Life as a trainee nears an end...

hey y'all
ok, it's been a while, this i know, but have i been busy? i like you, do you like me? well my birthday is coming up pretty soon, November 24th, which is like 4 days before i swear in as an official Peace Corps Volunteer, wow, I'm almost there, it has been a long time coming, i think i started the application process in like 2005 and i am finally about to be a PCV. I am about to leave to visit my future site, home that is, for the next two years of my life. I am in Pisco, well Independencia actually, which is about 300 km south of Lima. This area was severely affected by the 8.0 magnitude earthquake that happened in August 2007 and there is still much in ruins. It is puro desert, sand dunes and dust as far as the eye can see. I went there for field based training, which was a week of tech, tech week. The first day we did encuestas, interviews digo, about hygiene. Hello stranger, can i see your bathroom? Do you clean it often? Do you wash your hands? Prove it. The next day we learned about casas de adobe anitisísmicas, that is, houses made of mud with a plastic mesh around the outside and another layer of mud mortar to seal it all in. Believe it or not a mud house can actually resist major earthquakes. The following day we built an entire latrine, we did not dig the hole, which i saw a man doing with a hammer and pick because despite the appearance of pure sand it is actually quite rocky, during the three hours that we were placing concrete for the base he had maybe dug about 6 inches deep. The next day of tech week we learned how to dig a trench. we were connecting individual houses with the existing sewer network so we went out in two person teams, one manning or womaning a pick-ax and the other a shovel and we dug for about 3 hours in the heat of the intense desert summer sun, after we had the trench roughly sloped to the connection, this was total guesswork, a man took a hammer and chisel/pick thing and broke a circular hole into the existing concrete sewer line, they rammed a 4 inch PVC pipe into it, slapped some concrete mixed with the very earth we dug up on the connection, and we buried the line and called it a day.

On to other news, Obama is our next president and i have never been more proud to be an American, f*** yeah! so a restaurant in Chaclacayo put CNN on for us and we totally took over the place, about 40 gringos drinking beer and screaming with joy each time Obama won a state. it was so exciting! the hard cores stayed to the very end to watch Obama deliver his victory speech, and what a powerful one at that. i was inspired, in tears, and wanted to run into the street jumping up and down and cursing in English foul words of elation, three stepping off brick walls slow spin 360 new balance grabs with a tweaked out right arm flipping off all the dissenters that booed when John McCain congratulated our new president. I will never forget where i was when we hurdled that barrier to equality in the states, never forget the power i felt as part of a mob of 40 overwhelmed neocolonialists (jk) watching the world turn its back on an ugly distant past. The icing on the cake was when Obama spoke of the 106 year old Ann Nixon Cooper and traced her life and asked America to look one hundred years in the future, one hundred years, this flap of the wings of a flying space pig brings an idealist dreamer's hopes to the verge of sublimation, soul vapor.

so we had a talent show the day we all found out our site assignments. imagine, 8 weeks of anticipation wondering where in the hell you are going to spend the next two years of your life, then finding out, and having to perform in a talent show in small groups that same day. I haven't laughed so hard in a very long time. some highlights were a group that acted out several typical situations in the life of a peace corps trainee, riding on packed custers (small buses) that double the recommended max capacity, and then they did a skit when two volunteers go out clubbing and afterward one decides to eat food from the calle (street) and gets the bicicleta (diarrhea) the next day. Brad Goodman, who is an enigma because he is absolutely impossible to even try to explain, and hilarious, comes out in a suit jacket acting like a hopped up pill salesman saying Cipro, Cipro, get your Cipro, only five soles (this is the antibiotic that everyone takes when they get diarrhea), with two bottles in his hands shaking them around, and suddenly jumps off the stage (about 4 feet high) into the crowd and gets right in an audience members face with his eyes about to pop out of his glasses screaming, "¡Come lo que quieras!" (eat whatever you want). Another highlight was a skit from another group taking place in another packed custer, the cobrador is played by cholo Mark, (a cobrador is the person who announces the route of that particular custer, collects money and yells at everyone to get on move to the back, make room even if it is so packed you can't breathe, get off and do it all hurriedly) a female volunteer played by Dianna is sitting down and Jason "Cotton" Pickens, a.k.a. Alabama Man, dressed up in a white poncho and wife beater underneath with a strange straw hat plays a filthy machista passenger that is standing right next to Dianna coughing, hacking up spit and swallowing it, and jutting his crotch into Dianna. Meanwhile there is a mother with her child requesting money from them while the young daughter played by E-Loch robs Dianna. The whole time this is happening Geoff Lord is playing another passenger calmly sitting and observing this go down with a cigarette in his mouth. I must preface this with a small explanation of Lord Jefe (Geoff), he seems to be perpetually grumpy, and cynical of everything. He struggles with Spanish and lives with a large family headed by a single mother, who wakes up at 4 am every morning to run "Vaso de Leche" which is an outreach organization that gives free food to the poorest members of the community, and then goes to work. His room has a glass wall with a very thin sheet for a curtain, making privacy non-existent. He just quit smoking and cut down drastically on drinking, which he was doing quite often right before heading down here to Peru. In reality i think he just plays the cynic to make dark humor and sense out of this whole training thing. In the end he is a good sport, and a great guy!
So Geoff is sitting on the custer in this skit and chaos is going on all around him but he remains calm with the cigarette in his mouth unlit, and i imagine this takes a lot of self restraint not to smoke it, when all of a sudden he stands up, still remaining calm, walks to stage center, in the heart of the chaos in the custer, faces the audience and violently rips his shirt off, throws his hat to the ground, and puts on a pair of Lennon sunglasses. He is wearing a headband and under the shirt he is wearing a cape and a wife beater with a logo of a sweet potato smoking a cigarette with the caption Papa Dulce underneath. He is the super hero papa dulce (sweet potatoe or sugar daddy, more or less), who is well known and even more so feared in this corner of the imagination on this Custer in this Peru. He single handedly recovers the stolen goods, returns them to their respectful owners and engages the disgusting poncho wearing pervert in a battle (of who could care less). It is a fierce battle, Matrix style, with the final blow being delivered by Papa Dulce, a vicious pelvic thrust knocking poncho pervert to the ground in defeat. Dianna jumps up to thank the heroin, with desire for her mysterious savior shining like the north star in a moonless sky of a desolate sandy desert, but Papa Dulce wants nothing to do with this, and says, no no dama, I came for him, indicating the cobrador played by cholo Mark who is wearing a Grease Monkey mechanic outfit with his shirt half unbuttoned exposing his markered up hairy chest. The scene ends with Papa Dulce carrying the cobrador off in classic newly wed style. My whole body ached from laughing so hard.

Well that's all for now folks, and if you want more where this came from, you just come on down to Peru, we'll show ya a real good time!

ciao, besos, abrazos, y mucho cariño from your boy,
Fletch