starting a book group

I was reading Reading Lolita in Tehran and considering my whole emotional turmoil around expectations of women here it has been really helpful. I mean not that the expectations are the same here and in Tehran in the last few decades, but that idea of being frustrated with others presuming limitations of your abilities. In any case, it made me want to start a book group, like the one that Nafisi had in Tehran before she fled to the US... What should we read? What language should it be in? Who would be interested in such a thing?
I'm not sure if there are people in Rinconada who would be interested in a book group. So far I know of no such thing, but there are several university students in town so I feel hopeful that it might be possible, or that such a group may already exist. Hmmm.

An apparent baby storm

Happy Valentine's Day! It's raining babies. It seems like everyone I know is having a baby. My cousin had a beautiful nearly 10 lb boy this week- Feburary 9th. Look! This is Kelly, Micha and little Erik.

Then my very dearest friend from the 7th grade tells me that she's having a baby and it's due October 3. She is very excited even though she and her fiancee were quite surprised by this development. They were planning to get married at Christmas, but in the last three days they decided to move their wedding date up by about 8 months. I'll be sending them ¨What to expect when you're expecting¨as soon as I find it on Amazon. (Don´t worry I'm not ruining the suprise becasue she doesn't really do blogs.)

Meanwhile, I have discovered that I am one of the oldest childless women ever seen in the town of Rinconada Llicuar and I hear surprise about this all the time from my new friends and neighbors. I´m spending a lot of time lately explaining that Americans tend to get married when they're a bit older and I'm met with an axiom about how the value of the ¨goods¨decrease after age 25. (Raise eyebrow here.)



Since I'm only 28 years old not having kids has never, ever come up as a criticism against me. In fact, not having kids has so far been a credit to my good sense as I think it did actually help with getting the master's degree and all. But lately, since I'm spending my spare time at the Miss Rinconada Llicuar pageant where 15 year old girls from the campo model bikinis after they perform traditional Peruvian dance numbers it's all kind of messing with my head. I'm wondering what does it mean to get married and have kids in life. It that really the point of it all? And is it always all tied up with traditional ideas about beauty and women competing against one another for power?

I actually never did want to have kids. I remember my friends in high school deciding what the names of their future children would be and me saying, ¨What about pet names?¨ I think that in the last 3-5 years my complete disdain for the idea has left me. I am open to the idea in life, but not now, not yet. This is fortunate for me because if you get pregnant and decide to keep your baby as a Peace Corps volunteer you get ¨medically discharged¨so basically if you get pregnant they kick you out.

The social pressure is just really interesting because it's quite cross cultural. My friends and family of the same age in the US are having babies and really everyone in Rinconada Llicuar makes crazy comments about me not being married and "Don't you want kids? It's bad to have kids when you're too old." Then they make jokes about me taking their kids back to states with me. I never in a million years thought that I would find myself explaining that, "No I'm not going to take any children back with me- at all." It's odd. It is interesting.

I'm sooo happy for my family and friends who are making great waves in the world and will make wonderful parents and dear god people, please spread the word that babies do not a woman make.

water purification SODIS

You have to boil the water in Peru in order to kill the parasites, viruses and bacteria that call it home before you can drink it. I'm lucky that the town where I live, Rinconada Llicuar chlorinates the water at the well, but you still have to purify it before drinking because the water system is not that well maintained and we only have water for 3 hours every other day. People fill up big trash cans, buckets, pots and all kinds of stuff in their houses to keep their water and after sitting around in trash cans for a couple of days new little microbes start living there. So bottom line: you get diarrhea unless you purify the water so some people boil their water before drinking it and many others just have diarrhea all the time.

In Peace Corps training they taught us this cool way to purify water called SODIS. Basically these Swiss scientists discovered that UV-A rays from the sun, the ones that burn your skin, also kill micro-organisms that cause diarrhea. This is very cool because you do not need to burn fuel i.e. wood or gas to purify the water, a fabulous benefit because fuel is expensive for people, not to mention that the smoke is not the best for respiratory health.

Basically, you put the water in clean, unscratched plastic bottles and leave them in full sun for 6 hours. Then all the little heebi-jeebies will die and ¨Poof!¨ no diarrhea for you. I have been using SODIS on my water for about a month now and so far so good. I have no more diarrhea than I had when I was drinking bottles water that I bought from the market. I mean I still have diarrhea but, I don't think it's the water. I think it's the food. Well, actually I think it's that the vegetables, and dishes are all washed with un-purified water and sometimes I eat off wet dishes and cook with wet veggies. Not ideal, but here we are. Poco a poco.

I'm excited because at first I was skeptical that this SODIS thing would work. I really think it works! I mean they're not quacks at the NGO or anything it's a big international non-governmental organization but still, I was suspicious. Now that I've tested it on myself I think I might take the show on the road and do some classes about it in my town. Apparently, in both Honduras and Bolivia the Ministries of Health promote this method of water purification. It's great for very poor communities because they can often find plastic bottles, but they don't have a lot of money for fuel and sometimes see boiling water as an expense that they can forgo.

http://www.sodis.ch/