Tragedy and change

Lima has definitely moved from summer into autumn now. The mornings are covered over in cloud and the sun comes out later and later; by late May, it won't be coming out at all. On Monday, my day off, I went to Larcomar to watch the sunset over the ocean, and just as it got fully dark I saw an amazing curtain of fog fall on the bay. It was like someone had lowered a bead curtain down from a certain point in the sky--the fog fell in thin little tendrils in a long line over the water. And this morning when I went to the school at 8 am, there was sun on my street and fog sitting on top of the mountain ahead.


On Saturday April 5th, Señora Fransisca died. Now her whole family has gone back to Sullana and BJ, Magda and I are alone in the house.

Roses from our garden that Fransisca watered and trimmed and got to bloom so beautifully

Elena had recovered from her appendicitis operation and was going to visit her mother almost every day again, and I thought, it'd be nice to go with her one day and see Fransisca. On the 5th, Fransisca was going to have her gall bladder removed, a preliminary operation but one that she urgently needed before she could be healthy enough to get the heart valve transplant. I went with Elena early in the morning to see her before she went in for the operation, but we got there too late despite taking a taxi. Elena's two brothers arrived and we all sat waiting outside the operating area for several hours.


At around noon the brothers left to get money being wired to them by their family in Sullana. An hour later, the nurse called for a family member of Fransisca Saavedra, and Elena leaped up to go in. Five minutes later she came out, Ay Katalina mi mamá fallecióooooooo!!! and stumbled into my arms, wailing, disoriented, as if she couldn't see straight or think. She didn't even try to "hold it together." She just went to pieces. She couldn't help it. The people in the waiting area were very compassionate--they surrounded her, gave her water to drink, talked soothingly. I was crying too, holding her. It wasn't my grief, I didn't really know Fransisca very well, but the pain coming off Elena in waves shook me too. Then she got on her cell phone and started calling everyone she could; everyone who answered, she had to say it again, Mi mamá fallecio!, start crying again, hang up, call someone else. She was on the phone when her brother Lucho walked back in and heard what she was saying. Bam. Another person destroyed. Later Tito came back and got hit with it. It was like watching an entire family one by one walk up to the seashore and get pummelled by tsunami waves. Or like those anvils that always fall on those dumb little cartoon characters, times twenty. The news hitting each of them one by one, breaking them, and sweeping them away was so powerful that I couldn't do anything for them except get carried along by the ties of my friendship with Elena.

So I spent most of the day waiting. I watched their stuff for hours while they made funeral arrangements, and I called Magdalena to tell her the news--and she had to break it to the 12-year-old Rubén. I went to get everyone lunch at the hospital cafeteria, which they didn't eat, of course, but I did. Our lunch was paid for by a really sweet lady who was a patient on the same floor as Fransisca and had become her friend. She had a thick tube coming out from under her hospital gown, seemingly attached somewhere around her middle, with a big plastic bag on the end, bag and tube both a gross brown color; I didn't ask. After lunch I sat outside the morgue for several hours with an intense craving to eat a mango, but no money left except for my bus fare home. In the evening Magdalena brought Rubén to the hospital where a good crowd of family members had gathered, and the weight on that child when I saw him walk off the bus--he had the gravity of a planet, of a whole solar system, this kid who normally bounces around looking into everything with a beautiful light in his eyes. He hugged me a little when I greeted him, and then he went to his sister Elena and fell down on the floor in front of her and cried into her lap, and she cried over him. Lucho's wife and kids came, and I remember Lucho holding his 12-year-old brother with one arm and his 10-year-old son with the other, staring into space with grief on his face.

Anyway. Magda and I went back home to pack up the family's things; they wanted to travel straight from the hospital to the overnight buses that leave Lima for Piura and Sullana in the north. We got Carlos the taxista to take us back with the suitcases, then put the family in the taxi (by a very Peruvian squishing-miracle, all their stuff plus six people managed to fit in) to go to the bus station and went back home ourselves on the 02 at Plaza Grau. I'm very good at catching the 02 at Plaza Grau now, since I do it all the time coming back from Chaclacayo. It's a monstrous bus that likes to barrel right by you if the light is green, so in order to get on you have to wait behind the stoplight and then run out into the stopped traffic waving at the driver. I've even banged on the doors to get his attention on occasion (none of the Peruvians think this is weird.) Other buses are much easier to catch but they don't take you straight to Tupac, you have to get off and take another one at Huaylas or Metro, which takes longer, costs more, and involves waiting around in the dark at night.

