It’s always great to see other people working so hard to create positive change where they live.  It’s even more inspiring to see some of the ways they accomplish that goal.  One of our volunteers sent me this link, and it is an amazing video.  The situation is very similar to Peru, except that AIDS has not spread so widely in Peru.  What I love most about the video is that it supports our idea that even poor, rural villagers can become motivated and do amazing things for their communities. 

To see more inspiring videos subscribe to www.karmatube.org, or just keep visiting the Frontline World website for more stories from around the world.

 

Mejor Chicas y Chicos Steal the Show

Though lots and lots of great progress has been made over the last four weeks, it is hard not to feel like the town’s attention wasn’t taken over recently by last weeks massive fiesta to commemorate none other than Saint Francisco. Over the course of the week our tiny town of 300 swelled to well over 700, as guests and family members poured in to eat, drink and be merry. The festivities kicked off last Thursday with a 5:30am butchering of our family pig, and ended at 5am Sunday morning after the last of the band members (and their dancing sidekicks, the ballerinas) decided to lay down their instruments. The entire weekend was full of wonderful events that really brought the entire community together. Carly and I reached a new level of appreciation for the extraordinary place in which we have been lucky enough to work.

On a slightly more formal note we have also reached some really great new points of success with our Youth Health Promoters. As of now, we have ended our Youth Health Promoter classes and moved on to Project Planning and Community Workshops. The classes themselves ended several weeks ago with a formal presentation by all of our students. Though Valerie and I had been a little nervous to put all of our kids up in front of the community, in the end they rose to the challenge and did a great job.

We ended up splitting the presentation into three segments and let each student then sign up for the one they were most interested in. The first group discussed the classes we had already completed and what they had learned and which had been their favorite subjects. After that the youth split off into a presentation of the community workshops which they are helping us run. These workshops have actually proved to be a wonderful opportunity to work with the kids in smaller groups and help them work more exclusively on their public speaking skills. The last portion of their community presentation focused on a discussion of ideas for our large scale community project. The audience was, during this point, allowed to suggest their ideas and give feedback to the students. In the end, six project ideas were suggested: community trash program, cocinas mejoradas, free and available medical kits and classes, public restrooms, a series of workshops and videos for community members to attend, and the expansion of our community vegetable garden. After some lengthy discussion and an open vote, both the students and folks in attendance voted overwhelmingly to move forward with a project to set up a trash program.

After the meeting we returned to the classroom with the students and drew up models for each of the project suggestions. I think we are all really excited, because not only does a trash program enjoy the most support but also of each of the models it really provides some great opportunities to expand in the future. Valerie and I are already imagining joint composting and recycling programs followed by lots of talk between the kids and the municipality over the details of eventually getting a permanent landfill developed.

We are back off into the hills on Monday for our final leg. As the rains will soon be here, we will be leading a few more workshops and hosting a ceremony/thankyou to our students and families. It’s sad to think that Monday will be our last trip up the mountain but we are so excited to put together some great packets of information to leave behind to the next group of volunteers!

 

San Francisco’s Top 10 Most Shocking Moments!

In keeping with the quick and friendly nature of the blog world, I’ve decided that there is no better way to relay a few of our experiences to date than with a top 10 list of our most memorable shocking moments. Of course, as you all know, we have been spending a lot of time working hard with our youth class and exchanging culturally within our community. But what fun would it be to always ramble on about our ¨genuine¨ times, when Carly and I really know that folks are more interested in the details of how we have tortured ourselves over the last few months. Instead of going on about accomplishments and perspectives, I thought we could all recap the last few months with a few good laughs…Enjoy.

1. Opening our bedroom door the first day to find a still-twitching-cow being bled-out and butchered on our front steps
2. Our surprise when we discovered that our in-country liaison had, while we were present (yet then unable to understand the Spanish), gone ahead and promised every member of our community that in no time we would be purchasing them all brand new fully functional toilets
3. The joy of discovering that our bedroom came fully furnished with two beds, a table and scorpions
4. The realization that when a group of Peruvians invite you for a drink, they assume you will be sharing their same cup and are insistent that you stay for longer than just one
5. Our surprise when we learned that the little chicks running around our yard enjoy eating fresh garden seedlings almost as much as we enjoy sweating for the weeks necessary to plant them
6. Experiencing ¨hands-on,¨ that when you offer to help the family prepare for the weekend fiesta, this means pinning down a 500lb. squealing pig at 5:30am while your toothless friend drives a butcher’s knife into its throat
7. The great debate as to whether the welts which persisted for weeks all over Carly’s body were the result of bed bugs or chicken pox
8. Learning that the young boy with Tourette´s Syndrome in our town had, after hearing my name, without control begun to make ¨Currrr-tis¨ his new most overly used word
9. Finding out that our one refuge for privacy, our mud-hut bedroom, ceased to be so exclusive after a family of bats took it upon themselves to begin sharing the space
10. Getting introduced to the roaming (several thousand strong and slightly plague-like) army of ants whose daily voyage often puts them on a course to “pass through” whomever’s home is in their way

