Flipping Scripts -- and Syllables

 

Duraznopampa from the path to San Pedro

I was up well before dawn today, gathering my things into my backpack to catch my transport to leave site. It was delightfully reminiscent of my pre-dawn travel-day ritual in Bahía Azul when I would catch the boat that left at daybreak to cross the Laguna to the mainland at Chiriqui Grande. 

The kitchen of my host family's home

Despite the short night’s sleep there’s an exhilaration to the process that always has me overflowing with energy. Different today though were the layers of warm clothes I was wearing against the morning chill. After two sea-level sites in the tropics, the cool mountain air at 7,200 feet above sea level is bracing. 

Rio Utubamba

And today it wasn’t a boat I was catching, but a crowded combi—a little van fitted out with extra fold-down seats,that bounces along beside the Utubamba River as it winds between towering hills, dropping through a verdant valley towards the provincial capital of Chachapoyas. 

Plaza de Armas in Chachapoyas

I’m here in the far north of Peru, in the Departamento of Amazonas, just wrapping up a ten-day visit to the place I’ll be living and working for the next two years in my third go-round as a Peace Corps volunteer. It’s an absolute thrill. Four years after abruptly leaving my site in Vanuatu at the outset of the pandemic, I’m back in it.

A visit to the Kindergarten in San Pedro

  My site here is just fabulous—far better than I’d allowed myself to hope for. If that sounds like the naive enthusiasm of a starry-eyed newbie, so be it. I’ll gladly accept the label. I’m not even sworn in as a volunteer yet—our cohort has two more weeks of pre-service training to finish up back in Lima—but as much as I’ve enjoyed immersing myself in PST for the past eight weeks with my new friends in Group 41, I’m itching to finish up the prologue and get on to the opening chapter of what is promising to be an epic volume 3 of my Peace Corps journey. 

Walking to San Pedro

  I’m pressed for time to get this first blog entry posted, and I’ve got a ton more photos to choose from, so I won’t go into a lot more detail, but I’ll be living in Duraznopampa, a little  mountain town of 800 souls where I’ll again be serving as a water and sanitation specialist. The project goal is to improve local leaders' capacity to assure access to safe drinking water for the families in Duraznopampa and in five anexos, smaller communities that are each about an hour’s walk from my home base. I’ve met dozens and dozens of people around town here and on daily hikes out to the surrounding villages and virtually everyone has been friendly and welcoming. I’ve been introducing myself as Luis, but people around here are fond of nicknames, and a lot of people have suggested the popular form, Lucho. But what seems to really be sticking is the affectionate diminutive form of that nickname, Luchito. I liked the ring of that even before it struck me that it almost perfectly transposes the syllables of my original Ngabe nickname, Tolichi. As someone who is always more than willing to read a simple coincidence as an auspicious omen, I’ll take it!