Time to Adjust...Again....

The last few weeks have been busy and slow all at once. I spent almost a full week out of my site because of a memorial service and meeting presentation in Azogues, a weekend getaway to the beach J, and then another trip back to the pharmacy in Azogues to get medicine for my pink eye.

The trip to the coast was actually more travel than time there, and the weather was awful. I spent the majority of my time inside with MacKenzie and Meaghan and only touched the sand once, but it was still nice to get away for two days. I took the early (5:30 am) bus back into Azogues on Monday morning in order to give classes in the school.

I really enjoy working in the school and spending time with the kids, but it is also disheartening to be at the school and see the lack of structure and discipline the kids have. Most of them run around, coming and going from class as they please, hitting others, talking back, and outright refusing to complete work. I have very little influence since I am only with each class for 40 minutes each week, so I try and focus on being upbeat and positive with them, encouraging them all to participate as much as possible. From what I have seen, there is also limited discipline at home. People are afraid of making kids mad or upset because the worst thing would be for them to cry. To avoid having them cry, they are given most anything they want. While I know I got many things as a kid, I also had some discipline, rules and structure, which I appreciate more and more each day (even if I didn’t like it at the time) J.

Another tough aspect of working in the school is seeing the special needs children and how they don’t receive any special attention. This is an area I think I can work in, so eventually I hope to talk to the director of the school about it. The special needs children are often called the “dumb ones,” and I’m told not to bother with them because they won’t understand anyways. They are sort of left off to the side to do their own thing (or nothing at all), and usually end up causing trouble with other students because they are not in a proper environment to cater to their needs.

I woke up on Tuesday with pink eye, which I knew because of my past experience and the pink eye rapidly spreading around the school. The kids don’t really understand that it is contagious, so they are touching each other’s eyes, then touching other people, etc, so it was just a matter of time until I got it. I called Quito and got the name of the medicine I needed form the Peace Corps doctor, but this of course meant a full day of travelling to be able to get into Azogues and back. After this, I was tired of travelling and decided I would stay in my site, so I spent 12 days straight in site, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is one of the longest times I’ve been here in a row.

Things I realized during my days here:

-          I receive about 10% of phone calls and text messages that I should be getting, and often receive them much later when the wind blows a burst of signal in.

-          I can get cellphone service in two places on the roof, but I have to brave the guinea pigs and chickens, plus hear the conversation over the crowing rooster. I’ve decided it is much better during daylight when I can at least keep an eye on them.

-          While they may look the same, the guinea pigs here do not have the same cute personality of those in the US and I don’t enjoy having them run loose in my hallway.

-          Sharing baked goods with the family and extended family is still the way to go, and they are no reciprocating by sending various foods into my kitchen for me!

-          It really does get warmer here, and the days have been sunny and seemingly hot after the past few cold months. My room never gets warm, however, because it doesn’t get sunlight and the 2 inch spaces around the windows lets all the cold air and wind in at night.

-          The healthsystem allows children to receive care without parental permission. If they’re old enough to come into the subcentro alone, they’re old enough to get treated (the youngest injection I saw was 11 years old). Also, the doctors can go into the schools and vaccinate anyone they need to at any point

I am now spending the weekend in Cuenca to have my laundry done, complete all the Peace Corps work I have via e-mail, and just explore the city. The family is in Guayaquil to bring MacKenzie to the airport, so when I go back I will be the only gringa for hours. It is almost starting over again, so it will be another tough while adjusting to life without the support and friendship of MacKenzie. I think the family has finally accepted that I am the one who will be here for the next two years, however, so things are going very well in that regard.

Work in the subcentro has picked up and I am getting much more support with the Peace Corps work I have to complete and with doing things there. We had a meeting with the health volunteers (finally…) and while only 3 of them showed up, Lucy told them that she doesn’t have much time, so I will be in charge of running the meetings and working with them. We are starting this week with making a cucumber salad so they can learn new, healthy recipes. They are really excited about learning more recipes, and hopefully they will also become excited about working in the gardens because nutrition is a large area of concern here.

There is a lot of change here and a lot of new things happening, so I’m excited to see how it all plays out. I hope everyone is doing well in the Sates – I miss you all!

Besos,

Kerry

Always more to do!

Hola a todos!

It has been yet another week here in Zhoray and wow does it feel like time is flying by! Before I know it, it is the weekend again and I am travelling into Azogues for my Saturday outing.

