We watch her concert every night during dinner. It’s my dad’s favorite. 

9:56 pm  •  27 May 2012

I kind of love this song right now. Sorry, I couldn’t find a better version. 

9:54 pm  •  27 May 2012

9:52 pm  •  27 May 2012

-       I love watching novelas with my host mom. Her reactions are the best = incredibly dramatic and full show commentary.

-       How can washing the morning dishes make you feel so defeated?

-       Dirt floor problems: Rainy season + dirt floor = muddy room

                               Sweeping a dirt floor, yes it is necessary

-       Qualities I’ve picked up from Peruvians: Not looking people in the eye

                                    Hugs = awkward pats on back/shoulder

-       My 74 year old host mom can out drink me

-       First day in Anta with my bike: little girl runs straight at me and I crash, of course

-       Asking people for their name (general politeness) gets you lunch invitations

-       Family dogs: Cholo Bruto walks me to the combi stop, Princesa pees on my dirt floor

-       Sleeping through an entire week does not make you feel rested

-       I have hit my head/fallen out of a combi just about every time I return to my site

-       My host mom has finally caught on that I don’t like rice. She has solved this by supplementing my lack of rice consumption with 3x as many potatoes

-       My host dad reminds me every time I turn down soup AFTER I’ve already eaten my lunch plate that I’m going to die. He also calls me a cat.

-       Feeling clean means washing your hands or brushing your teeth

-       Lima has THE best movie theater. You reserve your seats. Much better than that time Ashley almost got into a fight over our seats in Chaclacayo.

-       Sometimes you wait 5 hours for your socio only to end up doing paperwork by yourself.

-       I have never seen as many stars as I do in Anta. Gorgeous.

-       Return phone calls. Or else you go to the city for dinner and your regional coordinator goes to your site for a surprise visit.

-       Switching every other week between complete exhaustion, 12+ hours of sleep and insomnia is making me feel very unbalanced.

-       My neighbor brings me the newspaper

-       I am buying a dry erase board for my kitchen for mine and my family’s daily English/Spanish/Quechua vocabulary

-       The way to my host mom’s heart is buying her tea from the city

-       I can now say I’ve eaten tuna fish spaghetti

-       I’m starting to like Huayno – the sierra music of choice. Not good.

-       The difference between my Mexican family/friends and Peruvians: My Mexican family will honk outside your home until you come outside, Peruvians scream your name over and over from the front porch

-       My Justice of the Peace is too cool. At our last meeting she was wearing a red flat billed cap with gold glitter dollar signs all over it

-       So. Many. Flea Bites.

-       I love my 3-year old nephew, Edu. We ride our bikes together (well, he has a plastic car his mom pulls by a rope), he holds my hand at the market, and he calls me Chrisssshhhtie. 

9:33 pm  •  27 May 2012

Being sick while in college was manageable. I had my apartment (read:privacy, bed, comfort - mourning the loss of all 3 is a common bond in PC) and all the medicine I could want at my disposal that would knock me out long enough so I woke up recovered. 

Right now I am sick (think wavering between extremely hungover and that feeling about 5 minutes after you’ve downed a 1/2 liter of vodka and don’t have enough time to regret said decision because you are too busy perfecting your aim into a toilet bowl - yet in this instance alcohol is not to blame), sleeping in a hostel with 11 other volunteers, and spending my days at a training in Piura, known as the department of eternal sun. 

What I want is to curl up in the fetal position in a bed (preferably my girlfriend’s because she has THE best bed and when don’t I want to be around my girlfriend?) with AC and a really cold glass of orange juice. That is all. 

10:37 pm  •  26 April 2012

..And written by a volunteer from Peru! 

- Gracy Obuchowicz

Just before graduating college, I was invited to dinner by a friend’s sister, Kristen, who had recently finished her Peace Corps service in Guyana. We sat around the table eating hummus and flatbread with her handsome Guyanese husband, and she told me stories about speaking pidgin English and the little boat she used to travel to and from her site. She came back brighter and worldlier somehow.

