Rich and poor

This past week we got to see the immense contrast that exists in Peru, as in the US, between the very rich and the very poor. The part of Lima we live in, Las Delicias de Villa, is definitely a poor, third-world area. Not all the streets are paved and there is dirt and dust everywhere; some of the houses look finished but others are literally shacks made out of some brick and some random pieces of siding material. You wouldn't think anyone lived there except for the laundry strung up inside. Many houses don't have running water, electricity, or both, so there are always wet patches on the streets where people toss their water out the front door, which sometimes get unattractive if people drop fruit peels or other things that can attract flies. There are knee- or waist-high piles of dirt everywhere, which I can only explain by guessing that the people were moving it out of the way to build their houses and had literally nowhere to put it. Rich people can take dirt "away," but where does it go? A question I had never asked myself.

Chaclacayo, in contrast, has pretty houses with gardens, a library, a nice central park/square with coffee shops and laundromats and a bar or two. No piles of dirt. And there really are some very rich people here, because last week Dr. Tony and all the kids were invited to the home of some friends from church for lunch. They live in a gated community right at the foot of the mountains. They have a lovely house with lots of windows and glass doors, a pool, a patio, a lush green lawn which has to be irrigated to be that way, a trampoline, two new-looking cars, and four or five domestic servants, plus a full-time nanny for their little granddaughter who was visiting. The couple seemed like very nice, unassuming people; you would never guess that they were rich until you saw their house. Dr. Tony told us that they invite the kids over twice a year and send their servants' children to school. The kids loved the trampoline and pool. What an amazing contrast to see.

Peruvian hospitals and other types of chaos

We've been at Dr. Tony's for a week and a half now and are starting to get the hang of things. We basically have two types of jobs as volunteers: hang around the house, spend time with the kids, and help the nurses and the teacher; or go with groups of kids into Lima for their medical appointments. There are people hired to take the kids in to the hospitals, but often they need extra adults to hold hands or carry little ones.

On my first full day in the house, Dr. Tony asked me if I would be willing to donate blood for one of their patients, a 25-year-old with aplastic anemia who seems to need transfusions almost weekly. Tony assured me that all the needles and medical facilities are safe and hygenic, and I admit that his being an American doctor made me trust his judgment. Ridiculous fact #1 about Peruvian health care: there are no blood banks to speak of. If someone needs a blood transfusion, they have to go find a friend or relative to donate specifically for them. So I agreed and took the bus into the hospital in Lima with a very nice employee of Tony's named Norma. The hospital was an old building but clean enough, but the disorganization left me pretty much speechless. In order to donate blood, we had to get an order signed by somebody, except that nobody seemed to know who that somebody was, and Norma couldn't get anything helpful out of the nurses for a long time. When we did get the order signed, we had to go back to the front of the hospital to pay 70 soles for the donation (ridiculous fact #2.) Then there was more waiting, a very nice young lab technician who flirted politely with me while I sat around, a bunch of questions in Spanish about my medical history, and then the actual donation. Then Norma had to go wandering around the hospital (with me in tow drinking Gatorade and eating cookies to get some blood sugar back) looking for Hipolito's doctor. No pagers, no schedule of where the doctor is at what time--Norma, not the nurses, had to go walking around asking people if they had seen the doctor. This lasted for about 15 minutes until we discovered that the doctor was not in that day. So instead of leaving the proper paperwork with the nurses, Norma was told to come back tomorrow to give the donation slip to the doctor, who would then give my blood to Hipolito. Meanwhile, as Norma is looking for the doctor, the nurses and various people in the hospital wing are standing around a big Nativity scene for the Bajada de Reyes, which is a lovely little ceremony in which the baby Jesus and the rest of the nativity figures are taken down to singing and clapping. I don't know which was a bigger shock to me--the fact that the Catholic faith was so public, or the fact that they were all singing and taking down the figurines while poor Norma went wandering around looking for the doctor. Luckily Hipolito didn't seem like he needed the blood right that minute; he was sitting up and talking to me and hugging people who came to visit. He's a very sweet person and he has since come back to the house, but he hasn't stopped needing blood donations.

Probably the biggest surprise to me is that the hospital chaos, like the chaos that is Peruvian driving, doesn't surprise anyone here. On another occasion I went with a group of kids to physical therapy, and the therapist that two of them see wasn't there when we arrived, so the kids just shrugged and said they would come back tomorrow and settled down to wait for about two hours while everyone else was seen. It was unbelievable.

