Picking up this year's projects

I've now been back in Lima for a week, and I'm slowly picking up my projects for the year one at a time. It takes a while for anything to really get started around here, and this week was the kids' first week of classes in school, so my choirs and tutoring work have to wait until next week to get organized and probably until the week after to really start happening. There's no point in trying while the students are still straggling in days after school has begun, or not coming in because they don't have uniforms, or coming in droves on the first day with their parents who hadn't signed them up ahead of time, etc. So this week I've had time to practice the ability to de-stress and be patient that I learned last year. I don't know whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that my American stressed-out sense of time has relaxed somewhat--I'm almost getting to the point where I don't feel like a bad volunteer for not having worked 40 hours this week.


But in their own good time, my projects are moving towards starting. I've met with the vice-principal to talk about what I'll be doing this year, and I also met with the director of IRFA, the GED program for adults, to arrange to tutor there beginning in April. The IRFA experience was so typically Peruvian, it made me laugh. I went up to the school at 2:30 because I'd heard the program started at 2, only to discover the teachers all hanging out eating ice pops and doing math problems because the classes don't actually start until 3. The teachers were a really sweet bunch of Peruvians, mostly young women, volunteering their Sunday afternoons to tutor the mostly older adults who never finished secondary school. The ice pops and math problems continued until about 3:30, when the first students showed up, and about that time the program director walked in too. I waited for a while while she ran around talking to various people, and then she sat down with me and explained a little about the program. About half of the teachers' students never showed up that afternoon, which apparently is especially typical in the summer when the students have to be home with their children... once again, the Peruvian experience of dedicating lots of time and effort to something that only half works at best is an act of faith that simply amazes me. In the US, we'd take one look at that and go, are you kidding? Get yourselves together and start functioning well, and then you'll be doing something worthwhile. But, as they say here, something is something, better than nothing.


I also went to an amazing talk last Saturday for the catechesis and confirmation teachers. I'm going to be a confirmation group leader! Once again I wonder if my Spanish will be sufficient; it isn't easy in any language to talk interestingly and meaningfully to teenagers... but the only way to do it is just to jump in, and trust the words will come. The guy giving the talk was an ex-priest who now teaches religion in a high school. He started with the world wars, talked about the cultural changes of the 20th century that led young people to see the world in a different way than their parents, how this might relate to the church and how Vatican 2 was all about letting the world change the church, gave the perspectives of various popes during and after Vatican 2 on progress, change within the church, and the struggles of Latin America to lift itself out of poverty--and related all that to the latest conference of Latin American bishops last year in Aparecida, Brazil, and the very progressive, pro-Vatican 2 document they released after their meetings. And all of this as a background to help us talk to young people who want to be confirmed. We have to think about why church involvement does not attract young people; what's unattractive about a God and a church committed to justice and changing the lives of the poor and treasuring the worth of each person, especially those whose voices are never heard? What are these teenagers looking for when they come to a parish group, and how can we give it to them?


It was an incredible talk, four hours long, and it left me absolutely on fire to talk more about this stuff. I have to read up on Gustavo Gutierrez and liberation theology, and the mostly disastrous history of US involvement in Latin American politics (Juan Bosco the speaker touched on that too), and then the document of Aparecida, especially the part where they talked about recognizing and nourishing the role of women in the church. The original document, says Juan Bosco, said "the ecclesial role of women," but the Vatican censors changed it to "the laical role of women." Juan Bosco looked straight at us. "These bishops were already talking about the priesthood for women. And now 96 of them have signed a petition to the Vatican to have their original document back, without those 200 changes that were made to it, because they too are the 'teaching church'." And with my liberal heart burning within me, I shot out of there to look up graduate theology programs online.

I don't know what it is, but something about the struggle for justice, in any situation where justice is being violated, gives a fire and a meaning to life that just doesn't exist when everything is chill--say, for example, in a wealthy US suburb where people go back and forth from their secure jobs and kids play soccer after school and everyone has everything they need and more. Theoretically that kind of life should be the ideal for everyone, right? And yet it means so much more for me to be here living among people who are struggling to survive--to be able to say, you know what? I stand with these people here, my friends, for economic justice, women's voices, the life in abundance that Jesus spoke of and that Latin America longs for. There is so much love of life here. People live in cardboard houses but always have dance music playing from inside. The next time you get annoyed at a bunch of loud, partying Latinos in the US--try not feeling resentful because you're working and they're not, and instead take the afternoon off to join them. And then let me know if you know of any good graduate programs where I can study the connections between theology, literature, and international development and economic justice.

