A Full Week of Work and Host Family Life Complete.

DESPEDIDA

Many things have happened since my last update. It has been a time of transition and change and practicing patience and learning to appreciate quiet. The night before we all left, we had a goodbye dinner and worship service together. It was a beautiful time for us to truly take some time to celebrate the community that exists between us. We ate bruchetta, the best lasagna I have ever had in my life, salad, and topped it off with some Chilean wine. Well done, Jed and Jenny, well done.

MY PERUVIAN HOME

My host family has been extremely welcoming to me:

      1.      They gave me the big bedroom, complete with my own personal roll of toilet paper. (I’m not really sure why this is a thing since we all just use what’s in the bathroom anyway).
2.      My host mom makes me breakfast in the morning. If she has to go to work early, she leaves it all set out on the table. (Breakfast usually consists of something with bread – marmalade, avocado, scrambled egg – and then a hot beverage. She makes this delicious oatmeal drink that I can’t get enough of!) My host mom also packs me my lunch every day. (Lunch is the biggest meal of the day, so they pack something big like chicken and rice for example. The first day she gave me enough to feed a family, and they gave me a hard time at the office for how much I had! We’ve been working on portion sizes since.)
3.      They invited me to go to church with them. (They’re Catholic.)
4.      They have already made plans to celebrate Thanksgiving with me and try to understand some American traditions. (We’ll see how authentic it ends up being.)
5.      They encourage me to invite friends over whenever, and when Emma came over this afternoon they prepared a huge and delicious meal for us. We ate pasta in a spicy red sauce with shrimp. There was also freshly made passion fruit juice, sweet potatoes, and cucumbers. The meal concluded with canned peach for dessert and a hot tea. (They pulled out all the stops!)

Ways life is different:

      1.     At least compared to college and summer camp, the house is so quiet. Everyone has very different schedules, and it is hard to find times that overlap. I don’t have a community outside of the house yet, so I’ve been doing a lot of reading. My current goal is to reread East of Eden. I am well on my way.
2.      No one gets to work on time. I was told to show up at 10:00am at the office, but the reality is that people are still filtering in until lunchtime. I more aim to arrive at 10:30 now so that I´m not always the first one to get there.
3.      Cold showers. The water heater doesn’t work currently, and they do not seem to have any plans to fix it. Brrr!
4.      You never drink water out of the tap. It has to been boiled or you have to buy bottled water. My family just keeps a pitcher of boiled water handy all the time.
5.      They drink coffee all the time here, but it is always instant coffee with evaporated milk and sugar.

View from my window to the north.

One side of my bedroom.

And the other.

View from my window to the south.

Down the staircase.

Living room.

Kitchen.

Dining area.

MY WORK

My volunteer work here will primarily be with the two organizations CENCA (pronounced sen-ka) and Bridge of Hope Fair Trade. I work with CENCA Monday to Wednesday. My work there will be with young adults (jóvenes) in the one of the poorest districts of Lima, which also happens to be the most populated. There are over a million people in San Juan de Lurigancho and many of them migrated from cities in the mountains or jungle areas during the years of terror in the ‘80s and ‘90s. There is a school that CENCA runs on Wednesday nights in the outer edge of San Juan de Lurigancho directed to jóvenes. It is called ESDEL (Escuela de Líderes). The main objective is to educate and provide a forum for discussion for these jóvenes about things like what it means to be a have political voice, their rights as citizens of Lima and Peru, the importance of community building, etc. My job is to help plan and implement different social activities for them as well as help facilitate ESDEL. Monday and Tuesday will be dedicated to planning.

What a typical Wednesday will look like for me (hopefully… this week was a little different, but the following is supposed to be the norm): Get to work around 10:15am. Meet with Davis and Alberto, the other two who are working with the jóvenes. Put together any materials that are needed for the evening. (Last week it was basically making big flash cards. I felt like an elementary school teacher.) Eat lunch. Have the afternoon free to nap. Hop on a bus at 6:00pm to go out to San Juan de Lurigancho. Arrive in San Juan de Lurigancho a little before 8:00pm. Facilitate ESDEL class from about 8:15-9:30. Hop on a bus to take me back to my house. Arrive back at my house around 11:30pm.

I work with Bridge of Hope on Thursdays and Fridays. For the first month or so, Thursday will be dedicated to visiting the different artisan groups in Lima. I will go with Jed and Jenny to learn how to get to each of them. Fridays I will be in the office with Daniela, my supervisor, working on whatever needs to be done. Right now I am compiling all the orders from 2011-2013 into a spreadsheet to eventually give to the artisans so they can track which client ordered which items in which month. Sometimes the orders are really large and it is hard for the artisans to finish all the items on time. With the information I am compiling, they can hopefully have a better idea of what items they should have prepared based on past trends.

This Thursday I went with Jed, Jenny, and Emma (she didn’t have to work that day, lucky for me!!) to visit the group Emady in the morning. They are a group of women who sew. Their niche is with shipibo fabric. This is a typical design from the jungle. They make bags, coin purses, table runners, napkins, and many other things. They were super friendly. I was greeted immediately by a huge hug from one of their sons, Victor, who has Down’s syndrome. They then took us upstairs to the third floor of their little house where their workshop is. We were surprised to see that they shared the third floor with a small farm of chickens, turkeys, and rabbits! This group has been very diligent with the money they have earned through sewing and are always ready and excited for new orders, even though there have not been many recently. The group we visited in the afternoon is called Ichimay Wari. There are many people that work together as potters. They make a lot Christmas items like ornaments and Nativity scenes as well as other household trinkets. They were in the middle of finishing a big order so we got to see them working in full swing. Even though they were really busy, they gave us an extremely warm welcome. One of the men met us at the main highway to make sure we didn’t get lost on the way to their house. They also cooked us a big lunch while we were there. We didn’t know they were going to make us food, so we had eaten a little picnic in the taxi on the way, but we ate the food they gave us anyway to be respectful. They put a little flair on the typical onion garnish by adding mint leaves to it… It was delicious! It is amazing that the people who most obviously don’t have a lot of extra money are always the ones who are the most hospitable, making sure you are fed and comfortable.

Emady.

A couple of their chickens!

The other half of the third floor... and rabbits.

They even put the kids to work :)

Adding a final glossy coat with her niece in the manta.

So well done! Look at the detail.

Their street. Theirs is the wooden one with cactus out front.

A view of the hill they live on.

Moto-taxi. This is the mode of transportation in areas like this.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

From East of Eden by John Steinbeck:

            “You’ve had that horse forever,” Adam said.

            “He’s thirty-three,” said Samuel. “His teeth are worn off. I have to feed him warm mash with my fingers. And he has bad dreams. He shivers and cries sometimes in his sleep.”

            “He’s about as ugly a crow bait as I ever saw,” Adam said.

            “I know it. I think that’s why I picked him when he was a colt. Do you know I paid two dollars for him thirty-three years ago? Everything was wrong with him, hoofs like flapjacks, a hock so thick and short and straight there seems no joint at all. He’s hammerheaded and swaybacked. He has a pinched chest and a big behind. He has an iron mouth and he still fights the crupper. With a saddle he feels as though you were riding a sled over a gravel pit. He can’t trot and he stumbles over his feet when he walks. I have never in thirty-three years found one good thing about him. He even has an ugly disposition. He is selfish and quarrelsome and mean and disobedient. To this day I don’t dare walk behind him because he will surely take a kick at me. When I feed him mash he tries to bite my hand. And I love him.”

            Lee said, “And you named him ‘Doxology.’”