And just like that, in one day, Fransisca was gone and her family had left. The house felt very quiet with just the three of us in it. Poor Rubén didn't even have the opportunity to say goodbye to Fe y Alegría, where he was starting to feel very comfortable, or to the church choir, or the new friends he'd made in Lima. It was thoroughly exhausting and in Mass the next day I had no energy to rehearse the songs with the congregation beforehand (I've done that now! A few weeks ago I got up in front of everyone and taught the Peruvians the Celtic Alleluia, which we always used to sing at Relay and at Maryland. I used to be terrified of singing on the microphone in church, much less teaching the congregation things before Mass, but I've gotten so used to standing in front of choirs lately that I was really surprised at how comfortable I felt doing it.) (My guitar skills are also much improved from last year and I have some ridiculous callouses on the tips of my left-hand fingers.)

We've talked to the family by phone a few times, and last Friday I went with some of the guys from the church choir to call Rubén on Elena's cell phone. I think he really appreciated hearing from them all. Magdalena also told me that when Rubén called her, he asked her to come up north and visit them sometime, "por favor with Katalina too!" I hope that I will have the opportunity this year to go see them in their home and see what their lives are like up north.

Semana Santa continued

After Good Friday, the rest of Holy Week was one long day into night into day. On Saturday evening there was choir rehearsal. I got there late and found the group struggling with a peculiar but nonetheless frequently occurring situation: that of having to put the final touches on music that Luis Alberto had begun teaching them in previous weeks--without Luis Alberto. Apparently our fearless leader had come at the beginning of the rehearsal, but had left, because he was going to spend the night in vigil in order to prepare himself to sing the Pregón Pascual in the central moment of the Easter service.

The Pregón is truly a special piece of music. It was written by a Peruvian songwriter for the Easter Mass, and it's sung by the choir and a soloist just after the Easter fire is lit: a moment of meditation that moves the celebration from anticipation to fulfillment, from the vigil to the Mass; a moment during the last hour of the night when everyone stands with their candles lit, hundreds of tiny lights flickering in solidarity in anticipation of the dawn, knowing that the light they await has already come with the Resurrection and that soon, now, their fullness of joy will arrive with the morning. And the Pregón begins with a hushed solo: "Light of Christ... You who sleep in the shadows of the night, you who sleep in the shadows of death... Get up, and be illuminated by the light... Get up, and let yourself be swept up in life, in love!" And each verse, sung first by the soloist and then by the choir, repeats over and over again Que se levanten, Let them rise up... "Let the oppressed voices rise up, let the abused children rise up, let the tortured bodies rise up, let the liberated poor rise up...!" The words are very specific to Latin Amerca and the whole thing is a particularly Peruvian expression of that Easter longing for renewed life. The lyrics literally call Christ out of the tomb, and yet they also say things like, “Let our America be one united people,” concrete, social-political cries for justice and peace. It’s amazing.

…and so I ended up directing Saturday night’s choir rehearsal too, because Luis needed time and space to get ready to carry the solo part of this soaring meditation before all four sectors of our parish. Understandable. (I do very much like being the choir director, I’m discovering, especially when I have different instruments and different voice parts to lead and cue and bring together, like we did at Easter. :) )

After the rehearsal we went to Sheila’s house for what was unmistakably the oddest Easter vigil of my life, but also quite possibly the most moving. Sheila’s parents own a pool hall and the whole choir trooped over there to hang out from 11 pm to 3 am, when we had to go back to the church and from there to the soccer field to be ready to start the service at 4 am. I had brought Hershey’s chocolate and shredded coconut from the US to make chocolate nests for Easter, so I brought them from my house and walked around Tupac a little with Juancho, Robert, and Juana looking for more chocolate and some kind of candy to go on top. Arm in arm we walked and one by one they told me about their hearts, their relationships, their work, their lives... Then I went back behind the pool hall with Sheila and Eymi to make the chocolate nests. Sheila’s house isn’t a house, it’s one of these shacks made out of woven-bamboo estera and tin roofing, wooden boards for a floor, and we had to walk by her parents sleeping in their bed to get from the door into the kitchen. But there was a refrigerator outside to let the candy harden in. (Sheila, by the way, is in college studying to be an architect.)

When we did a little prayer service around 2 am, we attempted to sing the Pregón even without Luis or the lyrics, and I ended up doing the solo part... and then during the musical interlude, Alfredo said to me, "Kata! Pray!" I just looked at him, and then, as everyone was waiting, I started praying... in Spanish, in front of everyone, giving thanks for that night and the morning that was coming and our friendship. I don't think I said anything brilliant, but the words just flowed, in a language not my own, as if something outside of me was speaking through me. I was actually serving, ministering, to this group of people that had taken me into their country, their homes, their choir, their conversation, so that I wouldn't be alone here... Later, singing a song called The Prophet, my friend Juana leaned on my arm and said to me, "I already found my prophet. It's you!" I was amazed and humbled. We finished the song and spent the rest of the night playing, singing, dancing until it was time to go.

