Pilcopata's revenge aka its attempts to make me like it

Back in the jungle and I feel like my life is a videogame and I just passed on to the next level of difficulty: only one eye! Last Thursday night as I was taking off my contact lenses I dropped one and could not find it; my eyesight is really bad and I need to have my contact lens remade in Italy, mailed to Cusco and, in the fortunate event in which it would get there, go and get it, because it would really be pushing my luck to have it sent to Pilcopata (my USB was given to a woman who was supposed to come on Saturday and arrived this morning). [My first investment when I move back to Europe and begin to work will be eye surgery, to solve all these problems for the rest of my life].
The Peruvian jungle is stunningly gorgeous and the town of Pilcopata is impressively ugly. The trip here took us 10 hours in a bus with bad breaks and two exhausted drivers, a rain storm chasing us and a landslide that blocked the road for 2 days right after we arrived. I traveled here with Simone, the volunteer, and two Italians working in Cochabamba, Bolivia, Cristina and Marco, who came to evaluate our project and see if we can cooperate and if Cristina’s boss in London wants to send us volunteers. It looks like she approved the project, if we can overcome a few technical difficulties such as my (as yet) inability to be here and in the Sacred Valley simultaneously.

Let me tell you a bit about the interesting town of Pilcopata and its inhabitants. We arrived and were told that Simone could go and live in the rooms in the parish church: I went to see them and found out the priests had traveled to Cusco and the rooms need to be repainted and restructured completely before any volunteer can live there. Yesterday the priests got back and I see what may have caused the planning difficulties—consider that in Pilcopata there is no cell phone reception, no private land lines, and none of the people I work with use Internet, which leaves two possible systems of communication: 1) call the public phones and ask the person answering to pass the phone to the person you want to talk to or deliver a message, or 2) have a letter hand carried and delivered by someone traveling here.
Now consider my (failed) attempts to communicate with the priests before coming:
A few weeks ago I had Fredy carry a letter to the priests. He says he delivered it, the priest says he never got it.
Maricarmen says the priests called a couple weeks ago saying the rooms were ready for the volunteers; the priest today told me he’d called saying they were not ready and there was still a lot of work to do.
I’d called repeatedly asking to speak to the priests or to tell them to call me back, and never received any call. Simone and I had to introduce ourselves to Maricarmen’s father about 6 times during the first couple days here, till we decided he must be senile. He them told me that he is actually almost blind. He is also the person in charge of answering the public phones and delivering messages. Lots of things suddenly make sense…

Also, Maricarmen insisted I go and live in her house in construction in her land a bit out of Pilcopata. I’d told her before coming that it scared me to go and live there because it’s dark and isolated, but she insisted it was safe [“Nobody has ever been raped in Pilcopata”(…)]. When I arrived the house was full of mud, wood and other construction materials, the second floor is completely missing, there is no running water, electricity, furniture or windows…but other than and the fact there are snakes it’s ready to live in it. I told her it wasn’t ready and after accusing me of spending lots of the project’s money because of being scared to live in her house and changing plans at the last minute, finally last night she agreed that “of course” the house is not ready, after all her construction workers had been telling her for almost a week.

Things here are quite slow and it’s interesting that a volunteer coordinator lived here for almost one year because no one knows about the project. Working here is not easy because the school director is very rude, the priests don’t have the money to buy the materials to restructure their parish, and it’s going to be very difficult to find host families because people are overall much poorer than in the Sacred Valley. But at least the doctor is young and very active and there are 4 medical students doing their internships here.

You need to have reached a sort of inner peace to enjoy life in Pilcopata (and it helps if you like hot weather), you need not to be after gorgeous Argentine men (or any other gringo) and preferably not care much about any of the following: social life, shopping, night life, winter clothes, cultural events, nice looking hair or overall nice looks. Admittedly I am very much into most of the above—especially the Argentine men, and I am incredibly disturbed by how horrible my bangs look!—and yet I don’t see the contradiction between that and my wanting to do development work. Is there one? Here there is lots of time to do non-internet-requiring work, read (currently reading Salman Rushdie's "Midnight Children": brilliant!), think, write, and movies are extremely cheap, Simone and I bought 19 movies for 18 soles (4euros) and have been watching them (movies watched since arrival in Pilco: Motorcycle Diaries, Children of Heaven, Ratatouille, Shreck 3, The Simpsons).

Yesterday we met Sofie, a girl from Belgium doing an internship in the hospital here, and we told her to come and eat pizza with us tonight, made by Orisson (the guy who is currently renting and running Maria's hostel where Simone and I are living) in the brick oven…definitely good! She came and she’s very nice—we had a nice evening with her and a tourist from New Hampshire, who spent some time around Lake Tititcaca studying birds, and (not surprisingly) answered all of our conversation attempts with one word answers.