It makes you wonder, if no inequalities existed, if everyone had what they needed in life, where would our fire and our meaning come from? Poverty and injustice are bad, but if we eliminated them the way we want to... we'd have to find something else to work for and believe in. Perhaps humanity as a whole is kind of like kids in the backseat of a car: one steals the other's stuff and they hit each other and cry simply to avoid boredom, and if you could ever resolve it to everyone's satisfaction, which you can't, they'd just go back to being bored and start hitting again. If the world didn't need saving, we healers and idealists and dreamers would be out of a job. Kind of ironic that answering one's highest calling requires the existence of the things your soul longs to fight against "with every fiber of your being," as John Edwards would say.

...Anyway. I'm having a good time as always singing with my friends in the church choir. And yesterday three of my girlfriends who speak English very well came over for a conversation hour, and we sat in the foyer because the other rooms were being worked on; the earthquake last year caused some hairline cracks in the walls.

Yesterday I also went for the first time to visit the sick like I did all last year on Thursday afternoons. That is always an adventure: yesterday, for example, I found myself hauling water out of a cement tank in one lady's front yard to take over to this sick old man living in a shack across the street. His water gallons were all dirty, so Estela--the organizer of these visits and the most Jesus-like person I have ever met, an incredibly peaceful and at the same time lively and resourceful little middle-aged woman from the sierra--wet the jug a little and scrubbed it off using only her fingers and more dirt from the ground. And what do you know, it rinsed clean. It can be incredibly sad to see the way these poorest elderly people in the community live, but at the same time it makes you appreciate the life and spark and happiness of your young friends.

Another adventure is having some of Sister Consuelo's relatives living in the house with us these past few weeks. Consuelo's aunt from Sullana needs an operation to replace a heart valve, so she and her two youngest kids, 19 and 12 years old, are staying with us somewhat indefinitely. The aunt herself spends a ton of time helping in the kitchen. When I'm cooking, she will come in, offer to help, and tell me lots of little ways to do things better, like if we got certain sponges at the market we could clean off the stains on the insides of the pots. "In the north, I have them looking like this!" and she taps the gleaming silver outside of the pot. To me this is like, woo-hoo, your pot is shiny, whatever... but I think she really doesn't have anything else (anything "better?") to do with herself, not even up north in her home, not after having gotten used to doing housework all day to raise eight kids. I don't see her reading much except for an occasional glance at a newspaper. She's a very sweet lady and I wonder what it's like to be her. She also cooks very deliciously. (For some reason, Consuelo has been acting surprised to see me cooking this week... even a little more surprised when my cooking turned out to be pretty good...)

Leaving Chaclacayo

Well, I'm back in Lima. Last Friday there was a great end-of-summer party for the kids at the Hogar with masks and costumes and dancing and cake. The sisters' friend and taxi driver Carlos arrived right in the middle of it to take me back to Lima, but we invited him in for cake so I didn't have to leave right away. In Peru you can do things like that and people don't freak out about getting off schedule--Carlos came in and sat down quite happily to his cake and ice cream, not at all concerned about losing half an hour of his time.

(This is not Carlos. From left: Jocelyn, Milusca, Angela, Luz Maribel, and me. Check out more pictures from the party at:
http://umd.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2241675&l=bce39&id=5742334

The other big event during my three weeks at Tony's was a trip to the beach. Tony has a North American friend named Bonnie who lives in Lima and runs an organization called Friends of Tony, which does a lot to support the house and the kids. The Monday before I left, they paid for a bus to come pick up all the kids from the house and drive two hours to a beach south of Lima, where one of Bonnie's friends has a nice house right on the shore. There were tons of (mostly white) adults there to supervise the kids for the day, equipped with blankets, umbrellas, sunscreen, and bag lunches for everyone. It was an amazing day! The shore has the same barren, windswept look that I remembered from last year; we were in a wide, shallow bay area between two extensions of sand-colored rock portruding out into the ocean. The waves crashed too far out to swim out beyond them, and the surf was less than rough but definitely fun. Within 10 minutes I'd left the kid I was supposedly watching playing in the sand with other little ones and their chaperones and jumped in with the teenagers.

Some of the kids come from the mountains or the jungle of Peru and had never seen the ocean before. Jefferson, a 4-year-old whose whole face is covered with burn scars from when he survived a fire as a baby, but who has more energy than any other 2 kids of the Hogar combined, kept asking me as we drove south along the shore with the sea clearly visible out the window--"Where? Where's the ocean? I don't see it." I guess he just didn't know what to look for.

