So you've presumably read a lot of updates and not many of them have included any hint of the work I'm actually doing. Well, I've done formal interviews with the director of the primary school, Director Chavez, and the women who work in the health post to orient myself a bit. I spend a lot of time in the health post just hanging out and letting people see me there. Being in the health post gives me the opportunity to not only meet people, but be seen as a professional associated with the health post, which gives me some credibility and helps me gain the respect and "confianza" or confidence of the community. I'm also, like I said, going to be teaching English to get to know the kids better and become a better known part of my community.
I'm currently working on my Community Diagnostic, which is a three month process and our primary job until March, which involves using various tools to gain information about the community and the people, and help us decide what projects will be most important to improve the health and well being of the individuals within our communities. The biggest piece of the Community Diagnostic is completing a survey. Not all Peace Corps volunteers need to do a survey, but all the community health volunteers do. We are given a survey we can use, but I really didn't like it, so I designed my own, which took a significant amount of time. It's 8 pages long, and asks some seriously personal questions, but ones that are necessary to learn about the health of the community and the knowledge they have about maintaining their health and that of their kids. It's most likely that my work will focus on pregnant women mothers with children under five, because I can make the biggest impact on their lifelong health and well being if I start at a young age. Iraca is known to have a pretty intense problem with malnutrition, and unfortunately, chronic malnutrition in children under the age of 5 can result in serious growth issues, especially when it comes to brain development. The Chota region of Cajamarca also has the highest rate in the whole department of maternal mortality, so I'm hoping to somehow get involved in the promotion of hospital births as opposed to home birthing.
I have a lot of ideas for what I want to do in the community, but I need to do my house visits around Iraca to complete my surveys, and once they are done I will have plenty of information to narrow down my ideas to the most important and what will be the best received and supported by the community. We'll have to see. I'm lucky though, my health workers have said that they will try and accompany me on my house visits to complete my diagnostic. At least in the beginning I would really love their company to show me the paths around my town and also to help me with the interviews if I need it. For those people that have not met me yet, it will be a good thing to have a well known health worker with me so that I'm not threatening or intimidating, and they understand better why I am there.
Creating the survey was a nightmare. Not only did it take me forever to design it perfectly in my Excel, but then when I brought it to get it printed, the first place I went just couldn't seem to print documents out of Excel. The second place I went, the formatting got completely messed up because they had PCs and the formatting I had spent forever on, didn't transfer. So I printed the document, took it home, cut it up and glued it all back together on different pieces of paper. Then when I brought it back into town to get it copied, the copy machine practically ate the copies, and all 50 surveys that I printed have weird hard folds in the pages and are crooked, because the woman couldn't seem to make a straight copy. Then when she was stapling the encuestas together, the stapler kept getting stuck and ripping my encuesta, so now all of them have little tears in them, strange folds, and two staples. I tried so hard to make a perfect, streamlined encuesta that looked pretty and professional and neat, and now it looks like someone threw it up. It was tremendously frustrating...but welcome to Perú.
I got Perued. Again.
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