Note: I wrote this blog a week ago on the 25th of June but am just getting the opportunity to post it. I promise to post more often from now on : ), and I am getting my new camera in 12 days so pictures will finally be returning. Now…
So where to begin.
Life in Collón continues to be an enigma. Somehow, after almost seven months at living here I still fall short of words trying to describe what this experience means to me and what it is doing to me. After seven months, I feel remarkably unsuccessful, yet generally quite happy with my life. I question my efficacy here, yet have not once questioned my decision to come. I feel a lot of these conflicting feelings come from the two seemingly different lives I live. One, as a privileged American living in a fascinating Third World Country, and the other, as an akward gringo trying to implement a vague idea of sustainable change into a tiny Andean community. Both of these are me, but the person I am as I comfortably sip a beer in my favorite bar ’13 Bujos’ and the person I am in site, still unable to deeply connect with anybody outside my host family and still utterly confused by Quechua, seem worlds apart. Let’s talk about this.
Life as a priveleged American has been good and promises to stay that way, and even to get better. Since my last blog, I spent Semana Santa (Holy Week, leading into Easter) at the beautiful beach of Mancora in the northern coast of Peru with many of my good friends from Peace Corps. Then, I got back to Ancash and went on some beautiful hikes, including a two-day stint on a portion of the Santa Cruz Trek, and a day hike to Lake 69, a beautiful mountain lagoon nestled at the foot of a glacier. I get to go into my capital city of Huaraz and kick back at least every couple of weeks. And I even got to take a few days to go to the coastal city of Chiclayo, where all the Environmental volunteers attended a conference together on Project Design Management So really, no complaints.
And the next several weeks are looking even better. This weekend, I climb my first mountain. Then, on July 5th, I’ll get to return to Pacasmayo (where we had Reconnect) and see a bunch of friends after running a 21k and proving that just living above 10,000 feet keeps you in shape. A week later, my friends Matt Kuzara and Ben Royer will be coming my way to spend a few days hiking Ancash followed by a trip to the Peruvian Amazon. Yup, we’re going to the jungle! It’s great.
This life of seeing Peru and being with new and old friends is incredible. It keeps me motivated and always gives me something to look forward to. Yet it also stands in contrast to my life at site as a volunteer. I’ve already seen more of Peru 10x over than most of the people in my community ever will see. And buying a $4 meal in Huaraz is way out of most of my community’s budget. We literally have different realties.
So how do I fit into this rural Andean reality? Well, right now I’m not claiming to know the answer. I hope to find it, in fact learning how to connect with people I do not share a common culture with is a big part of the reason I joined the Peace Corps, but right now I am just lost. It’s all so different, even right now as I am in my room, I have the local Huayno music blaring above me, and I can hardly even hear my own thoughts, which seem to me at this moment disjointed and unclear. And I’m not even sure if it is the music, or the effort of trying to explain how I feel when I’m at site that is causing this.
And how do I feel at site? Generally pretty good, at least in terms of being in control of my emotions and of the stress that often accompanies this type of experience. My biggest challenge is, as it has been, feeling ill-equipped and unable to really be of help here. As always, I still remain optimistic for the future, but at the same time, I have mostly come to terms with the fact that I may not be the super-volunteer I once envisioned I would be (although I haven’t lost hope!). I do not take personal blame for this, I simply live in a hard site, as most of us do in Ancash. But it’s not the lack of basic services that makes service here more difficult, but it is the fact that after seven months I haven’t found anyone here that really wants to make things better. Sure, everyone wants things to be better. But no one has come to me and showed willingness to help me do this. And at the same time, I still do not feel integrated enough in the community to be able to identify those who would even want to help me in the first place.
And this leads to one of the great challenges of development, sustainability. I don’t want to just do projects by myself, because they wouldn’t last. Successful projects have to come from the grass-roots; if the community doesn’t have a stake in the project how will it last? Yet, I do not feel competent enough to get the community involved in a project. Why? 1) I am having a hard enough time just getting kids to come to the computer classes I give Monday-Wednesday, and to the English classes and Youth Group I have fruitlessly tried to start. If I can’t get small projects underway how can I expect commitment in larger projects. 2) I still have been unable to implement my surveys. I have been trying for months to get the health post to work with me on this, but they are under-staffed and always busy. There have been countless meetings that I have set up with them that have fallen through. And, if I don’t have my surveys implemented, I feel I have no ground to stand on when asking people to come help me. I can’t just say, ‘Hey, we should work on this because I feel it might be needed and helpful here’. That’s the outsider imposing his own arbitrary solutions on vague problems scenario. Rather, I want to be able to say ‘Hey, I just did these rockin’ surveys and it turns out there’s a mal-nutrition problem. 40 of you expressed interest in learning how to use home gardens fertilized with compost to combat this, so let’s have a meeting and start working’. But I can’t say that until the surveys have been done. And I can’t get the surveys done without the health post because I need the help of the local health promoters because they can navigate the dark waters of Quechua in a way that I can’t.
