The good outweighs the bad

It’s true.

This week on Tuesday my adult health promoters and I decided to have a cevichada to make some desperately needed money. For those of you who don’t know what ceviche is a. you’re missing out and b. it’s raw fish meat that’s cut up and soaked in lime juice with tons of onions and chili peppers and salt.

Hopefully I can post a picture on this thing so you can get a better idea. Its then served with cut up sweet potatoes (camote) and toasted, salted corn-ish seeds (canchita). I mean, the thought of eating ceviche originally grossed me out but now I’m totally cool with it and enjoy eating it.

So, of course, I somehow got assigned with the job of picking up 15 pounds of raw fish form the market in Tumbes city. The only issue was that my town’s anniversary has been taking place and I was going to be at a town party/concert until two in the morning the night before. So I got up early the next day to be the “early volunteer that got the fish.”

So at 7:30 I walked into Tumbes, down to the bank and got money out for 15 pounds of fish. At 7:50 I was walking down the main street to meet my counterpart, Sofia who said she would meet me to buy the fish. As I walking, I noticed a man walking closely behind me, kind of in my blind spot. Being paranoid, I started walking more quickly and began to cross the street. What I didn’t notice was the second man running up behind me. Cue the 5th time Lindsey has been robbed. And this is not petty theft. The two men, after ripping my purse off, hopped into the mototaxi parked across the street and took off down a side road and I was left, once again, in the street without my purse. HOWEVER, after all of my time here I have learned a few things. Keep NOTHING of importance in your purse; so I had the bulk of my money in one bra cup and my cell phone in the other. The lousy part was that I forgot I had left my ipod and Maggie’s 24th birthday gift inside my purse.

Conveniently, there was a policeman nearby and I managed to explain what happened. People nearby that had watched everything unfold, wrote down the two license plate numbers of the motos, so I at least I had that going for me. But I doubt anything will come of it. The one super baller and exciting part of all of this was that a newspaper rep had been nearby and I managed to record and interview on a ghetto digital camera, take a picture and write down my information. So now I am a movie star that a. made the evening news on tv b. got mentioned on the radio and c. got on the front page of the local newspaper!!! Go Tumbes 21!!! I wish that happened every time I got robbed.

But alas, there is a good end to this story. I still managed to meet Sofia after the whole debacle and buy my 15 pounds of fish. It smelled pretty bad and I made her carry the plastic bag for fear that the stench would seep into my skin (although I have no problem handling manure sans gloves), but we made it back to San Juan all right. My health promoters and I all went straight to work cutting fish, squeezing limes and slicing potatoes and our ceviche turned out to be delicious. We also made an amazing S/. 80 (roughly 30 dollars)!!! So that was a real morale booster both for my health promoters (now we actually have money to work with) and for me.

And if that wasn’t a morale booster enough, my town’s anniversary hired my cousin Yenner, and his 15 person orchestra/band to play for 8 hours on Wednesday night to celebrate 140 years as an official town.

Now Yenner has recently been developing this band over the past few years and they have all been coming over every Thursday to my house to practice (the room next to me is the only one big enough to fit the instruments). So Wednesday was their first big gig. I was so proud of them! Anne, Alyse and Isha came from their towns to join in too. Right as they were all getting ready to start in the main park, Alyse and I come out of my room to find one of the lead singers running up the stairs in his boxer briefs. Upon seeing us, he tried (unsuccessfully) to cover himself up with basically a washcloth and kept muttering “Im sorry, I’m sorry” as we laughed like 10 year old girls.

The party/dance marathon/beer fest started at 2 in the afternoon and ended at 10 at night. After attempting to dance salsa and cumbia for so long, my legs began to waver and I thought my feet would fall off, so I naturally bought French fries drenched in sketchy Peruvian condiments and sugared pineapple juice. This along with drinking for 8 hours on end has contributed greatly to some severe diarrhea on my part (it was all totally worth it though). After saying my goodbyes I came home, ate peanut butter and honey- covered potato chips (don’t judge) and fell asleep.

So like I said, even though there were some definite horrible parts to the past two days, the good of everything outweighs the bad.

Aunt Leah and I. Yeni and Milton dancing and drinking.