 

Making Plans…

It’s hard to believe, but we have finished the health education curriculum with our students and are moving on to the final project planning stages of our proyecto piloto in San Francisco. Our student’s final exams scores showed an average increase of 22 percent in health knowledge. As Curtis and I graded their exams, hopeful and anxious to see what lessons had been learned from our health classes, I began to notice certain patterns in the answers – questions that nearly all of the students had answered correctly. All of the students had a perfect memory of how to make suero casero (rehydration drink) to prevent dehydration from diarrhea. Nearly everyone remembered that HIV/AIDS is an eventually fatal disease which compromises the immune system. Everyone learned the meaning of “self-esteem.” These questions were frequently left blank or missed during the initial base-line exam which we gave in July. It’s gratifying to see that we have made an impact on our student’s understanding of health and well-being, though we hope that this foundational knowledge will be just the beginning for youth in San Francisco. It’s important to note that much of this information which seemed to stick so well was linked to fun, participatory activities in the classroom. Mixing and tasting suero casero together. Curtis’s classic banana and condom demonstration. The Adonde Voy y Quien Soy drawings which each student made, exploring their lives, feelings about themselves and hopes for the future. We have learned our own lesson from our class on Education: how do most people learn best? Having fun and doing it yourself.

 We are also rapidly moving forward on our community project plans. The youth health promoters held a community meeting to present on what they’ve learned and accomplished in the last few months and to brainstorm collectively for project ideas. It was a great opportunity for them to practice speaking in front of the community and although they were very nervous, they did a great job! We compiled a list of 5 potential projects: a trash collection system; cocinas mejoradas; expansion of community vegetable garden; first aid kits and classes; and public bathrooms. Later, in project planning classes we came up with project plans and budgets for each of the five projects and took a vote on their favorite. A trash collection system was the winner, as it was with the community vote as well. Everyone recognizes the desperate need for a sanitation system in San Francisco. We still need to do some more exploration of budget details before committing to the project, but we are very hopeful that this will be a sustainable and high-impact project for the youth to lead.

Until we depart in December, we will be devoting our time to coming up with a more detailed plan for a trash collection system for future volunteers to implement. We are contacting authorities in hopes of devising a plan for a permanent landfill, but this will be a lengthy and expensive process. Until then, we need a solution for today. We are hoping to put into place public trash cans separating organic and inorganic trash. We’d like to arrange a weekly pick up for the inorganic trash to be carried to the nearest landfill, while organic trash will be collected and composted. There is a lot of room for growth in this project: education programs on sanitation, recycling, composting, etc. We can’t wait to see where the youth take this project. I know that even once we have left the quiet of San Francisco and adjusted to the urban rush of our lives in Buenos Aires and New York City, Curtis and Carly and I will continue to follow the progress of the little mountain town that has become home.

 

Making Progress!

What an incredible last month. We have all decided as we look back that in no other place is time as relative a thing as it seems to be in San Francisco, Peru. Over our long extended last month we were finally able to hit a bit of a rhythm and settle into the community. Making the decision to stay a little longer actually afforded us the time to accomplish a great amount with our class and the community.

The first and most exciting piece of news is that we´ve been able to finish our first round of Youth Health Promoter classes. The formal classes actually ended on an incredibly positive note, as we finished up with subjects related to sex, and pregnancy. I think that we all felt, given that we have 13 young teenage girls in our class,

that spending some extra time focusing on responsible decisions regarding sex was incredibly necessary. Of all of our classes I´d say that we got some of the most participation out of these lessons which was great to see. A real turning point came after our sex and STD class when we asked each student to go home and write some anonymous questions they had regarding sex. We were impressed when each student came to the following class with at least 2 questions. It really just enforced our understanding of how little education young people have access to in these communities in regards to sex, puberty and pregnancy.

After ending our set of lessons on a positive note, we spent two additional classes reviewing materials in preparation for our big final exam. At first we were all a little nervous to go back over our prior lessons and see just how much the students had retained, but after a couple days of review it seemed as though they´d been able to keep the majority of what we discussed. Though we haven´t yet been able to grade each exam we are all excited to return to San Francisco in a few days and tally up the results. Even though the tests have all been taken we still have several classes of project planning scheduled for our return. We have had many discussions with both the kids and members of the community related to our project and I think we are very enthusiastic to actually get down to some real ideas and planning.