Out on the soccer field we rehearsed "Gloria, gloria aleluya!" in the pitch darkness while everyone arrived and got set up. The moon was full and there were clouds moving around it in the sky, and now and again a star appeared, reminding me, for anyone who’s read it, of the moment in The Lord of the Rings when Sam Gamgee sees a single star shine through the smoke of Mordor and “the beauty of it smote his heart” because there was light there beyond the reach of any shadow. The service included fireworks, a bonfire, the Pregón, readings, candles, holy water, music... and by the time we got to Communion, it was light. There was a bright, fresh, laughing light in the faces of all my friends and everybody milling around hugging people on the soccer field after it was all over.

(While we were still singing the final song, one of my students from the school came up in the crowd of people surrounding the choir and held up his index finger and thumb about an inch apart. This sign here means un ratito, "just a little minute," and is used universally in Lima to pull people out of what they're doing if you want to talk to them. Sheila did it to me during choir rehearsal, and I had to stop what I was doing with the musicians and walk over to her to talk to her privately, apparently because this was something she couldn't say to me from ten feet away. She asked me if her cousin could come to the Easter vigil even though she's not in the choir. I stared at her incredulously, tried to politely express the idea of It's your house, invite whoever you want!! and can we talk about this after rehearsal?, and went back to trying to fix the music. I've done un ratito myself to interrupt teachers in the middle of their classes to ask them about choir things. The interruption is not considered rude; in fact, it's considered rude to ignore the person trying to get your attention. But I seriously could not believe that Rafael was doing this while I was still singing the final song of the Resurrection Mass! I gave him a look that said, Do I look available right now?? and then ignored him until the song was finished.)

After Mass we had a delightful Easter breakfast with the other house, and after breakfast I went back to my house to sleep, having been up for 26 hours straight.

Semana Santa, part 1

Finally, I get to write about Holy Week! It's been hard to find time to blog.
Back in late March...

I was just getting over my sickness and almost through auditioning kids for the choirs. (But I hadn't returned to the doctor yet; I was still coughing. Apparently it was an allergy in my lungs that was making me asthmatic. Stupid smoke in that discoteca. An inhaler and prednezone, when I finally went back to see Ana María again, did the trick.) The weather was very warm compared to the same time last year, especially in the sun during the day. It gave me hope that maybe this year the winter will be warmer than last.

At this time last year I was just getting to know people--Good Friday, in fact, was the day I met Eymi, Luis Alberto, and Alfredo in the Via Crucis procession and asked them about the church choir. That night I went to my first rehearsal, and the rest is history. But now, this year, I was one of two guitarrists leading the Palm Sunday procession from the church to the soccer field for Mass, singing all the versions of the Holy, Holy that we know. It was 6:30 am and the sun was just coming up. The women here always bring baskets of beautifully woven palm creations to sell at the Palm Sunday service, crosses, abstract designs, decorations, etc.

my beautiful friend Rocío, who sings in the group that did the CD last year

me and the cool palms that Robert and Adrian bought for me

I kind of suspected that during Holy Week I would get stuck leading and organizing things I really didn't know how to lead or organize, because other people wouldn't show up. And that's precisely what happened. But the miracle was that I didn't get too stressed out or upset. On Holy Thursday, the choir, like other parish groups, was expected to offer a reflection during the vigil after Mass. But, naturally, we hadn't come up with anything beforehand--perhaps because nobody told us we were supposed to until the end of Monday night's rehearsal, which was the last one before the Holy Week services began. Right before the service I grabbed hold of two members of the choir who came early, and worked out with them a little presentation of that day's reading broken into parts and interspersed with verses of a song. The idea was BJ's, but the organization and execution ended up being mine, and it turned out pretty well. During the vigil I also ran back to the house to grab a psalm book because Eloisa, the only other girl who'd had an idea for a reflection, showed me the psalm she wanted to read and then LEFT after Mass! Ah, Peru. The vigil ended up being very pretty, music and readings in a candlelit church until midnight, and I felt excited at having made part of it happen.

On Good Friday, instead of praying the Stations of the Cross in the church, the parish's tradition is to go out walking around the barrio to the houses of fourteen sick people, and at each house to offer prayers, songs, etc. Magdalena was having more fun than is traditionally appropriate on Good Friday playing with the megaphone: there is always a megaphone so that the people can hear the songs and prayers, and so that they stay together while walking and singing between houses. It's not weird here for people to troop around their neighborhood for hours in a sort of loosely united group (definitely not a procession or parade), with one person holding up a big crucifix and someone else singing into a megaphone, making a bunch of noise with guitars or drums or sometimes big brass instruments that go BBBRRAAWW! while the neighbors are trying to sleep or whatever.

