The big two-four

As far as birthdays go, this year was pretty tranquilo.  My host mom made a small dinner for some friends in site, and we ate cake.  

But as a year-in-review type thing, here are things I did last year, and hopes for next year:

23 things I did last year

1. Rowed 112 miles down the Amazon in a raft
   
2. Became the madrina for the most adorable 12 kindergarten graduates that you’ll ever see
   
3. Taught my first group of teens sex ed
   
4. Painted a World Map in the Primary School
   
5. Painted a map of Peru in the Secondary School
   
6. Read all 7 Harry Potter books in Spanish
7. Visited home
   
8. Completed one year in Peru, one year in site, and had the mid-service meltdown
9. Taught English classes to both students and professors
10. Participated in a giant paint fight for Carnival in Cajamarca
    
11. Watched the Broncos lose the Super Bowl
12. Milked a cow
    
13. Learned to make queso fresco
14. Walked 9 days in the Cordillera Huayhuash, including over a pass of 16,400 ft, with my favorite hiking buddy
    
15. Learned to cross stitch
16. Ran a marathon
    
17. Started applying to medical school
18. Dated (and broke up with) one of the best people I’ve ever met
    
19. Wrote my first ever cover letter
20. Said bye to a best friend
    
21. Was thrown head first off a bridge over a 150 meter canyon
22. Taught a second year of sex ed, including meetings with parents
    
23. Was adopted by a Peruvian family
    

24 hopes for this year

1. Go to Mistura (food festival in Lima)
2. Bring 2 teens to a youth camp in Ica (help by donating HERE!)
3. Finish all my trainings with teens and parents in site
4. Leave my site ready for my replacement Volunteer
5. Finish Peace Corps feeling good about my service
6. Get a tattoo
7. Travel to Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia
8. Paraglide off of Giant Jesus in Rio
9. Celebrate Thanksgiving at home
10. Move to Denver
11. Finish applying to medical school
12. Get into medical school
13. Start medical school
14. Figure out all the technology in the developed world
15. Visit family and friends around the States
16. Ski every moment I possibly can
17. Stay in one place, without travelling, for more than one month
18. Run another marathon, or do a triathlon (or both)
19. Get a job
20. Stay in touch with my Peruvian family
21. Go to Italy
22. Visit Hamilton
23. Go to Telluride Bluegrass Festival
24. Play a lot of piano

Tantará students present their school

Check out this video that the students of the secondary school made to send to my World Wise Schools connection in Manitou Springs!

I Am A Runner

I can't count the number of times I've said, "I'm not a runner".  It always seems to go along with the phrase, "I'm a swimmer".  It's as though we swimmers have collectively decided that we don't have to be runners.  I can, however, tell you the first time I called myself a runner: it was about 3 minutes ago when I wrote the title of this blog post.

Training for the marathon for me, was a lot like Peace Corps in that it seemed to follow the same progression.  When I was just starting, it was exciting and relatively easy.  I felt motivated to leave my room each day and go on a run, and I felt good when I finished.  That happy feeling lasted for quite awhile.

Day 1

In Peace Corps, we talk about the "mid-service crisis".  The mid-service crisis is that point in the middle of service when the excitement of being there has long passed, but the light at the end of the tunnel has yet to appear.  Mine happened when I got back from visiting the States.  Marathon training was actually one of many things that helped me lift myself up every morning and eventually pulled me out of that slump.

I also had a mid-training crisis.  Around weeks 9 and 10 of training, suddenly motivating myself to pull on my shoes was a challenge.  The runs were getting longer, but the end was still out of sight.  As I struggled through my training schedule, I needed some way to get out of the rut I was in.  The answer came inside the book "Born to Run" by Christopher McDougall.  I was reading this book at the time, and came across a section that talks about the look of bliss, of complete serenity, on the faces of many ultra-runners.

Jenn Shelton: one of McDougall's examples of someone who is happy to run

So, I decided to start enjoying my runs.  Every time I started to hate running, I forced a smile on my face, took a deep breath, and looked at the mountains around me.  I forced myself to appreciate that I got to be outside, that I had this time to relax, and to remember that running a marathon was a choice I had made.  Even I was skeptical that this plan would work, but suddenly, I started to like running.  I stopped hitting Snooze in the morning, started looking forward to my runs, and felt a lot happier while I was running.

About to finish!

I wish I could write more about the actual marathon, but to be honest, I don't remember most of it.

Here are a few things I do remember:
1) Group photo at the start line

Ready to go!

2) Peeing in a park at Km 6 because all the toilets had lines
3) Seeing Mike taking pictures at Km 11, jumping in the air and almost falling over
4) Finding 2 bald men running at the same pace as me and pretending like I was part of their group between Km 18 and 27
5) Seeing Todd at Km 28
6) Someone handing me a peeled banana at Km 31 and gripping it in my hand for almost 10 minutes before realizing I really didn't want it and throwing it away
7) A really nice man at Km 36 giving me some Gatorade and telling me that I was almost there
8) The last 0.2 Km (because just 42 Km isn't quite enough), and finding it really hard to push myself to the finish line until I saw the giant group of friends waiting at the end, who gave me the strength to finish hard.

Team Peace Corps

The Marathoners

Doing my first marathon in the Peace Corps was a great experience.  Training helped me through some rough times, and being here helped me though the hard parts of training.  People in my town got very excited when they found out that I was training for a marathon, and began to stop me on the street to ask, "Did you run today?" or, "How many kilometers?"

I am already thinking about my next marathon, and I can confidently say, "I am a runner".