 

Our return will also give us a chance to see how our group has done with their first unsupervised assignment. Before leaving we enlisted the help of our class and their parents, and were finally able to turn the hard rocky land in our communal garden into suitable beds for planting. We were thrilled to finally plant lettuce, cucumbers, cilantro and tomatoes. The real test will be seeing how all the veggies are doing, since we left it up to the kids to maintain and water the garden twice a day. We are hopeful that within the next week or two we will be able to turn the remaining beds and plant at least five more rows of veggies.

 

Though it has been nice to get in a bit of a break, we are excited to get back to the lives we have begun to create. Carly has taken off and is quickly becoming a master weaver, and I am looking forward to spending more time with Carmen and Leo helping attend to their cows after having been shown how to vaccinate livestock the other day.

 

¡Veggies are Delicious!

After living in San Francisco for a few months, we’ve come to realize that nutrition and health education here require necessary improvements and are some of the biggest issues at hand.

Most meals consist solely of white or beige colored foods. For example, a typical lunch meal includes white rice (made with saltwater, garlic and pig lard), boiled yuca and a fried egg. Soup is another common dish here that usually contains noodles, potatoes, herbs and packets of MSG. When you ask the average household why they don’t eat more vegetables, they say they ‘aren’t accustomed to them’. Although there is potential for a more colorful diet, they prefer their usual white and beige palettes instead. Curtis, Valerie and I are hopeful that with a little boost and lots of time, we can inspire change in the local diet.

After one couple donated us a plot of their land, we’ve been working hard with our little pueblo to create a community vegetable garden. Digging and tilling and digging more, we’ve started to create healthy and happy beds to plant our seeds in. The soil here requires constant watering and watching to make sure the local pollitos (chicks) don’t eat our baby plants (as we discovered they loved). As of now, we have lettuce, cucumbers, cilantro and tomatoes in the ground. And in another week or two, we hope to have the rest of the seeds planted, filling the community space with a large variety of veggies and herbs. Hopefully our hard work can inspire the village people with new and delicious edible options.

In addition to the Huerto Comunal, we’ve been working hard to bring health awareness to the kids in our class. With fun games, stories and lots of good tools, we’ve been helping them to better understand their bodies, nutrition, water/food intake, etc.

We hope with the classes, the garden and some extra side projects, we can see a positive change in the diets and lives of the people of San Francisco and possibly bring more variety and colors to San Francisco’s tables.

With the help of the community, we know anything is possible.

 

Having “The Talk” With Our Girls (and Jeffry)

Let me just start by saying, village life isn’t nearly as quiet and peaceful as we expected at times. This has been the week of fiestas – the usual Sunday soccer party, our neighbor Diana’s 9^th birthday, the fiesta of Las Reinas (the Queens) and this weekend a fiesta in celebration of Coyona, our neighboring village. I will have the music of rural Peru playing in my brain for months to come

Last Sunday we did the community clean-up project with the youth. We took the opportunity to put the planning of it in their hands to let them get some practice organizing a project and delegating responsibilities. They did an incredible job creating a plan and participating. They divided up into four teams and each chose a specific area of San Francisco to clean up. They were all in charge of spreading the word to family and friends and also made a public announcement over a loudspeaker. We collected sacks and sacks of trash – wrappers, old shoes, batteries, everything imaginable. As my team wandered over to pick up the trash behind one man’s home, I discovered that the trash was mired in a swampy pit of human waste – waste which is running through the center of town via a small creek and which animals were feeding on. The man who lives there is too elderly to walk far into the mountains for the “bathroom” and so has been simply using the small creek behind his home, probably for years. I knew that bathroom sanitation is our most serious health risk in San Francisco, but I didn’t realize that it was as bad as raw sewage literally running through the street. It’s sad to see a community which is progressing so rapidly in so many other ways suffering this kind of indignity. I hope that we can do something about this situation in particular in the next few months.

Recently Curtis and I taught the Sex Ed class to the kids. It was by far my favorite class that we’ve ever done with them. None of the girls have ever had any sex ed classes in high school and their parents have avoided any kind of discussion. So we both felt really motivated to talk with them about sex, gender roles, contraception and STDs. It’s probably the most important knowledge that we have to impart to a group of adolescent girls who have practically no access to information or adult guidance. And because it is a subject that they really want to understand, they were great at participating, asking questions and paying attention. It’s a big responsibility to be their only exposure to accurate knowledge at this moment. We made sure that they all know that our doors are open to come by and ask questions or talk in private and I really hope that they do drop by and talk to us. We’ll never know exactly what kind of effect this class has on their lives, but I sense that it’s this information more than anything else we teach that might really have a direct impact.

