Moments in Time

   Time is such a strange thing.  It’s an abstract noun.  It’s something we pretend to understand.  We build clocks.  We wear watches.  We write on calendars.  We say, “at three o’clock…at nine o’clock.”  The European mentality of times is linear.  Hence the phrases: wasting time, time is money, or time is not on our side.   According to previous civilizations in Peru, time is not linear, but rather circular.  What doesn’t get done today can be done tomorrow.  This helps explain some of the cultural differences throughout the world, right?

   We’re all living on the same planet, and scientists are always trying to prove the impossible: the origins of man and our planet.  Why don’t they try to prove a different impossible: the origins of “time” and what happens to it?

   I’ve lived with the Germans and their Pünktlichkeit.  I’ve seen the Koreans and their busyness.  I’ve waited and waited and waited on African time and I learned patience time and time again.  Now that I’m down here in Peru and time is flying, I just accept it not knowing from where it comes or to where it goes, nor the speeds at which it travels.  Some days go by quickly and others go by slowly.  That I’ve already been here 3 months is a bit surprising to me, yet at other times, I feel like I’ve been here much longer.  Throughout these past few months, I’ve experienced many things, including brief moments that will last much longer outside of the realm of time in my memories and my manner of thought for the ways that they have impacted me:

   One sunny day, I scrambled down a rocky dock in my jeans, a t-shirt, and my tennis shoes across the wet sand to scoop up a murmui (a little sea critter) whose hiding spot had been betrayed by the bubbles in the sand as the water retreated.  Having been enjoying the beauty of the crashing waves, I lost focus of the water as I tried to capture the little guy and got drenched by a new wave, getting to spend the rest of the day in wet socks and shoes.  I had a lovely time at the beach and also got a good reminder that it’s difficult to focus on more than one things at a time.  Prioritizing is essential.

   I got news a few weeks ago that a very happy playful little girl who was often in our house in Kenya dided a few weeks ago.  Saddened to receive that news, it got me thinking about how we need to enjoy the time we have (that is, if time is indeed linear) as we never know in what situations we will find ourselves.

   While in Ciudad Eten, as I wanted to cross a street, a Combi rumbled by and I heard the voice of a child call out, “Chiclayo! Chiclayo!  S./2.40!”  I looked at the vehicle and say a boy who appeared to be about 7 years old, standing inside with the door open trying to collect passengers to earn something for the day.  Disturbed, I asked some people nearby why the boy wasn’t in school.  They shrugged apathetically and said it’s normal.  There are too many children like him who need to help feed their families.  My heart broke for all the children being robbed of their lives by such injustices.  They’re not only missing out on their childhoods, but their futures are also slipping through their fingers.

   I bought two mandarins from a fruit peddler on my way home from work one day.  A few minutes later, two malnourished little girls with a reddish tint to what should have been dark-chocolate colored hair appeared out of nowhere.  They grabbed at the plastic sack, pleading for the fruit.  Before I had a chance to open it and hand them each a mandarin, they’d ripped it and bit into the fruit peel and all, disappearing just as rapidly as they’d appeared.

   Just the other night, I went out with a Canadian friend who is working at an NGO that I did translations for.  We went out for ice cream and had a great conversation in English where we could speak normally without the other person being confused.  :)  We bid one another good-bye with a hug.  I was reminded of the comforts of a warm North-American hug after months of Peruvian kisses for greetings and farewells. 

   We all have seemingly insignificant moments like these, but moments that are important to our personal experiences.

Where in the world is Aprill...?

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Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to all you mothers!  Yesterday, I got the chance to go with the female teachers/administrators from the university to a museum and to see some ruins in honor of Mother's Day.  In the evening, I was invited to a Mother's Day celebration in a friend's home and later went dancing at a club.  More mother's day celebrating to be done today.  Here's a few pictures from the weekend.