Poop Week

The Universidad Cayetano Heredia in Lima is doing a study on the prevalence of taeniasis and cysticercosis in Peru.  Taenia solium is a tapeworm that is spread through the consumption of undercooked pork.  If the eggs of the Taenia are eaten by a human, larvae can enter into the muscle or brain and form cysts, causing muscle pain, seizures, and all sorts of other problems, like death.

Yeah, pigs, I'm talking about you.

So the Universidad Cayetano sent me materials (and the lovely biologist, Lauralee Woods) to collect stool samples from as many people as possible.  They will test the samples for any parasites, and send treatment to those who have taeniasis.

Before we could start doing samples, I had to go door-to-door and do a survey of my town to collect information on how they keep their pigs, where and when they kill them, and also the general sanitation of their homes.  Then we had to coordinate dates when Health Center personnel would be available and get the materials shipped.  And finally, last week was Poop Week.

Poop Week got off to a rough start when I accidentally left 2/3 of the materials in Chincha and had to get them sent up to me the following day.  Tuesday and Wednesday, 3 técnicas got on their ATVs and visited some far away communities to give out cups to families, while I visited as many houses as I possibly could in Tantará.  Prioritizing families with children, we managed to give 300 people materials to do stool samples.  

Lauralee and I then spent Thursday and Friday collecting, coding, and processing poop.

Lauralee stirring a vial of PBS and poo

Poop can be fun!

In the end, we collected 154 stool samples (not a bad percentage in a community of between 400-500 people).

Now we wait for the results, and then get to work treating the parasites we find.

Special thanks to the Universidad Cayetano for making this possible, to my Health Center staff who repeatedly woke up at the crack of dawn to help me (in addition to their already busy days), and most of all, to Lauralee, who dealt with my panic attacks, made everything run smoothly, and who gets extra bonus points for handling the most disgusting stool sample that ever existed:

(so gross I had to take a picture)

Huayhuash

Over the Easter holiday, my mom and her friend, Lynn, came to Peru to visit.  They arrived in Lima, and we immediately got on a bus to head north to Huaraz.  After an acclimatization day, we got on a bus at 5 am, drove 5 hours to the town of Pocpa, and started walking. 

Our group consisted of 7 people, the three of us and two couples from England and Switzerland, plus two donkey drivers (Jose and Ronald), a cook (Sammy), and a guide (Hector). The trek was 9 days, completely circling the Cordillera Huayhuash.  We camped every night above 14,000 feet, and went over high passes (between 15,500 and 16,400 feet) almost everyday, sometimes twice. 

I don’t have much to say except that it was easily the most beautiful place I’ve ever been in my whole life.  We were constantly walking through what should be scenes from Planet Earth, except in place of David Attenborough’s narration, we had Hector’s constant encouragement and repetitions of “Lento y seguro” (slow and steady).

Photos can’t possibly capture the vastness of a place like the Cordillera Huayhuash.  A picture does not show the majesty of the endless mountains or portray the smallness one feels while  standing at the edge of a glacial lake, watching an avalanche crash into the water below.  Nevertheless, here are some photos, so maybe you can get some idea of the incredible beauty that we were fortunate enough to walk through for 9 days.

The Team

Hector, Sammy, and Luis Pardo (the horse)

Our trusted donkeys and their owner, Jose

More donkeys

Camp 2

Camp 4

Lake Viconga

On top of San Antonio Pass (5000 m)

Walking up a pass

Last view of Yerupaja

PC Bucket List: Milk a Cow

As February comes to a close, I have started thinking about my Peace Corps bucket list: the things I want to do before I leave Peru.  

What's #1 on the list? 

Milk a cow.

On Saturday, I helped Fidela cook in the morning, then we packed up our lunch and went to take care of her cows. 

I'm not all that good at it, but I milked a cow.

Then, Fidela taught me how to make cheese, knocking another thing off my bucket list.

Since it wasn't raining, we ate our lunch in the sun, and then sat and watched the cows eat grass all afternoon.

An ode to some 7th graders

This may be old news, but I went home for Christmas and New Years.  Here is a video I made as a summary of my trip.

USA Vacay

Yes, I spent most of my vacation skiing and playing with my dog.  Being home was easy.  It was too easy.  A vacation to the US is just enough time to remember all the things I'm missing at home, but not enough time to remember all the reasons I love Peru.  Unfortunately, it meant that I came back to Peru wishing I could still be at home.  Almost a month after getting back to Peru, I'm still finding the transition difficult, getting back my motivation after my "US hangover" has been much harder than I expected.  It doesn't help that this time period also coincides with rainy season and the "mid-service crisis".

Little did I know that I had a wonderful surprise waiting for me in my mailbox.  Not only did I get a Christmas card from the Galef-Brown family and care packages from the Gray family and my Auntie Mary Lou (thank you thank you thank you), I also had a packet of letters from my World Wise School connection, a teacher in Hopkinton, MA.

I don't think these 7th graders will ever understand how much they helped me today.  The idea of World Wise Schools is to connect a teacher in the US with a Peace Corps Volunteer so that they can exchange information and help that teacher's classroom better understand a part of the world.  The positive impact that it has on me, however, was an pleasant surprise.  As I read these letters, my motivation started to come back.  They were filled with curiosity and encouragement that helped me remember that the place I live in is special and that my life is filled with incredible opportunities.  This group of students in the US helped me remember why I am here.

So here's to you, Hopkinton MIddle School 7th grade Spanish class.  Today, you helped a lonely Peace Corps Volunteer out of her slump.  And for that, I am incredibly thankful.

Here's a video I made for my WWS classroom.  It is a short tour of Tantará and a little song that my Club de Inglés kids sang.      

Tantará