Third-wave culture shock

Between all the trips that I take so many pictures of, I feel I'm not really capturing the day-to-day life I live around here. At this point, more than 3/4 finished with the year, Peru is a weird double reality for me of "normal" things that I do so often I feel used to them, and things that seem to shock me more deeply as time goes on, as if digging deeper into this culture I periodically run into the taproot of certain behaviors or customs that bother me, and am shocked or frustrated or outraged to see how deep their roots really go.

Responsibility and the idea of honoring committments is a big issue for both me and Catherine right now. Peruvians just don't seem to take things as seriously as we would expect them to. We are sick and tired of arriving for our classes and hearing No han venido ("they didn't come") or todavía no llegan ("they're not here yet"). Students or adults, you have to know the person individually to be able to judge whether they are the kind of person who can be counted on to show up to what they say they're going to do when they say they're going to do it. Some Peruvians are capable of this and some just are not. A few weeks ago our English class at night in the parish pushed us over the limit when the first person walked in at 7:15 to a 7:00 class; we cancelled class that night and said that from now on nobody comes in after 7:10. But more frustrating than the actual lateness (which was not that bad, relatively speaking; with many of my music classes in the school, the kids come waltzing in at 3:40 and seem to think that counts as getting there at 3) is the attitude behind it. Our adult English students don't get the idea that for the class to move ahead, the same group of people has to be there at the same time consistently. They will vanish for two, three, four, six weeks at a time, and then randomly see me on the street one day and say, "Hey Catalina, is there English class this week?" blissfully ignoring the fact that they have missed whole verb tenses and will be lost if they try to come back. Nor do they understand why we get upset at this. One of them got very indignant when we cancelled class because of the group's lateness, protesting, "You never said anything about getting here by 7:15!" To me this is unbelievable. They know the class starts at 7 and we have asked them to be punctual. But rather than being there to get everything we teach, their idea seems to be that they show up for whatever classes or parts of the class they feel like coming to, and pick up a little English here, a little there, as if they were visitors in the classroom... except that this mentality is shared by every student in the room. They aren't taking the class, they're auditing it--taking as much or as little as they please of what we are offering without having to commit to anything themselves. And that is frustrating and leaves us feeling taken advantage of.


I audited a class my last semester in college because I wanted to hear the discussion but didn't have time to write the papers. I learned a little, but not nearly as much as I would have if I'd done all the assignments. I didn't get any credit for it either. That's the way it goes! Hanging around an English class at your leisure without ever committing to actually showing up won't teach you much and it certainly won't earn you any credit. To me it is inconceivable that they can flout this basic principle of learning so casually and then get offended when we refuse to teach them any longer. But it seems to be a cultural thing here. From what I've seen, lots of Peruvians get involved in things, participate wildly for a month or maybe two, and then get bored and walk away when something new grabs their attention. An example of how they fall away: One of our good friends stopped coming to the English class, and when we asked him why, he said, "I can't, I have dance class during that time." Not I've decided to switch from English to dance, but I can't, I'm busy on Tuesday and Thursday nights, indignant that I was reprimanding him, as if to say I had no right to expect him to be there. The new thing gets priority. We started with almost 20 students in our parish class and are now down to 4, or 5, or 6, depending on whose attendance you consider consistent enough to count as being in the class.


People's supposedly fixed schedules change monthly because of this committment ADD. The two main English institutes in Peru, ICPNA and the Británico, structure their classes accordingly: each level is five days a week, two hours a day, for one month. You can take one month of intensive English, do something else the next month, then go back to the next English level, if you remember anything. That works for them because they're big institutes with a ton of teachers, but Catherine and I are individual tutors, and when our students simply vanish and don't call to say what's up, we are left with nothing to do, sometimes waiting around in our house for the better part of an afternoon for people who don't come. This is why we get a little angry at the people who vanish for weeks at a time and then come back later asking what time we can teach them, because their work changed and now they want to do English again. I had one prospective student who never even showed up to her first lesson, nor did she call to explain why; I heard nothing from her for two months, and then yesterday she called me asking, not if I could teach her, but what time she could come by, because now she's studying English again and needs extra help. I told her pointedly that I can't because I'm busy with students who come every week. This is not quite true but I wasn't about to take on the headache of dealing with her unreliability.


The Peruvian way of giving orders and making demands is also frustrating when you realize, yes, as unbelievable as it seems, it really is like that. I have yet to figure out how a culture so concerned with polite speech and formulas like "Señorita Catalina, buenos días" can teach people to shamelessly ask you for things that are completely outside the realm of what our relationship entails, professionally and/or personally. I have to think this through more thoroughly later, because it's midnight now... but again it has to do with me feeling taken advantage of, like the terms of my relationships with people here are not mutually understood. And I'm sure that in fact they are not.


And of course, as long as we're talking about deep-down, irreconcilable culture shock, there's the harassment on the street. It still amazes me how the students can learn so little English in the school (because they are taught to memorize phrases instead of using the language creatively), but all come out knowing how to say "Oh my God," "Hello baby," "I love you," "Very beautiful," or sometimes "F*** you," any of which you may hear shouted after you if you walk by a group of idle men by yourself. Today I was coming back from the market at 3 pm and some confused guy started yelling after me, "Good night! Good night! Buenas tardes! Hello, good night!" Sometimes I go for weeks without hearing much of this, and then all of a sudden I hear it every time I go out for a few days. I've gotten very, very good at pretending people do not exist when in fact it would be ridiculous to think I didn't hear them. But such is life.