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I’ve been meaning to update the blog since I got back late on Monday afternoon, but I needed some time to let things digest and really wrap my head around everything that happened. So the adventure started on Thursday night at 10:30pm when I headed to the bus station to meet with the rest of the team that was making the trip with me. I wasn’t surprised to find that the bus station was in a state of madness, since this is generally the state of everything in Chiclayo. Thankfully I found a familiar face quickly and soon met with the translator that I had hired earlier that day. Half an hour later we were all the bus and I was quite pleased to find that it was pretty nice and so I was able to sleep comfortably for most of the five hour trip. I woke up a few times and took some peeks out the window and even though it was pitch dark, I could see that we were on our way up a mountain and were often dangerously close to the edge. Around 1am we arrived in the city of Jaen, where I was put on a “moto” (a motorbike with a carriage on the back) and found myself racing through the dark streets of a foreign city. We had to go and hire a car and driver to take us the rest of the way, which was another five hours. After a short wait, I was packed into a station wagon with five others and forced to share the front seat with my translator. Besides the fact that I had just met this person, it was literally uncomfortable as I had to cling to the side of the car to keep myself in a stable sitting position. An hour into the drive we crossed a bridge and bid farewell to pavement as the rest of the four hour trip was on dirt paths that were thick with mud and rocks due to a recent rainfall. At times we were forced to slow to 10km, but most of the time the driver thought he was driving a 4×4 Hummer as we bounced violently towards our destination. We stopped for breakfast at some point, which was rice, chicken and yucca and unknowing to me at the time, a sign of things to come. We arrived in the village of Lorne Grande which has a population of about 500 or so and is one of the communities where Café Femenino operates. We checked into a hostel which was by far the worst hostel I have ever stayed at. It was just plain gross. We had lunch, which was rice, chicken and yucca… took a rest and then hit the streets looking for women to interview. Before long I was sitting face to face with my first participant – I had finally made it! My excitement was quickly dashed when it became clear that this woman did not want to participate. She answered every question with “yes” or “no” and when I asked her to expand she would say “I don’t know.” Her kids even came in during the interview and turned on the television and she seemed more focused on that than the interview. At the end of it, I was filled with dread at the prospect of having to suffer through more interviews like this. However, my next interview ended up going very well and I was comforted. My this time it was getting late so we went and had dinner (rice, chicken, yucca) before retiring for the evening. The next morning we woke up early, had breakfast (you get the picture, right?) and then had a couple more interviews. At some point, my translator really began to get on my nerves because he was turning out to be pretty incompetent. I hired him based on the fact that he majored in English in University, has taught English in schools and seemed to speak well during our interview. I don’t know what happened from that point to the point of us doing interviews, but he was suddenly having a hard time understanding me, wasn’t translating conversations for me and couldn’t translate follow up questions during the interviews. Besides that, he was just….annoying. Anyway, after we finished a couple more interviews we were to head to another community about an hour away in Neuva York. We were able to hitch a ride with some guy who had a truck, the only way to actually get there. The truck had two front seats and a bench backseat and there were 9 of us packed inside. In the back of the truck were easily 20 more people amid boxes and bags of goods. The ride to the community was tedious since it had been raining and the path there was in terrible condition. At some points we had to stop to move rocks and to push the truck through thick patches of mud. Eventually we arrived and were taken to Erlita’s house, a producer and the secretary of the women of the co-op and someone I had met the week before during the interviews with community leaders. Erlita fed us lunch (you guessed it!) and then we headed to the villages community centre. Erlita had asked the women of Café Femenino to meet there at 3pm and so we were able to start doing interviews immediately. However, as time went by, more and more women began to show up and I was suddenly faced with the problem of having to them all waiting around. I started to interview them in pairs or sets of three to make the wait time shorter. The interviews went quite well, although my translator ended up being completely useful and he was increasingly making me mad for wasting my money on hm. After the interviews we had dinner and Erlita made coffee – and not instant coffee either, but real coffee! She ground the beans, peeled the beans and roasted them and then served me a giant cup of the good stuff. It was so great to have real coffee, although I was surprised to find that the family all added a good three or four teaspoons of sugar to theirs. After dinner it was pretty late so Erlita showed me where I would be sleeping. Her house, which is quite nice compared to others in the community, consisted of two rooms – a kitchen with an eating area and a room with two beds. I was given one of the beds that they had enclosed with tarps to give me some privacy. Since the bathroom was a solid five minute walk into the bush (and was just a hole in the ground with cement walls around it) and impossible to navigate in the night, I was given a bucket to use in case I had to go through the night. Of course, since I’d had a giant cup of coffee, I had to go more than I’ve ever had to go in one night before. Not only was it slightly uncomfortable peeing in a bucket, but the entire family was sleeping on the other side of my tarp, likely thinking I was some kind of alien. I woke up early and had to wait until 2pm until Isabel would be ready to head back. Unfortunately, it was raining quite bad so our plan to visit Erlita’s farm had to be cancelled. This left me and my translator having to spend the day together inside a tiny room with dirt floors and no electricity. It was at this point that my translator told me that he had a problem with the women we had interviewed because many were not married, but lived with their partner and had children. I tried to respect his opinion, but he kept going on about it and pretty soon he got on the topic of finding god, and decided to give me suggestions as to how I could find him. I told him that I respected his beliefs and asked that he respect mine and perhaps it was best we just stayed away from the topic. I thought he would get the point, but clearly he didn’t, because I had to endure god talk for a couple more hours before I excused myself and hid in my tarp room. When 2pm rolled around and Isabel hadn’t shown up, I figured that we would not be returning that day. Yet, at 4pm she showed up with a truck and we made our way back to Lorne Grande. From there we got a car to drive us the five hours to the bus station. This time I had a seat in the backseat, but this didn’t give much comfort since the roads seemed to have gotten worse. The hours seemed to just stretch on FOREVER and by the time we got to Jaen I could barely feel my legs and was convinced that my back was broken from a cracked spine. In Jaen we found that all of the buses were sold out and we would have to stay the night and take the bus in the morning. I was pretty disappointed because at this point I hadn’t showered in four days, all my clothes were covered in mud and my translator was still going on about god. Luckily the hotel we stayed in was pretty nice, but I couldn’t sleep and ended up watching Olympic gymnastics until 5am. At 7am we had breakfast and then got on the bus for the five hour trip back to Chiclayo. About an hour from the city the bus broke down (of course) and we had to take a microbus the rest of the way. Around 4pm, I was finally back in my hotel .

