Ancash - Huaraz, Vaqueria, Cashapampa, Santa Cruz - Awesome

Gua, can’t believe it is already almost 2010. What a weird year number right? Its not almost that year, but time seems to have flown although so much has happened. That doesn’t make sense. How could that seem fast? Maybe time has passed more slowly. In 42 days, I will be one year in el Peru. It seems a bit like one year and eight months. The first year being training, with so much to do and everything completely new. Spanish for four hours, watsan for another four. Getting to know people, living in a strange place with practical strangers, working for a new organization, well, volunteering or whatever. There was a lot of stuff, getting used to customs, food, sickness, expectations, etc. Well then getting to site and going through all that new stuff again, family, living situation, expectations, support groups, lonliness, well that doesn’t quite gow away completely, anxiety. So maybe it was the first 6 months seemed like one year, and now the last five months have seemed like 8 months, making it still seem like one year and eight months.

I Went to the department of Ancash for Fiestas Patrias (Independence Day más o menos) and a town called Huaraz was the starting point of our vacation. This town was abs gorgeous! Mountains all around, white capped nevados, many reaching up over 5,700 meters (18,700.7ft). Mostly I was excited about doing the Santa Cruz Trek. It is a 50 km, 3-4 day trek starting in Vaquería and going to Cashapampa. The first day was getting there, arriving at around 1pm and hiking for about 4 hours. We set up camp after a TECHNICAL CROSSING: STREAM CROSSING, built a fire, cooked a delicious bean, rice, tomatoe sauce, tuna and spice concoction that was smothered in fresh cheese and tortillas. I was quite worried about being cold with my old Slumberjack sleepin bag because at camp eating dinner I had on five layers and was still cold, but I turned out okay. Day two, Tuesday, July 27 2009, on the trail by 10:30am and off track before lunch, bushwacking for about four hours until we found trail. Bushwacking takes up a lot of energy, we hiked uphill traversing looking for a high trail then thought the trail was down so hiked downhill traversing and finally found the trail realizing we had hiked down unnecessarily and are now at the base of the steepest part. We hit the summit of the pass, 4,750 meters above sea level (15,584ft) at around 5:30pm, a bit late to be getting to the summit, but we decended hastily and purified some water at dusk, finishing our hike with headlamps and flashlights at around 7:30pm. We cooked a spinach cream soup with peas and carrots and cheese and little pasta shells and lentils. It was also good but I liked the power bean and rice burritos the night before. We set up camp in the dark, and went to sleep, exhausted. The next day we got out of camp by 9am and hit the trail, hard, mostly descending, and this turned out to be much farther than expected, just like the previous day. We finally finished at 5pm in Cashapampa and got back to Huaraz with enough time to shower, repack, eat some zza, pie that is, and get on a much more comfortable bus than the one I came in on. Hung out in Lima for a day and a half and am now back in site, fixin for organizing some In Service Training in my caserio Dos Palmas and my town in a few days which involves sand water filters, disinfecting water systems, repairing water lines and waste management.

Check out mis fotos...

Yummy pigs head in the market of Huaraz!

MMMmmmm!!! cuy (guinea pig)

This burro has his work cut out for him

a cow chillin toward the end of the Santa Cruz trek.

awesome water color of the lagunas throughout the trek

Yay!! we made it to the trail summit, 4,750 m (15,584 ft), exhuasted and with the sun setting and no campgrounds in site we cannot celebrate for long.

this lil lake was at the beginning of the ascent

pure, natural mountain beauty

Now this is what I call a picnic with a view

More pack animals on the trail

ow now brown cow, can you spot a brown cow?

mountain beard, mountain spring spilling down the mountain side

hey there lil ryan, trek on, dude!!

strike a pose, now VOGUE

The motley crew stops for a fot-op

Gua, I love mtns!!!

This is towards the beginning, we have no idea the challenge that lies ahead

This is one of the Lagunas Llanganuco, awesome!

This is Huascaran I think, highest peak in the tropics standing at 6,768 m.

chillin like villians in Huaraz

Ok, you made it. And your prize for getting all the way through my blog is the following video.

ENJOY!

p.d. this is taking a very veryvery veryver veyr ryureve r long time, arrghhhghghgh

i guess too long, so I will put it in there next time, condensed or something, sorry.

