How Kathleen Met a Llama, and Other Adventures

Where's the meaning at???

2009-06-09T20:45:00.006-04:00

What's really important to you? To YOU?

Where do you get the meaning in your life?

Have you ever had that feeling, like a star burning just under your ribs in the center of your being, radiating hidden light and unlimited energy, that THIS is something you could dedicate your life to? Something you could get up to every morning and look it in the eye and no matter whether it was easy or hard that day, always be drawn back into that relationship, that journey? Something that would never bore you, something you’d always want to be with, because there’s nothing you’d rather do—because without it, nothing else would be meaningful?

If you have, and that something actually corresponded with a feasible set of possibilities in your current life situation... you are very lucky.

If you haven't, or if you have but the translation of that feeling into things you can realistically do with your time was complicated and confused... you're like most people, I suspect. Welcome to the dimension we call reality.

I, for instance, will probably never be a married Jesuit priest. If I were a priest, I could use my head to study and teach theology and write homilies, my heart for the human connections of spiritual care, and my developing organizational/leadership skills for the business of leading a church. It sounds great. Sounds wonderful, in fact. But I can't do that in the church I've grown up in. (I picked the Jesuits for my little flight of imagination because they’re intellectuals, but passionately focused on social justice too. I like to think I’d fit in with a crowd like that.)

Four and a half months ago I got back from Peru jetlagged and nauseous from flying overnight, badly in need of a haircut, hauling my guitar and two beat-up suitcases and shivering in my little Lima jacket on Inauguration Day… and despite the exhaustion, I felt like I arrived charged with a marvelous energy. I’d seen something in that insane Latin American country that I’d never seen here. Call it love, call it a simpler life, call it community, call it the face of Christ in the poor and needy and the redemption that comes from reaching out to them. It was a connection that gave me meaning. During my first days back home I felt a deep desire to ask every American I saw—What is important to you? Where’s your meaning at? What feeds your inner self, in the midst of our darling culture’s obsession with buying crap we don’t need? And what’s it LIKE here, what’s LIFE like for you? What’s on the radio these days?? What music are you dancing to when nobody’s looking???

(My answer: that really catchy one-note song, “Because when I arrive, I—I’ll bring the fire make you come, alive, I—I’ll take you higher…” And the car-dancing began.)

My volunteer experience is over, but life continues. At this point I’m interested in putting together my two very different worlds and discovering how a young, modern American can seek out and live a deep spirituality—which is to say, a deep, full life. I have no set-in-stone career plan. I’m not going to become a nun, because shutting off all possibilities of relationships and family in my life does not feel life-giving to me. I don’t know what form of ministry I’ll find fulfilling in my church; I may consider other churches that would let me do other things. But I’m on this journey, and I believe many others are too. I like it because it involves me doing crazy things and learning to laugh more.

As I move into the next phase of life, I feel it's best to end this specifically volunteer-experience-based blog (except for those vacation pictures I still have to put up) and begin a new one. (So sad! But true!) My new blog will explore my thoughts related to spirituality in a broad sense—things I’m learning about how to live as a human in this world—and continue chronicling my adventures, Peruvian and otherwise! Please see my new exciting post-volunteering blog at:

http://kfwanderer.wordpress.com.

July 4th: I head back to Peru until I take it into my head to come back. Sometime within the next year, ideally February: I begin a Master’s degree in theology, and see if I can’t figure out some of this nuttiness called life in abundance.

If my musings amuse you—welcome along!

The Adventures Continue

2009-06-02T22:50:00.004-04:00

If anyone's still reading after a break of more than 2 months--Hola again! I've got news: in just over a month, on July 4th, I'm going back to Peru for a while. Incredibly, it's the right thing for me to do right now, as part of this "in-between" time of my life after volunteering and before I start grad school.

For the past couple months I've been working, working, occasionally stopping to wonder what has happened to me recently, and working some more. I taught an ESL class through the end of April; went to visit my top choice of theology school, the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley, CA; and got jobs. I got a job in the office of Notre Dame Mission Volunteers, because hey, they've messed with my life so much at this point that the least they could do is take pity on a poor ex-volunteer in a bad economy. It's actually cool because I get to coordinate some aspects of next year's international program, and the people at the office are mostly young women my age, thinking about their next steps and doing something good in the meantime, like me. I got another job as a server at the Ropewalk Tavern in Federal Hill, Baltimore--only to discover after a month that the guy on the back of my T-shirt was Ronald Regan, and the place's motto, "Old School Conservative!" The people are all so cool, they had me fooled!! ;) I have not told them of my secret inner flaming liberal. And I got another job teaching voice lessons on Sunday afternoons at my local Music & Arts center--SO fun! I'd never taught voice lessons in English before, but I'm really enjoying it. I have a 19-year-old soprano, a 40-year-old beginning singer, a 17-year-old aspiring punk rocker, a 9-year-old who likes musical theater, and a young adult baritone who wants to sing backup in his Christian rock band.

So it's inconvenient that now that I'm just getting a bit comfortable, I'm turning around and going back. But I'm doing it both to check out possibilities of future theological study there, and to pursue a relationship that began while I was there. (Can you really say you've lived if you haven't moved to another country for love? :) ) And of course, to see all my friends again, and to experience the nuttiness that is Peru, the nuttiness that keeps you awake! Also it's just been too long since I was squished into one of those combis, heh heh.

...of course the truth is that I'm not truly comfortable back home yet, and I have to recognize that. Being the foreigner everywhere you go sucks. But it also wakes you up. It makes you live in the present, because you're constantly being surprised by something you're not used to. Living in the present is one thing I learned a little bit in Peru and am trying to maintain... it's much more difficult than it sounds, especially when you've gone from being on a "mission" in a foreign land with a definite purpose, to working for a living in suburban Maryland, where everything's the same as when you were growing up there, quietly scheduled and predictable. I have spent entirely too much time at the mall these past few weeks. At first it's fine, and it's good to have clothes, but then the mindset kind of seeps into your brain, and before you know it you're basing your idea of yourself on whether the shoes match the bag, etc. Lots of my friends in Tupac had about 3 or 4 outfits that they wore ALL THE TIME, and that was it. And life went on. It is SO refreshing to keep that perspective in mind--it allows you to enjoy what you have, and let it be enough--more than enough, delightful! Read Anthony DeMello's Awareness, if you haven't.

Living in the present for me is also about being in contact with reality, or the universe, or Mystery, or God. And so I've applied to an MTS (Master of Theological Studies) program at the Franciscan School I visited. There is so much in my experience of Peru, God, the poor, community, foreignness, being on a journey--that I feel I need a degree program to help me unpack it all and see what I came back with. So that's the long-term plan. In the short term, however, there will be some more Peruvian insanity coming up in just a few weeks. And I promise to try to get my Puno/Lake Titicaca pictures up before then.

dun dun daaaaa... Kathleen's life plans

2009-03-11T14:24:00.004-04:00

Today I decided I'm going to be a theologian or religious studies teacher. I'm going to be this because I think academia, which I've known for a long time is a good fit for my abilities and interests, could actually be a ticket for me to live between the US and Peru. Universities talk to each other. They share resources and swap professors. My hope is that I will be able to find a degree program, or a Fulbright grant, or something, that will let me spend significant amounts of time in Lima while still "advancing" my academic career in US terms.

It works on several levels. Peru is the birthplace of liberation theology as well as of its founder, Gustavo Gutierrez (whom, if I move quick and am really lucky, I may actually still be able to catch in some course or other in Lima before he gets real old and stops teaching.) So as a theology student I'd have excellent reasons to be there. And as a person, I have excellent reasons to want to be BOTH there and at home. It's not just that it hurts terribly to think about saying goodbye forever to all the people who became my world and my community there. It's also that Peru woke me up to life in ways I'd never been woken up before. In Peru I lived in a big city for the first time, traveled to great places, saw poverty firsthand, visited old sick people in their non-house shacks and was a better person for it, learned to dance, lived in a foreign language, learned not to care when people looked at me funny. I even used bathrooms that were not really bathrooms at all. (I'm sorry to be gross, but in a sense, there's something that's really LIVING about being able to say that.)

I have a feeling that studying/researching/teaching in Peru would keep me in touch with the "real life factor" that I found myself more attuned to there than at home. But at the same time, I don't want to give up my own background and culture and just move there. My hope--no--my GOAL is to be able to be a theologian in both worlds.

God, I'm exhausted. Making decisions is so draining.
Now I just have to go find out how to do this... after I take a nap.

Firecrackers, bonfires, and YELLOW

2009-03-08T22:04:00.009-04:00

A short week after Christmas, it was New Year's, celebrated with a sleepover at Eloisa's house, MORE cooking--eating out is not so much a thing with these people, it's much more about the group experience of cooking and eating together in someone's home... amazing!--and funny noses.

About Peruvian New Year's: it was one of the things I missed last year and really wanted to see, and I was not disappointed. Like Christmas, it's celebrated with a huge dinner at midnight. Unlike Christmas, families make scarecrow-like "dolls" out of old clothes and stuff bags with newspaper for their heads, and burn them bonfire-style on the street at midnight. It's supposed to symbolize burning the old year and old things in preparation for the new. (It's also a little freaky to walk around on December 31st and see these weirdly grinning scarecrows tied upright on people's roofs.) The sisters made one of these and burned it, but I wasn't there for the burning because I went to Eloisa's, and we didn't do one there.

I thought the firecrackers were bad at Christmas, but at New Year's it truly sounded like the whole zone was being bombed. There were little shooting-light ones that took off like anti-aircraft missles from the ground and made screaming noises like the laser shots in Star Wars, one after the other like gunfire. There were all kinds of whizzing lights and flowery exploding lights and some that just went BANG without lights at all... it's less of a visual show than US fireworks and more of a big chaotic chance for the entire neighborhood to go BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG at once. Between that and the ashes of burned effigy dolls smoking outside every house on the streets, Tupac truly looked like a war zone by 1 am.

The other big tradition of New Year's in Lima is YELLOW. Yellow is New Year's color, and for about the last three days of December the market explodes with vendors selling yellow decorations, beads, headbands, funny glasses, you name it--but especially yellow underwear. I don't know how many thousands of pairs of yellow underwear must have been on display on December 31st in that market. It's tradition to give yellow underwear as a present to friends for good luck. Magdalena and I went to buy a pair for everybody in the two communities, and certain nuns, I won't name names, were even seen wearing said underwear on their heads that night. :) I tried to be tactful in avoiding the granny-style panties that Magda was picking out for everyone, and choosing out my own reasonably cute pair... but unfortunately it was one size fits all, and as I'm much bigger than your average Peruvian woman, the underwear remains more of a souvenir than a part of my wardrobe.

Christmas and the beach

2009-03-08T20:12:00.032-04:00

It's March and my adjustment to the US is going... okay. Today I almost cried in church when they started talking about Easter, since Easter was such a special part of my experience of Peru. The isolation of living with my parents in the suburbs kills me. But as I "look around" and try to figure out my life plans, I'm doing several things at once. Teaching ESL at CASA of Maryland; looking sporadically for a full-time job; arranging to teach voice lessons at my local Music & Arts center; even maybe waitressing in the near future. I was going to go to bartending school but that's on hold for the moment.

