Thanksgiving... and I'm almost home

The first two weeks of November were insane with the Lord of Miracles, the chorus performances, a late-Saturday-night birthday party followed by Mass at 8:30 am, plus regular English classes, plus trying to find time in the evenings to record a song with the other chorus I'm in. I've been participating in a group of young people, sort of connected with the parish because it's some of the same people, that gets together on Sunday nights to sing. We were trying to enter a song in a competition and had to record it and send it in, which meant getting everybody together at the same place and same time, plus the instrumental accompaniment, during the week--almost impossible!... but somehow we got enough people there to put in all the parts, and made the recording and sent it in, and believe it or not we got chosen to go to the competition! We have to sing live on December 1st, and before that, we have to go record the song in an actual recording studio. The time I put into this group, and I do put substantial time into it, isn't exactly "service" on my part, but it is pretty sweet just for my personal enjoyment in being with my friends and getting to make music at a higher level. The group and the competition is exciting for everyone else as well because they've never done anything like this before... not to mention that the song is an original one composed by the director, in typical saya style with drums and zampoña and a flute-like thing called quena and three-part voices. Very cool and it totally deserves to be performed live. My only concern is that the voices and their tuning issues won't do it justice, because they usually don't.

So that's how the beginning of November flew by. Then this Tuesday, just as things had quieted down a little, our friend Jess from Maryland flew in to visit us! She and I had coordinated her visit since October as a surprise for Catherine. All the sisters knew about it. All I said that day to Catherine was, "I'm going to bring you a surprise... something you haven't been expecting." And when I walked in with Jess and asked Catherine to step out from her tutoring for a moment into the hall--priceless. Jess speaks Spanish very well, so she has had a great time meeting everyone from the parish and seeing the center of Lima a little.

Three gringas seeing the city from Cerro San Cristobal

...and our very decorative lunch.

That Thursday the three of us spent all day cooking a full-blown Thanksgiving dinner for the sisters and our friends. I learned to do turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie from scratch... some of it turned out kind of weird but it was all good! I was so unbelievably tickled to be eating turkey and stuffing and pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce (Jess brought it in cans from the US) on Thanksgiving! The holiday was a hit with the Peruvians. It was kind of nice having to explain why we do Thanksgiving, too, instead of just saying, Oh, it's Thanksgiving... ok, let's eat pumpkin pie. Before the meal everyone shared something they were thankful for--Catherine and I were of course thankful for all of the people there to share the day with us, but I was really touched at how all the Peruvians said they were thankful to us for inviting them, for choosing them to be with us on our special holiday, and for having met us this year. Of course, one has to make a few cultural concessions--instead of football on TV, there was dancing after dinner. :)

Turkey feet!!!!

Peruvians discovering Thanksgiving dinner

...and dancing afterwards.

And now there is UNDER FIVE WEEKS until I am getting on a plane to Washington, DC! Unbelievable.

The weather is warmer--sometimes I even go out in t-shirts--and sunnier, and it seems like that long, gray, stale, changeless winter of plodding, pointless English groups in the school and students who didn't come... has finally moved into something with more life and more possibility. It's amazing how much you can put up with cheerfully if the weather is nice. (It's very weird though to think that it's almost Advent and almost summer at the same time. Gah! Brain spazz.) I'm already planning my possibilities for next year... who I'll teach, fourth AND fifth grade choruses in the school, maybe getting into the Confirmation program... and am very happy to be coming back. In a way very characteristic of my Enneagram type (the nuns got me into the Enneagram this year), I just know in my gut that it's the right place for me to be next year. Call it, if you like, the blessing of finally realizing clearly (after many many months of being torn in two!) what my friend Naomi ironically but wisely said to me over a year ago: "Why are you going to Peru? Because God wants you to go to Peru."

I say this because there are times when it's the only conceivable explanation I can think of for why I am staying another year. Peru and I have a love-hate, love-frustration sort of relationship. I'm either crazy busy or painfully bored; I often feel utterly useless; my social life and my students and my projects have minds of their own and do not respond to my efforts to plan or control them in a structured way, but rather go their own way if and when the spirit moves them to do so. For an American raised on the idea that "if you can dream it, you can do it! Go out, work hard, organize, apply yourself, and make it happen!", this is excruciatingly frustrating. So many of the quotes we have read this year from Saint Julie, the foundress of the Sisters of Notre Dame, are about patience and waiting for God's time... and I'm trying, trying, trying to learn to do that.

It's especially rough when this is true of your friends, the people in your life... sometimes they show up to church choir, and sometimes they just don't and you don't see them for weeks... but then they come to your Thanksgiving dinner and want to take you out the next day to go dancing and you get an invitation the same weekend to go to another party. You can't force anything and you just have to sort of go with the flow. I might as well also share, since it's no secret to anyone around here, that this has been exactly the dynamic of the something that may or may not have existed between me and a certain guy here. There, not there. Extremely frustrating. So frustrating in fact that it has been almost a relief to discover recently, beyond all doubt, that it is definitely not there. So, ok. I'm just concentrating on finishing up my year. In Peru, the ideas are always big and marvelous, and every now and then (when you're least expecting it) they burst into reality in surprising, exuberant, beautiful ways... and the rest of the time, they fall flat. No han venido.--"They didn't come."

For all these reasons I can't wait to go home right after Christmas. After that, we'll start thinking about coming back in February.