When It All Comes to An End

Today is Friday, November 18th, 2011, and it has been exactly 11 weeks since I first came to Lima; and tonight I leave. While I´m beyond excited to go back to see my family, at the same time I am also really sad to leave the environment in which I feel I grew so much as an individual these past 2.5 months. I´ll miss the Cross Cultural Solutions volunteer house, filled with its warm, friendly staff and the laughter of my fellow volunteers. I´ll miss Fe y Alegria #17, my teaching routine, and having the girls bombard me with relationship questions at random intervals of time. I feel like both my home and work atmosphere made my time here as amazing as it was. Since I was here for so long, I had the liberty of seeing 4 different volunteer groups come and go, and it was interesting to see how to the house-dynamic changed with each group. There were two people I really bonded with though, Mark and Meghan, who were from the 3rd group with whom I spent the most amount of time with. Anyone who knows me well knows how much I love laughing, and these two brought out the best of my humor that had unfortunately been lying a bit dormant for some months now, and for that I will be forever thankful. I came to Lima thinking that I had to be serious for the majority of the time, since volunteer work by nature should be somber, right? Wrong. The laughter that I shared with my housemates when I wasn´t working transferred into my teaching routine, as I became more animated and took myself less seriously in the classroom (something that I think really helped get my teaching points across to the girls and the boys). All in all, I never thought I would have as much fun as I did here in Lima, but I did. Laughter transcends cultures and boundaries, and all the fun I had made me concentrate more on living in the moment instead of worrying about homesickness. That´s probably also why I was so serious and tense the beginning of my trip, since I thought that in a few weeks time from the start-date of my program I would be heart-achingly homesick, yet that never actually happened. I´m still kind of scared that it will happen with my next adventure, but for now, I´m so grateful I had all the experiences that I had here in Lima. The people here, the Limenos I mean, are one of a kind people. They´re so open, sweet, and easygoing, and I will never forget the amazing teachers and the curious students that I met at Fe y Alegria, nor the people that I met out and about the city. I know that anytime I come back to Lima I´d have at least 10 places to stay, and that sense of hospitality, radiating from these peoples, really touched me. Thank you Lima, you will forever remain in my heart as a beautiful, eclectic city that rendered me a young adult, instead of merely a teenager.

My Newest Endeavor...

I`ve realized - perhaps obviously - that a large part of the reason that adolescent Peruvian girls enter into unprotected sexual relationships is because of the guys. If the guys don`t specifically tell the girls that they want to use a condom, the girls will stay quiet and not even touch upon the issue. Thus, I decided to begin talking to groups of adolescent boys about the importance of condom-usage, just like how I talked to the girls about the importance of using both a condom and birth control pills if they are sexually active. However, from an anthropological standpoint, it was interesting how the way in which I had to approach this topic to the females was completely different than how I had to approach it with the boys. While the premise of what I was discussing was exactly the same (how use methods of birth control and the importance of using them), I had to alter the way I spoke to the two different sexes in order to get them to listen to what I had to say. With the girls, I was soft-spoken and used a very serious tone of voice, while with the boys I was a lot louder and a bit more hardcore, kind of like a drill seargent (the only thing missing from my spiel was yelling "DROP AND GIMME TWENTY!"). My approach to get the boys to wear condoms consisted of this:

Top 3 Reasons Why You Should Wear A Condom:

1) Some girls will try to manipulate you and tell you that they won`t get pregnant if you don`t use a condom. They only do this in order to have your baby and finagle you into being not only their husband, but also their economic provider. I ask you, "Do you want to be married at age 16?" If so, have fun saying goodbye to your hard-earned money.... AND your freedom.

2) Wear a condom because the withdrawal method does not work when used as an independent form of birth control because of its high failure rate. I ask you, what guy has the self-control to pull out right as he is in his moment of ecstasy? (all the guys mulled silently over this one......). Thus, it is easier just to use a condom and feel all the pleasure you want instead of having to remember to pull out.

3) Imagine if you have sexual relations with a girl that has already had certain sexual relations with some of your friends. If you don`t use a condom ..... It`s like having sex with your friends. I ask you... Do you have a strong desire to have sex with your best friends?

Overall, the boys seemed to respond to these reasons to wear a condom a lot better than by me just telling them, "wear a condom so that the girl won`t get pregnant and so you won`t get STDS." While it may be a bit risky to be telling the boys such things in a Catholic-run school, the reality is that sexual health needs to be discussed with today`s youth, and it needs to be discussed in innovative ways that really resonate with the new generation.

Beach Trip and Halloween