Tomorrow

is our AMAZON JUNGLE TOUR!! 3 days 2 nights in the jungle! I can't believe it, I never thought I'd be doing this since I didn't come prepared with camping gear, etc, but the professional guide company arranges all that. We spent all morning booking the tour, talking to different agents, negotiating prices. There's a guy from Texas here who runs a restaurant called The Yellow Rose of Texas, but he used to be the director of tourism for the city, so he gave us all the best names to go to and told us not to pay more than $35 or $40 per day. So after our Rose of Texas breakfast we got our Amazon tour worked out!! We're going with a young couple from Denmark and a Peruvian guide named Alex who is very cool.

The rest of the day we've spent wandering around Iquitos looking for things like a long-sleeved T-shirt for those jungle hikes--which involved me trying on a lot of men's t-shirts to the amusement of the Peruvians working in the stores; the women's ones are too tight for jungle hiking!--and the artesanía market, which involved a cool bus ride that let us see a lot of the city. We've seen the Amazon River, houses built on stilts, awesome cloud formations, rain and sun at the same time, a rainbow, and almost best of all, it smells like summer rain! AAAH! Plus Iquiteños using mototaxis and motorcycles like Americans use SUVs--constantly and recklessly!

These are all pictures from the city of Iquitos itself.

I'M IN IQUITOS!!

aka the AMAZON RAINFOREST!! Woo-hoo, so long gray chilly Lima, hello warm humid jungle!

The Tree of Life is found in Iquitos. Fyi.

Rebecca got in at 4:15 am on Saturday and I went with Carlos the taxista to get her at the airport. It was cool to see her reactions to seeing Lima for the first time--it reminded me of how I felt over a year and a half ago, coming out of the airport and driving down along the whole stretch of highway next to the ocean, from the north side of Lima to the south... the desert sand, palm trees, the sandy rocky cliffs towering on the side of the road. Yesterday we walked around Tupac a lot, went to the market (poor Rebecca the vegetarian, walking by the stands with chickens cut open and dangling by one foot with all their organs on display looking like little multicolored squishy balls! that and the entire pig hanging on a hook on the corner of the meat row...). She was tickled with the mototaxis but we didn't get to ride one just then.

We walked up to the house in Delicias and looked out from the roof over the recycling yard behind the house, which basically looks like a huge junkyard, with the family that owns it walking around in the junk and sorting things, kids running around in the yard throwing rocks at the random roosters strutting through the recycling... all the brown and dustiness and half-built houses... and about a mile downhill, the hazy blue-gray ocean on the horizon. Plus the randomness so Peruvian I couldn't ever have arranged for her to see these things: a guy getting off the back of a bus with a huge wheel, just this wheel that looked like the back half of a bicycle; a dog wandering around in church and scooting under the benches; a musical/dance show set up in the middle of the street for Fiestas Patrias (Independence Day holidays) that included dancing bears (not actual bears, people in bear costumes) and dancing girls...

Then Saturday afternoon we spent getting her a ticket to Cusco, because Machu Picchu is just worth seeing. This task took us to Jockey Plaza, the ritziest mall in Lima, which is exactly like an upscale American mall. A bit different from the mercado. By the time we got home we were so exhausted we went to bed at 9 pm.

I wasn't even going to go to church this morning, because I'm on vacation, and if I'm there (I thought) I'll get dragged into leading the music, with everyone asking me what number every song is as if I had it all in my head, while THEY are the ones holding the notebook that has such things written down. Grrr, so typically irresponsible...! But the thought of not going made me so sad, like something missing in you way deep down. What can I say? I'm hooked, a church junkie. I need my Jesus fix!! But I also needed to just go and sit and not be in charge of organizing music for once. So Rebecca was my excuse. We sat in the back together and I pointedly ignored the choir's not-too-subtle glances in my direction. The music really was kind of pathetic without guitar, but that wasn't MY fault (at least not exclusively). Other people could have been there to play. Padre Kevin, the totally awesome visiting English priest, even gave Rebecca a public welcome, much to her embarassment. She then had to get used to all my friends and lots of random people as well greeting her with the cheek-kiss.

