While living with my new Peruvian family, I've been waking up a few days a week at 5:30 in the morning to go to the gym with my Peruvian mother (Aida,Lucho's mom, and she's wonderful and beautiful, and lots of fun!) to do spinning, lift weights, and take crazy, workout dance classes. It's been fun, but a little difficult to do while being jetlagged and when getting accustomed to my work schedule here in Lima. The house is in San Borja, where there is a wonderful park that surrounds a military building where we have been told many people were tortured and died during President Fujimori's reign in Peru in the late 90s and early 2000s. It looks like the death star, watching me as I run in circles....Otherwise, the house is wonderful, and I get to watch movies in spanish (including Erin Brockavich, The Terminator, and Big Daddy)!!
Erin's place is great! She lives on the roof and has a wonderful little terrace out side of her room with a great view of the foggy, gray city of Lima.
So now back to what we've been doing. We visited the University Peruana Cayetano Heredia on Monday and met all of the wonderful epidemiologists and doctors there, and even overheard a phone conference with our very own Dr. King Holmes! I'm very excited to work with this group, they are brillant, lovely, and super helpful!
Then on Tuesday, we worked on our IRB's...everyone keep your fingers crossed that we will be able to do are studies starting next week!!! If not, we might just have to keep teaching and traveling (which wouldn't be all that bad, would it???). Tuesday evening Erin and I got a little pampering done (how could you refuse a $7 pedicure? $10 face sugaring?) and then had some Peruvian beer at a little whole in the wall bar where we met some Peruvian musicians and were invited to a concert for friday night! I'm excited!
On Wednesday, we went to Canta Gallo again and did our workshops. We taught a little bit of english (the numbers 1-10), and supported a workshop on Influenza. It was very interesting and fun, and Erin got to show off her amazing teaching skills! Then we went to another poor community called Villa Rica, that was about 30 minutes from the university (when there's no traffic) and was created by a woman that moved from the Amazon to Lima and wanted to have other Shipibo immigrants live with her. We toured around the community and met another group of strong, organized women that were about to have a meeting about the Communal Bank that they were maintaining. Communal Banks are a form of micro-finance, common of people that have very little resources, in order to form a safety net for the families that participate in the bank as well as enable people to borrow money in order to start their businesses of artesenia. I really want to learn more about it! We also got to chat with some of the doctors from Cayetano that work in this community as well as in Canta Gallo. They work in a health posts as well as do door-to-door healthcare in the communities. As I was observing all that the doctors were doing in the community, I felt this disconnect between doctors and the actual needs of the communities. How can we promote healthcare such as vaccination and cervical cancer screenings when these people make less than 30$/month? I mean, I'm going to be studying the HPV vaccine and its acceptance in the community, but even if they get this vaccine for free (which they won't for a while), this will protect them at the ages of 40 or 50, but the life expectancy hardly reaches that and people are in danger of starving every day....This is why the communal bank as well as supporting the communities in the artensain work is important to me (though I'm feeling that these people really don't have that many opportunities. It would be nice if they could have jobs that they could make more money, or could live their lives as they did in the Amazon).
Thursday, I went with one of our advisers, Isaac, back to Canta Gallo in order to follow the doctors from the university as they did their outreach healthcare work. It was very interesting listening to their questions and seeing how the families that they spoke with responded. It was great to see the Shipibo woman in charge of social activities and health in Canta Gallo accompanying the doctors as they went from house to house in order to translate and help the families feel safer to respond to the doctor's questions. Also during the day, we met Peruvian students of anthropology that were studying the Shipibo traditions related to childhood. Erin and I are going to observe some of their interviews and hopefully get a little of their advice for our work in Canta Gallo.
In the afternoon, I met Erin in Miraflores and we walked to the ocean and watched some surfers and even met one fogarty scholar, Adam, who was here for a year and was going to Namibia to do work for PATH in malaria prevention (what a small world!). He was passing through Atlanta on his way to Namibia, so I told him where to go shopping...very cute.
Later in the night, we went out with Erin's roommates to have sushi, which was fun. Now today (Friday), we are going to hear a lecture on mental health in indigenous populations in Lima, and hopefully we will go to this concert we were invited to, and then finally tomorrow morning, we are going to get out of Lima and see some of the beauty of Peru!!!
Story to be continued....
Pictures: from the top, erin teaching, the military building where i run, a lovely night in the lovely Barranco, me eating a delicious slice of pastel con maracuya (the best fruit ever!), church at night in Barranco, child peeing outside in Canta Gallo, picture with healthcare workers in Villa Rica, erin with children from Villa Rica, us with the woman from the Banco Comunal in Villa Rica, me teaching.
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