Wednesday, March 5, 2008

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.

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