Random voluntary activities

This volunteer program is funny, because whenever someone asks me what kind of work I'm doing, I don't know exactly what to say. If I were able to stay for longer I would be able to focus more on one or two projects, but since I'm pretty much here and gone I've just been trying to do as much as I can. I decided to dedicate myself to the kids' summer camp that just started last week, which is Monday- Thursday from 9-11 am and includes about 30 10-year-olds. The first week went OK, but a lot of the volunteers including me had issues because Gaby, the volunteer coordinator who has also for some reason taken it upon herself to be in charge of the summer camp, did not really communicate to the volunteers what we were supposed to be doing to help, so a lot of us just ended up standing around while the kids just sat there in their chairs waiting for the grown-ups to all get on the same page. The first couple days of the camp involved way too much sitting and listening for the kids in general, and indeed was way too similar to the classroom style these kids are used to, always with someone lecturing at them and little to no participation. The goal of the camp is to give the kids an opportunity to do something different, and to participate in activities more actively and creatively, and the first week didn't really live up to that. The second two days were a little better: the group was divided up into two groups of 15 (from now on Group A comes Mondays and Wednesdays, Group B Tuesdays and Thursdays) and one group went to pick up trash from the beach while the other cleaned up the market. Afterwards the mayor came with a truck to collect the garbage, personally thanked the kids, and gave them each a soda. I'm not sure how much the lecture the previous day about the four R's of recycling had really sunk in, but at the very least the kids felt that they had worked hard and done something good.

After the first week of the camp we had a big volunteer meeting with Gaby and Jennifer, who is a primary school teacher from Mancora who's also helping direct the camp, and I was practically expecting punches to be thrown considering how upset some people were, but it actually ended up going pretty well and Gaby and Jennifer seemed open to most of our suggestions. The theme of next week is sports, so I can't imagine that not going better than the first week. We also divided up different parts of the day and put different volunteers in charge of them, so now everyone will know what's expected of them and the kids won't ever be sitting around waiting for something to happen. Also, Shelly suggested that I write a song on guitar to have as the camp theme song, so I think I'm going to write something to the tune of a popular reggaeton song that all the kids should know. And then sing and play it in front of a fairly large group of people, I guess? (I've had nightmares to that effect, haha.) We'll see how that goes.

So this week I worked at the camp in the mornings from Monday- Thursday, so couldn't go to "dengue" as people call it, and on Friday they didn't need us there, so instead I went for a couple hours on Saturday and found myself helping to poster the town with cautionary information about malaria and spider bites. I wasn't even aware that either of those things were an issue in Mancora, and I'm not really sure why we didn't have a poster about dengue, but whatev. The dengue squad now finally has gotten money from the municipality for the little pieces of cloth they needed to hold the pesticide that's used to treat water in people's houses and prevent the growth of larvae, so as far as I understand all this coming week they will be doing nothing but preparing the pesticide bundles. Hopefully I'll be able to help them with that at some point.

Another thing I did this week was go with Maria, a therapist at the Center for Special Needs Kids, to a couple of house calls she was making. I kicked a ball around on the beach with a 17-year-old girl named Luzmila, and all was going well until her eyes started to roll back in her head and she started tipping over backwards. I was terrified and darted over to catch her before she hit the ground, and luckily she regained her senses before she fell because I don't think I would have been able to support her weight. I kind if wish someone had warned me about that, haha. The center also has a recycling program that they're just starting up-- they take the kids out to collect plastic and glass bottles, then sell them or make other things out of them, like flower vases that the kids have fun painting. I would probably be more interested in working with them if it weren't for Ernesto, the other head guy who is apparently a perfectly good person during the day but a bit of a creep on a Friday night for instance, when he's drunk and comes out dancing with you and your friends. Yeah. It kind of makes having a professional relationship with him a bit awkward.

The most useful thing I've accomplished since I've been here was a matter of pure luck. On Thursday last week I was sitting in the office with the dengue squad when someone walked by the door and one of them called out, "Chiry! Come in here and say hi!" When Chiry walked in I couldn't believe my eyes. He said something I believed to be the Spanish equivalent of "Hey guuuurrrlllzzz" and after kissing everyone on the cheek started affectionately playing with one of the woman's hair. No different than the behavior of a flambouyantly gay man in the United States! He also had an incredibly high-pitched, effeminate voice. I had never seen an openly gay Peruvian before (I'm sure there are lots of them, but in Cuzco it's really hidden) so the discovery of this one pretty much made my day. The dengue team briefly introduced me to him, and after he left they explained that he was the sexual health promotor. He works in brothels giving out condoms and giving charlas about STD prevention. He also works with gay men and even lesbians (for some reason it's even harder to imagine there being lesbians here than gay men). I asked someone on the dengue team if he'd been working with Sarah, another volunteer who has been working on writing grants and getting support for a planned "brothel project." But apparently neither she nor past volunteers who's been working on the project had any knowledge of Chiry's existence. It's incredible the obvious connections that don't get made, sometimes. They were all worried about getting support from the municipality because of the taboo about premarital sex in this culture and the stigma on sex workers, and it turns out the municipality is already hiring someone to do exactly the thing they've been wanting to do.

Anyway, after I got done with the dengue work for the day I immediately went to the doctor and asked him if there was any time I could sit down and talk with Chiry. Ironically, all the other volunteers had just left for vacation so I couldn't even find out for sure whether they knew about Chiry and I wasn't exactly the choice spokesperson for the brothel project, but I figured it couldn't hurt to sit down with him and have a conversation and figure out how we could help. But no one was able to get ahold of him until the following Tuesday, when Alia and I both came to the clinic to meet with him. I guess because of the totally different context, he was a lot more reserved than I'd expected him to be. After talking for a couple minutes about where we were coming from and explaining that we'd like to try to figure out how we could support him in his work, there was an awkward silence and at first I was afraid he wasn't going to say anything. But then he invited us both to come to his hair salon (yes, hair salon!) to chat a bit more. He ended up telling us that he'd have to consult the brothel owners before he brought either of us along with him, but he seemed pretty open to having us tag along one day. The other volunteers would be arriving that night so we exchanged phone numbers and I told him we'd arrange a meeting with everyone interested once everyone else was back. Then for the next few days I couldn't get ahold of him (turns out he'd given me the wrong cell phone number), so eventually Alia and I went back to his hair salon to find him, this time accompanied by Gaby, who was very professional and managed to set a time for a meeting with him and the group this Monday, at his hair salon.

I will report back on that later. For now I have many other things to be busy with.