We’ll be back in a couple of weeks to update again. We are having a big dinner in Piura with my parents who will be visiting, Curtis and Carly, Rolando, Javier AND Zoila and Meli (my host family). I am so excited to have the opportunity to introduce my parents to Zoila and Meli and to make a special celebration of Meli’s 12^th birthday. It should be a wonderful culture-clashing, linguistically challenging event and an awesome opportunity to spoil my little sister. I’ll be heading off to Mancora to spend some time with my parents (!!!), but we should be wrapping up the final youth classes at that time and moving on to the much-awaited project planning

 

San Francisco, Part Two

Tomorrow morning Curtis, Carly and I will be bouncing our way back to San Francisco in the little camioneta that is our only means of transport. It will be a long trip, but I’m looking forward to seeing Zoila, Isaac and especially Meli and sharing all the veggies we bought here in the city. They give us fruit and coffee for free, and we bring back veggies and small necessities from Piura – people in San Francisco know how to share and I like being a part of that.

The two weeks that Curtis and Carly have been in SF have been an entirely different way of village life for me. And in a good way. Their new host family, Carmen and Leoncio, threw a huge fiesta their first day in the village. Life seems to have sped up with all of us there and we are really happy to be making so much progress. The classes with the youth are going so well. They are getting more and more relaxed and I feel like we have gained their trust. We’ve been incorporating lots of fun games and activities and that’s been great for building relationships with them. Curtis and Carly are naturally great teachers and it’s wonderful to have a team to work with.

The garden has also been an amazing project for the youth. We have already turned a very rundown, overgrown piece of land into a beautiful space. We have perfect rows of tilled land and a plan for the layout. We should be seeding in the next week. Carly is also coming up with creative activities for the kids to help us make the garden beautiful and organized.

In the coming weeks, we will be organizing a community clean-up day with the youth as they do their Medio Ambiente (Environment) class. Beautiful San Francisco is marred by scattered trash and a contaminated creek and we are hoping to make a positive and short-term impact on that, while also following the progress of the municipal government in considering landfill construction in the long-term. In just a few weeks, we should be wrapping up the general health knowledge classes and moving on to community project planning.

On a sadder note, a teenage boy from our town named Idel died unexpectedly last week. We think the cause was appendicitis, although no one is sure because the boy never managed to see a doctor. He died while walking for help in the night with his mother. It’s a sad reminder that preventable deaths are so common here in the remote areas of developing countries where access to health care is limited. We’ll keep his family in our thoughts.

 

Mountains, Cows & Kids

Back in the big city… who thought Piura would look so metropolitan? With all thats happened in between, it’s amazing to think that we were only just here 2 1/2 weeks ago.

San Francisco is incredible. In the month that Carly and I traveled throughout Peru prior to arriving there we never came across a place so iconic and beautiful. The ride from Piura to San Francisco was all the introduction we needed. I won’t go into it, but lets just say 6 hours sitting on a raised board hovering above a pickup truck stuffed with chickens and pigs, with 25 of your newest best friends straight up a mountain side was….well exciting.

The best part of our arrival to San Francisco was immediately getting to meet our new host family. Carmen and Leoncio are the sweetest people one can imagine. We live with them and their rambunctious 5 year old grandson, Brian. The first week we showed up just also happened to be the same time Leo’s father and two sisters were in town to visit. Since his father had not made it all the way to San Francisco for the last five years, Leo promptly decided to slaughter a cow (which was soon draped in pieces over every single free space in and outside the house) and host a fiesta.

I have to admit both Carly and I were pretty nervous to walk into the health post that first night and be introduced to our class for the first time. After having heard some feedback from Val that the kids were a little nervous to participate, we had decided that our first class would be best spent getting to know one another with some fun games and activities. It actually worked out perfectly because their homework from the previous class had been the Yo Soy, Adonde Voy activity (who I am, and where I am going). Carly and I started with our own renditions of who we saw ourselves as being and where we thought we were headed in the future. The kids loved it and immediately warmed up to participating once they saw what silly fools we were willing to make out of ourselves.

I don’t know what I’d expected out of the students, but I have to say that whatever it is they have exceeded my thoughts. They are all incredibly nice well behaved kids, and they seem eager to learn. That’s not to say that they aren’t at times disruptive, but what group of teenagers isn’t? They are as Val described slightly timid, but I can already see in the two weeks we’ve been there that they’ve started to lighten up a bit. The important thing is that they are all so bright and willing to learn.

