First Impressions

This is my third week living in my new community here along the beautiful sunny coast of La Libertad.  And it sure has been a busy few weeks! I have been working hard to meet people in different organizations and I have been exploring my new town. I have also been setting up my new room and spending time getting to know my host family. And each time I meet someone new I think to myself...this is a potential friend for the next two years of my life!

My town has a clock tower, just like in Back to the Future! 

My new room, all set-up! Complete with a leopard print blanket

My first day at site I went and visited the municipality and they took me to see the wastewater treatment plant. But really there is no wastewater treatment plant - there are only wastewater lagoons, the rest of the treatment plant is missing! All of the wastewater is piped to three large lagoons where the raw wastewater sits (and some evaporates) before it is discharged out into irrigation canals for the nearby fields of agriculture.

Waswater lagoon

My first few weeks were also full of lots of parades. I was in an AIDS awareness parade with one of the local schools and there was another parade promoting reading for kids, and all the kids were dressed up as books. 

AIDS awareness parade

Book parade

I am also working in another community that requested a water and sanitation Peace Corps volunteer, but Peace Corps did not have another volunteer for them, so they are sending me to work with them as well. This community is one of the centros poblados (small communities) within one of the districts in the Province where I am living and working. 

On my way out into the smaller communities

Meeting with the Mayor and his aldermen

 December 10 kicked off a week-long festival celebrating the anniversary of my community with a huge parade down the main street with marinera dancers, horses, devil dancers, kings, and many marching banks! The parade lasted all through the night (and really all week). I fell asleep listening to marching bands and when I woke up in the morning and was walking to the municipality marching bands were still going by me on the street!

Beginning of the parade

Marinera dancers (the national dance)

Little devil dancers

Knights

Selva (grassland) dancers

Dance of the selva (grasslands)

Tall firework towers were built out of bamboo on the second day of the festival called "castillos". Each one had firecrackers and fireworks tied to them so that when they were lit off parts of the tower spun and flashed with lights. The fireworks on each tower lasted for a couple minutes, and there were aerial fireworks that shot off the top of the towers as well. There were 15 of these towers built all around the main plaza! I am impressed nothing catches on fire. 

Castillos for fireworks 

One of 15 castillos built around the plaza

While the festival was going on non-stop, I had more work to do. I gave a presentation at one of the other small towns in my province on the importance of safe drinking water and met with a biologist to discuss reservoir disinfection. Afterwards we inspected the water system and we climbed up into the reservoir!

Reservoir 

Well that pumps the water into the reservoir

My adventure with chocolate chip cookies 

This week I also taught my host sisters how to make chocolate chip cookies. Which seems like a simple enough task, but they had never made them before! And it was difficult to find the ingredients, especially baking soda and chocolate chips because people don't bake very often here, and no one makes chocolate chip cookies. After we found some replacement ingredients (sodium bicarbonate in a pharmacy and a bar of chocolate) we started mixing the dough. 

A couple things we ran into...first my host sister did not want to put the whole eggs in the batter, she only wanted to put in the egg whites, so I had to convince her this was correct. Then she didn't understand why the chocolate chunks were hard in the dough, she wanted to mix the chocolate until it was melted and consistent in the batter. The next problem we ran into was that my host family doesn't have a baking tray and no one sells aluminum foil in my town. After scrounging around in the kitchen for a while (and thinking maybe we can use the top of a pot to bake the cookies) we found a round metal pan that would work (I have no idea what it's actual purpose is for).  

Once the dough and the baking pan was all squared away we had to figure out how to light the oven, since the stove/oven runs on a gas tank in the corner of the kitchen, but my family has never lit the oven before. Finally we figured out where to light it with a match and we were good to go. Or so I thought...the oven degrees were in celsius, so I did a quick conversion of what 350 degrees fahrenheit is in celsius, but there was no "ready" light to tell me when the oven was pre-heated to the correct temperature. So we ended up putting in the first batch of cookies before the oven was hot enough, so that batch turned out a little flat and weird (and took forever to cook). 

But the next few trays turned out much better and we all had yummy cookies to enjoy! SUCESS!

Mixing the dough for the cookies 

Finished cookies!