Following my ass of fire debacle, I had the chance to finally do something new, which came in the form of a 3 day trip to Ancash with my fellow Health colleagues. On the first day we separated into small groups of two in order to teach mothers about childhood stimulation (constantly saying new words in front of your kid, exercising your child’s senses, etc). While I was not able to meet with the two mothers I was assigned to talk with (Peace Corps doesn’t take into account that doing host visits right near lunch hour on a busy workday is not a good idea) I did have a great time participating in a photo shoot with my friend Emily. Although we didn’t perform our task, we sure did get pictures of Mato (first town we visited in Ancash) and ourselves. In the afternoon, my health group of 6 people hung out with kids in the community and made piñata’s, which ended up being pretty fun. Following our arts and crafts session we all had dinner in Mato. Then for whatever reason, following dinner, I got called out to talk to these Peruvian ladies who had assembled outside the place we were eating. Since I didn’t feel like saying a speech in front of 12 Peruvian ladies, I decided to do the next best thing, which was dance erotically in front of them…sadly my erotic dancing provoked them to ask for more thrusting and shirt swinging. Although Peruvians are very reserved people generally, they do love it when people act ‘unreserved’.
After my swinger’s moment in Mato, my health group and I went to Musho early in the morning in order to learn how to build latrines. The volunteer living in Musho was a nice guy who told us some great pointers to get through service and help the maximum amount of people. While he showed us the techniques of building latrines, his best contribution to our group was his advice “Your not here for the goals of the Health program…You are here in order to improve the town in the most ways possible even if it doesn’t correspond necessarily with the health goals”. That was amazing to hear because we are constantly told we need to try and fulfill these set goals even when in some cases the towns already have sufficient amounts of cocina mejoradas or latrines. In addition to his great device, he also helped bake some amazing cupcakes, which were fantastic (mainly due to the fact that Peru does not sell cupcakes or sadly…chocolate chip cookies).
Following our day in Musho we returned to Mato in order to build cocina mejoradas and learn the proper techniques of performing a community diagnostic. While the community diagnostic was nothing to write home about, the cocinas project was informative and quite fun. Since there were only two guys in my group I had to do most of the manual labor work, which consisted of tearing down the existing cocina mejorada and building it back up, primarily with a mix of dried and wet mud. While the cocina is made up of seemingly stone-age materials, it functions well and prevents a majority of the smoke from staying in the kitchen. Let’s just say it works a lot better than the fire-pit method, which makes people want to rip their eyes out from the continued exposure to smoke.
Shortly after building our cocina mejorada in Mato, the health groups were whisked off to Juarez in order to take red eye buses back to Lima. Thankfully, our program directors allowed us to spend a few hours in Juarez to eat and chill out after such an energy-consuming trip. While in Juarez some volunteers and I went to a restaurant called Café Indino, which made us some of the best breakfast burritos and banana pancakes I have ever had in my life. ¡Talk about bon appetite! I felt like going missing in Juarez for awhile just so I could keep going back to that place in the morning…Sadly I think that might be the best breakfast food I might have here in Peru…Pero…¡Espero que no!
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