Talk to y’all soon!
Ciao,
Fletcher

Hullo thur gangsters,

Yeah, yeah, I know, believe me! It’s been a long time since writing, well, don’t worry, I’m not gonna make this super long winded just to make up for malfeasances’ sake.
Work wise, I have been working with the health post on a project called healthy municipalities. This entails talks about hand washing, clean water, water treatment, trash management, and personal hygiene issues. Also there is a cleaning campaign that is starting a few towns down and is going along the main highway hitting several small villages in an effort to pick up trash in problem areas: canals, soccer fields, schools, etc.

I have also been “supervising” the second phase of a sewer project. I am helping with the land surveying and learning about sectioning land using a theodolite. At first I was a bit overwhelmed because the engineer at the municipality gave me a hundred some page report and told me to review it so that I can supervise the project. I felt so flustered. I tried to express to him that I don’t have any experience with this type of project. I just wanted someone to sit down with me and discuss what I would be doing, and take me to the site and give me a walk through/review. This didn’t happen; instead I rode my bike there and met the surveyor and have been helping him since. In Peru, I get the feeling that when people find out you’re an engineer, they expect you to know everything, which can be frustrating because unfortunately I don’t.

Other (non work) wise, I just went up north to Pacasmayo and ran a half marathon, 21 kilometers (13.1 miles). My goal was to do it in less than one hour 45 minutes. Well I had a great run, I got second place and my time was 1:32:56, which I was very happy with! The course was pretty tough, there were quite a few hills, some sandy, some steep pavement, but overall it was quite beautiful. The beginning we ran on the bluffs overlooking the ocean out towards the famous lighthouse. I was running this part with a husky dog that happened to be running the course with us and it reminded me of running back home with my dog Wiley. Although he got in my way a few times, it was a nice nostalgia. Then the course turned back and we ran through the boardwalk with people lining both sides cheering and up to the steepest hill of the course around kilometer 15. The rest was on the road out and back and finishing at the boardwalk under a giant Powerade arch.

Later that night we had our fourth Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament. 32 players, five soles entry. I was on top of my game and made it all the way to the final match. I lost however to a kid from Peru 9 named Ja. He was quite intense and I think his barking after each win intimidated me. I got flogged 4-0, but I still won 40 soles for second place. Yeah, second place was my spot on this day.

I had a great time the night after the marathon. It was great to see people who live on the other side of the country and we all let loose and celebrated being done with the race. We went to a dance club at the end of the night and danced despite having incredibly sore legs and a hot Dartmouth alum flirted with me, which was pretty awesome. Well, the next day I was incredibly hung over. I think it was actually a combo of being sick and hung over; I felt like dog shit and had the shits, two boos.

We went back to Trujillo that day to take an overnight bus back to Lima. I paid for a “guardaequipaje” or bag check at the bus station and came back later that night and my backpack was gone. I was quite upset, I paid to have it checked and it still got stolen. I had my iPod, my medallion from the race, a t-shirt I won for getting second, the race shirt, lots of clothes, expensive sunglasses, Chaco sandals, and various other things of value. Well, we ended up settling out of court, they paid me 200 dollars and gave me 70 dollars in bus services. I probably had over 700 dollars worth of stuff in my bag, but oh well, it’s better than getting robbed on the street and getting nothing back,eh? I ordered a new iPod on ebay, new and improved, and am having it delivered to another kid’s parents who are coming here in August, so that is exciting. My iPod was one of my most cherished items, and I’ve realized is something that gets me through the lows, so this is essential to replace!

At the end of July is Fiestas Patrias, kinda like our independence day except this is like a week long. We get free vacation days, so a bunch of us are going up to the Cordillera Blanca in the department of Ancash. We are meeting in the city of Huaraz, which is international mountain trekking headquarters. Three other Peru 12 gangsters and I are doing the four day “Santa Cruz” trek. Just to give some perspective, in this mountainous region of Peru there are more than 50 peaks of 5700m or higher. In contrast, North America has only three mountains in excess of 5700m (Pico de Orizaba in Mexico, Logan in Canada and Denali in Alaska), and Europe has none. The Cordillera Blanca also has the highest peak in the tropics anywhere in the world, Huascarán at 6768m.

So I am really excited and hopefully will be posting some awesome pics soon.

Ciao y hasta la próxima,
F-grenade

yo yo yo y'all, this is Ayacucho, en the mountains.

happy christmas

yo peops,
This is the ole site. Desert and farms living peacefully together

hello señor chancho

other random site photos

yeah, this is me and my buddy lil ryan giving a charla on handwashing and hygiene. good stuff!

Speech speech speech. All right, all right already, had to give a speech.

well hello there party people. Having a good time? I hope so.

