The Wall

April 22nd, was "Día de la Tierra" or Earth Day and I celebrated by pulling off my first real, solo Peace Corps event. By the end of March, I realized Earth Day was coming up and, even though I'm not an Environment PCV, I really wanted to do something to get kids thinking about making more of an effort to protect the environment. After some research of previous PCV projects and a lot of pondering I came up with a few possible ideas:

• Park and neighborhood clean-ups
• Movie night with an environmental theme to raise money to buy and install more trash cans around town
• Paint a mural to promote environmental awareness

To get the project moving, I partnered with our Regidor del Medio Ambiente y Turismo. Now I'm not totally sure what that translates to with regards to the way our city hall is set-up and I'm also not positive that his title is exactly that but basically he's pretty high up in our municipality and takes care of Guadalupe's environmental and tourism concerns. He's helped Amanda and I get connected with the right people and is full of ideas about how Peace Corps can work with Guadalupe. However, after our first couple meetings to discuss an Earth Day event, we realized we were taking on a little too much for one day and were going to have to scale things down or push the event to a later date. Luckily, my regidor found out June 5th is "Día Mundial del Medio Ambiente" (aka World Environment Day) and we were able to plan two days of events instead of one! 

Starting with Earth Day we chatted with one of the schools in town (which happened to be my host brother's colegio) about projecting a movie after classes to earn money to buy and install trash cans in a park near my house. They agreed and I set off to find an environmentally-themed movie. My first thought was Fern Gully, but no luck there. So I ended up choosing Wall-E, a movie about a world filled with trash, sedentary humans becoming overly plump due to their reliance on technology and a robot romance in outer space. Yeah...

I watched my copy of the movie once with my host brother to make sure it wasn't too bad of quality (aka filmed with a video camera right in the theater) and that the language could be switched to spanish. I made a poster with all the details to promote the event for the school and teachers reminded their students to attend and help out. We charged S/1.00 per person and sold bags of popcorn for S/0.50 and about 60 kids ended up coming. They were more interested in turning the event into a social hour and chatted the majority of the time but I really can't blame them because it was only my second time watching the movie and I was not too into it. Don't get me wrong, the theme and the message is wonderful but I swear at least 75% of the dialogue is, "Wall-eeeeee!" And that was just too much for me. The important thing is that we made over S/70.00 from the event and after selling some of the extra bags of popcorn to the old men taking their afternoon bench sits in the plaza we made a grand total of S/80.00! It was awesome.

My next move is to hold a competition within the same school among the students in order to find a winning mural idea. There is a wall near the park where we will be having a park clean up and, somehow, it has become the local dumping area for household trash. Right now, like most walls and sides of buildings, it has some political propaganda painted on it from an old election and is definitely deserving of a new paint job. With the help of my regidor we tracked down the building owner and got his permission to paint it. I got a wall! It's just so Dawson's Creek. [Let me quickly explain. Dawson's Creek is basically a show defined by the love triangle of two best friends, Dawson and Pacey, fighting for the love of their best friend, Joey played by the young Katie Holmes. In one of the episodes Pacey buys Joey a wall as a gift and she gets to paint whatever she wants on it. Thank you TBS for playing three episodes a day during summertime.]

My wall!

In addition to the mural and the park clean-up, we're trying to plan another movie night on "Día Mundial del Medio Ambiente" next month but this time it will be in the municipality and will be open to more than just one school. AND, no more Wall-E this time! We'll be playing The Lorax, a lovely Dr. Seuss tale about what happens when you don't appreciate the trees (or something like that). Because each trash can costs about S/130.00 we're really hoping to make a lot more money with this next event and maybe even get some financial support from the municipality. 

With the success of the Earth Day movie, I've begun to feel a lot more at ease in site. After 5 months in Guadalupe, I'd say it's about time! It's hard to put yourself out there in a different country with a different language, especially when, as PCVs, we are in charge of our own schedules. So it's really a good feeling and it's motivated me to keep productive. Except for today as I have taken this morning off to clean my room, do some crafts (that's actually work to raise money for a girls' camp my department is having next month, but it's also mostly fun for me) and catch up with all of you.

The month of May, much like the month of March, will be filled with trainings and travels but this time I promise I will take many more photos and share them all with you. In about a week and a half I will be reuniting with the rest of the WASH 20 crew for our second training this year. The first half of the week will be in Chiclayo, a city about an hour and a half north of Guadlupe and we'll be working with our socios (counterparts) to plan and work through possible projects. The second half will be in Chachapoyas, Amazonas! We'll be up in the sierras visiting the sites of some of our own WASH 20 volunteers and, by the way they describe it, I know it's gonna be just gorgeous (and muuuuch colder than the coast). 

At the end of the month I'll be traveling down to Lima for another training. Peace Corps provides a lot of opportunities to join committees and groups such as the English Teaching Committee, Gender Equality, etc. In March, I applied to be a member of the Peer Support Network and am now the representative for La Libertad. Basically, I'll be calling all of our La Lib PCVs every month or so to check in and will be available to whoever needs a chat. There's more to it of course and I'll be figuring that all out at our orientation at the end of May. After almost 8 months in Peru and away from my own support system back home, it's exciting to find my place in Peace Corps and to be a part of our PCV support system.

So many good things to look forward to! I'll be sure to share them with you soon.