One of our friends from Chaclacayo, Ever, came to visit us last Thursday and went with me to accompany the Pastoral de Salud on their visits to the sick. He saw Señora Rosa in her shed with her bent hands and seemed even more shocked and troubled at the sight than I was. The next time he came to visit us, he arrived in a mototaxi with several bursting grocery bags full of "viveres"--rice, salt, teas, pasta, canned milk, and other nonperishable foods--ready to distribute to the people here who need them, bought with money that he and his friends in well-off Chaclacayo pooled together. It reminded me of my parish at home making sandwiches in the basement after church to take to soup kitchens in downtown Baltimore. I was really touched by the generosity of Ever and his friends, not least because I saw something of myself in them, foreigners to the world of poverty but eager to help a little if they could figure out how. After church Catherine and I helped to divide the things into ten bags and take them around to different houses with Estela, the unofficial angel of the parish who knows the needs of all the poorest people in the area. It was only a little bit for each person that way, but nonetheless it seemed almost like magic, all this good stuff appearing out of nowhere to fill the "viveres" baskets.
Besides all the missed class, things are going along more or less normally. Often on weekends we go out to the discotecas in Barranco, and little by little the Peruvians are teaching me to dance. Yesterday I bought a merengue CD, my first Peruvian music purchase. It's cool to realize you've been somewhere long enough to recognize the songs played on the radio and in the clubs. I have yet to see an original CD or DVD being sold in this country--I'm sure they exist in expensive stores in Miraflores, but in every market you go to, there are tons and tons of CD's and movies being sold, every one of them pirated. It's what the people can afford to buy-- S/. 2.50 for a mix burned off someone's computer. The vendors (I think) create the cover inserts, which all tend to follow a certain style of tacky bright colors and computer-generated images. They list the songs, the CD title ("Merengue MegaMix 2010," "Salsa de Oro," "Super Bailable"), and always, always feature pictures of mostly naked women in poses that do not inspire respect on the part of the viewer. When I first came here I couldn't believe that anyone would hand a child a CD in a case like that and say, Put this on! But that's just the way it is. Not even the women seem to think it's odd to have what looks like a Playboy model staring suggestively at them while they read their song list. The blonde on my merengue CD looks a little confused, as if I'm not quite the person she was expecting to have looking at her; we have a tacit agreement to ignore one another and are getting along well that way. The CD has my favorite song, Noches de Fantasía, and is very "danceable" as they say, so it's all good. A few weeks ago I also bought a zampoña, which is a traditional Andean panpipe. It's great--the kids at Tony's and my friends in the church choir are teaching me to play El Condor Pasa and other traditional melodies.
I'm still struggling with feeling useful enough, mostly because teaching the same two lessons of English to every kid in 3rd and 4th year at school is really boring, and every time I try to start private classes outside the school, the people show up for 2 weeks and then stop coming. But I do have one student who comes every week without fail, Mondays at 11. He is a very sweet 30-year-old who looks 25 and seems very childishly innocent. He was studying English with Sister Denise before she left, and now he's asked me to teach him how to use a computer, because he had never used one before. So far we have progressed from poking the mouse cautiously, as if it were a live creature, to Googling things like dolphins or rivers or Machu Picchu and scrolling down the page to look at the images. Often after about ten minutes in the Internet cafe he will stop what he's looking at to produce a little gift for me, like chocolate, a scarf, gloves, a piece of the cake he baked yesterday, a fake rose with a plastic heart attached, etc--a source of endless amusement for Catherine and Teresa. But he's so shy that he never says anything more forward than "I'm going to miss you a lot when you go to Cusco... you know, you get used to the person who teaches you." And in a way, I like our Monday morning outings, when we talk about what we did over the weekend and how our families are doing. It's nice to have a Peruvian friend like that.
...speaking of which, next Saturday my mom and Marissa are coming! And we're going to Machu Picchu! I cannot wait to see them and get out of this miserable Lima weather.
