Saturday, November 22, 2008

...and the prodigal blogger returns

Apologies for the fact that my blog has adopted the mode of being of everything else here in my life in Lima: all or nothing, long droughts of boredom and then everything happening at once.

I can't remember almost anything that I did in October. It was a nothing month. All I remember is that the second-year Confirmation group went on retreat and didn't take me with them. I was originally invited to go with them even though I'm not really their catechist, I'm with the first-year group, but they wanted other adults along... or so I thought. It turned out that what they really wanted was a pretty time-intensive committment to helping organize the retreat, and when I couldn't make the organizational meetings, I was politely but firmly un-invited by Carmen. So the majority of my friends went and I stayed in Tupac, bored and depressed, and alone. I spend a lot of time alone here during the week, but usually on the weekends I see some friends, so that weekend was particularly rough because I felt kicked out of the fun.


Then there was a series of joint choral rehearsals with the other sectors of our parish to prepare for the anniversary Mass of the sector of Santa Isabel. I did things like typing the song sheet for the service, telling the Tupac choir to meet half an hour early so we could go down together to the joint rehearsal, setting off with Sofía and Sister BJ when no one else showed up half an hour early for said joint rehearsal, etc. (Our choir in Tupac has pretty much disintegrated this year. We're down to rehearsals of between three and six people, usually including me, Sister BJ, Sofía, and/or Victoria.) Not as cool as September's Huititi dance, but something to do outside the school.


There was also a crazy misadventure involving Dr. Tony's house, Sister Marleney, a kid and his father from Piura, a nose, and a muskrat. Marleney is the principal of a Fe y Alegría school up north, and one of her students has a tumor in his nose, maybe benign, but needs operating anyway. So she asked if the Hogar San Fransisco might be able to help him. I said, I'll call Dr. Tony. A week later the kid and his father were on a bus from Piura to Lima. Marleney asked me to get them at the bus station and take them to Chaclacayo, and I said, no problem.

After waiting at the bus station for two hours and then taking a taxi and a colectivo to the house, I introduce them to the doctor... and the kid decides he doesn't want to stay. He's sixteen years old, but he was terrified, literally trembling with nerves at the idea of staying in this weird new place in this weird new city while his dad had to stay somewhere else. I tried to convince the father that as the father, he had to make the best decision for his son's health and leave him in the house no matter how uncomfortable he was at first, but the father couldn't do that. He listened to me talk for minutes on end saying, Yes, you're right, señorita, that's true... and then turned to his son and asked, So, Jomar--will you stay? And of course the kid shakes his head in terror. So in the end, they both decided to go stay at his friend's house in Comas, to the north of Lima; and since he doesn't know Lima at all, the father turns to me and says, Señorita, you have to take us to where my friend can meet us, I can't find my way by myself, I don't know Lima, what will I do if he doesn't come?! After deciding not to accept the help that the sisters had arranged for him, he basically dumped himself into my hands and said, Do something with us, we're poor and have nowhere to stay, don't leave us alone!!

Well, I was going back to Lima anyway, so I took them to the bus station where his friend was supposed to meet them. I had to leave them there waiting in order to be back to Tupac on time. Later they called my cell phone to say that their friend had indeed come (something that was not at all certain in my mind, this being Peru!), and after that I never saw them again. Marleney tells me that she called to yell at the father and make him take his son back to Tony's, which he did, and then after staying one night they left AGAIN because the kid "couldn't get used to it there." Sister Maria Laura put it harshly but truly, when I told her: "If the son dies from not having this operation, the separation will be much harder!" But nobody could convince them. What can you do?

...ok so there was really no muskrat in that story. I said there was because on the bus back to Lima, while fuming about being stuck in traffic with two lost and irresponsible Peruvians on my hands, I was reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Annie Dillard was talking about muskrats. It was one of those weird Peru moments: I'm on a bus in Lima with two lost Piuranos, taking them to meet their friend who might not even come and then they'll ask me to figure out something else to do with them, stuck in traffic, reading a book about muskrats.

Besides that, October was basically a lot of Adelante, sporadic choir rehearsals (the ever-continuing fight to get time with the kids!... it wears you down to go to the place you're supposed to be helping out and basically be told, Go away.), hoping to do cool things on the weekends, and being disappointed when I didn't. I felt forgotten, if you can believe that, like somebody put me into this little life routine of house-school-house-parish-house and forgot to come back and take me out again... like I'd ceased to register on anybody's radar. We all have our "funk"moments. I think they're just harder sometimes when you're in a foreign country, far from your family and in a world where you are necessarily limited in the things you can do and the people you know.