On February 5th, I will head back to Peru to serve as a Notre Dame Mission Volunteer in Lima for the year 2008.
I have learned a lot this past year about the kind of work that is feasible for me and valuable for the community I serve. At NDMV's missioning service for the 2008 international volunteers, I spoke a little about my experience trying to make a difference in Lima and how the true value of my service goes beyond my actual projects to include the simple fact of my presence to the people there, and their presence to me. Sometimes the most profound effects of one's presence at a service site are interpersonal and invisible--for example, friendships that let two different cultures come together and lead to changes in perspective on both sides. And yet above and beyond these connections, I have also had the privilege of making a small difference in the neighborhood of Tupac Amaru by teaching English, teaching music, directing my fourth grade chorus at Fe y Alegria, and serving in the parish of Jesus Artesano.
Although progress is often slow on my projects and the difference they make seems small, I reassured everyone present at the missioning service that beyond a doubt, my work in Peru is worth it. Its effects extend even beyond the community where I serve, because living in Lima has drastically altered my perspective on the world and encouraged me to share what I've seen and learned with those who are close to me in the United States.
As a nonprofit organization, Notre Dame Mission Volunteers relies on donations to support its volunteers abroad. If you are interested in helping to support my work in Peru for 2008, I invite you to make a donation to Notre Dame Mission Volunteers. Checks can be made out to Notre Dame Mission Volunteers, with "Kathleen Fritz--Peru" in the memo line, and mailed to:
Notre Dame Mission Volunteers
403 Markland Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21212
Or, you can donate online at www.ndmva.org (follow the link to "donate" and indicate "Kathleen Fritz--Peru" as the purpose of your donation.)
Any amount that you feel comfortable donating will make a difference. Even a small amount of money by American standards can go a long way in Peru! The donations received by NDMV will be used to support me during the year so that I can dedicate my time to my classes and to the parish community.
On a musical note, I'd also like to invite you to support a group of young Peruvians from my parish who are beginning to establish a musical career as performers and composers. This group of young people, called Voces Juveniles or "young voices," has no formal musical training or music education in their backgrounds, but they have learned from one another and from other musicians. In the past two years they have come together to form a group of singers and instrumentalists that performs both traditional Peruvian folk music and their own arrangements of popular music.
This year the group entered an original song in a competiton with the theme of justice and peace, and the song was selected as one of six finalists to perform at a daylong youth workshop on that theme. You can view a video of the group performing their song at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bovg_SBCu90
Guess who the tall blonde one singing on the left is! :) Besides being up-and-coming musicians, these people are my friends from the parish. They have been incredibly supportive and welcoming to me and it has been an honor to be involved in their music-making. More than anything, I am constantly impressed by how much they can produce from virtually nothing--aging instruments, no training, a cold rehearsal space with other young people doing less wholesome activities on the sidewalk outside, etc. They even have to combat their own tendency to be chronically late to rehearsals and engagements, which in my mind is one of their biggest obstacles to success--but somehow they manage to progress anyway!
Just for being selected as finalists, we got to record our song professionally on a CD with the other finalists. It was a really exciting opportunity, and the experience gave these young musicians a taste for a more professional level of performing and recording! Our goal for this coming year is to record an entire CD of our own original songs. To help us toward that goal (studio time is expensive even in Peru!), we are selling the CD of the six songs selected as finalists in the competition. Song #4 is ours, the only one in traditional Andean style with panpipes and a quena flute, but the other tracks are also original compositions by young Peruvian musicians and several of them are quite good.
The cost of the CD is 21 soles, or 7 US dollars, and it comes complete with a translation of all the songs into English by yours truly. If you're interested in supporting this group by purchasing a CD, you can contact me at:
email: ksfritz@gmail.com
phone: 410-750-6324
Many thanks for all the support you have given me over the past year and for your continuing generosity! The Sisters of Notre Dame and I will be praying for you and wishing you all the best in this new year.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
I'm home!
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
....
Christmas was very interesting in Peru. It didn't really feel like Christmas, for one thing because it was 70 degrees and sunny. There are no real Christmas trees to speak of in Lima, but there are lots of tiny plastic mini-trees hung with a few token ornaments next to the nativity scene, which is the main focus of Christmas decorating. Nativity scenes can be very elaborate and beautiful, with the people formed like indigenous Peruvians and dressed in traditional Peruvian clothes. Ours also had lots of fanciful, rainbow-colored animals from parrots to fish surrounding the baby Jesus.
