...but my life is still awesome.

Since my last post was an angry rant on the things that annoy me about Peru, now we'll talk about some coolness.

October is a great month because I have a good amount of time left here this year, but not too long, and I'm looking forward both to coming home for SIX WEEKS! in January and then to coming back here. (It will be Carnevales again when I get back! When my guy friends here heard how strongly I reacted to Carnevales in February, they promised me with glee that they'll be waiting with waterguns, water cannons, buckets, etc for me to walk out of the airport. I've warned them that I'm bringing a water balloon with each of their names on it back from the US.) Plus, it is finally spring here! The sun is coming out almost every day and staying out for hours at a time, and it's drier, clearer, and warmer. I now go around in only 3 layers and none of them is a heavy sweater. Yesterday we took an hour-long walk down past the Pantanos de Villa, a very green wetland preserve, to the beach, and it was beautiful walking weather and a gorgeous afternoon on the shore! The sun was partly hidden behind clouds but it shone through palely and made the water silver. It amazes me that that much beauty has been so close by all year, but I never came to see it.

I'm working on signing my fourth-grade chorus up to participate in a city-wide school arts festival in the Museum of Art in Lima. They are so excited, but the contest's rules state that no more than five students can participate in the category of Vocal Arts--clearly it was not designed for real choirs. I've chosen out a small group to represent the whole. Typically of Peru, things like the transportation and what other adults are going with us and who will accompany them on the guitar have not been decided yet, but I suppose they will all fall into place. I also asked the art teacher when his end-of-the-year theater performance will be, because the principal suggested I combine my concert with that, and he said, "November 26th. Or if not, the 3rd or 4th of December." Then last Friday he said that it's been moved up to the 3rd or 4th of November, so we'll just have to sing what we have ready! The kids and I have become dear to each other, and some of the most committed ones have even begun policing the less interested, saying things like, "Señorita, she never comes when you say there's rehearsal, and when she does she talks the whole time! Señorita, she's not paying attention!" Every now and then they have moments of really good music-making; these come unexpectedly, like something pure and shining suddenly flashing out within a clumsy work of art you're struggling to form. It's amazing to me that they knew absolutely nothing about singing when they started. Even more amazing, I feel like I've hardly done anything with them--I've only been the vehicle for something greater than me to reach through to them, just like it reached through my middle-school choir director over ten years ago and began to enchant me. Last week I gave them a note and said, This is do. Where's mi? and they sang mi PERFECTLY!! I blew them kisses and practically jumped up and down with delight. Then I started teaching them a song I remember from those middle-school years when I fell in love with choral singing for life, and as they sang I had this powerful sense of being very, very near to that time and place far away when I first learned it. The same thing that happened for me then was happening for these kids now (I can see it in their faces! at least for some of them, the ones who are really interested) and my being the vehicle for it is a far, far greater blessing than I have ever deserved. I actually cried when they left the library (each one kissing me on the cheek to say goodbye). God is too good to me. I have to write to Mr. LeJeune again and tell him how great they're doing.

(Funny, isn't it, that something like teaching a group of kids to sing do and mi can fulfill you so deeply. It's like sharing a secret, a precious treasure... and for whatever reason, it fulfilled me when I learned it, and it fulfills me now to teach it.) The next rehearsal, of course, they were talking and pulling each other's hair and interrupting me and I don't know what else. So you just keep on doing what you're doing.

My English students are in their normal state of flux, some coming, some not, even some new ones at this late point in the year. Catherine and I are learning more Peruvian recipes; on Saturday we invited a group of friends over to teach us ají de gallina, and we taught them brownies in return. We had a great time, and afterwards we sat around chatting with the nuns about how this group of sweet, generous, friendly guys hadn't thought to offer to help us with the dishes, and what in the world we (women) were going to do with them. The thing is that their mothers don't demand help from them in the house. One of them said his mother refused to teach him to cook, because she'd made that mistake with his brother, and now, horror of horrors, his brother's wife doesn't want to cook for him because she knows he's capable of doing it himself. And this is his mother teaching him this! It's so obvious that the reason things don't change is because women don't demand it. I'm going to be good at demanding things.

I've started playing guitar for some of the Masses in the parish, mostly out of necessity, because Alfredo says he can't come on Wednesdays for the next month (monthly schedules again!). I don't really like it, but if no one else is going to, I'll do it. I really just don't enjoy being the one leading everything and having the whole church looking at me; I much prefer following one of the Peruvians and adding harmonies or playing the tambourine. But oh well.

On a future-oriented note, I'm leaning more and more toward pursuing a Master's in theology or religious studies when I get back to the US. An article in Teresa's English newspaper reminded me yesterday about one of the biggest reasons I'm glad to be here for another year: the religious-political climate in the US right now is almost insufferable for me. Politicians, especially President Bush, loading their speeches with religious rhetoric as if that will prove their piousness and guarantee the vote of the Christian right--the fact that, in the eyes of the media and in the popular imagination, churchgoing voters concern themselves with teaching Creationism and abstinence-only sex education and prohibiting gay marriage while supporting the President's tendency to violently invade other countries--the expectation, even among my educated Catholic friends at Maryland, that because I came to church every Sunday I must have been rejoicing when John Kerry lost in 2004--the scathing parodies of "religion" and "the religious right" by people like Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, which are all too accurate and at the same time completely ignorant of what faith really is... it's enough to make your head explode. Ironically, religion is much less of a political issue here, where no one has heard of the idea of separation of church and state and there are huge public statues of Jesus and Mary in parks. It's just something that's there, public, present, and people can do whatever they want with it or nothing at all. So while I am not planning to become a nun any time soon, I'm having a great time hanging out with them in a place where my faith can breathe freely, so to speak. It's much better for my health and sanity at this time.