This past week all 12 environmental volunteers, our language teachers, our volunteer representative, our tech trainer, and our program director all piled into a slightly more than 15 person passenger van and headed into the mountains. 

Our driver, Justo, did an incredible job navigating around the slow trucks and gracefully avoiding moments where death seemed to flash before our eyes. We climbed the highest pass in the world at 15,800 feet and then descended only slightly to stay near the highest volunteer in the world’s site. The transition from desert to steep green mountain scenery was a much-needed change and almost provided enough adrenaline to overlook the freezing cold aspect. The trip had two purposes: one to do some field based training, and the other to drill our program director with questions about our future sites to see if we could get any information out of him. Officially we find out our sites on Tuesday but after a lunch of much gossip I found out that I’m going to the AMAZONAS!!!!! This means I’ll be in a cloud forest in the mountains, and apparently living in a town of 400 people, which seams like a dream!

            Anyways aside from the gossip we also taught in schools about different cultures and ecosystems around the world. A group of three of us taught 5^th graders about Africa including performing an engaging story that took way too long to translate into Spanish, and too many characters to take on with just three people. Upon arriving at the school I realized that I had forgotten my copy of the script at home thus adding to the overwhelmed frantic feeling that all of us were having about this skit. However we dove into it passing back and forth scripts and cardboard eye glasses to represent the narrator, and grabbing for our handmade masks that enabled us to leap into the characters we were trying to portray. My rendition of a crocodile that tries to eat the hunter brought laughter throughout the classroom, which the teacher for some unknown reason tried to hush up quickly. We made it through the skit somehow or another, and I was even able to create a Sub-Saharan ecosystem food web in Spanish with the students. 

            Throughout our week we drove on some of the windiest steepest one-lane roads that I have ever been on, as we descended into valleys where people are truly surviving off of the land. We ate traditional food from the area called Pachamanka, which is meat and potatoes cooked under ground with delicious flavoring. We even built stoves for families who had been relying on open fire to cook in their houses. These stoves felt like quite a feat using paper to measure out the brick spacing and a delicious combination of mud and rocks to seal them together. Our stove was the last to finish because when it came time to put on the chimney it became apparent that there was no hole in the roof for the chimney to go through. We were a team of 5 girls and the lack of hole in the ceiling seemed like too big of an issue for us. The father of the house came in to assess the problem and before I realized what was going on he was on top of this mud made cabinet with a dull knife in his hand stabbing holes into the metal roofing. We got a semi large enough hole and then had to tackle the problem of getting the chimney down the hole, which was on a very steep incline. My job was to hold the rickety ladder as the Jaime, the father of the household climbed up the side of the house. As soon as we began to hand him the chimney the physics of him reaching over to the hole and then trying to get the chimney upright was just not going to work. So we recalled the chimney and Jaime climbed down the ladder. We then went to the other side of the house and someone came running down the road with a rope in hand. This time Justo our driver got involved and we successfully tied two ropes around the chimney, hoisted it up into the air and somehow landed it right down into the hole. Inside we quickly slapped what was left of the rock/mud mixture on the chimney to stabilize it, and danced our way back to the van happy to have completed the project!

            It was an incredible opportunity to see some of Peru’s remote landscapes, and I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to live here for the next two years! Book your tickets to the Amazonas!!!!!

Stories from my Abuela

       It is a late afternoon tradition to greet my host grandmother when I get home from class. I enter at the bottom floor of the house to exchange hellos, attempt to understand what is going on in the television, but mostly we just smile at each other. One afternoon she had prepared soup for us so we were sitting at the table eating soup with large pieces of potato in it. We had run through all of our conversation topics so we were simply enjoying each others presence in silence. I focused in on eating my soup very slowly so that I wouldn't finish before her which would lead me to have sit there with nothing to distract myself with. So I started cutting my potatoes into small pieces. After about two minutes of this I looked up to see my grandmother laughing uncontrollable. Confused I gave her a look that begged for explanation. She then proceeded to mimic the clanging noise I am making with my spoon as I cut through the potatoes, which she finds this hilarious. We both laugh together at my musical meal and I spend the rest of the time focused on eating as silently as possible thus making any proceeding clang directly followed by bits of laughter.