I had been thinking about the Peace Corps. After that dinner, a clear vision formed in my head: me, living in an African hut, playing with a group of beautiful children, and carrying water from a long distance wearing some kind of loose-fitting batik dress. Of course, I knew there was more to it than that. But Kristen’s story really spoke to me about how big the world was and how I might go about finding my place in it. Today I’m proud to call myself a returned Peace Corps volunteer, having finished my service four years ago as a youth development volunteer in Peru.

This week the Peace Corps turns 50, and veterans of the program are getting together in my hometown of Washington, D.C. to celebrate. These 50 years have brought over 200,000 American volunteers to 139 different countries. With an annual budget of around $400 million to support 8,655 current volunteers whose goals are simple: providing technical assistance, educating other countries about the United States, and learning about other countries to bring that knowledge back home. For its volunteers, the Peace Corps experience also promises personal transformation and through it, the promise of a brighter, more connected America.

“I think it’s a wanderlust combined with the sort of glamour of having done it,” says my friend Mia Farber, who was the volunteer who lived 30 minutes down the road from me and would cook me lunch when I needed to escape from my little village. “People really revere returned Peace Corps volunteers. There is just nothing bad you can ever say about it.”

The reality of what really happens in the field is so much harder to explain. Even through photographs, it’s difficult convey the beauty of the Peruvian village where I lived and worked for two years. My village of 35 families is nestled in the Andes, under a giant white-capped mountain that turned incredible colors in the late afternoon sun. My neighbors were a mix of Quechuan older ladies, who dressed traditionally in thick felt skirts and big straw hats, and the younger generations, who spoke Spanish and were trying to find their way out of the farming lifestyle. They all stared and giggled at me when I first arrived, and never really stopped. I was a signpost from a different world, a tall gringa who ate their simple meals of rice and potatoes and helped their children organize a business that sold homemade tamales on Sunday mornings.

The sunsets and the potatoes are easy to talk about. Then there are the things that are really hard to fit into a story. How I had to stop working with certain schools because the teachers regularly did not show up for class. How I came to realize there was nothing I could do to save some children’s education. How I had to leave my first host family the night before my 23rd birthday because the father beat up his two daughters for talking to boys on the porch when he wasn’t home. Or how a month before I finished my service, I was sexually assaulted by someone I trusted. How nothing was ever really done about it because after telling my Peace Corps doctors, I was too exhausted to do anything else.

Near the close of my service, I was asked to speak to the incoming group of volunteers about best practices in youth development. After my presentation, a few of them came up to me, asking questions and telling me what they wanted to do in their sites. I kept saying, “It’s really hard. It takes time. You have to get to know people before jumping in.” They looked at me bright-eyed, and I recognized myself when I had first gotten there and thought I could do anything. I had the funny urge to push them down to the ground and then pick them up and hug them close to me, just to warn them of the cycle that would soon start.

With time to reflect, knowing these extremes is what helped me to develop a deep love for Peru. The extremes helped me see my own culture more clearly, both the strength of my optimism in the hard places and the depth of my materialism, which I used to get me through those places. Eventually, around month 18, I fell into a somewhat comfortable place in the deep crack between these two cultures. I leaned heavily on my Peace Corps friends, who were the only ones who really understood the divide. I wasn’t asked to choose a side until I came home to the United States, which proved to be a harder adjustment than when I moved to Peru. I wandered around the grocery store, puzzled by my tears over a whole aisle dedicated to breakfast cereals, and wondered if I would ever feel normal again. I did, but it took a while.

Losing and then having to find your culture again is a circuitous route to becoming a better citizen. I wonder if this is what Kennedy had in mind when he first gave that speech in 1961 at the University of Michigan. He was looking for Americans who were ready to serve their country by showing a kind, giving face to people abroad, yet ended up attracting many who were frustrated with America’s own international policy. Gloria Levin, who served in Peru from 1966 to 1968, in the thick of the Vietnam War, said there were members of her group who refused to swear the Peace Corps oath, which asks volunteers to support and defend the U.S. Constitution. She says that she joined for her own personal development and as “an antidote to the U.S. government’s military incursions in southeast Asia.”

Jill Meeks, who served in Guinea Bissau, West Africa in the late 1990s, showed her town that being an American can take on different forms. “I felt like I was representing the United States, and just by being in the country taught people about how Americans could be from different ethnicities and they weren’t all white,” says Meeks, “although they definitely considered me ‘white’ I was constantly explaining I was Latina.”

