Paint Balloon Fight and Pisco Sour Day

This weekend, I'm off to Carnival aka a weekend long water balloon and paint balloon fight up in the mountains of Cajamarca. Photos to come.

Also, the Peace Corps doctor just sent around an email advising us all that Feb. 2 is Pisco Sour Day. They're delicious. Have one if you can. The doctor recommends it.

New Discoveries in Valleys

Apologies for checking out for a while. I'm sort of in a valley of the progression of peaks and valleys that comprise the Peace Corps experience. I'm not thrilled with the progress on my trash project. The town voted to put the project in its budget for this year. Here in Peru all town are required by law to do what's called Participatory Budgeting. There are town meetings where people discuss projects and decide on options for projects and improvements. Then, citizens vote on priorities in a public meeting. It's a cool system, very progressive. So, the town decided they want a Solid Waste Management Project. It's not clear to me that the mayor is being very transparent about the budget or evidencing in any way that they are in fact going to work on the projects prioritized by the community. Maybe I'm missing something. I really hope that I'm missing something. Ugggg. It's also just lonely lately. Life as a Gringa Freak Show strikes again.

On the upside:
I love Wildboyz. I realize that this show has come and gone and I'm arriving at this state of cognizance a little late. If you know me you're probably not surprised at the tardiness of my discovery. It's absolutely my new favorite show. My nearby Peace Corps Volunteer friend, Tania had the DVD's and I saw it for the first time at her birthday slumber party the other night. I must get Wildboyz.

AND there are parties. Many parties. Carnival started a week ago. It will last for weeks after Ash Wednesday and Rinconada Llicuar's anniversary is in mid-February. There are dances, parades, dance competitions, and fairs galore. Also, Rinconada Llicuar will be electing Miss Rinconada Llicuar again this year. Last year they wanted me to judge. This year they want me to be a contestant or Miss Carnival. Pageants. My favorite.

Here are some spellbinding shots form the Yunsa de San Sebastian. A Yunsa is a traditional celebration for Carnival. Folks chop down a tree, place gifts in the branches, and then hoist it up to be chopped down with an axe so that it falls into a crowd. Everyone runs at the falling tree to collect their gifts. Please note the front loader used to lift the tree. This is no small falling tree. There was also my neighbor Nicole's 2nd birthday and the arresting introduction of Marcy the baby goat to Scooby-doo my stealth panther cat.





Orlando helps the front loader lift the Yunsa into place.










Raising the Yunsa is team work for all ages.















The San Sebasitan funders take a Crystal beer and marinera dancing break from chopping down the Yunsa.














Choppin' the Yunsa










Local cumbia masters Sin Limites (Unlimited) put on a show after the big event.










Nicole and her daddy put on a fabulous party.









Marcy and Scooby meet.

Parasites, yunses, and cumbia, ooh my.

It's another sweaty day in the Sechuran Desert. Today I've been working on a project with Doctor Franciscio at the Health Post. He has wanted me to do short programs about health issues for the town loud speaker system for a little more than a year now. I did a few when I first arrived but, the good humor of the emisora operators only lasted so long. The loud speakers are literally bull horns tied to a long piece of bamboo on somebody's roof. They’re called emisoras, literally emitters. Town's people pay 1 nuevo sol, about 33 cents to announce that they're selling fish, having a meeting, hosting a mass for a family member who passed on, or sending a hello message with an accompanying regatone song to a boyfriend or girlfriend. I don't really like talking on the emisora and people will only stand for The Gringa’s Spanish at 7AM for so many days running. So, I talked Dr. Panchito into recording himself talking about parasites and what not. Today he came over to my house to finally make the recordings with the microphone on my MP3 player. I had been to the Health Post to do this about 5000 times and could not pin him down. I finally I mentioned the project idea to Carlos, the Lieutenant Mayor who got excited about it and now asks the doctor about it every chance he gets. Fortunately for me, this situation put a bit of a fire under Dr. Panchito. He picked the topics, now he has recorded the shorts, and I’m trying to show him how to use the computer to edit programs on preventing parasite infection, respiratory infections, dehydration and diarrhea, and Dengue fever. There are all kinds of radio shorts on different health topic floating around so I'm taking a little of this and a little of that to edit together burn onto CDs to give the emisoras. The teaching computer skills may or may not actually work out. I got this software in a workshop to help with the editing and learning to edit sound has been fun. But, Dr. Pancho is a serious and hard to amuse kind of guy.

