A Nightmare, An Analogy, and Saludos

One Peace Corps nightmare scenario took place last Thursday evening.  Sal didn't feel to well up in his site near Chota.  It's not abnormal to not feel well, so he waited it out for awhile.  After a little time of running down checklists, diarrhea, nope, vomitting, nah, just really bloated and in stomach pain... he calls up Suni, our Peace Corps doctor in Lima, and she tells him to buy some specific medication and if it still hurts in the morning to call her.  "Ok, well, Suni, there's no pharmacy here".  Try to sleep it off.  Ok, he goes to bed.  Starts moaning, the pain's getting worse, his host family is alarmed.  So he calls up Suni, "I'm not waiting, I'm going to the hospital in Chota."  After looking for a car, which apparently wasn't easy, he goes to the Hospital in Chota, which is a semi-large town closer to his cite than Cajamarca.  They run some tests on him.  You have appendicidis, and we need to operate.  Hold on, let me call my doctor.  "They can't operate on you, we don't know/trust those doctors, you have to get to Cajamarca."  Sal calls up Jose, our regional co-ordinator, I have to get to Cajamarca, its an emergency my appendix is going to burst and Peace Corps wont let me have the operation in Chota.  It's now 3 in the morning.  Somehow, Jose gets to Chota by like 5, fills out all of Sal's paperwork and speeds over dirt roads to Cajamarca, and hes there by 8 where they run all the tests again, and say, "Yep, if we don't operate very soon, you could be looking at .... death."  Fantastic.  So he finally gets operated on, a full 24 hours after the symptoms started showing.  The doctors told him it was the biggest appendix they had ever seen in their careers.  That's what we call a Peace Corps nightmare.

Also I thought of a good analogy for what my primary project seems to be.  Since I like to play instruments, you can tailor it to youre own hobby.  So its as if I had a band, and twice a month we got together to jam out, and then all of a sudden this dude from England came and he was like, "yo, that was awesome, we gotta get you guys signed, you should start gigging every Thursday at this bar I know down the street".  I'd be like, "hell yeah, I want to be musician, sure, lets do it"  I'd start working harder at my music, maybe, but I sure as hell wouldn't quit my day job, my real income source.  You know what, when it really came down to it, I dunno, its not really for me, its too much work, I don't want to give up my Thursdays every week, and there's so much I don't know about the music business.  It was a nice idea, but now that we've thought about it, we just... we just like playing music we don't really do it for the money, never really looked at it as a way to earn money, you can't be in the music business for the money!  Well, who in their right mind is in the synthetic goods knitting business for the money.  Exactly.

Hey I mean, I still give presentations on marketing, accounting, and business organization.  I just hope they take what I teach them, and start applying it in other places and coming up with new ideas, thats the real ticket.  It's really just a woman's empowerment project, none of the men ever bothered to teach these women anything, just by being here I'm setting the example that these women's lives are worth something to someone. 

Keep in touch, seriously, I hear from the same 5 people all the time, if you're a friend that I don't hear from that often, it's the holidays, its time.

Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah,

Mateo