Field based training

Well, I got back home to Yanacoto this morning at 10AM after an all night bus ride home from Piura City. This may be a ditzy blog from a tired woman!

What a week! We rode all night in a bus from Lima to Piura City last Saturday. The buslines here put Greyhound to shame! They call it a bus cama which means bed bus. Big comfortable lazy boy type seats, movies and food. We all really slept pretty well. Then after 12 hours bus to Piura City, the 4 volunteers and one trainer in our group went by a small bus to Las Lomas, hired a private care to get us to Porterillo where we met two great PC volunteers, Lizzi and Michael who were our hosts for 2 days. We stayed in a small hostel there. Day 1 we walked a LONG way uphill to see the progress on a latrine project Lizzi was working with. Beautiful country in the foothills of the sierra with rice fields, banana trees, birds, burros and irrigation ditches. Yours truly walked probably 2 or more miles uphill to this site hearing along the way "mas arriba!" or higher, higher. Lizzi´s project was really inspiring, the pueblos dotted with the blue doors of new clean latrines installed in collaboration with another NGO.

In the afternoon, after walking back down, our group gave a talk at a community meeting on how to clean the latrines, handwashing and tieing up or corralling the pigs to prevent trichanosis (I can´t spell in either language now). My part was brief because my Spanish is really weak in front of a group. And then fatigue and heat caught up with me and I abandoned the group to find a latrine before I threw up and fell over in front of the 45 or so community people gathered. However, I recovered quickly with some orange soda and on we went! Every tiny community we went through had at least one gardener with beautiful flowers and stopping to admire the flowers gave me a chance to rest!

The next day we went to a secondary school for a class with the teenagers on HIV and AIDS given by Michael. I was so impressed with his teaching, the kids were attentive and knew the basics about prevention. We all really enjoyed this visit and were inspired by Michael and Lizzie´s work.

On Wednesday we left for another pueblo quite a long way into the sierra. Drove by private cars hired on the street to a beautiful tiny town where we ate lunch and waited for a combi. The combi was full so we wound up in another priave care headed uphill on dirt roads. At one point the driver stopped suddenly and tightened the lug nuts on the tires which struck me as hilarious given that we´d been bouncing along for over an hour on rutted road and I have no idea why at that point he decided to check the tires to see if they would stay on the car...

Sicches was so beautiful with greenery, flowers and many birds I´d never seen. Brian and Angela were our host volunteers, a married couple working in programs of health and environment in a setting very isolated. They have an organic garden at the health clinic, with the primary focus on nutrition and garbage collection. I was able to see the mountains of Equador in the distance so said hello to Sara Ponce´s land! The beauty of the country was definitely there but also severe deforestation, 100% with sugar cane fields and dry, bare hillsides. We attended a great class on nutrition for infants and toddlers at the health post organized by Brian in a community where 46% of the children have stunting due to poor nutrition and chronic diarrhea. Then we saw the water system... These intrepid Peace Corps volunteers have their work cut out for them!

In this Sicches, we stayed in private homes and I slept in an inside room of an adobe house with a dirt floor. The host grandmother showed me to my windowless room, warned me to watch out for some flying amimalita that bites (zancudos which I still can´t identify in English). I spent my first night awake, listening and swatting. Lots of spiders, Sean would have been totally unglued. However, the family was warm, the 8 year old girl delightful and what the hell, I´m hear to tell the story.

The second day in Sicches, I stayed behind at the health post to talk with the obstetris (another word I can´t spell) about childbirth and women´s health care. This will go in another post! I learned a lot including that my Spanish holds up pretty well one on one in a familiar subject area.

Then one of the men in the town told me something I barely understood about there being only one bus at 430 that afternoon because the next two days were holidays. I got Javier, our trainer to get the story untangled because I only understood a tiny portion of this guy´s Spanish. So after a lot of excitement and flurry, we were on a bus to Piura City a day early.

So now I´m home in Yanacoto, tired, dirty and satisfied with a great week. On Tuesday we learn who wins the election and on Thursday, we learn our work sites for the next 2 years. Then next Monday, we head to our sites for a 4 day visit.

Wow.