...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.

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.

The rest of Tambogrande, and being back in Lima to stay

After the day of Marleney's vows, I spent most of my week in Tambogrande with a few new friends. Sister BJ was the other visitor in the Tambogrande convent that week--she is from Arizona but is staying in Peru for 5 weeks to see if she would like to come for a few years and work here. She speaks a little Spanish but needs classes, and so one of Sister Meg's English students, Maria, came to tutor her. Maria brought her brother Carlos, who also studies English, and the four of us hung out most afternoons speaking Spanglish and wandering around Tambogrande in the cooler part of the day.

Carlos is an amazing visual artist, and I was blown away by the paintings he'd done when they invited us to their house. (Theirs was a pretty decent house--unlike some of the houses farther out from the center of town, it had real walls with drywall on them, concrete floor, a computer in the front room. I didn't see whether it has a back wall or whether the rooms farther in open onto the garden like most of the houses do here.) He also has a motorcycle, and so a few days after my back-of-the-truck experience, I went for my first ride on the back of a moto, hanging onto a guy, no helmet, zipping down the little rural streets with the wind in my face. It was great! In the traffic circle at the edge of town we had to dodge a herd of about 20 sheep. When we rejoined Sister BJ and Maria, we went up to the mirador, a lookout point at the top of the highest hill in town that is crowned with an enormous statue of Jesus. Apparently sometimes you can go up inside Jesus like the Statue of Liberty and look out, but that stairwell was locked, so we just hung out at his feet and looked out over the town as the sun set.

(The view westward from the mirador with BJ and Maria taking pictures of the sunset.)

On Saturday night I went to the wedding of Sister Miriam's cousin Corina. It was great because I had met Corina before when she came to Lima, and I'm good friends with Corina's little sister Matilde, who works in Lima not far from our neighborhood. There were three couples getting married in the same Mass, but Corina and her fiance were the best-looking of the three. :) There were no bridesmaids or goom's men, only a few little nieces dressed up in white dresses to be the "little angels" accompanying the bride. The party started off with the newlyweds dancing the Blue Danube Waltz at least six or seven times: first together, then with the "godparents" of the wedding (Peruvians have godparents for everything, not just baptism), then with his mother and her father, then with any family members that wanted to come up and dance a few measures with them. Then they got all the single women together for the bride to toss her bouquet. There were only five of us, and guess who caught it! ... The bouquet came flying straight at me and I couldn't dodge without looking silly. So they played the Blue Danube Waltz one more time and I had to dance with Corina's new husband while she danced with her "godfather." Apparently I will also be the next person from among those five single girls to get married. I'm sure this was all very confusing to the people there who thought I was a nun.

the beautiful bride and groom

the cousins, Miriam and Matilde

It was a great party with tons of dancing and we didn't leave till 2 am.

Very shortly afterwards I was woken up by the sisters' neighbor Simón. Simón is a citizen of Tambogrande who does a radio broadcast every morning... except it's not on the radio. The man has a megaphone and speakers in his front yard which he uses to talk and play music like a radio jockey, loud enough for half the town to hear, every day from 6 to 7 am. He calls the show "Segundo Simón" (Second Simon). He puts on music that sounds like it's coming off a grainy 1940's gramophone, talks over it, tells the weather for the day, and shares his thoughts for the day on the state of today's youth, the local government and its individual functionaries, how to be a good Catholic, or whatever else comes into his head. He's not particularly insightful. He is, however, possessed of a loudspeaker and convinced that everyone in the area can benefit from hearing his voice for an hour every morning.

The sisters have to do their morning prayer at 5:30 because it's impossible to do it once he gets going. Apparently people have tried to shut him up in the past, but there are really no enforcable laws about noise in Tambogrande or even in Lima. Peruvians are way more comfortable with noise than Americans; they really just don't have our concept that "my neighbors have to respect my peace and quiet." Example: Waino Sundays, in which a group devoted to a particular saint has its parties near our house here in Tupac and plays very loud, very repetitive, very high-pitched yippy music from late morning until after midnight. Or that time in Cusco when a "procession" went by our hostel at 4 in the morning, i.e. a group of people with an image of some saint or other troops by with a couple of brass instruments playing the same melody over and over and somebody enthusiastically whacking a drum. Don't get me wrong, processions and devotions to saints are a really neat part of the culture here; often a group will come into Sunday Mass with a beautifully decorated statue of the Virgin Mary carried between four people, and the devotees themselves all dressed up in traditional Andean outfits, and then go outside to do traditional dancing (they play big string instruments that look like a cross between a harp and a violin) before heading off down the street in their procession. I always stay to watch a bit. The only part I don't like is the fireworks, which are not actually fireworks since they don't set off any lights, they just go up and make a big BANG that sounds like a gun. The noise is part of the celebration.

...so anyway, Peruvians like noise, and Simón was my alarm clock, because I was getting up that morning to go with Maria to visit her cousin in the nearby city of Paita. Paita is a little town right on the ocean and it's cooler there than in Tambogrande because of the constant breeze off the water. The day and a half I spent there was a weird experience of very common, everyday Peruvian life. The town and its beach reminded me of Ocean City, Maryland and its boardwalk carnival, except smaller and kind of boring. There was a Ferris wheel and arcades and a moon bounce and shoot-the-clown games along the beach, and dirty streets with cheap trinket stores just behind, and the Peruvians all thought it was great, especially the Ferris wheel, which they called a "rollercoaster" and squealed with terror when it went fast. I was not impressed, but I enjoyed seeing the pelicans and a sea lion when we took a ride in a boat on the bay.