At one point John and one of the 2 new American volunteers picked me up out of the comfortable beach chair I found and tossed me in the water like a sack of potatoes, which I suppose made up for the fact that I managed to escape being attacked during Carnavales this year. I definitely prefer being tossed in the ocean by friends to being attacked with water balloons by strangers on the street. These new American volunteers, Mark and Sam, arrived shortly after I did and fit in great at the house; they're both musicians, and besides playing and singing for the kids, we enjoyed staying up on Friday nights with guitars and a bottle of wine on the roof where the volunteers' rooms are.

The only thing to put a damper on our day at the beach was a kind of uncomfortable discovery for me: Bonnie's husband, whose work enables her to fundraise and organize so many wonderful events for the kids, is an engineer at a mining company. Mining, in the northern village of Tambogrande where the Peruvian SNDs all come from, is the Dark Side, the forces of evil, the industrial giant threatening to destroy the agricultural livelihood of the people. The people of Tambogrande and many other rural communities in Peru have spent years fighting to keep wealthy, international mining companies off their land, because when mining comes in, the land becomes useless for growing Tambogrande's famous mangos and limones, which is what the people there live off of. The mine provides work for a few peope for a few years, and then leaves when the gold is gone, and there's nothing for the people to do anymore. So it was a shock for me to look around at the beach and go, All this fun for the kids, all the donations this group has given to the house, all the good they've done... all of it comes from mining money.

And I watched all the wonderful, sweet, helpful, rich white people there playing with the kids, and thought, what can you do. Today these kids are having the time of their lives thanks to these people's generosity.

three beach beauties and Bryan

the guys looking chill

Mami Terri dunking a screaming Victor underwater to everyone's delight

And so my three weeks at the Hogar went by much too quickly. Even more than last year, I surprised myself by enjoying my time there so much. As a teenager I always hated babysitting, but I guess the dynamics of me and kids have changed a little now that I'm older. It's true that you can't spend 24 hours a day in the Hogar or you go crazy; but with frequent escapes to the Internet cafe or the coffee shop or just to take a nap, I always came back refreshed and not only ready but actually eager to spend more time with the kids. At one point, when we went to the farm where Tony gets his milk and the Argentinian owner of the place delights in entertaining the kids with horseback rides and snacks, I even thought to myself--Maybe I won't be miserable when I have kids!! What a surprising thought. As long as I didn't get stressed about keeping to the schedule (which no one should do in Peru anyway), it was really fun to watch them all swimming in the farm's pool, change the little ones into bathing suits, put my feet in and spray water on the kids, and jump in and get my pants soaked to the knee because Victor, who has no arms and only one leg, was sliding off the little ledge yelling for help before he went under.

I feel I should say more about the kids' disabilities and poverty and all that, but the fact is... you stop seeing that stuff after a while. Maybe another day I'll write about how my 25-year-old friend Marleney described her life in Cajamarca, living by herself in a little apartment outside of town, where she raises and kills and eats her own chickens and walks to town to carry water so as not to pay a bill for it and uses candles so as not to pay for electricity and supports herself knitting and washing. And all she wants is to get her operation so she can be back there living her own life, maybe with the guy who writes to her to say he's waiting for her, rather than being stuck in a house full of 60 kids in Lima. Or about Jaime, a 20-year-old who always wears a hoodie pulled up over his ears to hide burns on his neck, but is studying English in nearby Chosica in between his operations to remove the scar tissue. Or about a one-year-old named Raul with a double cleft palate who weighs what a three-month-old baby should weigh, because of malnutrition; or about the concerned mothers in the hospital who always want to talk to me about him, asking me if he's my kid, how he manages to eat with his mouth like that, some reprimanding me for being a bad mother and not putting socks on him (he had them on but one fell off and we lost it), others kindly helping me to change diapers during those crazy hours of waiting for the doctor. Or about the group of mothers I met in the hospital that were 15, 17, and 20 years old, all talking about what their babies had and what to do for them.

But at the end of the day, what I remember most about Chaclacayo is Mami Terri saying prayers with the kids in the great room at 8:00, and then helping to take the little ones upstairs to bed, and getting tons of hugs and kisses on the cheek and hearing "Buenas noches, Catalina!". And then heading down to the park for a few drinks with the volunteers, to relax, talk in English, and help each other figure out what on earth we're doing here.