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Cerro El Pino

We took our first overnight visit to the campo this week. It was nice to get out of the training center and see some of the countryside for a change. On the way to the bus station, we stopped by an area called Cerro El Pino, a district of about 20,000 inhabitants in the hills of Lima. Cerro El Pino, in the past, was known for its crime and its horrible garbage problem. The problem - there was zero garbage collection. None. Now imagine living with 20,000 of your neighbors where the means of garbage disposal was taking your bag of trash and throwing it in the street.

At some stage, the good folks at Cerro El Pino got fed up with living in a landfill and did something about the problem. With the help of a non-governmental do-gooder organization, the community undertook a project to clean up the town. The district had to get vehicles to collect and transport the garbage, hire some help, and educate the residents on separating out the recyclables, putting their garbage in bags, and putting it out for the garbage man at the appropriate time. Sounds easy enough but when you’ve lived your entire life just throwing your waste out on the streets, that’s a pretty major life adjustment.

The newly recruited garbage collectors had experience. Their experience was wandering the streets of Cerro El Pino when it was still a shit hole, picking through people’s garbage for glass, tin and plastic, and whatever else they could sell, and taking it to a recycling center for the cash. The committee recruited these folks, trained them, gave them uniforms, personal protective equipment, an actual paying job and, most important, a sense of self worth. They’ve even been featured on popular television news shows around here.

The committee encountered a lot of resistance as they had to change people’s behavior and also had to start charging a small fee to make this a sustainable project. They’re still fighting that battle but it’s being won poco a poco. Walking through the streets of Cerro El Pino (escorted by a squad of armed Peruvian National Police) there was some garbage lying around here and there but for the most part the streets were clean, swept, and well maintained.

As for the crime, I did see a guy with a White Sox hat so it appears there’s still work to be done on that front.

Routines (Or the Three S’s – Part I)

Warning –The Three S’s refer to Shit, Shower and Shave. If you don’t want to read about any of these things, STOP HERE. I don’t get to the Shit portion until the very end so feel free to read until the last couple of paragraphs or so.


In the US you (and by you I mean you, me, Nobel Laureate President Obama, everyone) have set routines that you don’t really think about, you just do them. Take the Three S’s for instance; you wake up, walk bleary-eyed and barefooted to this gleaming white thing in the bathroom, take a piss, take a shit, push a silver lever and, presto, the shit and piss go away. Where? Doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it. It’s taken care of. Two seconds later you wash your hands with warm running water coming out of this other gleaming white thing next to the first gleaming white thing.

Routine 1 disrupted - Here it’s a little different. You sit on a toilet (not so gleaming) without a seat and fire off your deuce. The toilet paper goes in the waste basket next to the toilet. Never throw your toilet paper in the shitter because it will clog up. To flush, grab a bucket, dip some water out of the 55 gallon drum in the bathroom, walk over to the toilet and pour it in. Repeat as necessary. If it clogs up for whatever reason, there’s a plunger under the stairs across the courtyard. Go get it, walk back, plunge and pour. In the US, I would shit at will; home, library, restaurants, parties, baht mitzvahs, Conference Room D in the office, everywhere. Here, you choose your time and location very carefully. Now that I’ve been here a month, S #1 has become nearly routine, thankfully. I apologize to my readers. I meant to put this at the end. Oh well, the worst is over so you may as well go on.

Shower – In the US you run water and adjust the temperature so that it’s just right, turn on the shower, step in and wash yourself with warm soapy water. (I’m a top to bottom guy myself) Been a long day? Stay in there a little longer and let the nice warm water melt away some of the stress. Relationship problems? Wash that man right out of your hair. When you’re done, dry off, kick on the exhaust fan, put on some deodorant, get dressed and you’re on your merry way.

Routine 2 disrupted – Here the water here only comes for one hour in the morning every other day so you have to make sure that you have enough water to last the entire shower. Hot water? Not a feature at my house. The mission is simple, get in, get clean, get out, don’t waste water. Since the water is cold, I’ve adopted the poco a poco (little by little) method. With a washrag, wet myself part by part, turn off water, lather up and hit the important parts first and if I’m not freezing my ass off yet hit the rest. By then I’m somewhat used to the cold water so it’s OK to turn on the shower and rinse off. Done. Towel off. I didn’t have the presence of mind to bring a towel with me so I bought a towel here for 6 soles ($2). It dries like a towel that cost me two dollars so I mostly air dry. (I just washed my towel today and, unlike the American flag, these colors do run.) I’ve been showering about every 3rd day or so depending on how long I can stand myself. Key to not smelling like complete ass? Generous applications of talcum powder.

