Day 2 - Home Improvements

I felt a little suffocated, like I was wrapped in a burrito.  Where was I? There was a loud knock on the door to the room outside my room.

“Señorita!” Celina called.  Oh, right.  I’m at site.

“Si?” I groaned, shifting and feeling the aching imprint my straw mattress had left on my body.

“Tome desayuno.” She called.  Breakfast time.

“Ya, voy a venir.” I called back, groggily making myself vertical.  I felt squeezed too tight by the layers of twisted clothing I had piled on myself the night before, but I’d survived my first night and felt a little proud of myself.  I got up, took off my Northface and threw on my baby blue crocs, and walked outside to breakfast. 

Breakfast was two hard-boiled eggs and what they call “cafecito”, or “little coffee” for lack of a better translation.  Adding “cito” on the end of things is pretty common here.  Don’t be fooled by the fact that it is called coffee.  What it really is, is a murky brown liquid that is so heavily sweetened by Celina that it actually almost tastes like not fully refined sugar they put on sugar on snow at sugaring houses in New England.  I’m a little weirded out by it, and a little concerned about the sugar intake, but it reminds me a bit of home and that makes me happy.  I ate breakfast and then got my things together to head down into Chota. 

Celina decided to come with me to help me find a mototaxi, and we walked to the “central hub” if you will, which consists of a tiny store, the primary school, a church, and the health post all within about 100 ft of each other.  Other than this little area, the whole town consists of just houses on the side of the mountain.  We walked down there, by tons of people just sitting around.  (I always feel naked when I walk through groups of people, because they stare so intently at me!)  We had zero luck, so we walked a little further down towards the health post.  I thought it would be appropriate for me to duck in and say hello to the workers there, since one of them was my community partner.  They were super friendly and happy to see me.  One of them started chiding me for not wearing a hat – I was going to damage my face because I have the “skin of an angel”.  I blushed a little at that, and knew she was right about the hat.  Celina ended up leaving and I was told to sit and wait on a bench outside the post with some random woman I didn’t know who had a big bucket of milk with her that she needed to bring down into town.  I sat for a while, and the woman wandered inside, until I heard the roar of a motorcycle engine and hoped it was a mototaxi.  I shouted a quick goodbye and went running out to the street. 

A mototaxi - weird sort of motorcycle-gocart hybrid. 

It was a mototaxi, and it already had two people in it but there was room for me.  I jumped in and found myself with an older woman and who I thought must have been her 30 year-old daughter.  We rode in silence for a while until we stopped outside a house and just waited.  Without the roar of the engine I asked if they lived in Iraca, and we started up a conversation about Barbara, the previous volunteer, and my plans, who I was living with and if I had “acostumbrarme” or become accustomed to living in Iraca.  I mentioned that I’d only arrived the day before, which didn’t seem to strike them as a great answer.  Just as I started to wonder how much longer we were going to be sitting there, a woman came running out of the house with sopping wet hair and a brush and jumped into the mototaxi.  As we started moving, she started combing her hair, droplets of water flinging into my face.  I scooted a bit away from her to avoid being hit by her hair as she chatted away with the two other women in the mototaxi. 

            “Que comes?” What do you eat? The lady with the wet hair asked me out of the blue.

            “Pardon?” I responded.

            “What do you eat to get so fat?” She asked me.  I tried to control my facial expression and brushed it off with a forced laugh.

            “American food.”

            “Is everyone in your country as fat as you?” She asked me. I ground my teeth together.

            “No, only some of us.”

            This then segwayed into a conversation that lasted most of the ride down the hill (approximately 20 minutes) about whether I was fatter than Barbara, the volunteer I replaced.

            When we finally got into Chota, I was relieved to get out of the mototaxi and away from that conversation and decided to just shrug it off.  As I was walking through the central Plaza de Armas on my way to Anita’s for breakfast with Kate and Diamond, I found my path blocked by a group of kids preparing for a parade.  There was no way around them, so I decided to walk through them.  Just as I was about to escape the cluster of munchkins, some little boy a foot away from me pointed up into my face and screamed, “Look at the Giant Fat Gringa!” and I felt a hundred little eyes turn into my direction.  Rather than stay and gawk at whatever giant monstrosity or Godzilla type creature they had apparently discovered somewhere in the Plaza, I kept walking.  My morning was not off to a great start.

            I had a lovely breakfast with Kate and Diamond at Anita’s, our favorite restaurant, and then we made a plan for what to buy.  Our first stop was going to be Serpost, because I really wanted to check the mail.  When we got to Serpost, the woman said there was nothing there and I felt a bit disappointed because Mom had told me to expect packages.  We headed towards the market to buy some of the other things on my list.  About a block away from Serpost, and about 10 minutes later, the Serpost lady came running down the street and grabbed the hand of Diamond.  Apparently I had a package!! 

