Jesus! The bulls are coming!

Traditional Dress in Ayacucho

Easter weekend was my first official vacation as a PCV in Peru. Some friends and I ventured a half dozen hours in to the Andes to the increasingly popular city of Ayacucho. The city's 40+ churches make it an exciting place to be during Semana Santa (Holy Week). Processions, fireworks, bullfights, drinking. Only in Ayacucho can one find so many ways to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. People from all over Peru wanted to be part of the celebration, but few were willing to take the long and dangerous trip over rocky, cliff-hugging roads. Just in the last few years, when a new highway replaced the old roads and the 20 hr trip became a 6 hr one, did tourists start coming in troves.

Last week, I joined the gringo migration.

Trying the local alcohol, called Cañazo

Everyone tries to sleep on the overnight bus (with semi- to fully-reclining bed-seats), but few sleep well. They'd paved the bumps out of the road, but there was no getting rid of the twists and turns. Just when you start dozing off, the bus zips around a hair-pin turn and your body flies to the right and the left and the right. Now imagine trying to use the bathroom.

Me and Vivaan at Ayacucho overlook

Once we got there, life was good. Lounging on Thursday, after the previous night's bus ride. Full-day tour during the day on Friday, including my first time riding a horse (he was a bit small, but wily), my first time eating guinea pig (see below), and some fun under a waterfall. That night we had some pizza (good, for Perú), drinks, and dancing to celebrate my friend Vivaan's birthday.

Thirsty

Hungry

And then came Saturday.

Slow to wake-up from the previous night's festivities, we went in search for breakfast. Instead we found a bull run. They sent five through, one at a time, and we promptly joined. Below is a short video of the first one, at the starting point. Awesome.





Later in the day we went to the bull fight(s). Three bulls. Three deaths. Pretty gruesome stuff.


To cap off the weekend, Ayacucho put on a procession at 4 AM on Easter morning. Fireworks were set off from 4 until sunrise, when 50+ people carried a huge Jesus out of the church and into the town's main square. Crowd was an interesting mix of locals and tourists, drunks and Christians, old and young.

Kaboom!

Not Peace Corps. B Corps.

Here's a couple interesting reads on B Corps, triple bottom-line companies (profits, people, planet) that pay to be put under a microscope by an outside group (B Lab) to prove their commitment to the community, their employees, the environment, and of course, profits. Both were written by a Pulitzer Prize-winner Tina Rosenberg, who writes for the New York Times in the "Fixes" section of the Opinion Pages.

A Scorecard for Companies with a Conscience

Ethical Businesses with a Better Bottom Line

Training and Turtles

A couple weeks ago I headed to northern Peru for a week of water and sanitation training with the other watsan volunteers. The training itself was informative but, due to a plethora of power point presentations, made for some long days. One of the cooler parts of training was going into the mountains to check out a gravity-fed water system (as opposed to a system that pumps subterranean water up). My site in Independencia is flat and dry, and NOT green. As you can see from the photo below, my training location was just the opposite.





I learned some things, but mostly it was nice to see some PCVs I hadn't seen since I first got to Peru. Days were full with training, but once dismissed we took full advantage of our free time. Had enough people to play some 5-on-5 basketball - a real rarity in this country.




Found and drank some Peruvian micro-brew, a surprising but pleasant discovery in a country that has a limited variety of beers (the dark was good, but the wheat was kind of funky).



Visited some pretty massive ruins left behind by the advanced and pre-Incan Moche civilization.



Also, I made a point to visit the beaches of northern Peru and play with some turtles at my hostel. Surfing is big on the country's northern coast, but I didn't attempt to get on a board this visit.



Finally, just for kicks, I included a picture of Josh Love (we call him José Amor here) and a guinea pig, to share with everyone a beautiful mustache and a traditional Peruvian dish. No, we did not eat the cuy (COO-ee). Yes, Josh won the mustache contest.

What's on your face?

Without realizing it at the time, I made a resolution in 2011 to try out facial hair for the first time in my life. Facial hair experimentation is far from uncommon among Peace Corps volunteers.

For one, our job doesn’t demand a clean appearance the way an office job does. Some might say it even encourages just the opposite, as water and bathing is limited in many volunteer sites (I can’t use this as an excuse; I’ve got my own fully-functioning shower). The obvious result is facial hair.

Also, a solid mustache can be good for street cred. Or respect, as they call it here. It doesn’t matter if you’re more educated than everyone in town. All they see is a young American bumbling in Spanish about the importance of hand washing. I wouldn’t respect me either. Slap a mustache on that guy and all of a sudden his Spanish starts to sound smooth.

Finally, growing facial hair is a fundamental part of “finding oneself” for a PCV. “You’ll never forget your two years in Peace Corps. It’ll change your perspective of the world. You’ll come back to the US a changed person,” they say. But when you expect to change and you’re mostly the same person, a beard helps you (and all your Facebook friends) believe that you have changed.

And so on January 1^st, 2011, desperate for respect, anxious to find myself, but too hung-over to find the shower or a razor, I let the facial hair go. After a month I had patches of hair on my cheeks. I called it a beard.

Just last week I had “Early In-service Training” in northern Peru with the other Water and Sanitation PCVs in my group (PC 16). For fun, the guys decided to have a mustache contest in the month leading up to training. I felt good about the Fu Manchu I sported for the week of training. I then tried out a normal mustache for 10 minutes before getting clean again. I don’t know about Peru, but the mustache sure changed my perspective of the world.