We went to church at 9 pm on Christmas Eve and afterwards everyone went home to their families for dinner. A typical Christmas dinner is turkey with noodles, accompanied with salads, eaten between 11:00 pm and 12:30 am on the 24th-25th. My friend Selina came to have dinner with me and the nuns (since Catherine was already gone! I had to survive a week in Peru without my Caty. I did pretty well--I went shopping a lot with Selina and Sara.) At midnight exactly, the firecrackers started. The nuns wouldn't let me go outside because these are not nice, legal, organized fireworks like 4th of July, they're backyard firecrackers being set off by everybody and their kid brother, and apparently there are some, nicknamed White Rats, that shoot around in random directions before they explode. So I just peeked out the door at the whole exploding chaos. It sounded like the whole area was being bombed, but the people were walking around happily on the streets. Our electricity went out, probably because a firecracker hit a cable, and everybody was bummed because there was no way to play music and dance. So we cleaned up dinner waiting for the bombardment to subside, and at 12:30 we headed to the other house, where the electricity was still on. And in traditional Peruvian style, Iris, Consuelo, and I stayed up dancing until 3:30 in the morning.
Christmas Day didn't feel like Christmas Day either because the celebrating was all over by morning. I went over to spend the day with my friends Sara and Willy, and in the evening we played volleyball with my friends from the parish. They string a net across the street in front of the church and hold it up every time a mototaxi wants to go underneath. A couple of my friends took me out for chicha and pizza afterwards, a little mini-goodbye party, which was very sweet. And the next day I moved out of my room. I spent all day packing and cleaning, Sara and Willy helped me bring what I wasn't taking to the US down to the house in Tupac where I will live this coming year, and in the evening I was ready to go. I went to the regular Wednesday evening Mass and played guitar with Alfredo, practically jumping up and down and hugging everybody who came near me; Mass ended, and I got escorted back up to my house by a crowd of friends, saying goodbye in real Peruvian style by "accompanying" me until the last minute; and the taxi came for me at 9 pm, and I piled in with Iris, Consuelo, Robert, and Juancho as my escort to the airport.
I remembered the night I first got in to Lima and drove along the highway by the beach, staring at the cliffs and the palm trees and the unfamiliar flat-roofed buildings. It seemed unreal that I was actually going home. But I was giddy anyway.
The travel was long but uneventful. I delightedly drank the ice Delta Airlines gave me in my juice. In Atlanta there was a train inside the airport, with a smooth automated voice announcing "Next stop: Concourse B," with people standing quietly inside and moving when the automatic doors slid open instead of yelling BAJA! to get off. There was CNN and the Iraq war and football on the airport TVs, American accents, toilet paper in the bathrooms!, wide, clean spaces with carpet or tile floors, people who looked weirdly tall and pale, complicated computerized display boards of flights and times and locations. Sleepy, disgruntled, slightly overweight customs officials, very different from the smartly attentive señoritas in Peru. People slightly surprised at being asked if they had change for a dollar. I felt boldly friendly for acting the way people normally act in Peru, interacting with strangers in public, asking for help before even reading the signs.
It was weird to hear informal American English from the captain and the flight attendants--"Folks, if you'll bear with us just a few minutes, we should be on the road shortly." "Can I get you something to drink?"--and to prepare my responses in English, not Spanish, and realize almost with surprise that I knew all the typical phrases to do so. "Excuse me, could I get a...?" "Hi, do you have...?" "Thanks, have a good day!" Flying into Dulles over northern Virginia, I was mesmerized by the trees and grass and the little, isolated white houses tucked in among them on their private lots. They looked ridiculously extravagant. In Lima the houses are all built like rowhomes. I realized I was really home because the buildings outside the window all looked like the kind of places they were, instead of rectangular, flat-roofed brick things that could be houses or offices or stores or restaurants. And the cars--there were huge parking lots full of shiny little cars that glittered in the sun, sparkly new instead of junkyard-worthy! Glittering cars and McMansions tucked away in the woods. My home!