My Peace Corps experience was also about expanding horizons—both my own and those of my community. I often think that one of my biggest successes of Peace Corps was telling the girls in my host family that the domestic abuse was so bad that I could no longer stay with them.

It’s easy to see where Peace Corps can grow as an organization. Most of its volunteers are fresh out of college and lack the job skills needed to create infrastructural change. Combine that with cultural and language difference, plus little to no outside funding, and long-lasting development can be challenging to say the least. It’s difficult to track progress in a meaningful way. I’ve always heard that much of the effect of having a Peace Corps volunteer in a site can’t be seen until the next generation steps up to leadership. When I went back to visit my town last year, I found all the teenage girls I had worked with were graduating from high school, thinking of post-graduate options, and most important to me, not pregnant. I have no idea if this is a result of me being there or not, but I celebrate it as if it’s my own victory.

With 50 years to reflect on, it seems that our willingness to go far into the unknown is the most important part of being a Peace Corps volunteer. In an NPR interview, one of the first volunteers, Bob Klein, said that when he was starting out in Ghana, “the head of faculty said to us, ‘Don’t let anyone come out from Washington and let anyone tell you what it means to be a Peace Corps volunteer. Because you’re all they have and you’ll decide what it means to be a Peace Corps volunteer.’”

When I told Kristen that night at dinner that I was thinking about joining the Peace Corps, she replied, ”Do it. You don’t want to be one of those people who says “I wish I had done the Peace Corps.” She was right. Now when anyone asks me about going, I tell them to just go and worry about the details as they come up. I tell them that they will be richly rewarded in ways they will not be able to predict. I tell them it will be a little like that vision they have in their head, but so much more.

I tell them all of this because it’s true, but I also tell them for selfish reasons. I believe that a long-term cultural immersion will make them a kinder, more sensitive human being—the kind of American I want to surround myself with.

http://www.good.is/post/who-is-the-peace-corps-for-americans-or-communities-abroad/

10:06 pm  •  26 April 2012

Here is another reblog of a PCV about this life. He is serving in Ethiopia but despite the distance and the country, what he writes is entirely applicable to Peru..from transportation to the common frustrations. 

The blog is at: http://waidsworld.wordpress.com/2011/08/07/the-real-peace-corps/

The Real Peace Corps

I feel as though I’ve done somewhat of a disservice throughout this blog. I’ve painted a picture of my time here that isn’t precisely accurate. I’m an emotional person, romantic, optimistic to a fault. I like extremes and superlatives. I exaggerate in an attempt to draw the reader in, and to make sense of things I can’t make sense of.

I romanticize this experience as a function of my personality but also as a coping mechanism. Peace Corps is really hard.

So I want to write about the real Ethiopia. And the real Peace Corps experience. That way, if a future volunteer reads this, they understand what to expect, and won’t hate me for only showing sunset pictures and kids holding hands.

So what should you expect?

Nothing is the best answer. Expect nothing and you will be pleasantly surprised. Every experience is different. My friend Jon lives 80 miles away. Our lives could not be more different. His house has no floor save for the mud it was built on. He is lucky to have power one day out of the week.  My sitemate Dave lives 200 meters from my house and our experiences are entirely different.

So here are some observations, a look into what I do, and an idea of what your potential service will look like.

Peace Corps is defined by a strange dichotomy. Freedom and containment. I wake up every day with a blank slate. I can do anything. I can do nothing. And while the possibilities are only limited by my own imagination, the ability to do as I please is corrupted by a number of social, political, and cultural practices.

Case in point: Most volunteers assume they will run to let off steam in their new country. However, running here is a cause of stress more so than a release. You get stared at as a foreigner here. These are stares that know no shame. Stares that you can feel without seeing. They are honest and curious stares, but can crack even the kindest of spirits. But a foreigner in shorts? Running? That is unheard of.  Running here means being followed by hordes of children, the last thing you need when trying to let off steam.

I want to export coffee to benefit local farmers and provide an organic alternative to the Starbucks mess we have back home. The bureaucratic structure here has destroyed those dreams. Disappointment is part of the PC experience.