Alfredo and I showed up to be the musicians, but nobody could find the special Good Friday song sheets, and so the ladies of the Pastoral de Salud started asking me, Catalina, what are we going to sing? Um...?? I don't know! Why don't you ask someone who, for example, has been in this parish (in this country) for more than a year and knows what songs are normally expected for Good Friday and knows how to play them! But since Juancho, who said on the phone that he'd be there in ten minutes with the song sheets, never showed up, we just grabbed the regular sheets and started off. Estela read the opening prayers into the megaphone and then Alfredo and I began the music and we started walking under the hot sun. I didn't want to be the one singing into the megaphone, but other people's inability to sing the actual correct notes of the songs soon landed me with the job. (Alfredo and Eymi did sing a bit later on when I got tired.)

It was hard to be present to the ceremony, the prayers at each person's house, because I was constantly thinking about what song we could sing next, trying to vary the repertoire while keeping with the themes of repentance, mourning, etc. And while I was more or less stressing about this, an 11-year-old stranger began hanging on me. It was the weirdest thing. All along one leg of our walk she stayed near me, staring at me in fascination; I just smiled at her and kept singing; then she came up and walked at my side, resting her hand on my arm as if draping herself on me, as if to say, Hug me, walk with me, pay attention to me, give me affection!--and I had no idea who she was! I was totally freaked out and wanted to say, Who are you and why are you touching me?! Later when Eymi came along, she started hanging on her, when possible walking between us to hang on us both at once, and it was obvious that they knew each other... so maybe she just figured I would give her affection by association, seeing as I was also a young woman singing in the church choir. WTF, mate.

So I spent all afternoon tramping around the dusty streets of Tupac singing into a megaphone with an 11-year-old stranger fawning all over me. One of our stops was at the wake of an elderly man we'd been visiting with the Salud group. It was sad... but it was nothing compared to the second wake, which we found unexpectedly along our route and just sort of got called into. A 21-year-old woman had died from complications with her Cesarian section. (Apparently the baby did survive.) Her family was just absolutely in pieces. They looked like they could barely move, think, register what was happening, because of the unbelievable weight of the grief. Estela spoke a little and we tried to play comforting songs. Heavy, heavy stuff. I think was especially shocking for BJ, who hadn't seen the "houses" some of the sick people live in around here.

Sometimes the people we were visiting came outside, sometimes we sang to them from their door knowing they could hear us. People I knew appeared, walked for a while, and disappeared again; I made Alfredo switch with me because I had no voice left after 9 of the 14 stations. That night was a service in which I, with the help of the women of the choir, once again chose songs on the spot because nothing had been planned in advance. It was exhausting, but rather than feeling stressed out and abandoned by my friends and fellow musicians, I just went along with it. When people wanted things from me that I couldn't give, I just explained that I didn't know that song. The more frustrated I could have been with those who didn't come, the more gratitude I demonstrated to those who did... and I ended up with a feeling of, We did it!
I definitely think I lost a few pounds that day.

Living in Tupac = craziness

So as my tutoring is not really set up yet, I'm not spending as much time in the school as I would like to or as I feel I should be. BUT... I would hardly say that when I'm not in the school, I'm doing nothing. Tupac is different from Delicias in that respect: there are so many things that need energy and attention in the house itself, that I feel like I've hardly had a free minute all March.

The house is in the center of the town and literally connected to the church, a location that means NOISE. If it's not mototaxis blazing by or the cantinas on the next corner blaring their music all night on Fridays and Saturdays, or some event in the park broadcasting cumbia to the world--it's people knocking, knocking, knocking on the door to ask about anything and everything connected with the church. There's a sign outside our door listing the days and times when people can go to the library to sign their kids up for religious ed, but darned if anybody reads it. At least a couple times a week it's, Ring ring!--"Buenas noches, Sister! About signing up for catechesis...?" In the US people always read the sign before asking for help. Here it's the opposite. I want to tell them, READ THE FREAKING SIGN, people! Signs are for people to READ so they can have INFORMATION without having to bother the nuns! (or volunteers, or whatever. I've gotten completely used to being called Sister by this point, and I kind of enjoy it. It makes you feel nice, like people know you're there to help.)