And now to post about the great friends-gatherings I had at the end of my stay in Lima!
In December there was Christmas. In Peru everyone stays up on December 24th to celebrate Christmas at midnight, and all the partying is over by Christmas morning, so on Christmas Day nobody does anything. Since I didn't have family to celebrate with, I invited everyone to my house on Christmas Day to make a sort of repeat of Thanksgiving dinner. 15 cooks is a lot of cooks, but the sisters let us have the house in Delicias all to ourselves, because they're awesome.
Aren't my friends gorgeous? :)

This is the convent living room transformed into a dining room!

After eating we took a walk down to the beach, except they wouldn't let us in to the private beach area, so we had to come back. I got sent back at high speed on a bus because we realized we'd left our apple pie in the oven! Miraculously, neither it or the convent had burned up..

After Christmas we turned around and went to the beach two days later! This was another mega-day of shopping for food (the night before), cooking at my house (the convent in Delicias), and then going about 30 minutes to the south of Lima to a non-polluted beach.

My concert

2009-02-21T09:43:00.010-05:00

December started out with my concert in the school. I haven't really talked enough about this concert, not even to myself, I think because it happened in the middle of a lot of other things (I don't remember what now.)

It really was kind of amazing. Fourth and fifth grade choir, high school pastoral group, two high school girls who did several duets, and a group of girls who approached me about three weeks before to ask for a "singing class" after school. I said, only if you sing in my concert. This last group were very clearly novice singers, but luckily their songs were short. ;)

I arranged the date and time with Gaby and made flyers for the kids to color and give out to their family and friends. It was Friday December 5th, 5:30 pm, so that the parents could come but it wouldn't be too dark for everyone walking home afterward. The kids would have permission to get out of class a little early. The teachers and classmates, however, weren't going to be able to go, because class ended at 5:40... but I wanted them to be able to see what the singers had been doing all year, the result of all this yanking them out of class by their hair against the teachers' passive-aggressive resistance! So with Iris's encouragement I voiced this to Gaby, and voila, she sent out a memo saying that 4th and 5th grade would get out early that day at 5. I was stunned at how easy it was. It was like I was a sheepdog who'd been running back and forth barking at every individual sheep in the flock to try to get them in line, and they just kept wandering wherever they wanted to... and then in the blink of an eye the farmer comes driving up and claps his hands, and they all went running into the corral without so much as looking at me. ...Kind of like that.

Anyway the high schoolers helped me set up the chapel and decorate it with balloons and streamers, and a few parents came, and I was there with my guitar and Adrian filmed the whole thing (hopefully I'll get the finished, converted DVD the next time somebody travels between here and there.) The little kids sang first, then the newbie girls, then the big kids, then Jessica and Viviana. Each song was announced by a singer. I don't have pictures of the actual event but here are some of the participants:Christine and Jessica (Jessica did the duets with Viviana at the end)

Fourth and fifth grade. After I gave out the flyers, one of the girls came up to me very concerned to report that the tiny kid in the orange in the front row had been selling them in the market as tickets to the concert--at ten cents each! Peruvian resourcefulness! The next round of flyers I made had "FREE concert" written very clearly on them.

There was also a high schooler backing me up with another guitar and playing the cajon, a wooden box you sit on and play like a drum. We all ended together with the song "Danza Mi Pais"--an upbeat saya about how Peru dances through its good times and bad times with faith and hope. Everybody was clapping and moving.

The kids had never really done anything like this at the school... maybe for some of them it was their first performance of anything ever! They were really excited and the parents enjoyed it too. At the end Gaby made a little speech thanking me on behalf of the school for my two years of service, and the teachers gave me a gift--an alpaca vest, beautiful and expensive and like four sizes too big and a weird goldish color. But it was a really nice thought! (Since I knew I wouldn't wear it, I gave it to Luis to give to his mom.)

The hardest part of the experience for me was learning the humility to present something I didn't consider "good" musically. Seriously--the group of newbies was just painful at times, and the fifth graders had no concentration because they'd never been forced to be in two rehearsals in a row during the whole year, so they went out of tune with the fourth graders, and messed up their round, and... things happened that did not have to happen! It's no mystery--with consistent practice, they would have done amazing things. As it was, it was exactly what you'd expect out of a bunch of elementary schoolers. Pshaw. They're more talented than that. All I wanted was the opportunity to do something well! But that was not to be. For the kids and the parents (and I think for the school too,) it was a great experience. For me, it was... a bit of recognition after all my work, which felt like too little too late; the slightly harrowing experience of improvising the logistical details; and in the middle of all that, yes, the satisfaction of presenting what we'd worked so hard on. The music was fun and everybody liked it. So... Yay! ... I did it!

Other pictures from November

2009-02-20T23:15:00.018-05:00

THANKSGIVING!
Caty came back to see us and we got everybody together just like last year. We even cooked the same food.

It was a little weird because I felt like I'd seen so little of these people all the rest of the year, and now here they were at Thanksgiving... kind of like, ok, we can do this once a year, but that doesn't fool me into thinking I won't be alone a lot in this Peruvian life.

BUT... it was a great party.

everyone walks down from Delicias together...

Celina and Magdalena...

Mary, Celina, and Ever

And this is NOT Thanksgiving... it's me getting ready for the fancy-dress wedding I went to. Celina was my manicurist and Mary was my hairstylist. To my list of accomplishments in Peru, we add: turning a convent living room into a beauty parlor. :) (Sorry that due to technical difficulties I will not be posting pictures of the actual wedding.)

November part II: the Cardinal's visit

2009-02-20T22:55:00.001-05:00

So, close your eyes and let's travel back in time to Lima in late November. The day Katie and I got back from our retreat, Monsegñor Juan Luis Cipriani, Cardinal of Lima, came to celebrate Mass at our church in Tupac!

The Cardinal is the head of the Catholic church in at least Lima, if not the whole country. I'd never seen a Cardinal before. I learned that he travels with a whole possey of seminarians, carries a big shepherd's crook to symbolize his role as pastor of the people, and wears two hats--the big fancy one that you see above, and underneath, a small red one that looks like the type some Jewish men wear. He takes the big one off during most of the Mass. During the Eucharistic prayers, he takes off the little one too--and one of the seminarians has a little silver plate to hold the hat on until it's time to put it on again. Clearly the visit of this dignitary is a very special event.

The week prior to the visit, the Vicar of Lima came to prepare us for it. As far as I can tell, the Vicar is the Cardinal's "mini-me." He goes wherever the Cardinal is planning to come and tries to eliminate all local flavor as well as feminine influence from the celebration of the Mass. No female altar servers were to be allowed when the Cardinal came, and none of this getting up during the kiss of Peace to greet people across the aisle or across the church--complete chaos! Just a little handshake to the right and left is quite sufficient! The Vicar's homily was about how we don't want to go to hell and therefore have to resist our temptations to dirty sinful things. The undertone of repressed desperation in his voice turned his passionate energy into something a little weird and scary. (at least to me.)

So I was all ready for the Cardinal to be even MORE so-ridiculous-it'd-be-funny-if-it-wasn't-scary, especially since I've heard that the Cardinal is very conservative and has censored or opposed Gustavo Gutierrez's liberation theology here in Lima in various ways. But like so many other times in this country, reality turned out different than I expected. Cardinal Cipriani's public speaking style is the opposite of his Vicar's. He has a soft voice and a soft manner, and he spoke very encouragingly about all the beautiful things our Church has to offer by way of the sacraments. I don't remember now what exactly he said, but he struck me as a very intelligent, spiritually balanced, peaceful man. When the Vicar talked about where this chair has to go and why that song can't be played and how there will only be male altar servers, I found myself angrily demanding of him in my head--What words of life do you have for me, Vicar? What WORDS OF LIFE are you brining to us here in our church?? Words of Life were what attracted people to Jesus, after all. Jesus IS the Word of God who comes so that we might have life in abundance. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my pre-judgement of the Cardinal was quite the opposite of the truth of the man: conservative or no, his words were gentle, insightful, welcoming and inclusive... decidedly "of life."

The people were funny, they were totally star-struck by the Cardinal, kind of like a crowd of celebrity fans in Hollywood. His Eminence took it all in stride and was very humble and personable in his interactions with us. After the Mass he came (with all his seminarians!) for some light refreshments in the sisters' house, where supposedly only religious brothers and sisters were supposed to be, but Katie and I were allowed to stay seeing as it was our house too. And the Cardinal talked with everyone in Spanish or English as necessary, including a great conversation with me and Sister BJ about American college basketball! (he's traveled all over the US.) As he was leaving, the choir and the lectors, who had hung around outside waiting, got to take their picture with His Eminence. All in all it was a great night.

one month back

2009-02-16T20:57:00.006-05:00

Ok, so my life is very different at the moment from what it's been the past 2 years.
For one thing, it's cold (in case I didn't mention that before). For another, it's sunny and the sky and the trees are beautiful, and there is a washing machine (yippee!!).
And possibly happiest of all, I can do things here like make appointments and schedules and write them in my planner and then go to them at the appointed time and THEY ACTUALLY HAPPEN at that time and that place AS PLANNED! Hahaha! SO BEAUTIFUL! Aaaaahhhh scheduling!
And of course I'm home and enjoying living with my family. :)

But weather and schedules and family aside, I won't lie to you, my faithful readers: it's rough being back. I'm in a full-blown "transition" phase, i.e. living in my parents' house, job-hunting, and all the while trying to figure out what just happened to me over the past two years, so that from there I can figure out what kind of job and life I REALLY want to have in the future. It's very complicated. There's culture shock, brought on by everything from eating cereal out of boxes to throwing toilet paper in the toilet; the isolation of living in a suburb; the lack of a faith community to feel connected to; plain homesickness for Peru and my friends there; and most anxiety-inducing of all, the lack of a clear direction in my life and work. Just to give you a sense of what this is like, imagine your career ideas consisting almost entirely of concepts like "theology," "teaching," "writing," "ministry," and "bartending" (no serioulsy. I think it kind of balances and complements the rest).

Today I gave a presentation on blogging and journaling to NDMVs serving in the United States, and I felt like a poor role model for blogging so little about the end of last year. So, for your delight and entertainment, and in order to shamelessly lose myself in remembering some of my happiest moments in the country I am now missing TERRIBLY--here come some glimpses of late December and January.

Everything's changing

2009-01-25T13:45:00.006-05:00

*** ...So. ***

We have a new President TOTALLY different from the last one.
I'm in a cold, cold, silent, frosty, cold, quiet, organized, COLD place with huge houses and huge stores and huge distances between them. There is a new garage and a giant new black-and-chrome refrigerator that looks like Darth Vader.
There's an economic recession that's going to change a lot of people's jobs and outlooks on life... maybe my family among them.
There's no cumbia on the radio. In fact there's no radio or any other sort of noise, unless you turn it on yourself.
In church the people stand up in nice neat lines to go to communion. Also they control their small children and don't let them run around in front of the priest while he gives the homily... also there are no dogs wandering in while church is going on or firecracker explosions outside on the street.
Also the people are REALLY TALL.

...did I mention it's COLD AS ALL &*%&*^%$%#^& ? and that the sun comes up at 7 am and goes down at 5:30? WTF?
...but, at least there is a marked difference between light and dark, shadow and sun, frigidness and indoor warmth. A brittle cold with a blue sky and sun gleaming through naked tree branches lets you know you're alive. None of this dismal Lima-winter gray, 55 degrees and clammy and misting with no difference in the light between morning and midday and evening.