Shave - In the US I’d run some warm water, lather up with Neutrogena Skin Clearing Shave Cream and shave my face and head with a Mach III Turbo with the help of the mirror that’s right in front of me. Rinse. Towel dry. Apply a dab of Nivea for Men Revitalizing Lotion with Q-10 to face, head and neck for a nice soothing finish.

Routine 3 disrupted – Here the sink in the bathroom sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t, so I wind up using the shower to shave most times. I stick my head under the shower, wash my face with regular soap and shave by feel since the mirror’s about six feet away. No strong jet of water to rinse off the razor so it kind of gunks up. I've tried to tap it out on the shower wall but then I just get small pieces of concrete stuck in the blades. I thought I’d been doing a pretty good job of shaving until one of my fellow trainees pointed out that there was a fairly good size patch on the back of my head that I’d missed for quite some time.

I gotta say, as much of a pain in the ass it is to take care of the 3 S’s since I’ve been here, there’s an odd sense of accomplishment when you fire off a successful, uneventful deuce or take a refreshing shower. Now that I’ve been here for a month, the 3 S’s are becoming routine again.

I also want to make it absolutely clear that I am very thankful to even have a shitter, shower and sink in my bathroom. When I get to my site I’ll likely not have any of these luxuries. That’s when I’ll have to develop a brand new set of routines which will be covered in Routines – Part Deaux (Or the Three S’s – The Revenge of Sith).

Condom Races

After our chat on the different types of maladies Peace Corps Volunteers in Peru suffer (diarrhea, worms, insect bites, giardia, crazy egg laying fleas, etc.) we were off to the races. Condom races. The last few medical education sessions have been on STDs in the Peace Corps so, of course, no sex talk is complete without the condom demonstration and practicum (so to speak).


It seems a bit unseemly for a grown man my age to participate in a condom race with a bunch of folks nearly half my age. But that’s training so I had to go with it. A volunteer gave us the proper condom use chat and the demonstration. Instead of the requisite banana she used a dildo.

We split up into our three groups, Health, Environment, and Water & Sanitation for our practicum which was a relay race. Run down to the chair, pick up the big, thick, red, veiny, uncircumcised dildo complete with balls, open up the package with the condom (lubricated for our pleasure) and slap it on. Then take it off, and run back and tag the next in line with lubed hand.

My group, Wat/San, kicked the other teams asses pretty handily although looking back maybe we shouldn’t have celebrated so vigorously. After all, this group is about 75% male and probably shouldn’t be too proud of being better at slapping a rubber on a cock that’s pointed towards us.

Pollada

Saturday our Water and Sanitation group went to the Catholic University in Lima to look at some different development-type stuff like water pumps, renewable sources of energy, improved kitchens, etc. Some of the folks went down to the coast to get some seafood but I had to get back to the house for a Pollada. A Pollada is a fund raiser, a big chicken blowout. The event was thrown to raise money for a group of graduating nursing students to go on their graduation trip up to the sierra. In attendance, about 22 nursing students, 50 chickens and 10 cajas of beer. Cost 7 soles (<$3) + beer for 4 soles (<$2) each. The chicken was some of the best tasting chicken I’ve ever had (never mind that there wasn’t a ton of meat on them).


The party started off kind of slow with the men sitting around in one room eating chicken and drinking beer and the women in the kitchen cooking the chicken and doing whatever else it is that women do when they get together. They started cooking the chicken on the grill but ran out of charcoal so they improvised with a makeshift wood-burning stove made out of bricks set on the concrete floor of the courtyard just outside the door to the bathroom. I’m not sure where they got the wood but it looked like someone chopped up their bed frame and brought it by for the occasion.

I hung out with the men in living room but they started to get pretty drunk and they were yelling at the women to put on shitty American 80s music (esta música es “Sooper”) instead the festive salsa music that was on (which the guys considered to be “basura”) We drank al estilo Peruano which means someone opens a beer, they pour themselves a glass, hand the bottle to the person next to them, drink the beer out of the glass, shake the foam and backwash out of it, and hand the glass to person holding the beer bottle. That guy gives the glass another shake (optional), pours himself a beer, hands off the bottle, drinks the beer out of the glass, and so on around the circle. The glass doesn’t get washed. Ever. Sometimes it gets broken when they drop it on the living room floor while shaking the shit out of it, but it’s bad form to go to the sink and rinse it out. After it gets passed around the circle a few times, the glass is pretty sticky and, well, pretty damn gross.