I am starting to fall into a routine, which the Peace Corps discouraged during our first few months, but I think it’s a healthy routine that still allows me to integrate into the community. Sunday is my day around the house, Monday my day in the school, and the rest of the week work at the subcentro. The evenings are still spent baking and cooking, but more importantly just hanging out with people in the family. I am happy with routine and the predictability, so this is a welcome new weekly schedule!

Sunday reaffirmed my long-held knowledge that I would not make a good, old-fashioned housewife. From 8:30am-7:00pm I was baking, cleaning, washing clothes and bathing without a second of rest. I washed clothes for 4 hours, but I got about half of my dirty clothes done and we had some sun late Sunday and all of Monday, so my clothes dried in a day! Also, I learned that I’m not that bad at it (slow, but thorough) and it is not soap stains in my clothes, it is just the discoloration that comes from washing on a stone and drying in the sun. Super. So it is a toss-up about whether light or dark colored clothes are better – the light colors get stains from everyday living, but the dark are as good as stained with the discoloration from washing. Hmmmm, I guess I will just have to get used to having stained clothing!

From there, Nayeli and I made more carrot cake. It is quite a process to wash, peel and chop the carrots for the cake, and that is only the first step. It took us all afternoon to make the cake and cream-cheese frosting, but both turned out well! We made a lot this time, so we sent cakes to all the relatives and still had some to enjoy ourselves J. The whole process is slowed by frequently having to wash dishes (on the laundry stone where there is a water valve) in order to complete the next step. Also, only one pan will fit in the toaster oven at a time, so there is a lot of waiting involved for the cakes to bake.

After baking, I was finally able to shower because we had running water! Not having water is something that I am still not very used to. There is supposedly a water key in the subcentro that controls the water flow. If it is open, then we get water in the house but people on the other side of the street and up the hill don’t get water. When it’s closed, the other people get water. So it is a fine balance of sharing the water and also who wants to go up the hill to open or close the valve without making everyone on the other side angry. Then there are the times when there just isn’t any water for anyone! Usually we have water for a few random hours a day, and the rest of the time there isn’t any. MacKenzie and I try to keep the 3 pots on the stove full to have water for cooking and drinking when there isn’t any more, but even then there are times when we don’t have any. Of course when it does come on, everyone wants to do all their water-chores and bathing, so it quickly runs out. Es si es, just another thing that I try to accept, ignore, and not dwell on!

Classes went well at the school again on Monday, but I was worn out afterwards (as always). The kids are all high energy, needing constant attention in rapid Spanish, so it really takes my energy, but it’s a lot of fun! After class I went to make my own lunch, but they saw that I was toasting bread to make a sandwich and I was immediately sent downstairs to “eat a real meal that will fill my stomach and keep out the ‘mal-aire,’ or bad air, that made me sick last time.” So, I went downstairs and ate another scrumptious mystery plate, this time of intestines and stomach (and who knows of what…). Mmmmm, that will certainly keep me from getting sick!

I’ve started entering patient names and file numbers into an electronic Excel document at the subcentro – my first idea that they’ve liked and let me work on! How it is now, the ficha (file) numbers can be found by looking up a person’s two last names that are filed in “alphabetical order.” The reality is that the names are not filed well, the drawers are disorganized, and it takes up to 15+ minutes to find a single patient’s file number. Then comes the actual finding of the ficha, which often takes even longer. While there isn’t much I can do about organizing the fichas right now, I can put the names on the computer to easily search for the patients. It is a really slow process because there are about 4,000 names to enter and the handwriting in the books they are kept in is usually illegible, so I do the best I can and then the subcentro staff will help me fill in the gaps with what I can’t read. It is tedious, but keeps me busy and will be very helpful when it’s done!

I left Zhoray with the staff on Wednesday to go to Azogues with Lucy. I stayed with her because the monthly area meeting was earlier today. Brittney and I did a little presentation to all the doctors and directors of the area to present us, Cuerpo de Paz, our work here, etc. I think they were amused by our Spanish more than anything, but at least they were awake for our presentation, unlike most of the others. I am now spending the weekend out with Lucy and her sister and a few friends – another little vacation in case I’ve been working too hard J.

Happy birthday, Grandma! Hello to everyone at home, I miss you all!

Kerry

The slow process of integration

Hola a todos!

