My Hands are Very Clean

I am ten weeks into my Peace Corps service which means that I have been in my permanent site for as long as I was in training. This is an important landmark because my site is officially my Peruvian home. I have settled in for the most part but I am still encountering new cultural quirks and minute differences in daily life that remind me that I am far from home. Sometimes, these departures from what I would consider "normal" give me a bit of comic relief. At other times the slight differences are the ones that trigger the most intense spells of homesickness. So far, the times that I have felt homesick have been few and far between and are easily remedied with a nap or by watching Elf on my laptop. This week I also purchased a fan and a hammock for the garden, both of which will be instrumental in my quest to stay relaxed and comfortable amid all the craziness.
The crazy roosters that we keep in a pen behind the house are one of those differences between life here and life in the States that I actually find infuriating. These roosters crow at all hours of the day and night causing me to wake up every few hours. The roosters have even infiltrated my dreams! One night I woke up completely disoriented because I was dreaming that a friend was playing the trumpet very poorly and I was yelling at him to stop. When I awoke, I realized that the offensive "trumpets" in my dream were actually roosters. At least this dream interruption is less abrasive than the firecrackers, which tend to manifest themselves as gunshots in my dreams. Every morning around six the roosters increase the frequency of their calls and I give in and get out of bed. It is nice to spend the whole morning reading, writing, washing clothes, and eating breakfast but there are days when all I want to do is sleep in until eight. It is probably better that I don't sleep so late because if I did, I would get a reputation as being lazy. If eight am is lazy, I don't even want to know what my host family and friends would think of my schedule during college.
This past week I was able to take my first mini-trip to a workshop in the northern department of Piura. The topic of the workshop was AIDS project monitoring and evaluation. I was one of only two new volunteers invited because my predecessors in this site had a grant to work on AIDS education. Although I am an environment volunteer, my main ally in Pacora has been the health post so I have gotten involved in many public health causes. After my two full days in a VERY HOT classroom in Piura, I feel ready to dive into designing and executing large scale projects and in getting involved in AIDS prevention in Pacora. I hope that I get invited to a lot more workshops like this because I was able to meet other volunteers and their counterparts and get ideas for projects that I can work on. I was also able to bring my counterpart (the obstetrician from the health post, Rosio) who has proven to be incredibly motivated and passionate about public health.
Perhaps the most satisfying part of my week was the completion of the first phase of a hand washing campaign that I designed and worked on with Rosio. We enlisted the help of the health promoters and went door to door in the poorest neighborhood of Pacora to teach them to make tipi-taps and wash their hands. It was satisfying work because the tipi-taps will give these people the means to properly wash their hands even though none of them actually have taps. We posted banners all over the neighborhood including around the community spigot to remind them to fill their new tipi-taps whenever they go to collect water for the day. This project was incredibly simple but it seems like it will be an effective and efficient way to decrease some of the most common diseases including diarrhea and pink-eye. As I move on the second phase of this project, a hand washing campaign in the market, I am dreading doing any more demonstrations because after the first round my hands are dry and cracked. I even had to put off laundry last week because of the open wounds on my knuckles.