Doing something like the Peace Corps will be your lowest of lows and your highest of highs. Highs that shatter your previous world views.  You will feel refreshed, walk in a forest and quote Thoreau. The lows can last so long that you need a fleeting moment of existentialism just to make it through the rainy season. Well, that, and a ton of movies. You will consider going home. You will count down the days until you leave. You will count up from the day you arrived.

“I can’t believe we’ve been here for a year.”

“I can’t believe we’ll be here another year!”

You will understand yourself, question yourself. Compare where you came from to where you are. I have days when I miss America. I have days when I loathe it. Why do people care about Charlie Sheen and Amy Winehouse? How many marines died last week? How many kids in the horn of Africa died of hunger? I can’t even imagine dying of hunger. When I’m hungry, I eat.

But I eat strange food. Ethiopian food is unlike anything else in the world. Sometimes it is delicious, but most times it is very mediocre. Other times, it is so incredibly bad that I consider burning down every plant that grows whatever the hell is in ‘gunfo’

Don’t try gunfo.

Universally, Peace Corps volunteers crave food. I have dreams about it. Vivid dreams where I belly flop into a bowl of ice cream off of a hot fudge brownie diving board. Sushi. I have a long distance relationship with Sushi and we are not communicating well.

As volunteers, we love to complain. We joke about our poop and our pooping locations. We laugh about smelling bad.

We smell bad.

We yearn for hot showers. But I think it’s just for show. Any volunteer, more so than food or showers, miss people and places. You will miss friends and seasons. During your service, you will be alone on the Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving. You will miss your family, your really hot girlfriend, and the contextual clues you associate with fond memories. I know what the Chesapeake bay feels like on thanksgiving. I can feel the football, and taste the sweet potato pie. I know what Glebe Park looks like, the green asphalt and the smell of cut grass.

You will be stared at 24/7 365. I understand what it’s like to be a good-looking girl at a frat party. Stay strong ladies.

You will develop an eerie sense of calm. I’ve spent 75 hours in the last two weeks on a bus. The DMV will be a breeze now. I’ve found new and embarrassing ways to entertain myself. I could watch paint dry and be perfectly happy.

One of the great things about Peace Corps is you have a massive amount of time to become a better person. The best advice I can give is to try and do something everyday to improve upon yourself. For some people this is writing or reading. For others it is teaching English or working out. Learn an instrument or paint. Do whatever works for you, but know this: You will stare at the wall. I stare at the wall a lot. I’ve had every thought someone can have. Probably twice.

Transportation completely sucks.

I just got out of a bus with 12 seats on it. There were 25 people on it. There were two chickens and probably 20 kilo’s of rancid butter. Here’s a quck letter:

Dear Ethiopia,

It’s ok to open the windows on the bus. I promise you won’t die from the wind. I promise it’s not that cold. Currently, sweat is running down my lower back and into the danger zone. My sweat is sweating. Fresh air is nothing to be scared of. Tuberculosis is. As much as I like saunas and the smell of chicken feces, can we please crack the window’s for 2 minutes? I will love you forever.

Yours truly,

Michael

There is no average day.

Last week, my Tuesday was crazy. I had a meeting with the tourism office about making them a website. I taught a man how to make guacemole and tortillas which he will sell in his store. I played basketball, added a layer to a clay oven and worked on the newsletter I am writing for Peace Corps.

The next day? I slept in, watched a silly amount of the show ‘Dexter’ and checked my fantasy baseball team while the internet was up. Yeah, I’m cool.

There will be times when, despite your pictures of you hugging little kids, you just want to tackle one of them and scream, my name is NOT,

“you you you!!!!!, give me money!!!!!!”

In America we ask for the time. Here, we ask for the month. It’s the most obvious difference. The pace of life here is slow, methodical, cyclical. Everything takes a long time. If you aren’t a patient person you will become one.