            Later on that week I sign up for a cross fit class that is run by a fellow aspiring volunteer here. It is a partner cross fit session and the work out is written on the board, consisting of things like 100 push ups, 200 squats, 400 meters of carrying your partner back and forth in front of the training center. Needless to say it was way more intense than what I was prepared for, and we looked ridiculous to any passer by! But my partner and I took on the challenge and pushed ourselves further then probably what was healthy. Afterwards we took public transportation home instead of walking and I stumbled into the downstairs where my grandma is waiting. I fell into a chair and exhausted explained that I have just done way too much exercise and I can no longer walk. She finds this quite absurd and hilarious, and thus spends the next five minutes silently laughing to herself and sharing that fact that I can’t walk to everyone that comes into the house. Then she proceeds to offer me some juice but holds it out just far enough away from me that I have to get up to reach it. This is a struggle and I look like an old lady as I wobble over to get the cup of juice. Meanwhile my grandmother is dying of laughter on the couch as she watches the crazy gringa stumble around her house. It took three days for my body to recover from the workout!

        Today in the market she told all the vendors that I had been in Peru since I was a baby and that I was her niece making me feel pretty proud!

Increasing Language Skills

The View From My Roof (Where the dogs live)

I seem to have a reputation in my Spanish class to be the one that whenever called upon makes some sort of immediate reaction noise to the question, and then goes silent and stares at the teacher as if this is sufficient. While the reenactments of these moments are quite humorous they are also pretty accurate of what happens daily to me in Spanish. Perhaps the biggest example of this was during our hands on training activity where all twelve environment volunteers made a compost pile in the back of the training center. We were given proper instructions of how to layer the brown, greens, and poops in Spanish and then our Environmental Technical Trainer asked if anyone of us would like to facilitate the process. I jumped at the volunteer opportunity before realizing what it fully entailed, and even surprised myself by how enthusiastic I was to volunteer. Monica, the tech trainer, handed me the scale to weigh the bags and says ok Maddy I want this compost piles to be great. It is one thing to facilitate a bunch of kids to do what you want them to in a nurturing environment, but the prospect of facilitating a group of people my age, whom I am just getting to know and should probably make a good impression with was a bit daunting. I took a deep breath and declared ‘alright we need three groups of…’ Monica quickly interrupts me and with a giggle shakes her finger and says ‘no no no Maddy in Spanish!’ My stomach does a summersault, and I all too quickly realize I'm in way over my head. I proceed to make some sort of bawk and then just stare for a good few seconds. The next thirty minutes mostly consisted of sounds of distress and confusion pouring out of my mouth.  No matter how hard I tried every time I said ‘browns’ in Spanish it came out differently. I had to resort to smiles,  mis-conjugated verbs, a lot of pointing and jumping up and down to try to promote excitement for working.  We got the compost piles made, and people seemed to be in good spirits, but I was slightly embarrassed by the exposure of my language abilities.

Me and My Spanish Teacher

Why is it that every time I go to talk I come up with a total blank? For the most part I can understand what is being asked of me, but when I go for the answer I literally have no words, and I don’t think it is due to a lack of vocabulary. I thought about this for a while when my frustration overwhelmed me later after the compost struggles. I started to realize that when speaking in English I am the classic case of talking before thinking, and usually I can talk through my thoughts to form a sentence. However even in English I find myself creating the most unique and strange compilations of words,that I can often pass off as humor. Unfortunately this lack of forethought becomes extremely apparent when in another language. I am excited to respond to a question and prove that I understand, but my meandering streams of words just become fragmented sound effects in Spanish. I am having to teach myself to slow down and think, to form a sentence, conjugate the verbs in my head, and then say the sentence. This whole process seems very time consuming and forces me to be way more organized then my brain was designed for.  No longer is my language class a lesson on vocabulary and how to say the three goals of Peace Corps in Spanish, but its more about having patience with myself, taking deep breaths and trying to express myself clearly. My teacher very bluntly described my Spanish skills as having a lot of creativity but not advancing much, to which I responded with a short back of the throat cough/laugh and then a quiet stare of understanding. I can only hope that when my Spanish decides to advance it will not only be language skills that increases, but also a better awareness of how to clearly express myself to others. For now however, I still find great enjoyment with communicating in sound effects.

Our Water Storage Tank

Here are a few highlights of Pictures:

My Three Year Old Sister Ariana

Hard at Work Building a Tree Nusery

Our Tree Nusery

Our Environmental Sector Team