There were two pleasing things about that moment.  First, I had a package, obviously.  Second, our plan of sucking up to the Serpost ladies was apparently hugely effective!  Rumor has it, if the Serpost ladies don’t like you, you will never, ever, receive any of your packages because all of them will get stuck in customs in Chiclayo.  That means that you have to write a letter to customs in Spanish, without any errors, and then pay to get it notarized.  You have something like 15 days to get this done and if it is not done right, or on time, you have to pay to take a 10 hour overnight bus to Chiclayo to get your package, and probably pay to get it out of customs.  Knowing this, yesterday we all went out and bought Panetón, a nasty bread thing with chewy stuff in it that they eat for breakfast.  We brought it to the post office ladies and introduced ourselves.  That was apparently a smart move because now we had Serpost ladies running down the street to give us packages!

My package was a giant and very exciting padded envelope, which I decided not to open until I got home.  After that, we wandered around Chota, I measured the length of a normal mattress so I’d have a reference for my bed to tell my host dad.  I bought a blue pee bucket with a lid and a handle, another salmon pink one to use for my garbage, yellow paint, white paint, paint brushes, acrylic paints, little paint brushes, an electric hot water heater, a tea mug, a water jug with a spout to put my clean water, and a flour sac to use for rags in my room.

It was a long day, but Diamond and Kate agreed to come up to Iraca the next day to help me paint my room.  I walked down to the paredero, or mototaxi stop, where I could catch a ride back up the hill.  I got someone to take me up and headed home with all my new things to make my room a little more cozy. 
One of the first things I did when I got home was to open my package from my Mom.  The second I had ripped off that one strip and glanced what was inside I burst into tears.  They were so sudden but they weren't sad, more bittersweet.  My mom had sent me a fully packed stocking for Xmas.  I have been so bummed that I won't be home for Xmas, and most of the time I just don't think about it, but this made me feel like my Christmas will be less sad, that I'm still thought about.  She just made me feel so freaking loved.  All the little presents in the stocking were wrapped in the same green and red tissue paper that she always wraps them in, and I couldn't help crying because I wasn't going to be home and because I was so touched by the thought and love she'd sent in that package. I'm such a lucky girl :)

Sweetest Care Package from my Mama :)

That night, instead of moving further into my room, I moved all my stuff out.  The walls were covered in grime and spider webs, so I got my trusty broom and had at the walls, literally sweeping every surface of my room: ceilings, floors, trim, shelf, walls.  In true lonely volunteer fashion, I took funny pictures of it - my attack on all the icky things in my room - spiders, spiderwebs, years of general filth, etc. 

                      

           I'm ready! ...but a little freaked out...i don't know what I'm going to find...at least I look ready...

OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!??

Ok, Hayden, don't be a pansy, you can do this. Just one quick swipe with the broom...

Get out of my room, giant spider, or I'll kill you.  But mostly I don't want to touch you because then you're going to move really quickly in an unexpected direction and scare the crap out of me...

I'm serious! I'll kill ya! 

Cue Battle Cry

I had on a pair of spandex shorts and a tshirt, and I think I seriously scandalized Griseria when she came into my room to tell me it was time for dinner.  I put on a little bit more clothing, pants to be exact, before I went in for dinner.  Her daughter was there, who I found friendly, and they served me up about six cups of rice with a fried egg.  I ate as much as I could not to be rude, and right when I could eat no more, she put another fried egg on my plate and two pieces of bread.  That just wasn’t going to happen.  I told her I was full, she told me to eat, I said I was full, she offered me more cafecito, I told her I was full, she left me alone.

After dinner, I ripped up the flour bag into rags, filled my still un-used pee bucket with water, and started scrubbing down my room.  Turns out the ugly color on the wall was water-soluble.  This would have been ok except that the color that was under it before the ugly egg-shell color was dark ugly green.  I also discovered how terrible the paint job was – big dried drips on the wall and unidentified stains on the wall.  The water in my bucket was brown and full of floaties before I’d finished with one of the small walls.

 In the midst of the madness, my phone rang and it was my friend, Katie. I was so excited to talk to her, and didn’t realize how much I had already come to miss her in the short time that we had been apart.  We were having a great time chatting when Griseria came into the room and stood in the doorway.  I asked Katie to hold on a minute and looked at Griseria expecting her to say something.  She didn’t say anything.  I waited a little longer.  Nothing. 

“Do you need something?” I asked her politely.

“You’re doing your work?” She asked nodding towards the table. 

“At the moment, I’m on the phone with my friend who lives in Ancash.” I replied.  Wasn’t it obvious I was on the phone?  She had a cell phone…it’s not like it was a foreign object.  She just nodded once and smiled, still watching me…so I went back to talking with Katie and tried not to laugh or run away as Griseria just stood in the doorway, a strange smile on her face, watching me talk to Katie for about 25 minutes until she finally left.  SO. WEIRD.

I went to bed that night, pleased with the progress I made on my room, happy to know it was spider and dirt free, and moderately sketched out by the large hole I’d found in the corner of my room that had been stuffed with a dried piece of corn.  Rats? No, not even going to think about it.