In the evening there was a cumbia concert, and since Janet from TV was going to be there, Maria's cousin and her husband just had to go. It turned out that Janet from TV isn't even a cumbia singer, she's just the personality that stands there "animating" the crowd and organizing the thing. The cumbia groups were pretty good, actually very good, but the attention mostly went to the dancers, four girls in little pink bikini outfits who came out and shook their behinds in front of the cameras. It was pretty tasteless. Maria, me, and Maria's cousin's daughter--a smart, sweet little 11-year-old named Yessenia who gave me a pair of earrings she made--were all exhausted by 11 pm, but Yessi's parents were loving the cumbia and Janet and the whole show, so finally at midnight or so they let the two 20-somethings take their daughter home in a mototaxi and go to bed, and they stayed until 2 am. They were really nice people but I think they had no idea what to think of me. They had never met a foreigner before, and they kept talking about how all the gringos come from abroad to stay in their summer homes at the nearby resort towns, because that's the extent of their familiarity with white people. I think they were confused too about my religious/lay status. But they took me into their home very generously and invited me back in the summer when it's beach weather.

(Possibly the best part of all this was watching a bunch of guys trying to set up before the cumbia show. They had a huge cylinder-shaped advertisement balloon without enough air in it that said CLARO in huge letters, and they were pulling on ropes and jumping up to push it and poking it with poles to get it to stand up. Every time it almost righted itself, it would slowly flop back over on top of their heads again like a big fat worm. It was hilarious. By the time we got there there was a good crowd watching them. The owner of the nearby cafe said they'd been doing it for three hours already, at which point I gave up all hope. They never did get it fixed.)

My only other adventure in Tambogrande was going with Sister BJ to visit the nearby convent of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. BJ and I took a colectivo and a mototaxi through the countryside to where Sister Lucy and her congregation live at the edge of the mountains. Their house was full of plants, cactus, desert flowers, with a huge almond tree in the center courtyard. We climbed up the nearest hill with Sister Lucy and looked out over the valley. Everything was green because of the canals irrigating the land, but the mountains themselves were desert and their trees all looked dead and dry. Sister Lucy told us a story about a volunteer who came from Germany to work with them and ended up becoming a nun... I could see the appeal, when she talked about coming up to those desert mountains to pray, with the green valley below... There's a U2 song about all this, I think.

me and Sister Lucy




from the mountain near the School Sisters of Notre Dame


My trip ended well and I am now back in Lima. It's good to be back where everyone you know is. (I say that now... I can only imagine what coming back to the US in December will be like!...) And the weather here is changing! It's a little warmer, so showering is not so painful, and yesterday I actually woke up to sunshine that lasted all day until afternoon. (Today was cloudy again, but the clammy humidity of winter is gone and with it a lot of the chill.) Since I've decided I'd like to be more involved in the parish next year, I am checking out opportunities there as well as continuing with my English and music classes. Today I had my first rehearsal with the Pollitos in a while, and they were so cute! I missed them! They are learning to watch my conducting and use their head voice a little. I'm working on getting them entered in a city-wide school arts festival at the Museum of Art in Lima, but I found out today that I can only take 5 singers. It seems there aren't many real choirs that participate in these things. The group as a whole will have to wait until our concert at the school in December.

Earlier this week I told one of my students he can't come back any more. He had been bringing me little gifts and telling me I'm an angel and saying if he had a girlfriend, he'd want her to be like me, etc., for quite a while. Every time he started up like this I would be quite clear that I wanted a purely professional tutoring relationship with him, and he would say, "Oh yes of course, I understand that, I respect you, but you know these flowers are just a little sign of my admiration for you, as a teacher... I understand you have other friends, but I know you and Catherine go out dancing with them, and it makes me sad that we don't have the same kind of confidence and friendship as you do with them..." I was putting up with it and putting up with it until he wrote me an email in which he said, "I want to thank you because even though you know what you mean to me, you still give me English classes. Any other girl would have kicked me out of her classes and her life" by now. This made me really furious. It was as if he'd said "thank you for being too weak to give me what I deserve." So I gave it to him, in a very angry reply email that told him I'd had it with him and that he was not to come back to my house for classes or anything else. Apparently I scared him off because he hasn't come back for his Tuesday tutoring with Catherine either. Yesss, verbal-electronic slap in the face does its job! I felt so great after letting some of that righteous anger flame off... very powerful and very light of heart... I laughed a lot that day.

And so with just over 2 1/2 months left of this year, life is good--except for my latest weird/gross health issue: I seem to have picked up a flea in Tambogrande and can't figure out how to get rid of it. Figures. Catherine says it's no worse than having lice or parasites, but somehow to me this is way more gross... maybe because lice and parasites didn't give me little red itchy bites on my stomach!... Teresa says you have to actually look through your bedding and clothing to find the tiny jumping flea, and then trap it with a wet bar of soap. I tried this and it is 0% possible. (I saw nothing to trap.) On my list of Peruvian randomness, next to riding in the back of a pickup truck between a nun and a cross-dresser, is hunting fleas in my bed with wet soap. My life is insane.