"Living Poor" in Peru

Having finally finished the television series The Wire (McNulty, you will be missed), I have turned to books once more. I was recently handed a book called “Living Poor” by Maritz Thomsen, about Maritz’s time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador back in the 60’s, right when Peace Corps was getting started.

Peace Corps was very different back then, or so I am told. For starters, they had language and program training in the U.S. They also were basically dropped off in their country and never heard from Peace Corps until their service was up. They also got to choose their sites back then, drive cars, and even buy property! Obviously, a lot of things have changed since then.

As with any institution, and especially a government institution, there is a lot of bureaucracy these days. We have had 10 weeks of training in country along with 3 separate workshops after training, not including monthly regional meetings and reports to fill out periodically. We also have cell phones, computers, and that lovely thing called the world-wide-web.

So yes, a lot of things have changed. But the surprising thing is that even if Peace corps itself has changed and obviously we are 50 years after Mr. Thomen’s service…a lot of things he wrote are still applicable even today.

When talking about my Peace Corps experience in general, there are a lot of things that I just can’t put into words, which is pretty much everything, but thankfully Maritz has hit a lot of those issues right on the button.

Here are some examples:

“After listening for hours to a language which is badly understood, the brain goes into a paralysis; it closes the doors and shuts up shop”

This was truer in the beginning of my service, but it still is valid today. It takes so much strength to continuously follow a 4 hour meeting that afterwards all you can do is drool and stare out the window. Your brain is fried.

“I began to walk around town trying to get acquainted. But what an effort of the will it was in those first days to open the door of that sweet familiar room and go down into the street. A month later, to leave my tight little world of books, letters, pots, and pans, and walk into the country still required the one conscious decision to do it, like deciding to jump from a twelve-foot board into icy water”

This pertains to the beginning, once you first arrive at your site. I remember those days when it took every ounce of strength and courage to leave my nice, warm, cozy bed and to go out into the world and make myself known. This was especially made harder by my lack of Spanish skills and a lack of direction of what I was supposed to be doing. I used to make goals like “Meet a new person each day” or “go to the plaza and read.” Simple tasks and goals were what kept me going in the early days.

“Peace Corps Volunteers enter their new country so well briefed by their doctors on the hazards of the local foods that their first meals are terror-stricken experiences, gastronomic tightrope performances balanced between starvation and revulsion”

While I haven’t had it as bad as some volunteers, this is still partially true. I remember distinctly the day in training when Dr. Jorge talked solely on diarrhea: the different types, how often you will have it, and even the chance that you might go in your pants. I try to pay attention to cooking hygiene and seeing if the food has been washed before hand, etc. But it’s kind of hard when the custom here is to NOT refuse food, even if you think it’s been prepared poorly. I’ve also learned the hard way to avoid street food, but then again, time and again, I have a craving for it anyway.

“I think anyone who has not lived the wholly public life of a foreigner in a small town, where every scratch and belch is noted with fascinated curiosity, cannot realize how essential it is to have a place of refuge where you can hide from time to time and reform yourself”

I used to feel guilty (and sometimes still do), when I spend a lot of time in my room. But the truth of the matter is I’m on display 24/7. My house is surrounded by the road and the walkway path behind it. So if I want to just go outside and read, I’m either going to be honked at or hear someone calling out “gringa” riding past or be interrupted every 5 minutes to saludar the passerby-ers. While I admit, some of the shiny-new-car-smell has faded away, but then again, I usually meet at least one person a day that asks me “where are you from”, “what are you doing here”, and yes,” are you going to marry a Peruvian.”

“Along with everyone else I had been under the spell of Washington Peace Corps propaganda, which reports on the experiences of Volunteers in their different jobs. They are all reports of success-how Volunteer W comes to the high, arid town of A and leaves it two years later with running water, a chlorination system, and communal showers; …As a volunteer, you are orientated toward this kind of success; you want it desperately, unashamedly. When you make a mess of a project, it shakes you to the roots. It makes you feel, in fact, like the highly unpublicized cased of Volunteer Z working in the mountain village of C. All his projects had gone to hell, and his girl had written him that she was getting married that week to friend Q. Volunteer Z lay on his bed without moving for three days and, when the old Indian selling ice cream stuck his head through the window and yelled “helados,” suddenly jumped out of bed, ran outside, and bit the overeager salesman. Of course, the truth is that some days running outside and biting someone is probably the only rational move left to the volunteer.”