That's about as much as I've been able to process since I got back last Tuesday. My last few weeks in Peru, vacation pics, etc will be up soon, I hope. For now I'm just trying to breathe...

My last month

2008-12-20T11:24:00.003-05:00

My last post took us up through mid-November. In the month since then, way too much has happened for me to tell you everything in detail. Here are a few things that could each have their own post.

*Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani came to celebrate Mass in Tupac. (I really do want to do a whole post on this one so stay tuned.)

*Catherine came for a week and hung out with me so I wouldn't be lonely. We celebrated Thanksgiving with our friends and had the experience of seeing our turkey, alive and looking around in innocent confusion, get its feet tied up and get weighed on the scale before it was taken in the back and killed. We almost felt terrible enough to become vegetarians.

*I went to a fancy-dress wedding, in a truly awesome dress, and danced salsa and cumbia until 3 am. :)

*I finished preparing the kids in the school for their concert and managed to get the thing to actually happen! It was something that's never happened in that school before. There were two choirs, a primary and a secondary, and two groups of girls who sang things alone; the teachers and parents came and while the singing wasn't really in tune, everyone liked it. The vice-pincipal Gaby even made a little speech afterwards to thank me for all my work... for the first time I felt appreciated in that school!! The teachers gave me a gift, a very beautiful alpaca vest that is entirely too big and the wrong color. But still. :)

*Iris had a party with the youth group in the school, and I was there the whole day with them, eating delicious food cooked by Sra. Rosa the wife of the school guardian Reineri, dancing, singing, watching them play soccer outside.

*In between all these moments, I had long days of being alone in my house but not wanting to go to the school, being bored in the mornings when everybody else in the world is working like respectabe people do, feeling the frustration of still not being fully part of this culture or being able to live a "normal" life here... basically, I went in and out of a heavy, deadening depression. It's the feeling of being stuck doing something that has no possibilities for change, creativity, or letting your talents develop--a helplessness in the face of Peruvians' refusal to be put in order, their unreliability that makes me feel like I have no power to bring any sort of project to completion.

*The second-year Confirmation group here had their confirmation. I played guitar at the Mass and later in the day watched Happy Feet, that fabulous movie about a dancing penguin, and then went to Sheila's house with a group of friends from the choir to sing her Happy Birthday.

*With my own first-year Confirmation group, we tried to go to the Parque de la Reserva, which is apparently a huge fountains-and-lights exhibit in the center of Lima... but we spent so much time waiting for people to meet up that we got there late, and ended up coming back to eat hamburgers in Tupac. Typical Peruvian fun. :)

*I came to grips, searingly, with the fact that I don't think I have any talents. It was a very difficult moment brought on by a practice for tomorrow's Christmas concert in the church, which led to a discussion of hitting the notes correctly vs. singing from the heart with expression. The former I can do; the latter embarrasses and terrifies me. I've been reading a book about Aboriginal Australians who give themselves their own names based on talents they have, like Composer, Secret Keeper, Kin to Large Animals, etc; and the way they honor the talents of everyone in the tribe made me realize how little I believe in the value of my own creativity. All I've ever learned to do in my life is complete, really, really, REALLY WELL, the tasks that other people set for me. But something originally my own, that nobody asked for, just a spontaneous idea that I could wave around happily and go, Look! Look what I came up with!!! ... Why do you think the fantasy novel I wrote from age 11-16 is still sitting on my computer, instead of being read? Anyway. A very painful realization. But after a long discussion and a short break, I was later able to sing Silent Night a cappella, in my own rhythm, trying to just feel the music and be the instrument to transmit its message. And it felt good. A moment of new possibility.

*Of course some of the stress of the music was due to the fact that I'M LEAVING PERU IN ONE MONTH, without a definite plan of what job I'm going to enter into at home, knowing only that I feel called to talk about Life, real Life, divine Mystery, God; to live my life deeply, in abundance; to speak a word of hope to people trapped in their own perspectives on life, who haven't had the experience I have in Peru. I'm not going to be a nun. I don't have a career path and I wouldn't want one all set out for me and tied up neatly with a bow (see above!). I don't know in what way my heart will speak to me once I'm there, where I'll end up. All I know is that it is good to be in this Lima world in these days that I have remaining... and that really, "home" almost isn't "home" any more because the place I actually live is here!... and that it's going to break my heart to leave... and that I can't stay where I am. I have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

*Miriam came back from the US, understands completely my "desert" experience of being in a foreign country, and listens to me talk. And it's almost Christmas.

*I worked with Dante, Alfredo, and the rest of the church choir to "compose" a Christmas song to be presented at tomorrow's concert: we took the melody of a popular cumbia that's all over the radio, whose refrain is "I hope you die," and changed the lyrics to make a song about the birth of Jesus. It's hilarious and fabulous. Then we rehearsed it and tried to organize everyone to actually be there on Sunday...!

*I finished in Fe y Alegría with one last little actuación, in which I snuck my kids into the program Peruvian style, at the last minute, because they'd forgotten to put them on there earlier; and even got them the honor of singing the National Anthem in front of everyone simply by asking the people in charge about ten minutes before the performance started. See? I'm learning. Also, Sara had a little party for me with the Adelante kids, gave me silver dove earrings, and we ate ice cream despite the fact that one of the girls told me I look like I'm pregnant. Peruvian honesty.

*Today I'm going to Chaclacayo to be Mallco's "godmother" for his kindergarden graduation, i.e. I rented him a little suit for his party. It'll be good to see Tony and the kids again.

.......

So you see there's really been quite a lot going on. I'd give you pictures and all, but the thing is, Peru has stopped being weird for me. (Well, that's definitely an overstatement...) let's just say that I no longer feel like a journalist here. Instead I've become a member of this parish, this choir, this school (although that's a difficult relationship, thank God it's over!!!), this community. So if you don't mind, there may be no more blog posts from here on out. I'm just going to live my life for the next few weeks. I'm planning to travel, so there will be pictures from Puno and Lake Titicaca at some point... really before you know it I'll be home and you can ask me anything you want, and I promise to talk until you stop me. Believe me, I couldn't put it all up here anyway even if I tried.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

November part I

2008-12-16T15:30:00.005-05:00

I've discovered the secret to successful volunteer tutoring: Franklin the turtle. Franklin is a turtle about seven or eight years old whose adventures are chronicled in a series of books in the school library. At some point in September or October I realized that the students in Sara's Adelante class really don't learn much in the class, and would be much better served by individual reading time. I'll spare you my rant about how infuriatingly ineffective Sara is as a teacher, especially as a teacher of kids with behavioral problems who come from very dysfunctional homes... Let's just say that that feeling of frustrated helplessness that never truly goes away for me in Peru is currently due to feeling like I have to learn on the spot to manage a special-needs classroom, because if I don't stand up and make the kids pay attention, Sara does nothing and it's total chaos. (And I always said I didn't want to teach high school because I'd rather not deal with discipline; if you want to learn, come learn, and if not, fine with me, go do your thing elsewhere! is my thought on education.)

Anyway, everyone benefits much more if I take the kids one by one to the library and have them read about Franklin and then answer questions in their notebook. They like it, too, because they feel special with all the individual attention, and I try to be a broken record of positive encouragement, to counteract the negative things I suspect they hear about themselves at home and in school. The down side to that is that then they hang on my arms and hug me and whine for me to stay when I tell them I'm leaving for the day. And since they're not particularly cooperative when I'm with them, I resent the implication that I'm a bad person for not wanting to stay. (more later on this dynamic of, "Nooo, Katalina, don't go!! Stay here so we can keep taking what we want from you when it's convenient for us and then putting you aside the rest of the time!" ...It's not just the kids I feel that from.)

November was a busy month. Not in the sense that I woke up from Monday to Friday and felt happy thinking of the day ahead, but in the sense that many things happened to interrupt my boredom and loneliness.

Sissy Corr, the director of my volunteer program, came to visit me and my fellow volunteer Katie. This was awesome for many reasons: (1) I felt recognized and valued for my work. Sissy followed me around to my singing classes in the school and my Confirmation group in the parish and told me how great it was that I'm doing all this. She has the perspective to be able to say, Look what you've accomplished from nothing! She also took great pictures of my elementary-school singers and the high school youth group.

(2) I got to go on retreat. Katie came down from Tambogrande and the two of us went with Sissy and Sister Maria Laura, who directed the retreat, to a house outside Chosica (farther out beyond Dr. Tony's, getting up into the mountains a little and out from under the Lima cloud.) The retreat was an excellent experience, although the task--reflect on and try to understand the past two years of my life as an NDMV in Peru--was way too big for the three days we had; just getting started on the process was exhausting, and I would have preferred an extra two or three days to just sleep. Here's me and the fish pond in the pretty retreat center.

(3) I got to spend time with Katie. I always knew this year would be harder without Catherine, but I sometimes forget just how lonely I become for someone who shares my experience. Plus she's a cool chica. :)

So Sissy's visit was good. Plus talking with Sissy about the practical details of running a volunteer program, I realized the enormous amount that I've learned about what works and what doesn't, and I now have some ideas of things to share with the administration at Fe y Alegría to help out the next volunteer, whenever he or she comes along.

an interesting Halloween, making money, and the Lord of Miracles

2008-12-04T13:07:00.000-05:00

This is me with my friend Mary when we went out for Halloween. Halloween isn't really celebrated around here, except for a very few little kids I saw dressed up in some kind of lame costumes and walking around with their parents on the street. But people do go out dancing on the 31st of October, so Mary and I went to get a friend of hers, Carolina, whom I didn't know before, and the three of us headed for Miraflores.

Mary told me that last Halloween they went to a certain club and had a great time, because "you can dance by yourself, no problem, and the guys don't bother you." I wondered why that would be more true at this place than at another, but said, whatever, ok. (Then I was less happy when there was a cover charge of 15 soles. Carolina lives in a really nice house that reminded me of the US, and clearly has money; but when you're a volunteer, you start to think more like your friends, who would have felt very uncomfortable in that house and certainly would never pay S/.15 to dance when you can easily go to other clubs and dance for free. I was a little disgusted by the number of handbags Carolina had to choose from when we were getting ready to leave... more handbags than my friends have shirts, I'm sure.) Then when I got into the club, after a few minutes I noticed there were a lot of groups of all guys standing around dancing, and a lot of groups of all girls... and a lot of same-sex couples dancing... "Mary, is this a gay club??" "Yup!" says Mary, perfectly happy to be dancing without those annoying guys that sometimes won't leave you alone in discos. But I got bored after a while, because no one asked me to dance! The best entertainment of the night was a guy in a Zorro costume (it was Halloween after all) who introduced himself to everyone he saw as Don Diego de la Vega.

That Sunday was the annual Lord of Miracles procession. In the preceeding weeks I'd helped out a bit by taking letters to two schools in the area, letting them know that the image would be passing by their school, so that they could prepare an appropriate reception--decorations, flowers, their own image, etc.--and by giving out flyers along a certain section of the procession's route, to let the people know the same. On the day of the procession, I, with other people's help, made over 500 soles. Unfortunately none of it was for me!

My Confirmation group decided to do an "activity," i.e. sell food, at the church that day to make some money for their retreat at the end of their program. Juancho helped a lot, but Any, the other catechist, couldn't, so I was basically in charge of organizing the teenagers into preparing two GIANT pots of arroz con leche and mazamorra and selling it after church. We were quite the businesspeople! Juancho and I bought all the ingredients, the kids showed up one by one starting at about 5:30 am, and we started cooking, i.e. everybody arguing about how best to do it, almost burning themselves on the gas stove, running out to get more sugar and corn starch at the last minute, etc. It was fabulous.