Professora Pilar and I with a Mochica sculpture

Ruins of an adobe pyramid (from the Mochica culture)

Ruins of Señor de Sipán (as encountered in his tomb)

The DISKO

Weekend Escape

This past weekend, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to escape Chiclayo to go on a long and beautiful hike near Yaque.  Fresh air. Butterflies. Corn fields. Cows. Insects. Forest. Spiderwebs. Streams. Waterfalls. Rain. Silence.  Even though I get to escape the city for a little bit every week, sometimes I am in a rural village rather than the countryside.  I forget sometimes how much I miss the calm tranquility of uninhabited areas, how much I miss hiking and having no cell phone service, no internet access, no contact with the world apart from where I'm at.  With some fruit, humitas, bread and water in our bags, we headed off on our little adventure.  Towards the end of the hike we got rained on!  In Germany, I grew very tired of the rain.  Here, I love it.  Living in a desert keeps me in check...getting rained on is a blessing.  Here's a few snapshots of the day :)

 dragonflies

Do I or don't I swim?

 A few steps in the journey

 the final waterfall

University Life

About a year ago I thought I was leaving college life behind.  And I did…for a little while.  Now, I’m back in an institution of higher education, but as an educator rather than a student.  Seeing what I see here makes me more thankful for my Doane experience.  Despite the fact that students here tend to value their opportunities to get a college education, they are undervalued.  They have few resources and even have to pay for copies of exams that they must take on occasion! Administrators care little about their students and there have been strikes in the administrative department at least once a week since I began teaching.  Corruption is a factor in all areas of the university and people who work at the university are required to be part of a political party as they attain their positions as professors or deans or college president based on which party they belong to and which party has the most members to control the votes.  It’s crazy. 

I’ve been blessed to be able to work with a few caring and dedicated professors, but I cannot say that that is the norm here.  Many do not show up to all their classes or show up late.  I am thankful for my Kenyan experience, as having a whiteboard every day is a step up from the dusty chalk board and my occasional clumsiness of dropping the chalk and having it shatter.   Although many students lack resources and support, they are determined to make the best of their situations and to make the most of their education.  It would be nice to see that kind of enthusiasm among the majority of students back home.  Think how far they could go with resources!

Bonds of Solidarity

This week, I was asked by the Fulbright commission to define my supplementary project in 100-200 words.   As a Fulbright grantee, I am required to dedicate 20 hours a week to a project of my choice in addition to the hours I put in to fulfill the grant that I received (in my case teaching English at UNPRG.  The project is about as open as possible.  It can be anything from doing research towards a master’s thesis or collecting folktales from local populations to compile a book or coaching kids’ sports.  In February when I met the commission in Lima along with the other 3 grantees to Peru, we were told our project could be anything we wanted to dedicate our time to, as long as we could have a sense of accomplishment and success.  They simply want us to be “successful.”  

I gave it some thought and ended up deciding to partner with a local NGO.  “How do I explain my project so succinctly?”  I asked myself.  “Do I even have a ‘project’?”  With the reassurance of the dictionary’s definition of a project, I began to write.  Titling my project Bonds of Solidarity, I ended with:

With the aim to learn more about life in rural Peru, to serve and connect with others and to gain a better understanding of how non-governmental organizations function, I decided to partner with  Centro de Investigación y Promoción del Desarrollo Sostenible (CIPDES) an NGO based out of Chiclayo.

With this organization, I travel to rural areas of the department at least two days a week to help with projects such as installing drip irrigation systems to increase crop yields for local farmers and to bring water to homes that previously had no running water and identifying families with children in need of improved homes or kitchens to improve their health and quality of life.  For such families it may mean working with several institutions to help get them water, a toilet or a stove to contain their firewood so that they do not have to breathe in smoke all day as food is cooking.  I began a small project of offering help with homework for children in the village of Eten a few hours a week. 

Partnering with CIPDES is proving to be rewarding and challenging, helping me to grow both personally and professionally.  

Several of these parts of my project have already been mentioned in previous posts, but new developments are always unfolding. 

