Working Hard

I feel like not a lot has happened and at the same time everything is happening. All I have really been doing is teaching for the past few weeks. I know that I have said this many times but it is a lot of work. We have to write out lesson plans and tests and grade which is very time consuming. It is also a lot of work just to get things done in Trujillo. No one is ever on-time and no one ever follows a schedule. Which is a nice way to live but it’s a hard way to work. For example the hairdryer that I use broke and my roommate and I needed to get one. It took four days to get one. First we had to figure out where to buy one. Then finally one of our students said she would take us to get one but she never showed up. She wasn’t being rude it’s just the way things work down here. I think for them life is like abstract art. It follows rules but know one really knows what they are and they can be broken at anytime. For Americans life is not like art at all. It’s a set of rules that you have to follow and we generally get really upset when you break them. I don’t think either one is correct they’re just different. We finally got the hairdryer this morning it took about 2 hours. The first place we went didn’t really have what we needed but the second place did. The line however was really long because they only had one person on the register even though they had two people. Here in Peru they believe it’s better to have one person take the money and another person bag whatever you just bought. In the U.S. I would have driven to Target 4 days ago and bought a hairdryer.

It sounds like I don’t like it here but that is not the case at all. I love it here its just different. One of the missionaries said that there are three phases of culture shock
1. Honeymoon where everything is new
2. You really start the hate everything about the new place that you live in and they way they do things.
3. You assimilate and start to appreciate they way they do things.

I think I am in between one and two.