Life here is completely different. It is another world, lost in space and time. It is hard, and the little annoyances can manifest themselves into a black cloud. They certainly will, but it is important to make note of the small victories and the little moments. When I open my eyes I am reminded of why I am here. Just when I think a kid is running up to me to ask me for money, she tells me that she loves me and blows a kiss. But then I get on a bus and start crying. I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere with a busted engine. It’s getting dark, I have a chicken in my lap and personal space at this point is a distant memory. People are yelling into their cell phones, begging me to speak to them and take them to America. Oh and the only food in the town by the road is Gunfo.

Remember in times like this to take a deep breath. Peace Corps really is a roller coaster. An exhilarating and scary ride that completely sucks and totally kicks ass.

And when you are feeling down, just remember to go outside and let Africa save you.

9:52 pm  •  26 April 2012

Combi ride from Anta to Huaraz, my capital. Overnight bus ride from Huaraz to Trujillo – 10 hours and no sleep. 2 hour wait, fit in breakfast of water and egg sandwiches, tour the Plaza de Armas, picture taking with our socios. Bus (no AC) from Trujillo to Piura – 7 ½ hours, 2 bottles of water, S/. 1 chicken sandwiches, The Great Debaters, and Alvin and the Chipmunks. Taxi ride to 2^nd Piura bus station. Bus to La Union – 1 hour. Mototaxi ride (full circle, drivers were lost) and we finally made it to our hostel in La Union, Piura. 

Training for the week in Piura with the volunteers from Ancash, La Libertad, Cajamarca, and Piura. We each had to bring a work counterpart from our sites. You run out of small talk conversation topics really fast.

First thoughts on Piura:

Mosquitoes still exist!?
It is suffocatingly hot. I am no longer a Texan.
Dirt/desert, shrubs, and palm trees - reminds me of home.  

Also, I really, REALLY miss my brothers right now. 
And,  If I could go to the Sasquatch Music Festival I would give some serious thought to early terminating. Worth it, wish I was home, wish I had money. 

9:59 pm  •  22 April 2012

Disclaimer: This is not my original blog post. Rather, I borrowed it from a friend and fellow volunteer in Peru who I used to live near in Huancavelica. What she says is so spot on and for me, personally, so difficult to put into words that I had to post it. It’s a little long but if you’d like to know what runs through a volunteer’s head at least 5x a day, it says it all so read ahead.

Also, this is her blog: http://kcmawkwardadventures.blogspot.com/
It is one of my favorites.  

Peace Corps motto de jour is that this is the hardest job you will
ever love. The longer my service goes on the more I contend that it is
the strangest position someone can choose to put themselves in
professionally for 2 years. It is one of the only jobs where
self-awareness, thinking and “me time” can become a burden rather than
a welcome gift at the end of a long day. I personally believe that it
is the only job where over 50% percent of the employees would probably
fail a mental health test on any given day. The only business where
almost every employee has cried or stared forlornly off into space for
longer than is generally considered socially acceptable in the past
month or two.

Its is probably one of the only businesses where the last time you had
sex and how much you miss it and how sick you were last Tuesday are
polite dinner-time conversation. I feel genuinely sorry for whatever
unfortunate soul takes me on my first date when I return to the
states. I have a deep seeded fear I will get frustrated with a piece
and just casually pick it up with my hands in a 5 star restaurant. I
also contest that this is one of the only professions an American can
enter where you can eat with your hands while talking to your Mayor.
Basically what I am trying to say is that it is defiantly not your
typical job and therefore it does not have your typical outcome.
What has really started me thinking of all these things was talking to
my fellow volunteers and realizing many of us are in the same place,
and yet not in the same place at all. The Peace Corps is so
individualistic that it is sometimes like comparing apples to oranges.
The daily battles that you face can make you feel like you are on
another planet, even if you are only 5 km away and everyone in your
town knows everyone within a 15 km radius.