And then this afternoon was the flight! And we got off the airport and it was WARM and HUMID, almost like this time of year in Washington DC! I haven't felt real warm summer weather for so long! The kind that just wraps you in humidity and soaks heat, instead of cold, into your bones! It's warm and there's no AC in our hostel (The Hobo Hideout!!! hehe), but I'm loving it after the Lima chill. Plus, check out the awesome jungle bungalow accomodations!

We took a mototaxi from the airport to the hostel, and wow, the driving here is just like Lima, except the vast majority of vehicles on the street are motorcycles or mototaxis. There are palm trees everywhere and it's hard to see anything else because, well, it's dark. Will check back in at some point after that changes. Also, odd but nice detail: I don't really feel hungry like I normally would in Lima after eating what I've eaten today. Not as cold = not as hungry.

Let my two weeks of backpacker-adventurer-being begin!!

Confi = :)

Our group acting out an imaginary trial of parents by their teenagers... just one of our fun, life-examining activities in Confi!

Yesterday I got a nice break from playing the guitar at Mass in the morning: we had the first of this year's jornadas, or workshop-type meetings, with the teenagers in the first year of the Confirmation program from all four sectors of our parish. Normally each sector meets separately every week to talk about that week's topic, but this was an opportunity for all the participants to meet each other, hang out, and... mostly just meet each other. At the preparation meeting with the catechists, I was all like, "What's the topic? Who's going to talk about what? How are we going to give them good, deep moments of reflection, etc?" Instead, the main focus of the day was dinamicas. Dinamicas are group games kind of like ice-breakers, but way more elaborate and usually silly. My fellow catechist Any is the queen of dinamicas. Some of her classics:

"Casa-Inquilino." Two people hold hands to form the house, and one person stands in the middle as the inquilino. (An inquilino, it seems from context, is either a renter, or a post that the house is constructed around. Living in another language makes life so much more interesting sometimes.) One person is left out. The person outside calls out either "Casa," "Inquilino," or "Earthquake." If they say Casa, the house, without letting go their hands, runs to find another inquilino. If the caller says Inquilino, the inquilino runs to find another house, and the caller ducks in too, leaving a new person out, a la musical chairs. If the caller says Earthquake, the houses break down and everybody scrambles to form new groups of three. (some Peruvian reality there too.) If you're left out three times, you have to dance La Bamba at the end, in front of everybody.

"The Postoururi Iceberg." This one has some environmental conscience to it. Each group of five or six people receives five or six pieces of newspaper, which they place together on the floor. When the caller says Postoururi Iceberg (a famous iceberg in Peru's Andes), everyone stands on top of the newspaper. This accomplished successfully, one of the sheets of newspaper is taken away, and everyone has to stand on the now much smaller iceberg. And so on until you're all hugging each other, balancing on tiptoe, picking people up, etc. to all fit onto one sheet of newspaper at the end. The group who touches ground with a foot first has to dance.

And my personal favorite, "The little kitten" (el gatito.) The person who's "it" chooses a victim from the circle. They go up to that person and start acting like a cat. Meeeeoooowww, pawing, rubbing up against their leg, etc. If the person laughs, they become "it" and have to go be a cat to someone else. This is hilariously embarassing and a truly wonderful icebreaker, in terms of actually breaking the awkwardness in a newly formed group. I highly recommend it for corporate meetings, if anyone out there is running such things.