I've learned many but not all of the key rings to open various doors and rooms and temples for the people who come to use the church (usually about five minutes after I sit down to eat dinner.) And I've adjusted to the little things like cleaning the bathrooms once a week (in Delicias we paid a friend of Iris's to do basic cleaning) and hauling water a longer distance from the wash area to flush the toilets with. In this house, there is water provided by the city, while in Delicias the community buys it from a company that sends a big tank truck every month; but it's still good to save water, because sometimes the water provided by the city cuts out. In that case, we are lucky enough to have a well from which we can pump water up to a tank on the roof, and from there it falls through the pipes to the house. Last week the area's water cut out for about two days, and people were standing outside their houses with big, not necessarily clean buckets to buy water from a tank truck that came driving by, with a guy on the back hopping down to make sure the hoses went into the buckets... not, as I realized I had half expected, nice plastic jugs being handed down one by one without any splashes or dirt.

buying water from the truck

Our community in this house is a new one and we're still trying to find our feet as a group. Magdalena has lived in this house for several years, but I'm new to the house, and Sister BJ is new to Peru: she's been here three months now and is dedicating herself to Spanish classes before she can take on any ministry in this country. For a few weeks there was Fransisca, Elena, and Rubén, but mostly now it's just Rubén, because Elena spends most of her time in the hospital attending to her mom (or being operated on herself for appendicitis... you know, whatever...) It's a huge responsibility having a kid in the house. We have to cook lunch by 12:00 every day so he can get to school by 1, make sure someone is always in the house when he's not in school, help him with his homework, tell him to turn off the TV and go to bed at 10:00, get him up at 8:30... and as far as his laundry, I don't even know if he does it himself or if Magdalena does it. He is a great kid, but he's a kid, something none of us is used to having to care for.

And from his point of view, I'm sure it must be hard for a twelve-year-old from the rural north of Peru to be suddenly plunked down in a convent with three foreign women trying to care for him while his mom's sick. It's difficult, too, for him and BJ to understand each other. He talks too fast for her, she puts in English words that he has no way to understand or makes mistakes that interfere with her meaning in Spanish, and he has no idea what she's saying, and then later she ends up feeling like he doesn't respect her when she reminds him it's bedtime or tells him to get ready for lunch. I can't entirely blame him for this, as it's hard to take seriously someone who talks in a strange, funny version of your language. Also, I've discovered that even Magdalena is often not good at speaking Spanish in a way BJ will understand--using simpler grammar or words she knows instead of resorting to English. Maybe it's my practice as an English teacher here that makes me more sensitive to the kind of Spanish that BJ needs to hear and practice, or the lapses in communication between her and Rubén...

If it were understood that I was supposed to be the translator and everyone knew that, it would be easier in a way. I'd just translate and people would understand each other. But in order to let BJ speak and understand on her own as much as possible, I try to fill in only the most gaping of the gaps in communication, helping get a few key words or ideas across--in other words, I spend a lot of time listening in silence to people's struggles to understand each other. Very difficult for me, "mediator"-type personality that I am. It stresses and upsets me when communication breaks down and there are misunderstandings.

Besides our immediate community, there's an eclectic collection of people who sort of hover around the house, appearing once or twice a day or maybe every other day, needing things from you. (Or rather from Magdalena, but from me or BJ if she's not there.) Most constantly present is Ana. Ana is a 40-year-old woman who used to live on the streets because she was abused in her house as a child. When she slept in the park, Magdalena says, she used to carry around metal bars to defend herself with at night, and once she was taken to the police for carrying around a knife and frightening people, yelling, etc. She has a child who is being raised by her extended family. But now--I don't know how these miracles were accomplished--Ana takes medicine to stabilize her mentally; lives in a little room that her siblings rent for her, two streets away; takes a shower in our back bathroom twice a week; does her laundry here; sweeps our sidewalks and takes out the trash and recycling every day, for which Magdalena pays her S/. 3.50 per day out of a donation she received for Ana; and is calm and pleasant in her interactions with us. If you talk to her about something she likes or compliment her on her looks, she gets a big smile on her face and will tell you where she got her new blouse, etc. Magda says that a doctor once told her, however you treat Ana, that's how she's going to respond. So Magdalena is all praise for Ana's work, her laundry-doing, her taking the recycling to sell--and Ana rings the doorbell around 7 am every morning and comes in with a comfortable "Buenos dias," as if we were expecting her. Which, it seems, we are.

Apparently it was Estela who originally brought Ana to the sisters, and for a long time she slept in the parish multipurpose room and wandered the park during the day, and one step at a time the improvements came--no doubt through the persistent work of Estela and Magdalena. Ana also loves to sit in the garden and look at the beautiful roses, white, red, pink, and yellow, that she helps to water.

the garden on our patio.

Oh... and Ana also brings fleas into our house. I've become more or less accustomed to the odd flea bite now and then. Magda fumigates the house every so often, and I have branches of eucalyptus leaves, a big bunch for 50 cents in the market, strewn under my bed... it does seem to keep them away. But poor BJ is way more allergic than anyone else to the bites, and suffers for weeks after being bitten, whereas for me a flea in my room means I get a couple of red dots on my stomach or ankles and itch a little for a few days. Change the sheets, sweep the floor, and bring in more eucalyptus, usually does the trick...