Our lives can be so different on a day-to-day that it often is hard to
even compare it. There is commiseration. There are many shared
experiences. But life, plain and simple daily life, is not shared with
anyone really. You are the only one that can provide perspective on
what you just saw because John was 100 miles away when you got trapped
on the side of the mountain. Plain and simple some of your closest
friends may never see something so mundane as the inside of your room.
At the end of the day you are the only one that can decide if you are
going crazy or it was just having an off moment. While you can ask
friends for advice sometimes asking a Peace Corps volunteer for
emotional advice is like the blind leading the blind. Because honestly
none of us have any idea what the fuck is going on. At the end of the
conversation you may inevitably come to the conclusion that you have
no idea what the fuck you are doing. Or why the initiative you took is
now turning out to be one hellish mistake. Occasionally on a horrible
day and you make the decision to call a friend and find out they are
having the most productive day in South America. Why am I watching
paint that is already dry while you are helping with a dengue
vaccination campaign or already have a grant for S/.7,000? The
contrast can be so startling at times, you want to hate them for
having their shit together, but you cant really. What if it’s just
that day? What if it’s just their site? And really do they actually
have their shit together or does it just appear that way? There are so
many factors that it is really hard to tell purple from yellow
sometimes.

The one thing you have to constantly remind yourself is to not play
the “I’m better/worse than you game,” because you will always loose.
I’ll admit it I am one of those people that is secretly hyper
competitive and always has to win over my competitor of the moment.
This doesn’t extend to every facet of my life, for instance I hate how
competitive “Words With Friends” is, probably because I’m terrible at
Scrabble. But I generally like to win against a fellow competitor.
Even if that competitor was blissfully unaware that we were competing,
I was winning. Because lets get serious I always do. But here I can’t
use my competitive drive in the same way because it just leads to more
confusion and wondering if your answer is fact completely wrong. When
in realty there is no right answer.

There is only grey area. Let me tell you the first time you are
scorned in another language it can be overwhelming. Even if its not
technically your boss and you are not technically in trouble the
simple language barrier can make it feel like the most confusing thing
since the invention of the internet. Maybe I am alone here but
9-year-old Katie was very very confused by the Internet. So much so I
hoped it was a phase that would go away. I didn’t have time for
dial-up when there were Skip-Its. That and I didn’t realize my sister
set an email up for me until I was 21.

One of the most unexpected things that I have begun to realize that
many of the cultural factors I used to define myself are no longer
there. I have to find new ways to remind myself of things I once
easily knew to be true. You are the one that has to force yourself to
do anything and believe in will work out. There is just no other way
around it. There are new definitions of initiative, common courtesy
and relationships. For every time you get annoyed at someone cutting
you in line you have to channel that frustration into something more
productive, because if it builds who the fuck knows where its headed.
I have just learned to become equally as aggressive while standing in
lines. Sorry senora your time is not more important than mine when we
are getting on the bus at the same time. There are times when patience
and Mid-Western niceness are not a virtue.

Being so culturally isolated you begin to learn about yourself. Your
limits, your capabilities, your desires and how confused you really
can become. And trust me I could become very confused very easily
before. It generally took me about 10 minutes to get a joke.
I was recently reading a blog called 1000awesomethings or something of
the like; 2 of the 1000 “awesome things” struck me quite intensely,
me-time and thinking. Unlike almost every other American my life is
filled with me-time and thinking. I actually have to sometimes make a
conscious effort to stop having me time and thinking about things.
Partly because I would drive myself crazy and partially because I feel
the compelling urge to be productive. You have so much time to think
about your life that eventually it comes to the point you over analyze
ever misstep, accomplishment or random thought that comes into your
head.

Really if I wanted to have a whole day of me time I very well could,
and no one would scold me about it. They would wonder what I was doing
but there is no clock to punch or pre-set daily schedule. Once I
actually did stare at my room for about two and a half-hours before I
realized the time. I’m not even sure what I was even thinking about to
be quite honest. Maybe the fact the ceiling paint is an awkward shade
of off-white-yellow. Or that the hole in my floor looks progressively
more and more like a penis as the months go on. These are the
important investigations of my daily life.

I am not accountable to them in the way I was in every other job.
There are days where I am hyper productive, others not so much, and it
has nothing to do with the weekend or sense of days. My only real
sense of time is that I have to get up around dawn and accomplish
mostly everything before 2pm or after 6pm. I have learned is one of
the core elements of the Peace Corps experience is that time changes
meaning in a multitude of ways, not just a new perception of 9-5. You
have more time to yourself. Time to dream about fresh coffee with
Yours Truly natzo fries and an egg slider. Time to contemplate that
cereal costs 1/10 of your monthly income and everything you are eating
is laced with MSG. Peru, hate to break it to you MSG is not a
seasoning. It is actually illegal in several states in the USA, that’s
how much it’s not a seasoning. Time to have dreams that merge your
daily life into South Park and Sex and The City. Let me tell you
Carrie Bradshaw should not interact with Eric Cartman and Cusicancha
all in the same dream.