Turns out the women weren’t just sitting around cooking and gossiping, they were passing around the bottle too. I stepped over the cooking operation to hit the head and afterward passed the bottle around with them for a bit. Turns out I broke beer drinking with women protocol by not holding onto the beer bottle and serving them (but how was this gringo to know?). The Pollada really sounded like the beginning of a really good/bad porno: 22 two nursing students, ten cases of beer and 50 chickens. But in reality it wasn’t as hot as I had imagined. The Pollada turned into a dance party but I was getting kind of tipsy and didn’t want to embarrass myself with bad gringo dancing so I went to bed. The Pollada ended about 2am?

I’m not sure how much money they raised but most of the chicken hearts and livers wound up in the soup I had for lunch and dinner the next day.

Field Trip

We went on a field trip with our Spanish class to the National Museum of Culture in Lima to learn a little about the history and culture of Peru. We went down there in the training center’s combi which stalled out at one of the craziest intersections I’ve seen in a while. It kind of reminded me of an intersection in Manhattan during rush hour traffic except this one had mototaxis (three-wheeled motorized rickshaw-type taxis), older vintage Japanese cars, semi trucks, combies, etc.) There was a hell of a lot of honking, fist waving and pleasantries exchanged like in NYC. Fortunately, our able combi driver Ali was able to get her revved up and out of the intersection before any serious damage was done.


We learned a bit about the ancient cultures like the Incas, Nazcas and saw their artifacts. Of course there were a bunch of colonial-era type paintings of the Virgin Mary. In these paintings, the Virgin was always wearing a robe that was narrow up close to her head and tapered out in a kind of triangle shape at the bottom. A halo emanated from behind her head so it kind of looked like the sun behind a mountain. When the Spaniards arrived, they forced their religion on the people of Peru (as colonists are prone to do). Folks aren’t quick to give up their religious beliefs just because some asshole is holding a sword to their head. The local artists did paint the Virgin, but the robe represented the spirit of the mountain and the halo represented the sun which they also worshipped. At the time, the artists may have been giving the Spaniards a good old fashion “fuck you and your religion” but since then, the two religions have blended together and you see elements of both the original natural beliefs and Catholicism.

Up on the second floor there was an XIX century oil painting of two carriage drivers in a collision and whippin’ the shit out of each other over a fare while dust is flying, dogs are barking and people are hollerin’ in the streets. Not a whole lot’s changed in the past couple hundred years.

The Nazca warriors used to put mummified sculls one their belts.  Early psycological warfare.

Peruvian Fireworks

Now I’m not exactly sure if the Yanacoto party was a virgin party but by the time we got there at 11:30pm, it was rocking along pretty good. It was outdoors in a little plaza like area with a dirt floor. There was a traditional band from the sierra playing their saxes and singing. Folks were dancing like they do in the sierra which looks kind of similar to native American dance, shuffling their feet and waving their arms a bit. There were other bands but I was too concerned with the beer and fireworks to notice. The beer was kind of expensive, 5 soles (<$2 for about a liter of beer).


We showed up just in time for the big moment. There were a couple of fairly good sized bulls made out of bamboo and colored paper and a castle structure made of bamboo and colorful pinwheels. These were the fireworks. A man put one of the bull frames over his head and torso, lit the fuse and started dancing around the center of the dance floor. First, fire started blowing out of its horns and then the whole thing just started shooting colored sparks all over everywhere, including the spectators who had gathered around. He did this with a couple of the bulls and then went out to the bamboo structure in the middle of the street which stood about 3 stories tall. He lit the fuse which slowly crept up the structure and set off showers of sparks, launching screaming, burning bamboo projectiles high into the air, and lighting up fiery pinwheels. Then the fire would creep up to the next level and set off the next barrage. Of course there is always the grand finale where everything went up in flames and things were launched, screaming, spinning and burning.

No one got hurt or didn’t say anything if they did. Apparently Peruvians aren’t quite as litigious as gringos.