After Ana, there's Jorge, a young man who works in the parish library and has all sorts of family issues that he talks to Magdalena about. For a while he was sick and thought he might have tuberculosis, but he doesn't, thank goodness. His mom is absent from the house right now, so we usually feed him some dinner when he comes at 5:00 to do his work. Apparently there's also a Miguel who works in the library and suffers from depression, but is taking medicine now and starting to take more control of his life. There's Modesta, who always buys the flowers for the church and occasionally wants the money from Magda (who is in charge of handling most of the parish funds...)

And less often, there's Estela and her group of ladies who visit the sick and need help and support in attending to them. Today I went with Estela and ended up singing Happy Birthday (outside the house on the street with my guitar and everything) to a woman with an amputated leg and bed sores that she hasn't gone to the doctor for, because she has no money. The group decided to give her 50 soles for now to pay for a visit and medicine for her infection, and go from there.

All in all it seems like there's never a free minute. Thank God for my Mondays, which I have left free for myself as my day off, since Saturday and Sunday I teach a couple of English classes and am generally busy in the parish. Last Monday I escaped for a few hours to Barranco, the artsy, bohemian-backpacker-chic section of the city, where there are parks with trees and grass and beautiful views of the ocean. I do love living in a city built around a bay.

Auditioning singers, setting up tutoring (sort of)

After getting over my illness (mostly), I jumped into auditioning kids for the 4th and 5th grade choirs in Fe y Alegría. What a job. Almost everybody is interested in singing, so I have to listen to every kid in the two grades, about 170 little Peruvians all told. I took them out of their classrooms in groups of 6 or 7, taught them a little song, rehearsed it several times, and then listened to them sing it in pairs (or alone if they wanted to.) In honor of last year, the fourth grade all sang "Los Pollitos" ("The little chickens"), but 5th grade graduated to a more grown-up-sounding church song.

I was listening for the basic ability to stay in tune, alone or with me or with a partner. It was really fun for me to play around with the different voices, see if this person can stay in tune if they're next to this one who's a strong singer, see if these two can hold the melody without the third, etc. Both grades this year seemed vastly improved from last year's fourth grade auditions, when it seemed I could hardly find anybody with good pitch; this year there were lots, especially lots of boys, so that I even had to do callbacks to get the numbers down to 22 per choir. With the behavior of these kids, especially the fourth graders, more would be simply chaotic.

I had four afternoons in the school to do my auditions before they had a four-day weekend for Holy Week (which deserves a post of its own so I won't talk about it here.) Then suddenly it was the last week of March and I didn't even have choirs going yet, let alone the tutoring work that I'm supposedly doing! Part of the delay is due to my Mondays off: since I teach classes on Saturday mornings and do parish things on Sundays, I have claimed Monday as my free day on which to do NOTHING. (or on which to plan my English classes, arrange songs for the choirs, do my cleaning, etc.) I finished the final cuts for the 5th grade in typically Peruvian, spur-of-the-moment style: stuck my head in the door of class 5A and asked the teacher if I could steal certain kids; was told that the Ministry of Education had monitors there that day so I couldn't take anybody out that day; went to the library to organize my lists, and was discovered there by a bunch of curious kids as soon as the bell rang for break; told those kids to run and get me the people I needed to listen to again; listened to them in the middle of all the noise in the library, and then I had my 5th grade choir. There was a big group listening, eager for news of who'd made it, and I had to tell them all to run and play during their break and that I would come on Friday.

Fourth grade has now had two or three rehearsals, and they have good pitch but awful behavior. They don't really know how to be a choir... which last year's group didn't either, so I guess they'll learn. But fifth grade has had only one rehearsal and they are absolutely delightful. Nine of the 22 of them are from last year, so they know what they're doing, they pay attention, they follow me, they sing do-mi-sol, plus they give me hugs and kisses on the cheek and say, Señorita, when are we singing again? It's utterly adorable.

(I feel almost disturbingly like Julie Andrews, living in a convent, carting a guitar around everywhere, and teaching do-mi-sol to little children. A convenient arrangement, that of Maria: be a singing nun until the right guy comes along! Sweet deal.)

So the choirs are up and running.