Its not that I didn’t stare off into space in my other jobs, trust me
I did. My staring off into space at my EPA internship is the reason I
know all the NBA teams and what city they are from. But here it is
different. In my internship I was in a freezing cold cubicle staring
at a computer and gossiping most of the day. I was at least
accountable to be physically in the office for 8 hours, but here no
one cares where I physically am. Half the time no one is the wiser. I
have a bad tendency of telling one person where I am going but not
giving them the full details and moderately disappearing. It still
holds true here. I think my host mother has almost called the police
about twice now.

You are so out of your element in the Peace Corps that it is as if
your self-awareness becomes hyperactive. You are the superman of
thinking about your own life. A weird superpower I never knew I could
possibly have. Any unresolved relationship or feelings you had will
have time to resurface. Any self-consciousness that you had will
inevitably find the time to rear its ugly head. Any music that you
loved in the states will get played on your iPod 68 times. Often the
steps you took to maintain your self-identity are now null and void in
such a foreign environment. You have all the time in the world to
learn about yourself. Even if you thought you had it pretty set in
stone beforehand.

Fun fact I still freak out about crickets because from far away it
looks remotely like a cockroach. But mice I can have a pleasant
conversation to while they crawl in and out of my shoes. I currently
have a mouse named Felix in my room. We share rice. Not really that
would be fucking disgusting. But he does in my corner and the thought
of killing him gorses me out more than his existence.
Every day in the Peace Corps, whether it’s about you, your community
or some random thing you would prefer to never know. Like what
vertical birth looks like. Today I found out that now that the rain is
over the ice starts. Aaawweeessooommmmeeee. Because I didn’t already
think every day “holy crap this is the coldest I have ever been in my
life.” I blame retroactive amnesia for my daily commentary on how cold
it is.

One of the third year volunteers recently told me that you have to be
your own advocate in this game because there is no one there to watch
your back. It’s really true. You have the office in Lima that’s very
supportive when you get robbed or need resources. You can have friends
by your side on the phone, provided you have the same phone provider.
If you have different phone providers, don’t expect a daily call that
costs saldo. Which is a luxury greater than gold on the Peace Corps
salary which is so high you don’t even have to do your taxes. But this
is more of a safety net than a vigilantly watching out for you.
If you are one of the lucky few you will have friends only an hour or
so away there to help guide you. They can be there when everything
seems to be tie-dye, sparkly, neon carnivorous dolphins on land. I
don’t know why but that is my metaphor for really fucking confusing
and strange. Just go with it. But at the end of the day it comes down
to only you. You were the only one that was there, the only one with
an American cultural perspective staring at the picture in front of
you. You are the last line of defense.

If I am being honest I don’t know I ever really fully depended on
other people in my day to day besides my family and my college
lacrosse team on the field. I was a girl you could know for 2 years
before knowing some of the most ordinary details. I sometimes got to
the point where I felt like I was self-reliant to a fault. That was
until I got here I never realized that I was still dependent on things
that were distinctly a part of the world I had built. Distinctly part
of the world I was born and raised in; external forces that had guided
me for years. When you have this much time to reflect on your own
life in a world that is so similar and yet so dramatically different
at the same time you can actually see yourself changing. See yourself
adapting to the new world in front of you. Having to redefine yourself
while still attempting to maintain the parts of yourself that you hold
dear. It’s a balancing act. A balancing act that at times makes you
feel like you are a 95 year old on rickety stilts and other times like
you are Roberto Louango durante de game 7 of the Play-offs. That can
make you feel like a sloth or the most insightful than Google.

12:41 pm  •  22 April 2012  •  3 notes

tylerknott:

Typewriter Series #17 by Tyler Knott Gregson

How are all his words so applicable to my life?

My motivation. Perfection. She is.  

10:43 am  •  14 April 2012  •  1,043 notes