Breath.
So basically, I feel I need the surveys as a foundation to stand on. And for the life of me I can’t get them implemented. Add this to my general incompetance with learning Quechua, and my lack of any viable counter-part, and things just ‘ain’t gettin’ done’ (Yeah, the South is more endearing when you’re farther away).
So how do I plan on dealing with this? Well for now I am just pushing and pushing with the health post to get my surveys implemented. Our next tentative date for working on this is July 11th. I hope and pray that this works. Otherwise, I am trying to continue involving myself in the life of the community. And that’s hard, mostly because of Quechua, it sucks never having a clue what is going on, but also because for the most part community integration involves an axe or a plow, and having been sick the last few weeks has drained me of energy to work.
Now. I feel as though I’ve been dancing around what I’ve wanted to say without really saying it. So these next few paragraphs will be in summary an attempt to give a little clarity and directness to my rambling.
Overall, life is good, actually really good. It certainly has its ups and downs, but like normal, the ups are way higher and more frequent than the downs, which mostly just involve a few occasional bouts of lonliness or feeling useless at site. As for my work, I have not accomplished nearly what I thought I would have at site. I do not blame or absolve myself of this, I just accept it and try to deal with what that means. What I have been doing, I have considered successful on a small scale. This success has been my computer classes. I teach typing three days a week in the afternoon and I see it as a productive activity that is giving real workable skills to the students here. These computer classes also serve to keep me sane. They let me know the kids and when the people in the community see me walking to school in the afternoons with my laptop, they assume I’m doing something useful. So that is good too.
As far as community integration, I feel I have reached a level of mixed success. Basically everyone knows me now, which is good, but I don’t know everyone yet, which is why I feel my success is mixed. Nevertheless, I feel generally accepted here, and the biggest challenge is simply relating to people. As I said before, the realities that we respectively come from are quite different. I can’t just go to a one of my friends here and honestly talk about the challenges I feel that I am facing here. And neither do I really feel that I am entering into their lives. Learning how to connect with the people here is, I think, one of the most important lessons I will learn in Peru. I feel that way because I believe that if I can connect with them here, I will have learned something about the shared experience of humanity and will have reminded myself that for the most part, people are just people – trying to get by, live a good life, and love their friends and family – and that if I can learn to see the connections that bind us together and recognize humanity in everyone I meet I will be a much better person for it. I think in some ways I’m already learning that. I am continually impressed by my host-father’s dedication to his family and his light-spirited enjoyment of a world that continually presents him and his own with difficult challenges. Just the other day, he called me over just to tell me how the ropes hanging to dry were dancing on the clothesline with the wind. (¡Mira como están bailando! Look how they’re dancing!). His poetic appreciation of the world around us struck me. This is the same man that worries because he knows his daughter isn’t getting enough good nutrition, and knows her education will be seriously lacking, but can’t do anything about it because of the economic circumstances in which he lives. Yet he still enjoys his life, and he is one of the most joyful and youthful almost fifty-year olds I know. It’s rather humbling all of that. And there’s something impressive in the way he greets every day with a witty smile and whistles his way off to his work every day.
Again, on reflection, I would not change a thing in my life right now. Work has not gone as well as I wanted it to, but I am very optimistic and I still feel there is a lot of potential for good work here. I have a great host-family and I generally feel accepted by my community, even though I have trouble getting to know them beyond superficial gestures. And finally, my life outside of site is simply amazing. In a month I will be floating in a canoe down the Amazon River! I am going to summit my first mountain this weekend and I have friends here (and friends and family back home) that I truly apreciate with all my heart (even if I’m bad at staying in touch) and would never trade for anything.
So, love you all ; )
Brian
Read Full Post »
BGP in Peru 