Besides the dinamicas, we sang (translation: Kathleen spent an hour and a half frantically typing up a song sheet the day before); saw a depressing video about kids who work on the streets in Lima to survive; listened to a VERY brief talk on the dimensions of reality that we talk about in Confirmation: personal, family, social-political, and religious; and had no time to reflect on those dimensions in groups because we'd started too late and the coordinator wasn't there to move things along. (Remind me to complain later about the way group leaders in Peru tend to leave everything to everyone else, and then yell at everyone else for their incompentence, claiming that "my being late wasn't actually being late, it was to see if the catechists could live up to their responsibility and run the meeting themselves," a sort of putting the underlings to the test... and the underlings accept it, even blame themselves for not measuring up! This is not the first time this has happened to me and I strongly strongly disagree with this management style.)

The whole thing was kind of disorganized (SURPRISE), but it was really fun. At one point I also ended up doing a skit with a group of jovenes about roosters, and then changing the words of a popular song to present our group as The Roosters who wake up the world to live passionate, religious lives. I couldn't believe how enthusiastically all the groups made up dances to introduce themselves to the rest--really good dances, too! It looked like they were ALL members of a cheer team or dance squad. You'd never catch a group of American teenagers willingly dancing in front of their peers. But Peruvians just have rhythm, and for them it's natural, they're not ashamed of it. Some pictures of the group presentations:

This is me and my group, the Roosters (we were given that name... and had to find each other in the crown by going around making rooster noises, just like everyone else was making the noise of the animal on their little card...)In our weekly Confirmation meetings, there's always a good chunk of dinamicas time, as well as singing, a topic of discussion such as family, parents, finding God in our personal history, friends, etc. I'm really enjoying the group and glad that I can contribute with my guitar (as always!) and by leading the Bible reading section (usually). Even in Spanish, I feel more at home with the read-and-reflect than with the dinamicas or with spontaneously talking in front of the group.

Rebecca comes this Friday! and my kiddies are singing the national anthem at the Fiestas Patrias celebration in the school, and then-- My Vacation!

Survey question

Ok, so I've been reading this blog: http://www.onefunnunslife.blogspot.com/ and it is awesome. It's the adventures of a 20-something nun from Wisconsin, who makes religious life look freakin cool! If nothing else, check out the first minute of the video on the latest post. All I have to say is, JEDI NUN is precisely what I would love to be (maybe!).

I wonder if, maybe if I start blogging more like Sr. Katy, some of the coolness will rub off. :) So from now on, I hope, you're going to be reading less "ooh, THAT's a different and kind of weird thing about Peru!" and more, "this is what it's like to be Kathleen." Or Kata, as everyone around here calls me (short for Catalina).

1). Survey question: Should Kathleen consider somewhat seriously the possibility of becoming (gasp!) an SND?
...what I really mean by that, I think, is, How crazy would the majority of my world in the US consider me, if i did such a thing?
There is basically one thing I find supremely unattractive about the idea: the no-boys factor. (Surprise.) Second-most unattractive thing: Most of the sisters are one or two generations older than me, and being 24 and a fan of discotecas, the life I want is in many cases very different from what they have. But even being here in a somewhat difficult living situation, seeing the nitty-gritty daily life of the sisters firsthand... I still find myself wondering. I'll try to explain why.

Today I watched some of the men's Wimbledon final with the totally awesome visiting priest from England, Father Kevin, and at some point I started talking my crazy maybe-I'll-be-a-nun talk. Something he said in response resonated with me: There's this "radical tug God-ward" inside you, and you have to decide what to do with it, i.e. how it's going to translate into the life you choose to live. For some people, it's best translated into the life of a layperson, single or married. For others, the best outlet for following that radical pull is religious life. Father Kevin shared with me that he's essentially a priest because he wants the opportunity to tell people about God full-time and up-front, without having to make apologies or excuses or neglect other types of work or relationships. And he's very deeply happy doing it.

(Now THERE's a question... would I be a PRIEST if I could? Only one way to find out, hehe... revolutionize some church structures and then see where we're at. Will put that on my list of things to do. ...no really...you think I'm kidding...)