Katie, the new volunteer who's working in Tambogrande, is also serving in a Fe y Alegría school three days a week, but in her school one of the sisters is the principal. I wonder if that means that they have a better idea of what to do with her--i.e., that they give her more concrete direction about how to go about her service. In my school, I had a meeting with the vice-principal to talk about the idea of tutoring, and she nodded very approvingly and told me to work it out with the teachers. As soon as I finished the auditions I went to talk to the sixth grade teachers, and they're eager for help, but the details are basically up to me to determine: which kids, inside or outside the classroom, how long, what subjects, everything. Which leaves me feeling rather lost and helpless.

I guess this could be called part of my service--helping both the school and NDMV figure out a structure for the volunteer placement in the school. What this program really needs, although I kind of hate to say it, is someone to supervise the volunteer much more directly than I'm being supervised--right now, nobody checks in with me to ask when I'm coming and nobody cares if I don't show up (except the singers, of course. Tuesday and Friday afternoons from 4:20 to 5:40, I am held strictly accountable.) Because when you combine lack of direction and supervision with the Peruvian mentality of "Schedules, what? Just come whenever! Oh, she didn't come today? Mañana, then. Or if not, then next week.--You know what? Today's not really good after all. How about next time?"... then that little voice in the back of the volunteer's head going, You need to be working! Go find somebody to tutor and tutor them! gets frustrated and starts to drift off to sleep. Especially when I feel like I'm bothering the teachers for showing up at their door unannounced, interrupting their class, and trying to remind them what the vice-principal said about my tutoring project.

Sickness and the Crisanto Saavedra Family

Sister Iris has said to me several times, "Catalina, you're going to have new and different experiences here this year." She was right.

To last year's list of illnesses/body issues (traveller's diarrhea, head lice, parasites, fleas) I have now added foot fungus (thanks to the shower at Dr. Tony's, I think; easily cured with an antifungal cream and shower sandals) and a nasty infection that wiped me out for the second week of March and left me slightly asthmatic to the present day. It happened thus: I went out dancing one Friday with a couple of friends, all excited about seeing a live salsa band, and had a great time, but came home coughing and with a sore throat. I blame the smoke they kept pouring onto the dance floor for the sake of a cool ambience. By the next morning I had a fever. Since my stomach was fine (thank God), I figured it was a virus from drinking from the same water bottle as everyone else in the group and would go away in a day or two. When it didn't, I went to the doctor in the town's medical post, a very sweet, huggy, talkative friend of Sister Consuelo's named Ana Maria; and sure enough she gave me an antibiotic.

That night was quite an exciting one. Consuelo's aunt, Señora Fransicsa, was still in the house at that point with her 19-year-old daughter Elena and the 12-year-old Rubén, waiting for her operation to get a new heart valve. In the evening, duped into walking by those lying fever-reducing pills, I went over to the church choir rehearsal (now in the building connected to my house!), and an hour later was laid out in my bed once more with a raging fever. Getting up to call the doctor and ask her how to adjust the doses of the various medicines she'd given me was one of the biggest physical efforts I have recently made, but I knew I had to do it or I'd lie there and burn up. After another fever-reducing pill, it took an hour to come down to the point where I could sit up, but my temperature was still 38 C or about 100 F, with at least three hours before I could take another pill. Iris, who hadn't gone up to the other house yet, brought me a cloth and a bowl of vinegar: "Here. This is how you bring down a fever." And I didn't mind the smell of the vinegar dripping off the cloth and soaking into my pillowcase, my hair, etc, because the soaked towel drew off the heat from my forehead like a dry towel soaks up water. Every time I took it off to re-wet it, I could touch it and feel the heat radiating from the side that had been pressed against my head.

Iris and Magdalena then went up to Delicias with instructions to call them if we needed anything. In the house was me, Maria Laura, and Consuelo's family. I dozed peacefully for a few hours with vinegar on my head. Then at almost midnight, Elena woke me up to ask if I had any blankets I wasn't using. ("Blankets?") Her mother was lying in bed with a fever, shaking with chills under a pile of bankets. I thought, oh God--this isn't a 23-year-old with an infection, it's a frail late-middle-aged woman waiting for a heart valve transplant. So, feeling almost normal again, I got up and poured her some hot tea while her daughter massaged her and kept her warm. She was shaking too much to sit up in bed and tried to sip it through a straw. We tried to give her one of my fever-reducing pills--and she retched and threw up. At which point I freaked out and thought, she needs medical attention. Called Iris to see if Iris could go with her to the medical post in Delicias, the only one open at this hour. But Iris said no, in her condition it's more dangerous to move her than not to move her; the solution is to massage her feet and give her hot things to drink to take away the chills. Despite the proven miracle of the vinegar, I discovered that I am still an American who believes in science and drugs rather than massages as the way to cure illnesses: I was not satisfied with this answer. So I then proceeded to call my doctor at home, woke up her mother, who refused to wake Ana María because that would involve going over next door (presumably the family all lives in a sort of complex of connecting houses) and waking up the kids, and did I know what time it was? I knew perfectly well what time it was and I knew perfectly well that none of us, Maria Laura or me or Iris or Magda or Fransisca's children, were doctors or nurses, and we simply didn't have the right knowledge to give Fransisca what she needed. But I didn't get to speak to Ana María. I think I was talking to Iris again when I suddenly felt dizzy, handed the phone to Maria Laura, and went back to lie on my bed before I fainted. And put more vinegar on my head. I'd been up for perhaps half an hour.