The house is more relaxing than going into Lima, but it too has its organized chaos. The kids get up before 6 am and have breakfast at 7. We usually help the little ones who can't walk to bathe and brush their teeth after breakfast, or else I go downstairs to hang out with the older kids and help the teacher by reading to them or putting on music for them to dance to on the patio. The babies come downstairs to play for an hour at 10. Lunch is at 12 and the kids always want to go to the park afterwards, where the older boys play soccer, some on crutches which is very impressive, and the others swing or run around playing. It's a beautiful area and a very nice park with lots of green grass and flowers around. In the afternoon the adults usually take breaks, often at the little coffee shop down the street; the kids eat at 5, Dr. Tony goes to daily Mass at 6:30, and when he gets back the adults eat dinner. Catherine and I have been trying to do English lessons for the bigger kids from 8-9 at night, and then they go to bed. I'm starting to learn all the kids' names and to enjoy their wonderful different personalities... more later on individual adorableness.

The kids got stuffed wool llamas as presents yesterday, so my llama count is officially up to 0.5!

Dr. Tony´s house

Yesterday we left Lima for the Hogar San Fransisco de Asis, an hour from our house in Delicias by taxi. It´s in a suburb of Lima called Chaclacayo, which is a much nicer residential area than where we´ve been living. There are large, pretty houses and quiet streets to walk down to the park/playground. The house seems chaotic when you first go in, but it´s actually very well organized. There are cooks, nurses, and laundry people there, plus volunteers from the US and Ireland, to run the daily life of 61 young people from newborns to people in their mid-20´s. About half of the kids are from Lima, the rest are from various parts of Peru, and all of them need medical treatment in the city´s hospitals, which they wouldn´t be able to afford or get transportation to if it weren´t for Dr. Tony. They are all adorable. My Spanish is improving quickly from hanging out with them. It´s fun because we don´t have to police the kids too much; there are nurses to do that, so we mostly just play with them, take them to the park, bring the babies downstairs from the nursery to play, etc. The kids all have chores, and they keep the place quite clean, sweeping and washing the dishes after every meal. Everybody has a job to do. Those who can walk do the sweeping, those who can´t, dry the dishes; the older boys pick the little ones up out of their wheelchairs to carry them upstairs, and almost none of them do much whining or complaining at all. It´s really amazing. The house is absolutely full of religious pictures and statues, and Dr. Tony leads the kids in prayer before every meal. It´s encouraging to look at a picture of Jesus with kids when I feel overwhelmed... it reminds me that just being there for them is one of the most valuable ways I could spend my time. The kids liked my guitar playing and one of the boys kept requesting songs by Greenday, Coldplay, Dido, and Alanis Morrissette. ¨Feliz Navidad¨was the only song we all knew and could sing together. Not that all of them were there listening, of course--the house is too big, and the kids wander off and amuse themselves during their free time.

All of which takes my mind off the fact that the accomodations are less comfortable than in the nuns´house. Catherine and I share a room with Terri, a Belgian woman who has been working there for a year and who snores like nothing I have ever heard. She´s very sweet and knows that she keeps people up at night, so she´s offered to sleep in the clothes-storage room, which is actually bigger than our room and has a mattress... we feel bad kicking her out, but we also want to sleep at night. The room is smaller than a single dorm room at Maryland and has a bunkbed and a twin bed and not much room for anything else. The mattress and pillow are pretty lame and the shower doesn´t always have hot water, but then again my towel is big enough to wrap around me and we don´t have to stand in a bucket. So whatever, I´m learning to chill out and go with things--something in which I definitely take my cue from the kids.

Catherine and I are going to start some informal English lessons for the kids who want to learn. A lot of them do. It´s fun to be in a bilingual house where actually only three or four people are really bilingual; the volunteers speak English, the nurses and cooks and kids speak Spanish, and Catherine, Tony, our Belgian roommate and I can go either way. Somehow, though, the rest of the people manage to communicate through the language barrier. It´s also great to have the adult society of the volunteers (with their great accents!) who all eat together after the kids have had their dinner. They´re good at taking sanity breaks, such as Dr. Tony´s daily coffee break at 4 pm.

Catherine is beating me mercilessly at the cockroach-killing, so I´ve decided to stop keeping count. There aren´t any at Dr. Tony´s house anyway. I forefeit with a score of 3-6.

Llama count: still 0. Cows grazing on the side of a rather large highway next to a car mechanics shop: 1.

p.s.--There are mountains around here that are huge, bare, uninhabitable hills of brown rock and dirt. Very starkly beautiful, especially when the mist lifts and the sun or stars are out.