I'm not at all sure that nunhood is actually really truly what I want. But there IS that radical tug God-ward that needs responding to... more than that... it needs structuring one's life and awareness around.--Now, for me, just to get to the point of affirming this truth is huge, and I'm still working on accepting it as genuine reality. I've been so thoroughly formed and trained in the public-secular-intellectual American mindset, that the voice in my head saying, Um, HELLO, what are you, CRAZY? when I start talking about building my life around this God stuff is still very strong. Nonetheless, the happiness that I feel being here among the SNDs, working daily prayer into my life, and doing all my fun involvement-ministry things in the parish make me wonder if this could be for me.

So there you have it, folks: Kathleen is officially crazy. Feel free to use all the tools at your disposal to dissuade her from her insanity. Especially, but not limited to, introducing her to hot single guys when she gets back to the US.

2). Today for almost the first time this year, I missed home, and 6 months to go seemed like a long time. I think it's a lack of trees.--seriously, I'm missing my green. I miss walking in the woods, reading Tolkien, going to the Renaissance Fair in the fall, writing that fantasy novel that someday before I die I must finish and publish... all the things that sort of suffused my subconscious as rest and relaxation, when I was growing up. Where does this "new" reality of God leave all of those things?
Also, I'm sad now that Sister Miriam, Sister Juana Jaqueline, and Sister Iris are in California for their chapter meeting... three Peruvians who bring so much life to the community here, and two of them are among my best counsellor-confidantes here in Peru.

3) The good news... my friend Rebecca from high school is coming to visit me at the end of this month! and we're going to the AMAZON RAINFOREST, the city of Iquitos, largest city in the world unreachable by road. And then to the beach up north in Mancora! Must call for hotel reservations and bus tickets. The time isn't dragging anything like it was last year at this time, when I was crossing off days of July on my calendar until Mom and Marissa came at mid-year vacation; but the time off will still be VERY welcome. I really feel like I need a vacation.

Looking ahead

So... it's July!! About six months left for me in Peru. I can't believe how fast the time is flying.

I've come to realize what I want to do with myself after Peru. Which is good--last year I had no idea. I'm going to study for a Master's degree in theology. Call it the inspiration of living with nuns, that's made me want to combine my intellectual life and my faith, which up till now have been very separate for me. I'm signed up to take the GRE in Lima on September 29th, and I've had to build a few study hours per week into my schedule--I'm unbelievably busy here, and I still don't quite understand how, since my actual hours of teaching people things or accompanying them musically never add up to more than 30-odd hours per week. But there are so many more things to do here than at home: market, cooking, cleaning the house (the dust means that you really do have to clean at least once a week, and I'm in charge of the upstairs floor and the bathroom), and washing all the laundry by hand.

Plus all my things in the parish take place at night, and morning prayer takes place at 6:30 am... and on weekends, people around here like to party. Even sometimes on weekdays. My friend Victor had his birthday party last Wednesday, which we found out about after Mass at about 9 pm, decided to go, went and bought him a cake, wandered around his neighborhood trying to find his house, finally found him and the rest of the group as they were leaving his house, and ended up back in Tupac eating the cake at a Chinese restaurant and mixing the bottle of wine somebody brought with 7-up to make it go around. Got back home at 1 am and had to get to the school by 8 for the Teacher's Day performance, at which a good number of the kids proceeded to skip the choir number in favor of changing for their reggaeton dance number. Sigh. Nobody respects my art. (Lack of coordination rears its ugly head once more.) ...but anyway, it's amazing the way Victor, his birthday, and our friendship with him were valued over everyone's early-morning obligations on Thursday. Our culture could use some of that.

So, yes, I'm studying for the GRE (starting tomorrow!) and will be applying this year for MA programs beginning in September '09. Yale Divinity School has a four-year combined MA in theology and Master of Sacred Music, which would probably be fabulous for me... but my heart is set on the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, CA, a union of nine different theological schools from different denominations, plus a Center for Buddhist Studies, Center of Hindu Studies... everything. I have a feeling that most of my coordination/application work to get there is going to go towards getting financial aid. But presuming I can get the money worked out, that's where I'm headed. :)