Just so you all know I haven’t bitten anyone yet. Ha. This quote to me is very funny as it describes a little of the insanity that we go through on a day-to-day basis. When I first got here, I wanted to effect a real change in the community. I wanted to be like Volunteer W. But my service is practically half way over and I haven’t really gotten much to show for it yet. So like always, my goals have changed a bit. Now, all I want is to have a successful project, something to be proud of, and something to be remembered by. There are times when I think it is possible, but once again, it depends on the people in the community…if they are motivated, if they are cooperative, if they are responsible. In the end, it’s up to them to see that a project continues for years…and overall, I think that is the biggest dream of a volunteer.

“They work only to eat today. There is no refrigeration, no way to store or save again that tomorrow that never comes”

I think this is true, especially when it comes to saving money. Many people live off the land, and if they need money, they’ll sell a pig or sell some produce. If they do come upon some money, they usually spend it on frivolous things. I’m not saying I’m above this by any means, but when, for instance, your cement floors aren’t finished or you don’t have vegetables on the table, I think they shouldn’t be going out and buying an s/80 encyclopedia or s/90 face cream.

“I began getting furious letters from my friends and family asking what was wrong, why didn’t I keep in touch?...It wasn’t only that I couldn’t think of anything to say; writing a letter also involved finding the envelope, steaming it open, addressing it, stamping it, getting it into the mailbox. The whole thing was impossibly complicated.”

I liked this quote, not so much as I have received furious letters from family members, but that this is a good example of how such a simple task in the states is so complicated and tiresome here. Just take today, for example: watering the garden. I recently planted a garden that is probably about 20 meters from the nearest faucet. At first, I was going to bring buckets of water down the hill, but realized that this wasn’t going to work as the garden was much too big. So then, we borrowed a hose from a neighbor. Perfect, I thought. But, there was a catch. There was no way to connect the hose to the faucet, so somehow, you had to basically attach a string from the hose to the faucet and then tie a plastic bag over that, hoping that you’ve got a good seal. Then your next problem was seeing if there was even water that day. What I’m basically saying is that nothing is easy. And that I will never again take things for granted it the states.

“There is no single way to smash out and be freed [of poverty]. A man has to break out in a dozen places at once. Most important, perhaps, he should start breaking out before he is six years old, for by then a typical child of poverty in a tropical nation is probably crippled by protein starvation, his brain dulled and his insides eaten up by worms and amoebas. No, more brutally true; if he is a typical child, an average child, by six he is dead.”

This pretty much sums up my philosophy about nutrition and also the reason for why I’m here. I was always left disappointed in college when the biggest nutritional problem we face as a nation is obesity, meanwhile other people are simply struggling to survive on the food that they have. I’ve had a good long time to think about the problem of malnutrition, as it is very prevalent in my community. And what it comes down to…what everything in fact comes down to, is good nutrition. Those first 3 years are the most important of a person’s life as that is when the body and mind are developing. If a person does not receive good nutrition, they are left stunted, under-developed, and not reaching their full potential. Someone once joked that reason why Peruvians aren’t tall is because they were all malnourished as children. While I don’t believe that at all to be true, it does have a grain of truth in it.

“When you start bringing about change you often wonder what you’ve set in motion. I had been so anxious to get new money into the town, to get families earning more that I had scarcely thought about the new problems that new money might bring.”

I’ve thought about this a lot and have seen it first hand in my community and the surrounding communities. We often think that having more money is automatically going to bring about happiness and better health to the family, but as I stated before, when there is no such thing as money-management, things sometimes can get worse for the family. I’ve also been torn between the benefits and consequences of globalization. As more and more people gain more money, and hence, a larger view of the world, what normally is sacrificed is culture. How do you come to terms with that?

“As a peace corps volunteer we come to give of ourselves, but we are almost all a part of the Puritan ethic, and we make rules and set limits as to what we will give and on what terms, and what it is legitimate to ask of us. We want to be loved because we’re lovable, not because we’re rich gringos. But the people in the town don’t know the rules. “

While I’m not sure about what he means by the Puritan ethic, it is true about setting limits and what you are willing to give the people. When first coming to my community, I didn’t want the people to see me as Miss Moneybags, so I made it clear that I didn’t have any funds to give, but rather knowledge and information, while that is clearly not the case, as I make more money than most professionals and am able to receive grant funding. Now that I am entering into my second year, I’m more okay to giving of my own funds to certain projects because now the people see me for what I really have to offer and not just money.

“After years in Rio Verde it was like a fresh wind blowing through the mind to hear the names of books again”

While I’ve only been here a year, I still crave intellectual conversations with people as they are hard to come by. There isn’t a cultural norm of reading for fun or staying informed, as we would call it in the states, so it’s quite the find when you see a Peruvian reading a book…any book for that matter. However, I have been presently surprised by one of my neighbors that stays quite informed. He actually asked me my opinion about the oil spills in the gulf! Something I had just heard about a few days before him…increible!