My mom and siblings met me at the airport and Jamie freaked me out by having a beard. I wanted to play combi in the parking lot (full of private cars! No buses!!) but my sisters looked at me weird when I demonstrated hanging out the window yelling our destination and whacking the side of the car to pull over and let somebody on. It was sunny and 50 degrees and I said, it's COLD! and had to put on my sweater. Most beautiful was the light--that distinctive, golden light of a northern-hemisphere winter, slanting on trees and grass and highways with green median strips.
At home I started taking pictures of things like the Christmas tree and our family room. The sheer amount of space in my house is pretty scandalous, especially since the whole thing is being heated or cooled most of the year. And it is so quiet! The roads are quiet because everyone stays in their own cars, it's too cold to have the windows all down and the music blaring and the cobradores shouting. The streets are quiet because there's no mototaxis or buses or stray dogs wandering around or women trudging around honking bicycle horns to announce they're selling bread. (not to mention NO WHISTLES ON THE STREET! Although I did get a "How you doing today?" on the College Park campus when I went down to visit professors, so... yeah. At least on my street I can walk around utterly unnoticed!!!) The first night I was home, I put on my Peruvian music and taught everyone to dance, and later my brother made enchiladas (unheard of in Peru) with frozen packaged chicken, listening to Jason Mraz and using the dishwasher and microwave while Annie's clothes dried in the dryer upstairs. Everything was so weird and yet I can go on auto-pilot and navigate it all in my sleep, it's so natural it's automatic. And to be in a world that works exactly like you have learned it does your whole life is very, very deeply relaxing.
We had a great Christmas party with tons of family and more dancing in the kitchen. My little cousins have grown up a lot since I last saw them and I've met three new babies in the family that were born last year. I spent New Year's with my college friends and gave them all chullos.
I'm spending my time hanging out with high school and college friends and visiting my relatives. Occasionally I try to practice yoga with a DVD I got for Christmas. Friends, baby cousins, favorite restaurants, Daddy hugs, real pizza, big soft sofas to lounge on and big fluffy pillows, trees and grass and sunny cold weather... aah, America the beautiful.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
....
Christmas was very interesting in Peru. It didn't really feel like Christmas, for one thing because it was 70 degrees and sunny. There are no real Christmas trees to speak of in Lima, but there are lots of tiny plastic mini-trees hung with a few token ornaments next to the nativity scene, which is the main focus of Christmas decorating. Nativity scenes can be very elaborate and beautiful, with the people formed like indigenous Peruvians and dressed in traditional Peruvian clothes. Ours also had lots of fanciful, rainbow-colored animals from parrots to fish surrounding the baby Jesus.
We went to church at 9 pm on Christmas Eve and afterwards everyone went home to their families for dinner. A typical Christmas dinner is turkey with noodles, accompanied with salads, eaten between 11:00 pm and 12:30 am on the 24th-25th. My friend Selina came to have dinner with me and the nuns (since Catherine was already gone! I had to survive a week in Peru without my Caty. I did pretty well--I went shopping a lot with Selina and Sara.) At midnight exactly, the firecrackers started. The nuns wouldn't let me go outside because these are not nice, legal, organized fireworks like 4th of July, they're backyard firecrackers being set off by everybody and their kid brother, and apparently there are some, nicknamed White Rats, that shoot around in random directions before they explode. So I just peeked out the door at the whole exploding chaos. It sounded like the whole area was being bombed, but the people were walking around happily on the streets. Our electricity went out, probably because a firecracker hit a cable, and everybody was bummed because there was no way to play music and dance. So we cleaned up dinner waiting for the bombardment to subside, and at 12:30 we headed to the other house, where the electricity was still on. And in traditional Peruvian style, Iris, Consuelo, and I stayed up dancing until 3:30 in the morning.
Christmas Day didn't feel like Christmas Day either because the celebrating was all over by morning. I went over to spend the day with my friends Sara and Willy, and in the evening we played volleyball with my friends from the parish. They string a net across the street in front of the church and hold it up every time a mototaxi wants to go underneath. A couple of my friends took me out for chicha and pizza afterwards, a little mini-goodbye party, which was very sweet. And the next day I moved out of my room. I spent all day packing and cleaning, Sara and Willy helped me bring what I wasn't taking to the US down to the house in Tupac where I will live this coming year, and in the evening I was ready to go. I went to the regular Wednesday evening Mass and played guitar with Alfredo, practically jumping up and down and hugging everybody who came near me; Mass ended, and I got escorted back up to my house by a crowd of friends, saying goodbye in real Peruvian style by "accompanying" me until the last minute; and the taxi came for me at 9 pm, and I piled in with Iris, Consuelo, Robert, and Juancho as my escort to the airport.