It certainly is always an adventure traveling to and from Azogues. On the way home last Saturday, the bus broke down about 30 minutes from Azogues, so the usual 2 hour ride quickly turned into a 3 ½ hour bus ride as we sat for an hour trying to repair it and then another 30 minutes waiting for a new bus to get us and bring us into Zhoray. I decided to take an earlier bus instead of the last bus to try and get home before the rain and dark, but we ended up pulling into Zhoray about 45 seconds in front of the later bus!

I woke up Sunday to Nayeli knocking on the door asking when we were going to start baking (apparently the set time we had decided on the day before wasn’t really understood). So I got up and we made banana and chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast, then we started the carrot cake adventure. The carrot cake itself turned out well, but Nayeli insisted on using small, silicon, star-shaped cup-cake holders, so it took us hours to bake all of them. The campo-style cream-cheese frosting turned out horribly, so it went straight into the pig bucket and we just ate the carrot cake plain. The cake was a huge hit with the whole extended family, including Suca (host mom), so I have plans to make more with her sometime soon, in a big tin and in the real oven in her kitchen. I’ve decided that if nothing else, I can try to win over the community through baked goods. So far, it’s working well!

Sunday was great because Nayeli and I hung out together all day, along with the various other kids who would appear for an hour at a time, but I also got to spend more time with Suca. I sat down in the store with her for a few hours, then helped tend to the cows. I’m putting in my time with the cows now in hopes that I’ll get to help milk them once they give birth – there are two that are both pregnant, so I’m sure there will be plenty more work to do once the milking begins.

The rest of the week passed smoothly. I am not doing too much workwise right now, but I’m ever hopeful that something will start soon. I really need to get working on my community diagnostic surveys, but I don’t have any support with it and it’s hard to make myself go ask people alone if I can ask them a lot of personal questions. I only have a month left to get them done, so I guess that’s what is going to have to happen, so we’ll see how it goes. Otherwise I am still sitting in the subcentro most of the time, which is great for socializing and practicing Spanish, but not quite what I want to be doing for an extended amount of time. I’m trying to be patient, realizing I haven’t been here that long. As I get more and more comfortable, I can also become more proactive and make my own work, it’s just going to take a little time.

My Spanish continues to improve – I am definitely understanding much more than I was and I am beginning to be able to speak a little more at a time. I think spending time with the kids is really helping because they just laugh at my mistakes, then correct them for me, so I learn what it is supposed to be. Trying to be polite, the adults frequently won’t correct me, so I have no way of knowing when I’m saying things correctly or not. Aside from Nayeli, I spend time with Erika, the other girl living at our house to be able to go to school. She, Nayeli and I hang out in the evenings, their newest interest being to learn how to type quickly, so they practice on my computer each night. Little Sebitas (Sebastian, the 2-year-old whose dad owns the house I live in) frequently comes around to see what I’m doing in the kitchen and hang out for a while. As much as my Spanish is improving, I understand about ¼ of what he says, but he’s cute and hilarious, so he’ll just keep talking regardless of whether anyone knows what he’s rambling about, then he’ll break into song and dance!

MacKenzie has begun cleaning out her room and she gave me a bunch of books, so I have finally started the reading I had hoped to do during my time in the Peace Corps. I am currently on “Love in the Time of Cholera,” and I am looking for any and all suggestions, so please send them to me!

A little more on the food: the most interesting thing I ate this week was cow udder. Suca has begun feeding me dinner again, so I was lucky enough to have cow udder early in the week. I knew it was a mystery meat and nervously asked MacKenzie, who reluctantly revealed it to me. As much as the thought of it weirded me out a bit, the overall dish wasn’t bad. The rice and veggie flavorings covered everything else. As for my own cooking, I have been making my own lunches and loving the mole sauce that my mom sent me from Mexico – a little shake of it in most of the dishes adds some much needed spice and flavor! The last baking adventure of the week was apple pie. I decided to start practicing early to get ready for the holidays - it certainly wasn’t Grandma’s apple pie, but it turned out well! Next on Nayeli’s list is peach pie, which should require about 30 peaches because they are the size of golf balls here, but delicious none-the-less. Here are few more pictures of the baking adventures and my life in Zhoray.

Happy birthday to Darcy and Jamie, happy block break to the girls at CC, and hello to everyone at home!

Love,

Kerry