A little background info

Perhaps not everybody knows exactly why we're here or what we're doing. Catherine and I are spending a year in Peru as Notre Dame Mission Volunteers, which means we will be serving as tutors in the spirit of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, who dedicate themselves to educating the poor as a work of justice. Our placement is at the Fe y Alegria school in Lima, Peru, where we will be tutoring English and reading (and maybe a little music, now that the sisters have discovered my modest guitar abilities). We are living with three very nice sisters in a house five minutes away from the school. The Peruvian school year starts in March, because the seasons are the opposite from the Northern hemisphere, so between now and March, we will have another volunteer opportunity at the Hogar San Fransisco de Asis, a home for kids who need medical treatment. The home is an hour outside Lima; it is run by an American doctor who moved to Peru to work with children whose families can't pay for the operations they need. Dr. Tony provides a place for the kids to stay and organizes their treatment in the city hospitals. There are over 50 kids living there, with a cooking staff and everything, so they mostly need volunteers to play with the kids and spend time with them. Apparently this is great language training as well... if you know me and kids, you may have guessed that I'm also bringing lots of books to lock myself in my room with when they get to be too much.

We've been here for eight days now and are getting the lay of the land a bit. Living in a desert climate is very different--everything is dusty, including the unpaved street in front of our house, and most of the world is brown, tan, or dusty red brick, except the brightly painted houses and the little green patches of garden or cactus. The houses in our neighborhood look like they´re falling apart, but actually they're being built up; people here start with one floor and build upwards a little bit at a time, as they can afford the bricks. There are knee-high piles of dirt and/or bricks all over the place. Sometimes you see a very nice-looking house literally across the street from a shack of metal and wood that wouldn't look like a house in any sense except that there's laundry strung up inside it. Our house is very nice because it has running water and electricity; we cook on a gas stove that you light with a match, or in the oven. We boil all the water that we drink or use to wash food because the water isn't safe to drink or brush your teeth with. There´s no water drainage system to speak of, so when you shower, you have to stand in a bucket so that very little goes down the drain. Then you pour the water into another bucket and put it by the toilet so it can be used to flush. Fact: if you dump any old bucket of water into a toilet, it will flush. Who knew. Other than that, we haven´t had to change our lifestyle too much. The lack of Internet in the house actually hurts most, because I´m so used to having it at my fingertips to talk to people... we do all our Internet work from little cafes that have tiny little cubicles with old-looking desktops in them, but the connection is fast enough. There´s a TV that we watch the news on for language practice, and a radio/CD player. ...Oh, but before I talk about not changing my lifestyle too much, I still need to wash my clothes by hand. We'll see how that goes this weekend.

Cockroach count: Catherine 4, me 3. Llama count: 0.

Busy first week

So no, I haven't met a llama yet, but that's about the only thing Catherine and I haven't seen during this first week. Animals that we have sighted include tons of dogs in various states of cleanliness, live chickens and little chicks for sale in mesh bags in the market, some birds in the nearby nature reserve, a very fluffy and very dusty sheep coming out of a neighbor's house like a dog, and a few cockroaches in our house (killed so far: me 2, Catherine 1).

Lima is a city of unbelievable contrasts. A twenty-minute bus ride takes you from Tupac, our fairly poor neighborhood where people throw their water out on the streets, to a shopping center called Metro that would fit perfectly in a Maryland suburb. (Metro itself is a superstore that combines something of a Giant, a Sears, and a CVS together. I bought NoAd suscreen there, the exact same brand that I use in the US.) The bus system here is organized chaos incarnate--it really does work, and there seem to be prescribed routes that different buses follow, but mostly it consists of vehicles from small minivans to large buses going along with a guy hanging out the door and yelling where they're going to, like so: "BarrancoChorrilloHuaylas! HuaylaHualyaHualyas!" If you want to ride, you stick out your arm and they stop for you. There are very few personal cars on the streets. And if you think US driving is bad, the drivers here pay zero attention to lanes and honk to let people know they're going around them. It's kind of fun to sit back and watch the chaos as long as you don't have to do the driving.

Well, our time is up... more later.

I'm in Peru!

Hola a todos desde Lima! Catherine and I got in last night at about 12:30 and were met by Sr. Therese, who waited patiently holding her sunflower for us to appear out of customs. Our flight was uneventful. We took a taxi right along the coast of the Pacific Ocean to get to our pueblo, Las Delicias de Villa. It's a poor area, and our first introduction to the mercado street this morning was a quite overwhelming experience. There are little stands selling everything imaginable, all in bright colors; dogs and people dodging out of the way of tiny "moto-taxis" that resemble a child-carrier on the back of a bicycle, except with a motor and a driver (we rode in one back to the house and it was kind of fun!); the streets are dusty and unpaved, and nothing is as clean as we're used to in America, but the people are dressed like anyone you'd see in the US and there are stores selling Puma sneakers alongside homemade jewelry stands. The open-market food, which we have been warned not to eat, doesn't look too tempting because everything from raw meat to fruit is exposed to the open air, with nothing to keep away flies. Many of these houses I'm sure have no running water, and yet here we are with internet and cell phone stores next to the food stands. Anyway, it's been an overwhelming but exciting first day. Next time I'll write about the showers in our house. ;)