ but opted for something slightly less negative sounding. This whole Peace Corps changing the world thing is all well and good in theory but it is hard as hell in practice. My host father and counterpart is going to be out of town the same time I need to take him to a P.C. project planning meeting at the end of June. That’s fine; I would rather get more people from the community involved anyway. The problem is that no one else wants to leave town for 3 days to sit in a meeting. No one even wants to leave their house for 2 hours to go to a meeting in my town so my prospects for finding someone to take are not looking to hot right now. I will probably end up begging my host mom to go with me although that would put almost all of the chores on the 14 year old twins in my house and I would once again feel like a burden instead of actually helping them. Well see how that works out.
For lack of other things to do (and because I screwed up the first one) I am planting another vegetable garden. I don’t remember this gardening thing being that difficult in the states…although I did live in Iowa with the best soil on earth. I hope it goes better this time as it is something I would like other families to implement in their own homes.
It is officially one month until my birthday and my host mom got really excited this morning telling me we’d go to the market the day before to get fruit for a fruit salad. Um, I just realized that might not sound like exciting new, but when you live here it is. All that birthday fruit excitement will be followed up with a much needed vacation to help out another small business volunteer who has set up an international marathon in his site (on the beach! http://maratoninternacionaldepacasmayo.com/english/) and maybe a trip to the mountains of Cajamarca afterwards. Its time for a break from all the busy nothingness I am doing here.
Other than the fact that I have no idea what to do here everything’s great. My English class has almost mastered the alphabet after about 6 classes and we are now trying to master the rest of the language. I told my host sister that we say ´I am 23 years old´ and not ´I have 23 years´ which she insisted was correct. She has to go look it up in her notes as I sat there calling after her that I have spoken English my whole life and was pretty sure I was right. She has also spent about 100 hours working on a tree with bead leaves for what would be the equivalent of a life skills class here. I am loosing faith in the educational system here. The only thing that gives me some hope is that one of the teachers knows more about the yearly process to request funds from the municipality than anyone in the municipality does. She had instruction booklets and a timeline of things that needs to be done. I have already given up on doing much with the municipality but Karen went back and showed them the papers to ask exactly what she had to turn in and when. The looked at the papers and said something along the lines of ´hmm, we should have these´ then ran off to copy them. Its funny till you have to deal with shit like that everyday of your life, then it just makes you want to rip your hair out and take illegal vacations (which I of course don’t).
But this is all part of the experience and I am sure I will learn from it and leave a better person, etc, etc. The person next to me is still playing that same damn song that they were playing when I started writing this blog!
Peace,
Susan
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