After Mass we sold a total of 150 servings of arroz con leche (Peruvian rice pudding) and mazamorra (a jello-y liquid or liquidy jello dessert made from purple corn). But that was only about half of the enormous pots we'd made! So we agreed to come back in the afternoon and sell the rest, hopefully, when people came for the procession at 3 pm. After a much-needed lunch and rest in my house, it was back to the church. The kids were great vendors--they got trays and walked around with the procession selling as they went, and eventually got rid of all of it. Grand total: S/.200 of profit after paying ourselves back for the ingredients, etc. Each of the kids who helped will get almost 20 soles toward the cost of their retreat next year. (which I won't be around for!! :(

I didn't get to help carry the Lord of Miracles this year because I had a unique job during the procession. I was in charge of carrying the limosna box, asking people for donations. The money I collected was going to be used to pay the band, so it had to be quite a bit! At first I was a little nervous about asking people for money, especially these people, because from my perspective they don't have any. But my friends told me just to walk right up to the people watching and ask for "collaborations," and if they say no, they say no. And the vast majority didn't say no. Women selling snacks from little carts on street corners, a way that the poorer people in the neighborhood sometimes make their living, dug out 20 cents or 50 cents or a sol from somewhere to contribute to the Lord of Miracles. It really means a lot to them. I became a walking (or running!) broken record all afternoon and evening, from 3 pm to 9 pm when it finished back at the church: "Señores, a contribution for the Lord of Miracles? Thank you, how kind of you! Thank you very much, God bless!"
above: stopping to pray in front of the anda

left: a very touching moment between mother, son, and the Lord... actually these were two drunk people who wandered into the procession, but still...

right: at Sheila's house they prepared a reception for the Lord of Miracles. (these good neighbors were impeccably pious and not the least bit drunk.)

Unlike my friends here, very rarely in my life have I ever felt pressured to make a certain amount of money. But I learned during that whole day, first of mazamorra and then of limosna, that when your goal is to go out there and find a way, any way, to bring back X amount of soles, you get into a kind of money-making mentality where you lose whatever hesitations you felt about bothering people. Sure, they might get annoyed if you ask them for money, but someone else will be more annoyed at you later if there's no money to pay the band. Luckily I had my little friend Ivan to show me the ropes in terms of bringing in cash.
me and Ivan carrying the limosna box, way ahead of the procession

Ivan is an expert at selling the chocotejas his grandmother makes to bring in a little extra income for his family. Very shortly into the procession he took me under his wing, and for the next five hours he ran me up and down the streets, left, right, ahead of the image, behind it, to all the stores, all the houses, everything, saying, Katalina, over there! Katalina, ask them! This store here, Katalina! In a stunt that I'd like to think will be remembered for years, we even made the rounds of a soccer field surrounded by groups of men standing around drinking--the kind I always go out of my way to avoid if I'm walking alone, because of the whistles and harassment. What did I have to fear? I had a whole procession of churchgoers behind me, plus an official-looking vest and collection box and a twelve-year-old sidekick! (Ok, so one of the older ladies of the parish was also with us at that point, and she was great, she walked straight up to those who refused at first and demanded money like a mother scolding naughty kids. "If you have money to drink, how about giving some for GOD!!") But the way their mouths dropped open when this tall, blonde gringa came up and cheerfully asked for donations for the Lord of Miracles was fabulous. Those who didn't reach into their pockets immediately just stood there gaping until their buddies yelled at them to give the señorita a contribution! "Señorita--you're a vision! Una belleza!" proclaimed one or another. "Then why don't you contribute?" I replied, laughing. And wow, did they contribute! One after another, out comes five soles, ten soles, fifteen soles for the collection box! I think we took more cash off the borrachos than the whole rest of the pueblo contributed together.

By the end of the procession me and Ivan had over 300 soles in the box. All in all it was a very profitable day.

...and the prodigal blogger returns

2008-11-22T21:45:00.006-05:00

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.

Time

2008-10-14T17:25:00.002-04:00

"I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we--so incontrovertibly--are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die."
--Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Time is short. And long. It's expandable and shrinkable. Today I slept until 8 am, deliciously, dreaming that I was back in one of my high school musical productions and that I had to buy slippers from a Peruvian-style clothing stand, two different types of blue slipper so that I could take the little flowers off one and sew them onto the other and have them match. I said, in Spanish, That's ridiculous, I'm going to complain to the director, I'm not spending twenty soles on two different types of slippers. Then my cell phone alarm went off. I got up and got dressed in a rush to get up to the school by 9--and discovered that there were no students there. Jornada pedagógica: teachers' training day. No Liliana, Evelyn, Liz, José Luis, or Gerald in the morning, and no choirs in the afternoon. I felt my day ooze out of its structure, a bit repulsively, like an expanding waistline spilling over jeans. I have nothing to do and time is going slowly.

Since my last post, the first half of October has flown. I spend the first half of the week recovering from my weekend, the second half getting ready for the next weekend, and then do it again; I've almost started counting weeks from Thursday to Wednesday. Last Thursday I went with the Salud ladies to visit Agusto in his shack. Agusto is an older man who lives alone with his dog, Ferpudo, and a cat or two, in a house that's a couple of board walls imperfectly covered over with tin. There are three "rooms" more or less and a sort of foyer area that's open to the air, with laundry lines strung across it but no laundry, because Agusto has gotten sick lately and I doubt he can wash clothes right now. Instead of laundry there are things like plastic bags or dirty rags pinned up on the lines. There is cardboard underfoot and Ferpudo's bowl is on the floor with raw chicken parts in it--the dog eats better than his owner and is strong and frisky. He's got curly strawberry-blonde hair and his nickname is gringo. My compatriot.

Agusto normally receives us in his foyer, where there are a couple of chairs and a bench, but this time he was in bed. He's got some sort of infection that makes it difficult to urinate, and from what I understand, he's been to the medical post in Tupac and they've put a catheter in, but he still isn't feeling better because (Luisa says) he hasn't taken his antibiotic when he should have, because he had no appetite, so he doesn't eat, and then the medicine hurts his empty stomach. He has a brother and some nieces and nephews, but they don't come very often. I gather that they live far away. There's no one there to cook for him or make him take his medicine or go to the market for food; I don't know what he does on the days when Luisa can't go bring him some bread and milk and fruit or some chicken broth from the market. I think he gets up and goes himself. But the thing that shocked me most was, he had only one medium-weight blanket over him. He'd doubled it up and draped it over his legs, and from the waist up he was using a jacket as a blanket. I was bowled over. It's basically like he's sleeping outside, in the chilly, breezy, damp Lima winter, with only one blanket. I use two or three blankets, and my room has actual walls and a roof well attached to them.

I came home that day and slammed a chair on the floor and kicked my walls. It's all about time. Am I going to go to Agusto's house twice a day to make sure he eats something, drinks something, and takes his pills? He needs someone there to take care of him and there's no one. I've already committed my time to going to the market for the sisters, cooking lunch once or twice a week, running my choirs in the school, helping the kids (except when there's no school!)... How many nights has Agusto spent with his one blanket in the cold? So many that they've run together for him and the time since he was last warm at night seems short? And yet the thought of leaving him for one more night blanket-less like that killed me. I resolved to buy him blankets; it's the least I could do. I'll hardly notice the 35 soles. But I didn't go Friday. I was busy. I didn't go Saturday: I'd made plans with a friend to go to the market and cook together. And we did, we met and talked and cooked and laughed and ate and the whole afternoon flew by. Saturday evening was my Confirmation group, which, little did I know, had been cancelled by the coordinator that week, they just didn't tell us that beforehand. So the group showed up like normal and we had to invent things to do with them on the spot. Then when we finished I realized that we were scheduled to clean the church that day, but I'd invited my friends over for a movie-and-pancake night, it'd been so long since we'd gotten everyone together!... They all came over for pancakes and we had a great time.

On Sunday morning after Mass I finally went with Luisa to bring Agusto his blankets. And he blessed me. He took my hands and said, Hermanita, may it always go well for you wherever you go! And I almost cried, because it was so little I'd done for him. So little and so late. An afterthought to my happy, comfortable times with my friends that had been my priority that weekend. Unlike the widow in the Gospel, I give from what I have left over. But now, after adding three more interminable cold nights to his already infinite tally, Agusto has two new blankets. I hope he'll be a little warmer. He's still poor and sick, and the doctors in the public hospital are on strike and they're only seeing emergency cases.

Time can go on and on for ages without anything changing, an eternity, a lifetime--and then one day just like any other, everything changes. The earth existed without humans for billions (I think?) of years, and then one day, like Tolkien's elves, we woke up and started doing our human things, and literally changed the face of the planet. I lived and studied comfortably in the US for 22 years, and then one year I got a crazy idea to go live in Peru, and everything was different. I feel like I've spent much more time being bored as an NDMV than I ever did at home, and yet the number of things that have happened to me in my almost two years in this country seems exponentially greater than its counterpart for all of my previous life in Maryland.

My prayer right now is for more time. for the ability to live in the present moment. January 20th seems like tomorrow.

*Disclaimer: please excuse the new Google ads on the right. They are a shameless attempt to make a few dollars with this blogging thing. I'm not supposed to encourage readers to do anything in particular with the links, but if you like my posts, you might be nice to a poor volunteer and future theology student, and pretend to be interested enough to see what some of them are about.*

Craziest ten days of my life

2008-09-30T14:24:00.011-04:00

From September 20th to 29th, I:

Rehearsed, learned, and performed in a native Huititi dance for the parish Youth Day celebrations;

finished studying for and took the GRE;

kept on with all my regular projects like Confirmation, IRFA, choirs in the school, choirs in the parish, visiting the sick, and helping in the Delicias house with Teresa being on bedrest;

and decided, after a very strong, very painful freak-out session, not to be a nun.

It was a busy ten days.

Above: me and the other catechists in our traditional costumes from Arequipa!! Part of the costume is a dredlock-style full head of braids with ribbons tied in. My friend Josie's mom invited me to her house for lunch that day and braided my hair... so nice! Peruvian hospitality.

Left: me with my friend Juan Carlos (aka Juancho). He's holding up his skirt to show that he actually is wearing pants underneath. In this dance, the men wear long skirts over their pants, because in the time and culture that invented the dance, parents kept boys and girls very strictly separated and didn't let them see each other. So, with that crazy bravery that dares a man to do anything for love... the boys dressed up as girls to sneak in and see their girlfriends!

Look how well I fit in! :) I'm practically Peruvian. The guy in normal clothes is our teacher.
So the dance was awesome, plus the fact that the whole three minutes of it is nothing but jumping from side to side in different formations, so I got in really good shape by the end of the rehearsals! The music is with Andean flutes and drums, and you get to hop all around and spin and yell EEY! Fabulous.

The GRE, which I took yesterday at the Institute of American English in Lima, was also surprisingly good. I got a 1420 on the multiple-choice verbal and math sections. I'd been studying pretty dilligently for most of August and September, trying to find one to two hours a day during the week (weekends were too crazy) to study vocab and review math I haven't done since middle school. I got kind of ridiculously excited when the word Perspicacity appeared on the actual test, and a little indignant that not one single right-triangle 1-1-root 2 or 1-root 3-2 question appeared! after I reviewed all those stupid angles and hypotenuses. Oh well. I feel I've taken my first step towards becoming a theologian!

