Spring Break Peace Corps Style!

Easter weekend in Peru warrants a four-day weekend and as part of our "cultural integration," Peace Corps volunteers are given free vacation days. I decided to head up to Mancora, the Spring break destination of Peru, and spent my four days playing on the beach, eating amazing foods, and enjoying the infamous Mancora nightlife scene (with every precaution taken to stay safe of course). About twenty other volunteers showed up from all over the country so this turned out to be an excellent opportunity to catch up with people I hadn't seen since training and to meet volunteers who have been here longer than I have. The Peace Corps pretty much took over our hostel and enjoyed a weekend in the roll of tourists rather than idealistic, international do-gooders.
When the weekend ended it was back to reality, a transition that has been a little more difficult than I anticipated. I had taken full advantage of the Mancora culinary scene and eaten fresh seafood quesadillas, amazing octopus curry, and even some waffles at a restaurant called Green Eggs and Ham. I had left some loose ends before hitting the beach so I had to jump right from mojitos overlooking the Pacific Ocean to sorting hundreds of kilos of recycling and writing my community diagnostic. I am proud to say that I have completed both of these missions and I am back to feeling like a PCV.
The recycling campaign was the most fulfilling thing that I have done since getting to my site. I gave every student a bag (the waste in plastic probably seriously decreases the net benefit of the project but the educational aspect was more the point anyway), which they filled with recyclables and brought to me in exchange for candy and stickers. We ended up filling an entire room with bags of recycling and when I got back from my trip it was time to sort. I enlisted the help of some older students (all male despite my insistence otherwise) and we spent a total of four hours over two school days sorting out the garbage and putting all the recycling in sacks to be weighed and sold. At one point one of the boys helping sort the trash found a "toy" shaped like a certain part of the male anatomy, which belongs on the shelves of fantasy video and not in an elementary school recycling campaign. This provided for lots of giggling and extreme awkwardness on my part. When the recycler came to purchase the material, there was still much work to be done so I ended up staying at the school until 10 pm two nights in a row to finish up the sorting, weighing and transporting. The recycler transported all the material to his storage area across town using a tricycle with a big basket type of thing. It took about five very full loads but we finally sold a total of 170 kilos (374 lbs) of recyclables which is a huge amount considering a plastic bottle ways next to nothing. The enthusiasm on the part of the students was so satisfying that I have high hopes for instituting a permanent recycling program in the schools and I look forward to more campaigns like this in the future. The director has already requested that we make this a monthly campaign, I just need to figure out a more efficient way to collect the trash than individual bags for each student.
My next big project is to set up an Earth Day parade and banner contest among the school children. So far all of the schools have agreed to participate and I am looking forward to drawing more attention to environmentalism in Pacora. As my boss Diego always says, "the children are your little soldiers."