Let´s go fly a kite

While the sun has been in hiding this past week, kids in my town have taken to scourging the area for spare plastic bags and lightweight wood called “ caña” while contracting their dads and older brothers to sew/paste everything together to form a hexagonal-shaped kite. As I’m writing this blog, my aunt Maritza just came marching through my house announcing that there is going to be a great “kite” contest this week, complete with prizes, to see who can build the most attractive and most successful kite. I have solicited the help of my 9-year old cousin Artur to help me making mine.

So for the past few days when I have gone outside, there have been no less than two or three kites flying in the sky with one or two kids attached to a line at the other end. It’s actually very cute. On Thursday I spent the better half of an hour with the kids from my street learning how to fly a kite. I mean I guess I already knew how to but I hadn’t done it in a while and apparently according to the expertise of my cousins Artur and Michel , my technique was not up to par. It also didn’t help that I kept getting the meanings of “ tie it up” and “ let it loose” confused. When they’re high enough up in the air, they begin to look just like fish swimming in place with the tails flying behind them. It’s really quite beautiful to see a few of them up in the sky all at once. Eventually though, the kite got stuck in a tree and then the rope snapped while trying to pull it down. No matter. They were back at it today with a brand new one.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure kite season is meant to stick around for much longer. Today the sun came out with a vengeance, as if he almost wanted to warn me that the next 8 months of my life will be filled with nothing but UV rays and oily skin. I cant say I’m surprised; however I was just getting used to the coolness of the winter months here when the thermometer hits a lowly 75 degrees in the evening.

I guess I should be thankful that I’m dealing with this hot weather today and not yesterday. Yesterday I held my first big, public activity outside. Category? District Marathon. Time? 9 in the morning. Distance? 5 kilometers. Participants? Anyone between the ages of 10 and 18. Location? Very dangerous road that passes through my town but is the only thing paved so thus the only option. Number of attendees? 50. Number of people that fainted? Only one.

So to put everything in perspective, I’ve got two main projects going on here this year in addition to some smaller, secondary things I’m doing in my spare time. One of my main projects has to do with AIDS prevention in my site. Specifically, to form a group of teenage health promoters that can teach their classmates about how HIV is transmitted blah blah blah… how to prevent teenage pregnancy…why not to do drugs… how to use a condom… those sorts of things. In Tumbes, prostitution is very much legal and drug use might as well be too. So we’ve got a lot of AIDS going on; in fact, Tumbes is #1 in the country for highest number of per capita cases. Go team (note sarcasm). So while I’ve been teaching this group of about 20 kids about all of the themes listed previously, we’ve decided to do some activities that involve the town to get public knowledge out! Our first activity was this 5km marathon.

Now, I should preface everything by stating that I live in a town where many kids (maybe even most) can be labeled as un-ambitious to lazy. I was faced with a large-scale uproar when I proposed the idea of running roughly 3 miles (from one end of the district to the other) without stopping. “No one wants to go that far”, “We’re not used to exercising that much” or “ I can’t” was the gossip. In order to appease part of the public, I decided that yes, maybe 3 miles was a little too far for a 10 year old to run so I shaved off a kilometer and a half and instead made two finish lines; one for kids ages 10-12 that was 1 ½ Km shorter and then another one for the rest of the kids.

With the help of Tumbes’ ministry of health department (which donated water), my town’s health post ( which donated the use of an ambulance- complete with doctor) and the town police (to block off traffic), I felt as if I really had a lot of support from my community.

Earlier this week, I had been meeting with my little teen health promoters to record messages advertising the marathon and then playing them on our town’s loudspeaker (yes, the same one I still want to take an axe to every morning), with Rihanna or a Britney Spears song playing in the background. These teen’s had also made a ridiculous number of posters that we had taped all over the town’s traffic signs and houses along the road that had messages displaying information about teen pregnancy, different types of contraception that exist, and why HIV sucks.

So needless to say, there had been a lot of preparation that had gone into this “marathon” and I woke up yesterday feeling nervous! It wasn’t like the other types of nervous I’ve felt while being here (like talking in front of people or avoiding the dark alleys in the city), because this time I felt nervous because I felt like it was kind of the first big indicator of the influence that my teens and myself have on our community and whether people would decide to come out to participate. If no one decided to show, the whole town would know because while a lot of people didn’t want to participate, there was a large number of people that knew it was going on and I did not feel like having a bunch of hard effort go to waste with no marathon to show for it.

So imagine my surprise when I walked over to my health post yesterday morning and people were dressed and ready to go 45 minutes BEFORE the marathon was supposed to take place! NOTHING starts on time here and I am very used to waiting 2 hours for a meeting to start. I was ecstatic. I was even more ecstatic when more and more people kept coming every minute until I had at least 30 kids ready to go, with signs on their back saying things like “ Use a condom” or “AIDS kills” or “Abstinence is the answer.” It was GLORIOUS.

While I don’t think the head of my health post was very impressed with the results (because a. he was going to have to drive them to the starting point about a mile away in the town’s ambulance and b. I just don’t think he would be impressed with anything I did unless I learned how to cut atoms with scissors), it didn’t matter to me. All that mattered was that the kids came. Even the “cool” older boys that I swear to God I never thought would do anything if it didn’t involve girls or being lazy.

With the help of my teen health promoters, everything started off great and I watched as 50 kids from all around the district hit the ground running for the finish line. Two other Peace Corps volunteers form the area (Sarah and Ian) came over to help and we all took a car so we could drive by the kids and cheer them on and take pictures. I have not felt as happy when I saw the kids giving me double fist-pumps in the air as they ran farther than many of them had ever run before. I took a total of 87 pictured in 60 minutes.

Five kilometers down the road Sarah, Ian and I waited for the older kids to come across the finish line. The first kid Josue, came in at around 18 minutes. Bit by bit, more started to trickle in (some in sandals which is insane) and despite getting an unknown phone call telling me someone had fainted, everything seemed to be going well. But things only got better. After the first 10 or so big kids had come in, I started to see some of the younger kids come in through the 5Km finish line. These kids didn’t even need to be running this far! They could have stopped a kilometer and a half back!! They told me they came this far because they just wanted to. To see if they could do it. I was amazed. Even my younger host sister Prixi who is 14 and fat and eats terribly and whined after walking for a half hour the day before did it! You could tell she was so proud of herself, and I was too.

After passing out bananas and water, we waited around for the kids to get hauled back to town. I went home, sunburnt and sore-throated and immediately went into Tumbes city for some ice cream. And despite the fact that every kid I’ve seen so far today has told me they have blisters or that their legs are sore, I know they are proud of themselves and I am proud of them too.