I remembered the night I first got in to Lima and drove along the highway by the beach, staring at the cliffs and the palm trees and the unfamiliar flat-roofed buildings. It seemed unreal that I was actually going home. But I was giddy anyway.
The travel was long but uneventful. I delightedly drank the ice Delta Airlines gave me in my juice. In Atlanta there was a train inside the airport, with a smooth automated voice announcing "Next stop: Concourse B," with people standing quietly inside and moving when the automatic doors slid open instead of yelling BAJA! to get off. There was CNN and the Iraq war and football on the airport TVs, American accents, toilet paper in the bathrooms!, wide, clean spaces with carpet or tile floors, people who looked weirdly tall and pale, complicated computerized display boards of flights and times and locations. Sleepy, disgruntled, slightly overweight customs officials, very different from the smartly attentive señoritas in Peru. People slightly surprised at being asked if they had change for a dollar. I felt boldly friendly for acting the way people normally act in Peru, interacting with strangers in public, asking for help before even reading the signs.
It was weird to hear informal American English from the captain and the flight attendants--"Folks, if you'll bear with us just a few minutes, we should be on the road shortly." "Can I get you something to drink?"--and to prepare my responses in English, not Spanish, and realize almost with surprise that I knew all the typical phrases to do so. "Excuse me, could I get a...?" "Hi, do you have...?" "Thanks, have a good day!" Flying into Dulles over northern Virginia, I was mesmerized by the trees and grass and the little, isolated white houses tucked in among them on their private lots. They looked ridiculously extravagant. In Lima the houses are all built like rowhomes. I realized I was really home because the buildings outside the window all looked like the kind of places they were, instead of rectangular, flat-roofed brick things that could be houses or offices or stores or restaurants. And the cars--there were huge parking lots full of shiny little cars that glittered in the sun, sparkly new instead of junkyard-worthy! Glittering cars and McMansions tucked away in the woods. My home!
My mom and siblings met me at the airport and Jamie freaked me out by having a beard. I wanted to play combi in the parking lot (full of private cars! No buses!!) but my sisters looked at me weird when I demonstrated hanging out the window yelling our destination and whacking the side of the car to pull over and let somebody on. It was sunny and 50 degrees and I said, it's COLD! and had to put on my sweater. Most beautiful was the light--that distinctive, golden light of a northern-hemisphere winter, slanting on trees and grass and highways with green median strips.
At home I started taking pictures of things like the Christmas tree and our family room. The sheer amount of space in my house is pretty scandalous, especially since the whole thing is being heated or cooled most of the year. And it is so quiet! The roads are quiet because everyone stays in their own cars, it's too cold to have the windows all down and the music blaring and the cobradores shouting. The streets are quiet because there's no mototaxis or buses or stray dogs wandering around or women trudging around honking bicycle horns to announce they're selling bread. (not to mention NO WHISTLES ON THE STREET! Although I did get a "How you doing today?" on the College Park campus when I went down to visit professors, so... yeah. At least on my street I can walk around utterly unnoticed!!!) The first night I was home, I put on my Peruvian music and taught everyone to dance, and later my brother made enchiladas (unheard of in Peru) with frozen packaged chicken, listening to Jason Mraz and using the dishwasher and microwave while Annie's clothes dried in the dryer upstairs. Everything was so weird and yet I can go on auto-pilot and navigate it all in my sleep, it's so natural it's automatic. And to be in a world that works exactly like you have learned it does your whole life is very, very deeply relaxing.
We had a great Christmas party with tons of family and more dancing in the kitchen. My little cousins have grown up a lot since I last saw them and I've met three new babies in the family that were born last year. I spent New Year's with my college friends and gave them all chullos.
I'm spending my time hanging out with high school and college friends and visiting my relatives. Occasionally I try to practice yoga with a DVD I got for Christmas. Friends, baby cousins, favorite restaurants, Daddy hugs, real pizza, big soft sofas to lounge on and big fluffy pillows, trees and grass and sunny cold weather... aah, America the beautiful.
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