...And I'm glad about becoming a theologian, because, the nun idea... not so much. Last Friday for some reason I was just absolutely flipping out, sitting in my house crying because I felt like I was being torn in two inside--because I like everything, everything about the idea of being an SND... except the part about never being able to have a relationship or a family. All these questions about happiness, love, what one really, REALLY wants in life... sacrifice, leading to true happiness over immediate pleasure... being able to love people and share with them... Luckily when I went up to the school, Estela was there, and she listened to me talk for like an hour, and reassured me that one can serve God just as well as a non-nun. By Sunday I'd calmed down sufficiently to be able to study, and by Monday I was good to go on the test. And after the test, during my celebratory walk around Miraflores (the sun came out! and I sat in the park overlooking the ocean...), I found myself thinking calmly: El amor es uno solo. All love is one. I think if you're living a life full of love, and doing what makes you happy, that's all you can really ask for and all that can be asked of you.

So, as I said. A busy ten days. But good. ...real good. :)

Today there was not one but TWO dogs that wandered into my choir rehearsals in the school. Plus fourth grade behaved like a bunch of wild monkeys. Aah, Peru.

I don't need you to like me, and other thoughts

2008-09-12T23:22:00.009-04:00

When I'm not working with people here, I periodically find myself alone in the house. I do my laundry or my cleaning or, these days, study like mad for the GRE which I'm taking on September 29th. But mostly, laundry and cleaning are excuses for me to think like crazy. I sometimes feel like even when I don't want to be thinking any more, my brain goes around in circles until some sort of activity (like working with kids or directing a choir rehearsal or visiting the sick) intervenes to take my mind off... things.

(Disclaimer: these questions usually come up on Mondays or Wednesdays, when I have less to do and more free time, but nobody else has free time to hang out with me. So I sometimes get a little bored, and if I'm tired, bored turns into moody, and voila, we get the following... )

The most frequent question of my alone moments is, What do I want? Sometimes I just feel this sort of longing, for something undefined, for a lot of things, and in frustration I ask, What do I want?? Or put another way--Why do I feel unfulfilled right now and what would fulfill me? Am I complete, as a person, right now, with my life the way it is? If you want to know what it's like to be me right now, think about that for a minute. Are you complete? Or do you feel like there's something lacking in your world, in your life, a hole that needs filling in order for you to be whole?

There is certainly a lot of love in my life here. Tons of dear friends, the sisters who are like my family, the kids at the school, even those annoying old ladies in the parish... But none of them are "mine." They all have their families and I don't; they put their kids to sleep at night, or someday will, and I go to bed alone. Is that okay? Some days I think it is, and some days I know it isn't. Could I be happy as a sister, with a life like this, doing work that I love and delighting in the company of everyone, but never depending on the presence of certain people, a family, for my happiness?

My brain says, Seems doubtful. If happiness doesn't come from the love of your family, I mean nuclear husband-and-kids family--where does it come from? Supposedly, the answer there would be God. And that... is complicated. Some days I think that relationship is not enough to make me happy for the rest of my life. And some days I know it is. Those are the days that scare me most.

But I've realized lately, through talking to a friend who grew up very, very poor in this neighborhood, that people can put anything in that question above where I put "family" (well actually, I'm way far from thinking about families; the word right now would be "boyfriend.") Example, "If happiness doesn't come from having enough money to live comfortably, where does it come from?" My friend had a very dificult childhood and although he now has a decent job and enough to eat in his house, I can tell he's still trapped in the idea that other people look down on him for being poor. He doubts his ability to follow his dreams of being a musician because, according to the way he thinks people will judge him, "that's for people with money." Silly, right? Now that he's getting along okay, why keep feeling ashamed of who he was, or how he was perceived, in the past? ...Heh. Easier said than done. Money for my friend is a sort of beautiful, unattainable dream, money and the respect that comes with it. He never had any, and he had to take some hard treatment from the world because of it, and so he learned to feel unworthy of people's esteem, and when you learn something like that it's very hard to unlearn later. A wound that needs a lot of healing.

"If happiness doesn't come from... (that thing I never had and felt scorned and humiliated for not having), where does it come from??" I realized that I'm exactly the same way about guys. Never had any, learned not to expect them, decided I'd better get used to living without them, and placed the idea of having a relationship up on a sort of pedestal, thinking, That must be it, if I had that I'd be happy. But the truth is, there are people with tons of money who aren't happy. There are people who've had a hundred boyfriends or girlfriends and aren't happy. There are even people in steady, committed, loving, long-term relationships, who aren't happy (although those last probably have a better chance at happiness than some.) So, logically, that can't be it.

Enter Anthony DeMello, a Jesuit from India whose book I read a few weeks ago. The guy's practically a Buddhist, and his perspective, which he sums up in the title Awareness, is literally life-changing, if you take it seriously. He basically says, as humans, we need two things to fully flourish: to be free, and to love. To be free and to love--NOT "to be loved!" Wow. Either he's crazy or he's found the secret to life. He says that as children we are trained not just to want but to need, even to crave the approval of others--our family, our peers, our teachers--but that that approval, that "love," that pat on the back or admiring glance or certificate of achievement, is actually not necessary for our happiness. Think about a two-year-old child: if that child knows that Mom and Dad love her in a sort of existential way, that is, she trusts that they're going to keep her world turning and doesn't live in fear of abandonment--then she won't hang around Mom if she can help it. Instead, she'll go off exploring, delighted to discover more about this marvelous thing called existence. But as soon as fear of abandonment enters in, the child starts clinging, terrified to move out into the world. She becomes more preoccupied with keeping Mom's love than with growing into a fuller, more alive version of herself.

Basically, as I understand him, DeMello says that a lot of what we think is love, is actually just us trying to get our latest fix of the drug called other people's approval. My, how smart you are, Kathleen! How responsible you are! How good and generous you are to others! You look beautiful today! Good thing you got those As in school... good thing you never went to those wild frat parties in college... Good thing you wear those nice flattering tight clothes now, you're turning heads down there in Peru!... Behind every Good thing...! is an Otherwise: a vague, implied Otherwise looming just on the other side of whatever Line the other person doesn't want us to cross. Otherwise, you'd be off the dean's list and you'd end up waiting tables for the rest of your life. Otherwise, people would think you were irresponsible. Otherwise you'd be arrogant and irritating, and people would get offended and feel bad and talk about you behind your back. Otherwise you'd keep living your pathetic, restricted little boy-less life and live in fear of your friends saying, Let's play Never Have I Ever! (a truth-telling game where young people discover who's done what, what kind of experiences everyone has or hasn't had.) Otherwise you might end up as a nun someday, that is to say, end up going around with CELIBATE stamped on your forehead for everyone to stare at.

...Inasmuch as we NEED that drug of other people's approval, we are not free to go off and try something new, to gather up all our love and good intentions, and go out and make stupid mistakes, and then try to do better the next time--to grow little by little into who we authentically are. To breathe free air, beholden to nothing and no one except that which you choose to dedicate yourself to. To be fully alive.

So the lesson I take from Anthony DeMello is, I don't need you to like me. Yes, I'm talking to YOU. I may like you very much, I may even love you, but I don't need you! I would never, as DeMello says, choose your love over my own true happiness and fulfillment. So, I can choose never to go back to school and wait tables for the rest of my life if I want--and I could be happy, as long as I were truly "aware" (that's his Buddhist thing) of reality. Because the marvel of existence, he says, the wonder of entering into relationship with reality (or with God) is enough to keep a human being dancing through her days for a lifetime. I could be a nun, and derisive laughter of American culture be damned--and I could be happy! I could have a family, I could move to Paris and find myself a romantic Bohemian artist lover, I could run a bookshop, I could do whatever the (insert strong language here) I want! and I could be happy.

...I guess that means, going back to my earlier question... that I am "complete." It's just a question of recognizing it.
When I get really good at that, you'll know, because I'll be doing something I like, and I'll be happy for no particular reason.

It never rains but it pours

2008-09-02T19:50:00.005-04:00

Literally speaking, this saying is not at all true in Lima. It NEVER pours in Lima and it almost never really rains either. But activity-wise, it seems to be consistently true for my life in Peru... either I have nothing to do, or I barely have a minute to sleep.

For most of August after my vacation, I was in low-key mode. Working with the choirs, doing my parish stuff, even being a good housemate and keeping up with my cleaning, cooking, trips to the market, etc. There was a week when the electricity was going out every evening any time between 7 and 9 pm, for 5 minutes up to an hour. We had our weekly Confi catechists' meeting by candlelight in the parish multipurpose room, and Miriam's goodbye party (she's going back to the US for another semester of English! so brave!) turned into a romantic candlelight dinner. I was even exercising every morning between prayer and breakfast, inspired by Rebecca's brief stay here... until my left knee got all swollen and stiff and I had to go around in sneakers for a week to get the correct knee alignment back.

Then last week, everything started happening at once. I'll try to write this the way it felt to live it...

One Wednesday, I went with the Adelante class to the Museum of Anthropological History. This involved at various moments me trying to control a group of 16 third-graders inside a museum, letting 50 children down off a bus one at a time to buy ice cream from the vendor who wisely parked his cart right outside and then gave me an ice cream sandwich for free because he was so grateful, getting asked like 15 times by Liliana why I hadn't brought a real lunch with me (i.e. no rice and chicken in a plastic tupperware, just three little cheese sandwiches and fruit--silly me! That's not lunch in Peru!) and wandering around the beach in Chorrillos with the kids and teachers (we stopped on the way back because we were running ahead of schedule, of all things.)
Father Kevin the British Priest of Awesomeness left! and his despedida (goodbye party) was sad and happy at once, everybody danced with the padrecito, I helped my girlfriends from the parish serve the snacks and drinks, there was music and pictures and delicious cake. :)
Thursday, Consuelo, BJ, Adrian, Carmen, and I went to a ceremony in rememberance of the 5th anniversary of the Comission of Truth and Reconciliation, which investigated the violence committed by both terrorists and the military during the 80's in Peru, mostly the victims were poor Quechua-speaking people of the sierra, whole villages were killed and the military was often as bad as the Senderistas. so we went to this ceremony and listened to Grupo Siembra (aka Awesome) and somebody gave a long speech and it drizzled (this being Lima in the winter.)
I got back and a friend who another friend says has a crush on me, but unfortunately is only 18 years old, so sad!, invited me to get something to eat, and I was talking with him till like 9:30 pm. Then Luis Alberto calls me and asks me to play guitar at Saturday's Mass for Santa Rosa (Saint Rose of Lima, real famous, big deal, lots of images decorated with beautiful flowers processing into Mass on the shoulders of their devotees and accompanied by blaring brass bands and light-less firecrackers that sound like gunshots... you know the type.) Me: "Ah, it's 9:30 right now... you're there with the choir practicing NOW? Um... (shrug)... okay!" Grabbed the guitar, hopped a mototaxi down to Las Brisas and practiced with them. Friday, was exhausted. Saturday: taught one little girl from my 5th grade choir a voice lesson in Delicias at 10 am, the others didn't show up. Conversation group. Played guitar in the Mass at Brisas. Did not register surprise at the fact that there was a dog wandering around the church, but found its huge head and little stubby legs hilarious. Went with Sara to the house of a friend of her mom's who was doing an actividad (you know, have a restaurant for a day, sell meat and potatoes and lettuce to everyone you know for 7 soles each in order to get some money together... like y'do.) Ate in the house sharing an armchair with Sara; this armchair plus a strung-up sheet was the wall between the kitchen and the bedroom, the floor was dirt and the roof tin and the walls just boards. Went back to my house and chatted with Sara about being 20-somethings and looking for our vocations in every sense. Confirmation group, then Luis Alberto's house for HIS actividad, better than the first one because his mom cooks awesome.
sunday played guitar in Mass, conversed in English with Enrique, went and taught my last IRFA class in the afternoon. Little party to end the semester. Talked to one of the other volunteer teachers who left her family in the selva 4 years ago and hasn't been back since, sweet, tiny, thin and kind of depressed. Choir rehearsal at night in which I sang one of my original songs which Dante helped me translate into Spanish, and then arranged voice parts for Andrea Bocelli's Con Te Partiró.
At least twice during all this wonderfulness, I squished a flea with my bare fingers. little suckers come wandering out from under your pillow like they own the place.