After a while Fransisca felt warmer again; it turned out she had managed to keep the fever-reducer pill down, and that helped her sleep, plus I'd given her half of my vinegar. I think the next day they (Fransisca and Elena) went to the doctor. But during the first two weeks of March they went back and forth from the hospital so many times, I lost track of what they were going for when. It's possible that they simply accepted the fact that Fransisca felt better the next day, and did nothing. (Perhaps they gave her lots of hot tea and massages and rest and who knows what else, and considered this "doing something"--as well as avoiding food and drink from the refrigerator. Fransisca told me several times that the reason I kept coughing was that I ate and drank cold things. Even doctors here have told me to eat and drink everything at room temperature to avoid colds... I suppose there may be some basis for this in a desert climate that changes temperature so drastically from day to night, from cloudy morning to sunny mid-afternoon, and where the humidity from the nearby ocean gets into your lungs. Who knows.)

All during that second week of March I struggled to get back to normal, resting, taking my pills, trying to walk a little or do little things around the house. Mostly I felt bored and useless. But I read a lot of an excellent book, An Experience of Spirit: Spirituality and Storytelling, by John Shea, and I wrote a song. Parts of it kept occurring to me when I was lying in my bed with nothing to do. The theme is getting over disappointment and learning to live with it, as another job of mine during February and March has been to get over a crush I had last year and move on. But reading the book on spirituality, I connected the romantic part of the song with another verse about someone who gets tired of waiting to find what she needs in religion, and decides to move on from that too and live without it. I guess it's about unresolved longing. (For those who care, I never play the tonic chord as A major, it's always an A major 7th.) I'm very happy to sing it for anyone who will listen.

By the end of that week I felt good enough to start auditioning little kids for this year's 4th and 5th grade choirs in Fe y Alegría! More later on that, my work in general, and why life here is insanely busy. But on the sickness front: the next weekend, Fransisca had a sort of attack where her whole chest hurt. She was sitting in bed or on a chair, rocking a bit, and sighing, Ay, ay ay... Ay, Dios... ay, ay, ay, Elena, I can't take it... Elena stayed constantly by her side, calm and cool, rubbing her back and bringing her things, but she couldn't do much. Rather than going immediately to the emergency room, Fransisca's older son Lucho was called to come get them and go with them, and they waited for him to get there for over an hour, because he doesn't exactly live close by. In the US I would have called 911 and put the two of them on an ambulance right away. (And the cars would pull over for the ambulance once they're out on the road. Sometimes there are issues with that here.) Eventually Lucho did come and they got in a taxi to the emergency room.

Fransisca stayed in the hospital and has been there since. Elena spent most of the next week by her side while Rubén studies in 7th grade at Fe y Alegría. But last week, Elena got appendicitis-- probably from the stress of being her mom's primary caregiver, going back and forth on the exhausting buses to the hospital, coming here to sleep and to wash her mom's clothes, not eating regularly, etc. She is an amazingly warm, caring, efficient, smart, responsible young woman who doesn't like to ask for help and prefers to handle it herself, until she can't. Now she's in the same hospital ward as her mom, recovering from her operation. Her brother Lucho has taken up a lot of the caregiving work now, and their father Victor has come down from Sullana and is now living in our house with Rubén. It helps Rubén a lot, I think, to have his dad around, and it helps us too. When it was just me, two nuns, and Rubén in the house most of the time, the poor kid had no family but a lot of foreign "aunts" trying to care for him, cook for him, keep track of him, help him with his homework, etc. It takes a lot of time and energy, having a kid in the house, even a delightful kid like Rubén. He's not rambunctious, but he has a lot of energy, curiosity, interest, and he's always smiling. He's totally into the church choir, loves singing with us, and hero-worships Luis Alberto--he's constantly asking me, "Katalina, are you going to the choir? Is there choir tonight? Can you play that song Luis Alberto was teaching everybody last night? Is Luis Alberto there?" It's really cute. Yesterday we went to the market together and he helped me decorate the cake for Sister Patricia's goodbye party.

Fransisca (center), with her daughter Milagros and Mili's daughter Iara (left), her son Rubén, and her niece Consuelo.