The one glitch in our first two weeks spent in San Francisco came as a result of our project planning and coordination. The first weekend we were there Rolando came to visit and survey the community. The first night we held a basic introductory community meeting which was incredible well received. After that meeting a parent of one of the health promoters approached us to inquire more about the community project. After several discussions and some advice from Rolando, a last minute meeting was called with the parents to discuss the idea of making some headway on an idea to introduce toilets as a project. The thought is that since San Francisco had just recently received municipal sewage lines, that the next step would be to make a push to help the residents install toilets. Basically this meeting helped us to learn a valuable lesson in community organizing in Peru. Everyone more or less left with the impression that the meeting had been more than a discussion and that Mejor would be purchasing them toilets. Whoops. Though the idea of a toilet project is still a possibility, we all need to backtrack on some of the discussions we’ve had in order to remind everyone that no project is meant to move forward until the youth in our classes are given a chance to organize it.

None the less, we’ve already grown to love our lives in San Francisco. The constant bananas, oranges, handmade chocolate and fresh cheese which all the residents shower on us every time we cross the street, might help to give you an idea of the kindness and generosity with which we’ve been received.

 

Juntos en Peru!

The whole group! See the MEJORC Webpage for bios of each student!

Curtis and Carly are here!! I am so excited to share with them this experience of living and working in a rural Peruvian community. We actually bumped into each other a day early at a hotel in Piura and went for an amazing dinner of cebiche and lomo saltado – love the Peruvian food. We searched high and low until we found an amazing, affordable place to call our Piura home, wandered the market for hours, met Rolando and Javier for the first time and explored Piura a bit more. Curtis and Carly are full of fresh ideas, creativity and energy for the project, and we are all so enthused about what we are doing.

As for what’s happened in the last several weeks, Javier has finished processing the socio-economic data recently collected for San Francisco. We have 77 occupied homes, all made of adobe and all lacking electricity, with a total population of 283 people. Most striking and most inspiring is the jump in education of women in just one generation. The data shows that of mothers in San Francisco, 33 have received no education whatsoever, 37 attained primary level education and only 3 attended secondary school. Informally, I can say that virtually all youth here are now being educated in secondary school, although not all finish. I’m struck by the ambition of some of our students, children of barely educated mothers:  Malu (14 yr) wants to be an obstetrician, Meliza (11 yr) a nurse or a doctor, Marlis (13 yr) a teacher or a doctor.

We have completed 7 classes since my last update: Anatomy, Hygiene, Basic Illnesses, First Aid I and II, Communication and Self Esteem. Almost all of this information is new to the Youth Health Promoters, so it’s a lot to take in. Just in the last two classes, I have seen some change in the participation and comfort level of the students. Like any class, we have two or three students who are more confident and have always participated more willingly. The others have been challenging – timid and very embarrassed to participate except in the context of a game. The obstetrician who helped us with the Nutrition and Anatomy classes explained that a lack of self-confidence among students here in the remote sierra is very common – completely different from students in Piura or Lima who are exposed to more ideas, new people and active participation in school. We’d like to make outside-of-class activities a priority from now on– getting to know each other better, building trust and having fun.

Our originally planned trip to the two high schools of the Youth Health Promoters (Coyona and Barrios) to inform both teachers and students about our project was delayed by a three week national school vacation because of swine flu. However, we are planning to go to both schools in the coming week and it will be the first opportunity the youth have had to speak about the project publicly. We are also moving forward on our community vegetable garden! The profe has advised us on what is best to grow in this area and offered to raise the seeds until they are seedlings. While here in Piura, we are going to buy seeds and a hose. Once we have seedlings we will prepare the land as a group and set up a watering schedule with the youth. I think this is a wonderful opportunity to start working with our Health Promoters outside of the classroom, completing a project which will be lots of fun and will definitely make a positive difference in community nutrition.

We are slowly, but steadily navigating bureaucracy in pursuit of a landfill. The district of Canchaque has a technical expert who is willing to come to San Francisco in August to survey the land and explore appropriate and environmentally safe locations for the landfill. We are also brainstorming more about the logistics of a recycling program. I have really high hopes that we will move forward on implementing a reasonable waste management system. People in San Francisco deserve better than to have to live with their trash in the streets and contaminating the creeks.

All in all, I feel confident that the project is progressing successfully. I know that projects and ideas are going to speed up even more now that we have our entire MEJOR Communities team here and I can’t wait to see where the opportunities take us.