I look good, I mean really good!

Mmm, smell that steam

This is my pacha manca birthday party. It was a lot of fun and the food was delicious!

the photo above is a rare glimpse of a peruvian haireless dog, they have yellow mohawks, I shit you not. Photo taken in my site.

well happy christmas and a merry new year to y'all! i know, it's been a long while, but time makes the heart grow fonder, right? Well I guess I'll tell y'all bout my new host family. they own a video game/arcade hall type of thing, so there are hundreds of video games at my fingertips, too bad I'm not what some call a "gamer". Well Martin and his wife Maria are in their mid 30's with a 12 and 6 year old. The older boy is Jeison, spelled like this, and Jose is the youngster. Sometimes I wonder if Jeison maliciously speaks really fast and uses lots of slang, b/c I have to ask him to repeat it like 3 times. Another ocassion he was telling me jokes, trying, and got really frustrated when I didn't understand any of them, but he kept on telling them loaded with slang expecting me to suddenly understand. His cousin was like "claro que no va a entender porque estás usando tanta jerga", I mean, he gets it, why can't Jeison give me a break?

The lil one: he makes me wonder if I really want children, ever. He is cute as the dickens (is this a real expression?, sounds kinda weird), but he is so loud and rambunctious and a little never ending spring of energy and is always grabbing and pulling my shirt and putting his hands in my food and showing me everything which he thinks is interesting (everything) and did I mention loud? well maybe that just comes with being 6 years old, I don't know. He is a good kid, just a handful, requiring a lot of patience.

well I have been working on my community diagnostic, doing a few surveys and talking about strenghts, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within the community in respect to basic sanitation. Lots of people in the surrounding area cook with firewood and don't have any bathroom, not even a letrine, and don't treat their water. There is definitely a need for improved water sanitation and a strong desire from the people. I am going to be teaching english classes to professors at the local school here probably in January, so that could be fun. I can't wait to start actually doing projects. I am not the type of person who is a community diagnoser, I am a doer. I need to be building a ferrocement tank or helping design a water system or something, so I am really excited to start that kind of stuff. Well apparently only a few minutes remain for internet here at the old cafe, so I gotta go. Happy Holidays!, I love you all (y'all).

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

life in Yanacoto:
well, my legs are going to be super strong after walking up the hill to my house for three months, it´s a good 15 min of pretty intense hiking. walking down the hill in the mornings makes my lungs pretty happy b/c of the two stroke mototaxis (3 wheeler taxis that cannot even go as fast as i walk when going up on the steep dirt roads) zooming by. i take a 15 minute custer (small bus) everyday to the training center, which is a luxurious palace rented by peace corps where we have our technical training sessions. so far we have talked about water systems in peru and this week we will be building a latrine for one of my neighbors, who is hosting another volunteer, i am excited about this! so our cuerpo de paz soccer team (equipo gringo, a.k.a. white height) blew away the previous team´s record, we won two games and tied like 5, ¡vaya gringos! it was a blast playing on the concrete basketball court/cancha, although the first game i played i took a pretty bad spill and cut up both hands, then the next game i fell on the way to the game running down my very steep hill in the dark, and fell during the game as well, so now people think me a klutz, whatever. mae, i have been super busy! we have besides 8 hours a day of training, i have been jogging, doing yoga, and playing soccer, and every saturday we go to lima, recently to learn about agriculture here in el peru. unfortunately i had "the bicicleta" once again this last saturday and had to rush back, which you can´t really do b/c it is like an hour 15 to an hour and a half custer ride, which is usually crowded to the point of physically touching your fellow pasajero whether you like it or not, this is the LA way, personal US bubbles pop. so anyway, today i feel better so hopefully i am done with being sick for a while, Ojalá. i had a dream last night that i was about to go to the salad bar at city market and get the biggest salad with every vegetable imaginable and right before i did i was woken by mis padres asking if i felt any better, no, if only i could have eaten it first, it would have been just as good as the real thing b/c my dreams have been really vivid, some think this is because of the "ajinomoto" a.k.a. MSG that goes into every single meal, yep, every one, for flavor, thanks to the chinese influence in the cooking here. i will deal, no pasa nada chicos. anyway, at least when i am really stressed out or feeling lousy i can listen to my fav band at the moment, Built to Spill, on my ipod, this is my best friend right now. well i am gone, ciao y besos a todos.
fletch
p.d. i actually clipped my nails today, meaning i haven´t bitten them since being here, how proud are you mom?