Tambogrande and Mancora

2008-08-18T15:48:00.025-04:00

After getting back from Iquitos, we spent two nights in Lima before heading up north. One of the nights was a Friday and me, Rebecca, and Celina went out clubbing in Barranco. Rebecca made me all pretty (that's her gray shirt and her makeup job I'm wearing), but nevertheless I was snubbed by a Clark Kent lookalike (think Smallville) who started dancing with me in order to invite the three of us to go to the other disco next door, and once there started dancing with Rebecca and did not look my way for the rest of the night. However, dancing is dancing, one can't be too particular.

The day after the dancing, Rebecca headed to the airport to go see Cusco and Machu Picchu, and Celina and I ran out the door at 5 pm in a miserable Lima drizzle--me dodging the Confirmation catechists who were ringing the doorbell wanting things from me, as is their custom on Saturdays at that hour--and as it were, shaking myself free of their clinging grasp and oh-so-Peruvian "pity me" whine, and running down to the corner to get a taxi to the bus station in the center of Lima. Once we were there, breathing free at last like the backpackers we were, Celina realized she'd forgotten her toothbrush. So with 20 minutes before the bus was supposed to leave, we ran three blocks down the street in the dark and the drizzle to the nearest pharmacy. We got there, the lady showed Celina the toothbrushes she had, and Celi goes, "Do you have blue?" I almost died. This was the overnight bus trip I'd reserved a week in advance, with ID'd ticketing, seat numbers, dinner and breakfast served on board, kind of like an airplane... NOT the kind of bus where you miss this one, you can get the next one. I wasn't about to miss it and give up my 95 soles for a blue toothbrush. Luckily, we made it back in time, toothbrush and all, and got to watch Legally Blonde on the way up to Piura.

I was proud of myself for being able to get us to Tambogrande without guidance (thanks to Katie, my fellow NDMV working up north, for the advice on getting the Tambogrande bus from Piura.) My friends Maria and Carlos were still there, of course, and we hung out as if it'd been a month instead of ten months since I'd been there. They even took us dancing in Tambogrande's one discoteca (being able to look out through the gap between the wall and the roof and see the stars while dancing: priceless.) Celina really enjoyed seeing the rural North, so different from Lima. My favorite moment was going around the countryside with Sister Meg in the truck, visiting catechesis groups and seeing the little caseríos, tiny groups of houses where farmers live out in the middle of nowhere. And riding in the back of the truck of course. In Lima, they only let men do that.

Our second day in the north, Celina and I took a colectivo from Tambogrande to nearby Sullana to visit Rubén and Elena, the family that stayed with us earlier this year! It was great to see them again and to see them in their own home, although you can still feel the gaping hole in the family; they're still trying to regain their feet from the blow of losing their mom. I didn't talk to Rubén much because he kind of went off and did his own thing while the adults talked. We had great ceviche and chicha de jora, and then Celina gave us a ride in the family's mototaxi, and Elena and Mili and little Iara took us around Sullana all afternoon. I'd thought we were coming back that same day, but it got late, and before we knew it we were staying the night. I bought some snacks in a grocery store while we walked around town, because apparently this family's not used to eating dinner--lunch at 2 pm is it for the day! I also randomly found an awesome jacket and had to borrow Celina's 50 soles to buy it, and we were counting cents for the colectivo ride back to Tambogrande the next day.

the river behind Sullana at sunset; me and Elena with the river

(The colectivo rides, by the way, are awesome. Colectivos are station wagons, in which at least two people are expected to sit in the front (besides the driver), at least four in the backseat, and up to three or four guys who pay half price to ride in the trunk. They have a whole language of honks and hand signals by which the drivers communicate with people standing on the side of the road asking to be picked up. Our driver passed by someone signalling and pointing at a trussed-up (dead?) goat on the ground beside him... for all I know, he might have picked up the passenger and the goat if the colectivo weren't full already...)

After another day in Tambogrande, we said goodbye to Sister Meg and headed back to Piura to get Rebecca at the airport. She came off the plane giddy from her awesome Machu Picchu adventures and with lots of pictures. Although she'd gone by herself, Cusco is so full of tourists that she found a group of cool Irish guys to hang out with, and thus has pictures of herself at Machu Picchu. So then we were down to just 2 more days of vacation, and after a 3-hour bus ride, we got to Mancora very tired and ready to lie on the beach for 2 days.

And that's almost what we did... Mancora was quiet, the weather coolish at night and not too hot in the day, and the water clear and warm. The sun came and went. Celina and I had our own personal trainer for beach-exercise mornings (and jump, and squat! Walk it out! ;) love ya, Rebecca!) and there was plenty of time to lie around on the beach later in the day, eat ceviche for lunch right on the beach, and shop (a lot) for jewelry in the little artisan stands up and down the main street. I got a henna tattoo, FOUND a shell with a natural necklace-hole in it on the beach, and got it made into a necklace. (I also got a ton of mosquito bites, mostly on my FACE, because our room had no screens to keep the little buggers from coming through the wooden lattice around the door! I've never been so grateful to concealer in my life.)

That's us drinking the juice out of a coconut and then eating it! Sunburned? Who's sunburned? Not me. That charming pinkness you see faded into something resembling a "tan" (insofar as I can ever be said to tan). Rebecca, meanwhile, learned painfully that the tropical sun is stronger than the sun in the US... but didn't look burned at all. On the right you can see my gorgeous all-natural shell necklace! aka, free jewelry present from GOD. hehe. I was really, really thankful for the opportunity to rest and just escape from Lima. When we got back I crashed into bed before Rebecca even left for the airport, and mostly stayed there for the next 18 hours.

The Selva

2008-08-13T16:15:00.016-04:00

So, we left Iquitos by car, drove an hour and a half down to a little river-port town, got into a motor boat, and two to three hours later (I had no idea of the exact time during any of our time in the jungle) we were in canoes being paddled by our guides to the campsite. It was a few little houses on the riverside, one for guests with two mosquito-netted beds on the floor of each room, another for the guides who basically live there, and a dining room.

I never expected to go to the Amazon Rainforest and feel at home. But to my surprise, I got there... and felt totally comfortable, like I'd lived there for years! More than comfortable, I felt I belonged there. I guess it was just like going back to my childhood of tramping around the backyard woods in boots... except that this isn't just woods, it's SUPER MEGA AWESOME WOODS!! There were those giant trees you always see pictures of, and monkeys, and tarantulas, and river dolphins jumping, and tons of beautiful brilliant butterflies, and bright-colored birds. No jaguars or anacondas though. Just around eight million very determined mosquitoes. We lived slathered in DEET for two days.

Our activities included: seeing the river dolphins and swimming near their island (Rebecca tried to start personal-training me on this island, which meant I ran around and did jumping jacks and jump-squats (aka "torture") in my bathing suit on a stretch of sand in the middle of the Yarapa River.); going out by canoe at night to see animals and discovering a very very large river rat; walking around behind the guide, Lucho, who cut through the plants with a machete when necessary, to find the monkeys on "monkey island" and play with them (they're so used to tourists they will come down from the trees and climb you or, I got the feeling, fight you if necessary for the bits of banana and oranges you have in your hand); and going actually camping camping the second night.

YES THAT IS A REAL MONKEY I'M HOLDING! Ok, so he didn't like me, he liked the banana...

That second night was definitely interesting. The guides whacked vines off the trees with their machetes to string up each person's hammock, then strung mosquito netting around the hammocks and put a plastic tarp up over each one. Then it started pouring so hard that each person had to get in their little house, the dinner fire went out, and that was that until morning! Rebecca and I passed the time singing Disney songs from our neighboring mosquito nets until the rain got too loud to hear. And then there was nothing to do but sleep in our little coccoons, and wait for breakfast in the morning. I was a little concerned about being bitten on the butt by mosquitos when I went out to pee in the middle of the night... but luckily I wasn't. And apart from that I knew there was nothing to be afraid of in the woods.

The first night, in a way, was more incredible, because of the stars that seemed to be FIGHTING FOR SPACE in a sky crowded like a football stadium! Huge, brilliant stars that looked like they'd invaded the territory from another sky only that day... because clearly there were never that many of them every other time I've looked!...

I also got to take a shower in the river, on a bright sunny blue-sky day, and feel like a mermaid. :) And talk to the camp shaman, who told us about plant-medicinal cures for everything including cancer, who on the first night could be heard singing a low chant as part of an ayahuasca ceremony for one of the tourists who was feeling brave enough to try it. (Ayahuasca is a plant that makes you see visions... I was put off even considering it by the fact that it also makes you throw up.) And I got to talk to--ahem, I mean, I got to see--trees like this one.The food was plain but good: rice and fried sliced bananas at almost every meal, plus maybe some chicken, eggs, or else an ENTIRE FISH (gutted, but still, there was the head and tail so it counts as entire!!) battered, fried and put on your plate. Everything was fried and if not for all the walking, I'd have gained weight. As it was the backs of my legs got really sore from all the clambering around in boots, and my arms from rowing in the canoes.

I was sad to leave. But as I couldn't really have afforded another day, it was just as well that our plane back out of Iquitos was on Thursday night...

Tomorrow

2008-07-28T20:06:00.004-04:00

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!!

2008-07-27T23:14:00.004-04:00

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 = :)

2008-07-21T15:16:00.005-04:00

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

2008-07-09T23:10:00.004-04:00

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

2008-07-07T17:56:00.002-04:00

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. :)

A rainy day and a dentist

2008-06-25T22:19:00.006-04:00

Last Thursday it rained way more than is usual in Lima. The normal winter precipitation here is a fine mist, but this was actually a real (light) rain. It began during the night and by 8 am, when I was supposed to be leaving for the school to work with Liliana, there was a whole confusion over a nearby school's religion class coming into our church to pray, because (1) Señora Sofía had not arrived to open the church for them, and (2) the church floor was covered with large puddles of rain dripping in through the roof and falling through the open windows. And the religion teacher was standing outside my door in a hoodless fleece jacket getting wet, because limeños aren't used to covering up in the rain (they don't usually have enough rain to be worth putting a raincoat on for.)

I got to the school and some of the students were sweeping water into the gutters on the second floor with brooms. (The "hallways" of this school aren't inside, only the classrooms are roofed over, and between the classrooms you're walking in the open air. Some of the houses around here are like this too--they'll have a second floor accessible only by an outdoor staircase, or no roof over the walkway between the living room and the bathroom, etc.)