Last weekend I had the opportunity to help with and support two different health workshops.  On Friday, CIPDES held a seminar for people from many of Peru’s departments to explain the positive experiences that they have had with two mobile clinics in this province.  CIPDES will be turning over their two semi-truck polyclinics to the government soon since the government is better equipped to finance the project.  The mobile clinics are taken to underdeveloped rural areas in which no medical services are available and numerous specialists travel voluntarily to spend up to 10 days in a location treating the local population, be it dental care, delivering babies, performing surgeries or simply doing routine examinations.   The following day, I collaborated with 8 nursing students from a private university in Chiclayo to explain common health related issues in homes to women and elderly individuals in Ciudad Eten and to identify problems that they have in their homes.  Able to relate to several of their situations after my time in Kenya, I feel compelled to continue with the project and hope that we are able to improve the quality of life for some of these women and their children.  Most of them are cooking with firewood on the ground, meaning that it is not good for their backs, that they are breathing in smoke all day (and so are their children) and their eyes are also being damaged by the smoke.  Additionally, several of them do not have water in their homes (and therefore only pit latrines).  One of the mothers doesn’t even have a latrine in her home!  This week, I also got to visit the rural community of Valle Hermoso, to see the small cabinet that holds all the medical treatment available to the local residents and learned about the anthrax problems that struck the community a few months back as the virus is always living in the soil and can infect livestock (and subsequently people) under certain conditions. 

Additionally, CIPDES provides support to several rural schools, as it sees education as an integral part of helping people to move out of poverty, improving their quality of life.  On Thursday afternoons, I help children with homework or teach small English lessons to children in Eten.  This week on Friday, I got the chance to accompany one of CIPDES’s employees to distribute toys and educational materials that the NGO had purchased for some of the schools that they support.  Seeing the children and teacher’s excitement and curiosity was rewarding and reminded me of how blessed I am.

CIPDES also works in the environmental sector supporting conservation projects.  Last weekend, I had the opportunity to go to Media Luna, a beach reached only by climbing a large rocky hill and descending the other side.  The cliffs near Media Luna are one of the world’s largest resting places for pelicans as well as home to blue-footed birds and the Humbolt penguin which is nearly extinct. 

We got to take a tour of the conservation site, learned about how they are running their programs and also learned about the injustice of rock collecting.  There are so many things that we do not think about and take for granted.  When we see rocks on a playground in the USA, I doubt many of us stop to wonder where they came from and the work that it took to get them there.  As it turns out, there are several people working near this beach, barely making enough money to put food into their stomachs.  Unfortunately these men are being exploited by some American companies, being forced to run heavy bags of rocks up the steep sandy slopes of the coast to a place where a truck can access them to be transported to the USA as cheap materials.  It makes me so sad to see people being exploited in such a manner, especially when they are doing work much harder than most people I’ve met!

Today, I went to Tierra Blanca (near Chongoyape) where a peace corps volunteer from Maryland is working to build Peru’s first “eco-library.”  This building will have a neat design, if the funds are found to finish the project.  All is ready except for having the necessary cement.  Instead of using bricks of adobe to fill the insides of the walls, plastic bottles stuffed with other non-degradable plastic trash will be used.  The community members have collected and stuffed over 7000 bottles.   

After helping a bit lugging rocks for the base this morning, I went with a few other individuals to Chaparrí, a conservation reserve and home to the “spectacled bear.”  We did see one.  

I also met the director of the reserve who turns out to be Heinz Plenge, a world-renowned photographer for Discovery Channel and National Geographic!  (If you want to check out some of his amazing photography see http://www.plenge.com). The dry forest is home to many types of unique birds that are found nowhere else in the world. 

                Many times I feel as though I am not serving others nearly as much as they are serving me.  I am constantly learning about the fascinating world around us.  By working together, by sharing information, joys and struggles, by trying to lift one another up, we can all be part of a better world through bonds of solidarity.  

Kids in Kimori Kenya

For those of you who followed my time in Kenya and felt compelled to support some of the kids in Kimori, I've helped to start a program to support some of the children's education (especially those without parents or with single mothers).  Hold a Hand is a project to help with education as well as to start sustainable development projects in the region, such as artisan crafts to bring in income for some of the families.  For those interested the link for the school Kimori Academy and for Hold a Hand are found below.
Kimori Schools
Hold a Hand