The first Yunse of Carnival 2008 was all that I anticipated and more. It’s absolutely my favorite party of the year, called the Fiesta de San Sebasitan. It’s not a huge national fiesta or anything; it's only celebrated in Rinconada. Everyone throws talcum powder at everyone else. I was complettely covered. Every last hair on my head was white. The tree with the gifts that they chop down, the Yunse, was friggin’ ENORMOUS. They used a front loader to stand it up in the lot where they had the party because the forty guys trying to pull it up with ropes couldn’t lift it. I’ll post photos soon. The men and women who will help pay for the party in the coming year took turns chopping down the yunse and when it finally fell everyone ran to collect their t-shirts and plastic buckets from the branches. It’s like a piñata. Everyone comes running but, it's not a paper machet bull or Winnie-the-Pooh. It's this enormous falling tree, incredibly dangerous, but fun.

Then the bad played and everyone danced cumbia and marinera until the wee hours of the morning. I ran off home at around 2 AM when my favorite buddy the cop got too drunk and grope-y. Half a block away, in my bathroom, I was washing the talcum powder out of my hair and getting ready for bed when I heard the singer start yelling at the cops to get the bottles away from people. It seems that the fights were breaking out. At the end the drunks didn't get out the machetes so everyone was fine. I discovered that I like chicha, the fermented corn alcohol that is common here. I usually avoid it, as when I first arrived everyone wanted me to drink with them and I had diarrhea for like 2 months. I think that I have acculturated in the meanwhile.

Also, I’m starting a new little project for myself and I want to read some good memoirs, any favorites to recommend?

CARNIVAL!

Carnival is starting! The party that is happening tomorrow was the best party of the year last year and Peruvians have bleeping FABULOUS parties. There's a Cumbia group coming and the family that owns my house is the Mayordomo, or the people paying for the party. This means that there are goats to be killed and eaten, trees with gifts in them to be chopped down and LOTS of chicha to be consumed. I love Peru. I even like chicha. (Those firefighters changed my mind...)

Here's last year:

What's Eating Me

I've been thinking about food lately. I know. What's new, right? I was so excited to go back to the US for a short while to see my family to be sure but, to be honest my list of things to do was mostly comprised of food. I wanted to eat bagels, gorditas and tacos, mixed field greens salad, all things with ranch dressing, salsa and tortilla chips and pizza... remember pizza? I also wanted to drink good beer and wine. Then I got there and the holidays were upon us, so there was tons of food everywhere and really I couldn't go anywhere without eating tons. I'm excited that food is a social event in life. I like it. I like sharing food with new people. I love eating new foods in new places, even when it is mondongito which is cow intestines and I officially HATE the taste of cow intestines and the truth that they are in fact intestines. (You know what gathers in intestines, right?) But, when the firefighters from Piura came out to Rinconada yesterday and they wanted to eat mondongito and drink chicha and I wanted to hang out and make friends, guess what I had for lunch. That is to say, I am not a fan of the food world view that food is body fuel; people are machines; people need fuel and therefore they should only eat the things that give them good fuel. Give me a break. Humans: cultural, social creatures. We like to make friends too.

On the other hand, in the US I was barraged with lots of junk food, food that wasn't particularly good, food that my mom and grandma did not make, food that I didn't really want to eat but, that I ate anyway to be social and because it was around and when my family gets together we eat. It was odd. I found myself thinking, “Isn’t it elegant that in Rinconada we eat all things with a spoon and for dinner most nights I have steamed fish soup, caught in the nearby ocean by my neighbor? I felt healthier when I was eating the food in Rinconada. This is weird. Half of the kids in Rinconada are malnourished. What in the hell is going on there?”

