I used to have a pet lizard I got during a high school science class. We would have to buy it crickets form the local pet store as they were hard to hunt down in the back yard. Never in my life could I have imagined what a plague of crickets would look like. Well, I have been enlightened. For the past 2 months I have seen more crickets than I thought existed on the planet. They are everywhere and eat everything (including my veggie garden!). Every night and every morning I have to de-cricket my room. I have never needed music to sleep but have taken to falling asleep listening to my I pod so that the music drowns out the sound of them scrambling around in plastic bags and making very unsweet music. The plus is that the puppies next door would have probably starved to death has they not been able to come over to our house and munch on the crickets attracted to the outside light. There was a festival in the nearby town to celebrate their patron saint and Karen and I went, staying in the house of a local school teacher and her family so as not to have to return to our sites after dark. You would think the crickets would stick to the campo but ohhh no, they prefer the bright lights and blaring cumbie music of the city. At these festivals there are always little restaurant shacks set up, each blaring a different song by the same popular cumbia band. These restaurants are also always filled with drunken Peruvian men, which is usually a fun killer for the two gringas that just want to be left alone. The cricket invasion, however, made this a bit more fun as the intoxicated men would approach us with a cricket or 2 on their head or shoulder. Something about a middle aged man trying to act like he is the best thing since sliced bread with a cricket perched atop his head makes the situation much funnier. Later in the evening, walking back to the professor’s house, the roads were literally covered with crickets. My one hope for all of you out there in internet land is that you never have to experience the smell of trampled rotting cricket carcasses…it’s not pleasant.
My birthday week was slow but I didn’t feel guilty about not doing anything as no one here does anything on their birthdays. I woke up groggy eyed on the bid day, sleeping in until the late hour of 7am. My host family all gave me a hug, as is the tradition here. They bought me a cake and a bunch of fruit. My host dad asked me if I knew how to prepare fruit salad (he already know that I do). I told him that I thought I could handle the task and prepared a fruit salad of amazingness with yogurt and honey. My host mom made me a split pea puree, which is my favorite meal here, then we danced for the photo opp. I spent the next 2 days attending project funding meetings at the municipality (really fun). Karen and I are both participating with people from our communities to get funding for projects. They had been tolerable up to this point (mainly due to the fact that they were being run by the attractive male municipal worker who could start on time and stay on task), but ohh no, lets bring in two guys from the regional capital who start an hour late and take 3 hours to get through a powerpoint of 6 slides…such a good idea. Karen and I were about ready to flip out by the end of one of the meetings. She had started drawing a chair to keep calm and I was making a list of ways to improve the meeting such as a chair fight, sedatives, or punching the guy speaking in the face…ok wouldn’t actually do that but it seemed like such a good idea at the time. To give you some idea of my feelings for the speaker, his example of an environmental project was fixing the roads….hmmm. Anyway. It is all over and Karen and I both are listed to receive funding for our projects next year. Mine is for a plant nursery and hers is for improves cooking stoves.
Peace
Susan
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