In the Adelante class, Liliana couldn't concentrate because her tooth hurt. Sara the teacher did her concerned-frown-nod. "Yes, she's been like that since Monday! I've told her, she has to go to the dentist! See, Liliana? Liliana, if you don't go to the dentist it's going to keep hurting!" Liliana opened her mouth to show me which one hurt, and I saw a whole bunch of gray discoloring on various teeth. I'm no dentist, but the situation sure looked bad. She said she'd never been to a dentist. I thought, in all likelihood it's because she can't pay for it. So I went to talk to Estela, who in the mornings works as an auxiliar in the school. Estela said that the parish health committee could help with the cost of a dentist's visit. And the coordination began: i.e. Kathleen runs all over creation (well, all over Tupac) for the next two days trying to get Liliana into a dentist's chair.

Estela did most of the actual talking. Liliana, do you have insurance? Yes. (the government-sponsored seguro that anyone can enroll in.) Have your parents ever taken you to the doctor? Yes. Did they ever take you to a dentist? No. Does your tooth hurt right now? Yes. Is your mother at home right now? Yes. Estela goes to ask permission from Gaby to take Liliana home and talk to her mom--to "twist the mother's arm a little, to get her to take her in." Permission granted. But when I went up to get Liliana, she got up from her desk and burst out crying. She didn't want to leave. "If I don't go to school my dad gets mad!--But Liliana, you have permission to go, this is your health, etc!--No, no, don't go tell my mom, don't say anything! My mom'll hit me! Don't say anything!"

Estela sat down across from the crying girl, leaned back, crossed one leg over her knee, and looked at her. Liliana sits next to a mirror on her classroom wall, and in that mirror I saw Estela's face. Her frown was solemn, like a judge gazing down on a poor, powerless defendant; but behind the firm lines of her face there was an immeasurable sadness. The quiet little middle-aged sierran woman, poor as any of her neighbors here in Tupac, suddenly looked like a stern queen moved by compassion for the girl's suffering.
Your mom will hit you, said Estela.
Uh-huh! My mom's not good to me!
Who is good to you, Liliana?
Nobody!
Your dad?
He lives somewhere else!
... and so on. And in front of my eyes, Estela proceeded to calm Liliana down. Sometimes, Liliana, she said, we mothers get angry and hit and yell, but it's only because we're angry. In her heart your mother keeps loving you. You were her baby, you were in her tummy, when you were little she fed you, she gave you your clothes, she wrapped you up and carried you when you cried. She still loves you. Sometimes a mother's mouth can say, Get out of here, I don't love you any more!... but it's just our anger talking. In our hearts we keep loving our children. Don't worry, I'm not going to take you home right now. You stay in your class and study. Ok?

I thought, once again this woman has shown me what God is like. Reminded us where the love is in a broken place, rescued some compassion from suffering; done justice in listening, from her position of power, to the powerless. She has a surprising habit of doing that...

Estela and I went by ourselves to talk to the mom, who by now I was imagining as at least half ogre. We had to ask directions to her house because the family has no telephone to call; Estela asked in the corner shops for the family so-and-so, with a daughter who walks with a kind of limp (Liliana seems to have one leg a little longer than the other.) People said, aaaah ya, there's a girl like that on the next street, go ask around there... and I shook my head and followed, thinking of how I used to locate places in the US using things like addresses and street names and MapQuest. Finally we found the house. The mom opened the door, and far from being an ogre, she had a very nice face and a quiet if somewhat distant manner. Estela starts talking.--Oh, I've tried to take her to the dentist, says the mom. But she doesn't let the doctors treat her! She's nervous, and those male doctors in the seguro, they grab her mouth like this and it hurts, and she doesn't let them! The private clinic where my insurance is, they're women doctors, they're better, but that's 15 soles. (about 5 dollars.)

So the public seguro, 4 soles, has bad doctors, and anything else costs too much. I thought immediately of my dentist, Patricia, who all the sisters go to. She's young, friendly, sweet, smart, the gentlest dentist ever, and does excellent work... and just last week she charged me 135 soles to fill 4 tiny little pre-cavities. Wow. After leaving Liliana's house I said goodbye to Estela and went to talk to Sister Teresa, who said that yes, Pati might be willing to help out for cheap, plus there's been a donation to the school of $100 to be used for the children's health. So I called Pati and left a message that I'd like to talk to her.

Then I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning up water with brooms, dustpans, and buckets, first from the floor of the church, then from the roof of our house, where a puddle accumulated over the kitchen was dripping through and getting our cabinets all wet. I can't even imagine what the rain had done to the houses made of estera bamboo matting. I would have seen it firsthand if I'd gone with the parish ladies to visit Agusto, who they reported to be sleeping under a plastic tarp draped over his bed, because his bedroom was turning into a lake... but I half-purposely took too long cleaning the water off our roof to be able to go. I think I was a bit psychologically worn out by the whole dentist escapade in the morning, and by the stories Estela was telling me as we walked of her childhood living in poverty in the sierra.

The next day I went to see Patricia. She, being an angel, agreed cheerfully to treat Liliana at the cost of her materials only. So it was back to the school to tell Estela and back to the mom's house to tell the mom, and later in the afternoon I met the whole family when Liliana's mother brought her down with her three- and one-year-old brothers, and I showed them where the dentist's office is across from the park. The group of them came down from their house to the park on foot, about a 20-minute walk, with the baby slung across the mother's back in a brightly colored cloth, sierran-style, and the 3-year-old running all over the place and refusing to hold his mother's or his sister's hand.

The whole thing surprised me by being so difficult to coordinate--no telephone in Liliana's house, no car for the mom to drive them to the park in, just a lot of running around on foot and passing messages person to person. In the end Liliana had to go back several times and one tooth was taken out completely, but Pati was wonderful with her and reassured her when she started to cry (I was present for that first interview), and the mom was responsible in bringing her back again and again. And since then there hasn't been any real rain in Tupac.

Processions after church on Father's Day

2008-06-16T22:42:00.016-04:00

Amazingly, on Father's Day we had SUN! Here's some pictures of the processions that three different groups put on for the celebration.

Some leaders of the group of devotees of the Lord of the Ascention. These devotee groups are usually people who have all moved to Lima from the same area in the sierra, and get together to honor their particular version of Christ ("Lord of such-and-such") or the Virgin Mary ("Virgin of this-or-that.")

Some of the teenage dancers in the procession put on by the Lord of Cachuy (?) group. This is a good view of the back of the anda, the decorated image they put up on these table-like things and carry around on their shoulders. They bring them to Mass and put them in the church aisles.

Sometimes an anda will arrive after Mass has started, with its accompanying brass band BWA-ing with all its might so you can hear them coming from several blocks away. Then they're quiet during the service, just standing there in their uniforms with the beautiful brightly colored banners, until the moment of the consecration: when the priest elevates the host, the brass band strikes up again from outside and plays a whole little triumphant ditty. I always forget they're going to do this and it makes me jump every time. Not exactly what I imagine as an appropriately solemn (or even beautiful, let alone subtle) acknowledgement of the central moment of the Mass... but you have to give them credit for enthusiasm.

When I asked the dancers to take a picture with me, they dressed me up!! :)

another anda and its carriers

I dare any American man to go outside in this outfit.

milling around waiting for the dancing to start (there was a lot of that)

dancing

These two guys with masks, robes, and what seems to be feathers, did a dance in which they went around in a circle whipping each other's legs. With whips. Your guess is as good as mine.

The anda and the band, finally marching. Another thing they do is set off firecrackers during these processions... except there's usually no light, just a freaking huge BANG that makes me think somebody is shooting at the anda from about ten feet away. I jump, the Peruvians laugh... These processions eventually end up at the devotional group's meeting place (someone's house?), where they take full advantage of modern sound technology, blasting the harps and violins of their traditional huayno music to the entire neighborhood for the next twelve hours. (My friend Celina's family runs a business renting sound equipment out for these events--they may be held in locales without running water or fully roofed-over rooms, but they've got their speakers, microphones, and subwoofers working just fine.)

Me, the guy with the whip, and his son (Mini-avenging archangel?). (the son did not take part in the whipping-dance.)

Gaby is my hero

2008-06-16T22:28:00.003-04:00

Just a quick note about the 5th grade choir: it's now functioning again thanks to the vice-principal Gaby.

At the meeting we got everything worked out between me, her, and the teachers, and it functioned for one rehearsal. The second rehearsal, the kids came straggling in ten and fifteen minutes late, when their break started and not before. Clearly it is just too much to expect for these teachers to take the responsibility to build choir time into the kids's schedules. So I complained to Gaby and she said she'd see about things on Tuesday.

On Tuesday the kids got there between five and ten minutes late, which was not great but better, so I was less frustrated. But after the rehearsal Gaby told me she'd noticed they weren't there at 5:00, so she'd gone down to the classrooms to look for them. And there they were, painting, doing their art class as if to say, Choir? What choir? The teachers started giving excuses like, But if the kids don't want to go, do I have to make them? Gaby said, Yes, you do, this is a music class and they have to go. The kids said, I do want to go! And so thanks to Gaby they got there by 5:10.

If I'd gone there and seen this, there would no longer be a fifth grade choir. I'd have simply blown a fuse. But now, every time I come to rehearse, I go straight to Gaby and ask for my choir. And she gives them to me. :) And we get to sing!! This is the genius of rehearsing in the room adjacent to the principal's office: the vice principal hears your lovely little choir of children singing, decides it's a great thing to have happen, and steps in and protects it for you when necessary. Yessss.

Adrian the male quinceañera

2008-06-14T17:02:00.013-04:00

So around here, a girl's fifteenth birthday is a huge deal. It's a coming-of-age ritual. Families go all out to throw a big party, at which the quinceañera comes out at midnight to the applause of family and friends, sometimes escorted down the stairs by her father, then dances with every male relative and friend there, there are speeches, cake, dancing, etc.

Or so I hear. I've never actually been to a quinceañera party. But two weekends ago was a similar thing for my friend Adrian, celebrating his 18th birthday, which is the comparable coming-of-age birthday for young men.

My guy friends got all dressed up in their suits and looked snazzy. Most of the girls including me went in jeans and semi-nice tops; I would have worn nicer pants if I'd known how formal a deal this actually was. We got there early at 11:00, and sat around embarassed for half an hour because Adrian's family was all dressed up in suits and dress clothes, etc. There was a DJ, a disco ball, a cake that looked like a wedding cake. Adrian came out at 12:00 midnight, announced by the DJ, everybody clapped, and then a cool thing happened. He danced with his mom, then his grandma, aunts, cousins, little sister, etc, with the DJ naming each person as she stepped up to dance with him. And when they finished the family, they started naming friends! There must have been a list because the DJ definitely did not know me, and yet I got called in turn too. It was special because it emphasized not only Adrian's coming-of-age birthday, but also his relationships with each and every one of the people surrounding him, family and friends alike. Each woman called by name to dance with him was a special part of his life worth recognition.

After all the dances and speeches by the mom, dad, aunt, grandmother, Adrian, etc, the living room turned into a discoteca! I left "early" at 3:00 am.

