Back in Ica, celebrating a friend´s birthday and my hostal has free internet, so I am taking full advantage. Last month we had an all girl´s leadership/environmental camp. It was awesome, for the majority of the girls it was the first time that they had spent the night outside of their house, so they were super excited. We had awesome peruvian women speakers come in, a botanist and a psychologist. The pschycologist was pretty typical, doing a ton of self esteem activities with the girls, that the vols have all witnessed enough to feel like they were super corny. The botanist, on the other hand, was awesome. She started talking about natural medicine, and how every single plant on the earth has medicinal properties, and how pharmecutical medicine is all based on the design of natural medicine. She also talked about how the people living in this area were experts on natural medicine because they can´t afford medicine in a pharmacy and also because a phamarcy or doctor´s office is so far away. Another thing she stated which I found pretty cool was that everything in the world has a purpose, including disease, because it acts as a population check. She ended her talk by teaching us how to make medicinal balms. I hope this blog is not packed full of info to the point of oversaturation, but if it is I am sorry. Another thing we learned at camp is SODIS, it is a process of water purification. In Peru, not many people drink boiled water for many reasons, the process is tedious, gas for the oven is expensive, the process is even more tedious if the women only have firewood to cook over. Anyways, so we introduced a new way of water purification, in which you fill up 3 liter sized bottles full of water and then lay them on the roof for 6 hours and the rays from the sun kills all the bacteria, parasites, virus´s, etc. This camp was so awesome because the girls got to see that women are valuable on their own, not by how they are useful to men, beauty, cooking, cleaning, washing, etc. They participated in discussions and were encouraged to share their opinions. It was so great and needed in this really, really machista culture. When I got home my girls that I brought to camp told me that they wanted to start a girl´s leadership group, and I am so pumped. I am going to give them complete ownership. They want to raise money to go on trips, and they want to teach what they have learned to the community. It is so completely empowering to see it, and it makes me see living in a machista culture in a new light, because instead of accepting it, I see it as my job to challenge it, and try to encourage the girls to feel worth in their own being, instead of how well they marry or if they even marry at all.
oh yeah, side note, we had compliment bags in which the girls put nice things about everybody in camp. In the guy volunteers´bags they put things like you are really guapo (hot) and responsable. hehehehe...It is so funny because they are regurgitating words they heard from the leadership talks, and they are saying things like that which is complete crap because after the talks they think that that is what gringos like to hear.
This should be another blog, but I am putting it as this one because I am scared that if I add it as a blog no one will read what I said up above this run on sentence thinking that it is an old blog. If that makes sense, good, or if it is not very coherent, don´t think about it too much it is not that important.
Stuff I had to deal with in one day.
some stranger in my town told me I was gaining weight and asked if I had stopped running. I lost my temper and told him, yeah, but the thing was I could lose the weight, he is always going to be ugly.......I know, not the right thing to say, but to tell you the truth I do not regret saying it at all.
My host mom told me that I had gotten really good at washing my clothes by hand, and finally that meant I could get married. Shoot me.
A woman that lives in the house told me that she was really thirsty and that I should invite the family to a soda. I told her I only had money for the car into town, where my bank is, and she kept begging, I asked her why didn´t she invite me to a soda and she told me because I had just got paid, and asked why I did not have money. At this point I had to leave, because I wanted to strangle her.
A conversation that almost made up for it. I was talking to my host mom about the miss Universe contests and telling her that I did not really agree with them, and she told me, you know what Erin, I never told anybody this, but I don´t either, because I think that a person should be judged by what is on the inside and not the outside. We talked about this more, talked about the objectifying of women, and she was saying that maybe that is why women in Peru have little rights in the society, because they are not really looked at as a person, but are sexualized and have been sexualized since childhood, wearing minny skirts and high heels since the time they could walk. Their worth is determined by how much they are adored by men and subservient to men. This was a conversation I never thought I would have with a Peruvian. It was pretty cool.
ummmmmm, that is about it. Until next time!!