What a trip! It was long and hard and trying, but I was happy with the number of interviews I got. Since I got so many, it became possible that I could do one more weekend in La Florida as we had planned and return home 10 days earlier than expected. My mom offered to help me out with the ticket price and I was overcome with happiness at the prospect of getting home. Unfortunately, the next day I found out that we would not be visiting La Florida until the weekend after and so I was forced to give up my dream of going home early and accept the fact that I would be staying until the 28^th as planned. It was really bad news for me and to top it off, my translator told me that he wasn’t going to work for me anymore because he couldn’t handle staying and travelling in the rural areas. I was partly relieved because I knew it wasn’t working out with him anyway.

Last night I was able to talk to Kris on the phone and it was the longest conversation I have had in English in a really long time. It always cheers me up to talk to him although when I hang up I usually find I feel worse because I realize how much I miss him and home.

My next trip is on Sunday and we will return late that night or the next morning. Until then, I really have nothing to do. Today I went to the supermarket and bought some packs of mayonnaise and cans of tuna for some sandwiches because the cup of soup was getting really old. I was starting to come to terms with the fact that I was going to be stuck here another two weeks and had set up an interview for another translator, so I was feeling half ok. Then I got an email from Isabel and while it’s extremely difficult to figure out what she is saying because I think she uses some kind of translating program to put her emails into English, I felt like she was upset with me and once again, I was ready to just throw in the towel and go home.

Alright this was a really long post, but a good recap of my weekend in the jungle. There are many things I could talk more about, but I have to save some stories for when I get home! I hope everyone is doing well….

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