I was thinking about all of this and then on Sunday my friend Cynthia gave me this article that appeared in the NYT Magazine early last year by Michael Pollan. This is the guy who wrote "The Omnivore’s Dilemma." I have not read it but, it has come highly recommended and I hear it might be floating around in the permeable and liquid Peace Corps book exchange. In Michael's article I really appreciated the starting point that eaters are the important center in food discussions, not nutrients. In order to study food scientists break food down into nutrients. Then they try to figure out what each does in the body, what other nutrients they interact with to do this, how they do it, how they arrive, how they leave, why they work that way in some people but not in others, blah, blah, blah. The questions get harder and harder to answer, and we don’t know if we’re asking the right questions, or only some of the right questions, and we don’t know what we don’t know about food. None the less people have been eating for a long time wihout knowing very much about nutrients and many seem to have done okay while the ones that didn’t do so well died off. The processed foods that I was chomping back in the US sort of trick the senses that humans have evolved to decide what and how much to eat. It’s stuff that tastes like strawberries but is not. It’s tomatoes in December. It’s fats that come in forms that do not appear in nature. It’s big bottles of fiber or fish oil or Vitamin B. It’s Oreos, Snackwell’s or Chips O’Hoy. And I love all that stuff, epecially Chips O'Hoy. So, why did I feel healthier back in Peru where my kids have parasites and anemia, and weigh way too little?

For me I think it’s the social component of food here in Peru as much as it's my getting to eat more whole and fewer processed foods. I was thinking about this back in October too… And it’s still true. I’m way healthier here for eating with family and eating the stuff that they eat plus some (okay, a lot of) extra fruits and vegetables.

Respect the Poet

Lower your pants, all of you: you're in the presence of a poet.
-Varguitas in Aunt Julia and the Screenwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

Homecoming

Coming back to Peru feels like coming back home and I am grateful to the fates for that. I went to the store last night to buy Gatorade and Tylenol to feed my nasty cold where the shopkeeper called me Cholita about 47 times. I was thrilled. I usually get Gringa which means white girl rather than Chola as Chola describes someone who looks Peruvian, someone with long straight hair and dark olive skin. Peruvians use Chola as a term of endearment but Ecuadorans sometimes use it as an insult against Peruvians, kind of a racial slur. As a foreigner I never use it so as not to be misunderstood and offend. This lady was clearly not calling me names and I got to feel like I blend at least a little; my giant foreign gringa status is shrinking ever so slightly. It's the little things.

Coming back to Peru should be shocking, but somehow it's not that big of a deal to go from Targets, 40⁰ F weather, my mom's bizarre affection for gold lamé Christmas decorations, and introducing my dear friends from the Big Apple to the Three Cow Ranch to sitting with my laptop at the fancy hotel in Piura blogging in 40⁰ C weather. It's even the same time here as in Texas for half of the year and only an hour different in the other half. It will likely be more disquieting when I get to my house, but as I'm quivering with fever I've decided to heal in the big sweaty city before I go to my tin oven dust bowl to be entertained by the very neighborly Pedro and Dennis, ages 4 and 6 respectively. I can't wait to see Scooby-doo! (He's my cat.)

I hadn't realized just how much I missed live music, or at least live music that isn't cumbia run mostly on synthesizers, until I got to Austin. Back at home in the "Live Music Capital of the World" I was a fiend. I was playing with the car radio like I had an analog tick. I went to see Live Oak Decline play at HiLo as well as Jon Dee Graham and Dale Watson and his Lone Stars play on New Year's Eve at the Continental Club. My citified friends from New York, Toronto and Los Angeles tolerated my love of country or at least Austin Country and as far as I can tell Las Ladies had a fabulous time taking in the sights and sounds at The Continental. We also ate fancy Tex-Mex at Vivo, which seems like an oxymoron but was delectable. Fancy I tell you, as in there was valet parking. Don't worry. I wasn't totally yuppie-fied, although that would be easy to do in Austin. I also munched nostalgically on a plate of gorditas at my favorite taco place on Oltorf and S. 1st with a name that I can't ever remember.

Now it's back to the grind, ceviche, and my bike. There are summer camps to plan and recycling separation centers to fund and front porches to sit on.