Dios, tú me cuidas muy bien

2008-05-31T11:53:00.005-04:00

"Dios, tú me cuidas muy bien!" is something Sister Miriam is always saying: "God, you take such good care of me!" As the cloudy, clammy, chilly, depressing winter descends over Lima, and I feel like my projects for the year are sputtering and falling flat, I'm trying to be better at recognizing that this is in fact true.

On Thursday I was feeling bottled up and useless because one after another, my things I was supposedly doing didn't happen. By the time I went with the parish ladies to visit the sick at 3:30, I was totally in a funk and easily irritated by the sweet, irritating old lady who always whines at me and hangs on me (figuratively but sometimes literally too). (and she accuses me of abandoning them when I've expressed no such intention. Sometimes in the past I have had to leave early, so now every time I put my guitar back in its case without an obvious reason, she says, Aaayyyy, the señorita's going to leave us again! I'm sure she has to go early today!-- I'm like, lady, could you at least wait until I'm actually abandoning you to complain about it?!)

But this Thursday was different because all six of us went together to one house to offer some cleaning services. The old grandmother who lives in this house, Genoveva, can walk or sit in a wheelchair but she spends most of her time in her bed, which doesn't have a real mattress, just a long foamy cushion thing where the mattress should be. Her house has a front room, a back room, and behind the back room a huge yard, littered with old junky stuff just sitting around, where a dog and three cats and possibly more animals live, and where their only water faucet sprays water into a big washtub. The two rooms are very dark because the walls are concrete and there are no windows; and they were insanely messy. Stuff all over every old, dirty piece of furniture there is, dirty dishes crusting in the same pile with clothes, the stove-oven unit looking like it hadn't been used in years because of the crust all over the top. Genoveva has a daughter and a grandson that live with her, but the daughter, Cristina, says that she gets depressed and has no energy and feels like she can't do anything. Considering the state of her house, this did not surprise me. I'd be depressed if I lived there.

So we went over all six together and asked if we could do some cleaning. They said yes. And the parish ladies went to work. It was obvious they were in their element. At least one of them never finished elementary school, but when it comes to cooking or cleaning a house or washing clothes by hand, they have a lifetime's worth of knowledge and experience. They grabbed brooms, mops, got water from outside, disinfectant from somewhere, soap from the store next door, and I stood there awkwardly trying to figure out how to help until Luisa, the lady who hangs on me and accuses me of leaving, said, Señorita Katalina, you do the music! I was like, OK!! Somebody helped Genoveva into her chair and sat her there facing me, and we proceeded to rock out every church song I know for the next hour and a half.

Genoveva can't speak very clearly--I never understand her, and almost no one else does either, she just sounds like she's saying Mwaa-mwa-mwaaa! Mwa-mwaaa!--but she always sings and claps along to the music, which is darling enough to break your heart. She has this thin, four-foot wooden pole that she keeps at her side, and when the dog comes in from the yard, she pokes at the dog with the pole to shoo it outside, feebly yelling, We-aah! (fuera, "out.") Cristina, to give us more light to work by, took this pole and pushed aside one of the cardboards in the center of the roof. I was like, well... that works. Most of the roof is tin but the center has this sunroof capacity.

When they finished, I went into the song, Resucitó, "He is Risen," because it truly was a miracle to me how these women transformed the house. It still wasn't exactly an appealing place to live, but at least it wasn't so dirty and messy any more. The grandson came in from school, a slightly chubby kid with a bright smile, and was so thrilled that he went to work right alongside the women, but then forgot to clean in favor of showing me lyrics of songs he knows. At the end Estela produced rolls and coffee for everyone from somewhere--even more of a miracle!--and the kid called me "amiga" when we left!! I was so touched. And I hadn't even done anything except sing--left all the hard labor to the women at least twice my age!--but I was doing what I do well, just like they were, and the music really transformed everyone's spirits and made it fun instead of oppressive.

So that afternoon was really a special gift, for me as well as for them. Hopefully now Cristina will be able to maintain some cleanliness, now that the massive overhaul that was too much for one person is done.

Then yesterday (Friday) I went to the school in the morning to tutor Liliana in reading. Trudging up the dirt road under that oppressive cloudy sky that just makes you want to go back to sleep, I got there by 8:30 and went upstairs to their classroom--and it was closed and locked, nobody home. This has happened to me often enough with various classes that I just sighed, rolled my eyes, and said, I guess Sara hasn't come in today. Typical. I guess I'll go home and be useless again. But going back down the stairs, I heard these wild, animal-like shrieks and whoops from the corner of the courtyard where the cafeteria room is, and said, Hmm... that might be them! And it was. The boys came running toward me across the courtyard and said, Señorita Katalina! Close your eyes! Overcoming my wariness, I let them lead me into the cafeteria... and they'd made a birthday party for me!! Sara made papa a la huancaína and the kids brought soda and chicha. Then we danced to the radio while half the kids disappeared out the door to run around the school. Sara doesn't have a lot of control over the class, but she knows how to make you feel special. :)

Later in the afternoon I went to sing with Iris's youth group from the school. I always teach them the songs I learn from my friends in the parish, and they like to sing when they give mini-retreats for the younger kids in school. I loved it, and I realized how much I really miss singing with groups and leading music, since my choirs have been so out of wack lately at the school. Anyway it was a good break from the house, hanging out with teenagers for a while instead of with the sisters who (with all my love and respect) are all at least old enough to be my mother. (except Miriam.)

Then I had a WONDERFUL meeting with the 5th grade teachers and Gaby, and at least in theory, we are now all on the same page; I'm giving the kids grades and they are sending them to me rather than making me go get them. I'm hoping it really works.

And in the evening, Magda straightened out my energy with energy medicine. While she did her energy-flow-corrections, I lay with my eyes closed thinking about the things that stress me: non-functional work in the school, people ringing the doorbell, communication problems in our house, my friends in the parish acting cliquey in a way I haven't seen since high school. At the end Magda said, All your energy flow points were blocked, except one: the central one just below your ribs and deep inside, the one that represents your connection with God. That one was flowing just fine. This surprised me, and yet did not. I'm often very, very frustrated here, and yet I do feel I'm where I'm supposed to be for now.

Why does the concept of scheduling not exist here?

2008-05-29T12:20:00.004-04:00

Disclaimer: the following is a complaint session.

It's much harder to keep volunteer projects going than I really feel like it should be.

My trip kind of messed things up. I was just getting started with things, or rather, just starting to have some continuity, and then I had to be gone for a week and a half. And it's not that a week and a half is very long. But in Peru, once you tell people you're going to be gone for a while, they pretty much forget about you until further notice. That is, although I said to a lot of people repeatedly, The next class is on this date... I'll be back to work with the kids on Friday the 23rd... they were not, so to speak, expecting me or ready for my arrival. My private students did not show up on the day I'd said class would resume. The excuse: "Oh, well since I wasn't sure if you were back yet..." I have to call them, go find them, practically pull them by the ear to get them back into the routine we had so carefully set up. It just makes them seem completely irresponsible, like they don't care at all about what we're doing and are just coming because they're bored.

And don't get me started about the 5th grade teachers. In order to rehearse with that choir, every time I go--and I always go at the same time every Tuesday and Friday!--I have to argue, fight, plead, insist, practically drag the students out of the classroom by the hair in order to get them all into a rehearsal space. That is not my job. My job is to teach them to sing. Last Thursday I had a meeting with the teachers to try to agree on a different schedule, and the 2 out of 3 that actually came agreed that 3 to 3:30 pm was better than 5 to 5:30, because one of them could not possibly move his tests any earlier in the day, he always gives them during the last hour, etc. So then I went in the next day thinking this was all established--and he hadn't even told the kids about the time change! So naturally:

Me: Hi, everybody, time for choir! New time, hooray, now we can finally rehearse, right?
Kids: Huh? What? I haven't finished my work! I'm going to lose the points! Aah! Señorita, I'm dropping choir!

Every time I come they tell me this, and every time I come I promise to work it out with the teacher. Then I talk to the teachers, and they tell me in the meeting that the kids don't finish in the time given them because they fool around and work slowly and don't have discipline. So then, yes, when choir time arrives the kids have permission to go, but they know they have to prioritize, because they haven't finished their work. (This is true. When I go into these classrooms, the kids are often off the wall, walking around, talking, not doing anything, and the teacher yelling to be heard or else distracted by a small group wanting individual attention in a corner.)--I wasn't sure how to respond to that, because the only thing that occurred to me to say was, Who's the adult and who's the ten-year-old?! It's YOUR job as the teacher to make them sit down in their seats, stop talking, do their work, and finish it! You think the KIDS should be the ones responsible for disciplining themselves to work to a deadline and stick to a schedule?? YOU need to take some responsibility, take control of your classroom, teach some discipline to these kids, make them do what they're supposed to do when they're supposed to do it, and learn to respect a fixed schedule and stick to it!!

But I thought that might not be tactful.

So I went and complained to the vice-principal, Gaby, and there's another meeting this Friday. This time with Gaby present. And Gaby has the excellent idea that the teachers are now going to be responsible for SENDING the kids to ME, at the SAME TIME EVERY TUESDAY AND FRIDAY, and making sure that they have that space available free from the stress of missing important work. It's not too much to ask, trust me. It's half an hour twice a week, at the times THEY THEMSELVES have chosen. It's just a matter of them getting themselves together and actually doing what they've said they'll do according to the schedule they've said they'll do it on.

People who can actually be counted on to do this are gold in Peru. They exist, but they're rare, and they're the only kind you want to be working with. Try working with any other variety and the whole project just gets messed up, bent out of shape, becomes something it was never intended to be, and in the end stops happening. And then everybody goes, Oh, well, I guess not. Next time, for sure.

I just feel like whenever I go into the school ready and willing to help, I get told to go away and come back another day. The 6th grade teacher whose students I'm supposedly tutoring in reading had told me Wednesdays were good, but when I came back from my trip and showed up on a Wednesday, surprise! they weren't doing reading. They were doing a grammar lesson on adverbs. So the teacher hands me her lesson plan, which she had very thoughtfully copied for me, and was ready to let me take a group of kids away to teach them the exact same thing she was teaching them in the classroom. I was like, um, that's not the point. YOU can teach them what you're teaching them. I want to do DIFFERENT things, but still working on reading, so that when they're missing your reading lesson they're getting mine. She said, Tuesdays are better than Wednesdays. Come on Tuesday.

The only thing working in terms of me and the school, is Liliana and the Adelante class. And that's because Sara has no structure whatsoever to her mornings with the students, so I can come and read whatever I want with Liliana whenever it's convenient.

some pictures

2008-05-23T12:43:00.019-04:00

In May I went home for a week and a half and it was delicious. I went to Jamie's graduation, Jen and Matt's wedding, and hung out with friends and family, especially for my birthday and Mother's Day. And everything was GREEN! Like THIS:

Appreciate your green, people. It is one of the things you regard as normal, but the people here don't necessarily get to enjoy. Kind of like indoor heating, a fully constructed house, a washing machine, stoves and ovens you don't have to light with a match, sunny days during winter, paved roads, non-junkpile-worthy cars, etc.

That said... here are some long overdue pictures of my dear Chorrillos. My apologies for the lack of visual journalism so far this year.

a guy and a mototaxi coming down the road

eating soup after church for a parish fundraiser (this picture actually taken by Sister Edna last year, but we did it again this year)

The market! It looks much prettier on a sunny day

this is where I buy chicken.

Construction! They're turning the soccer pitch into a stadium.

Our laundry hanging out to dry between the house and the parish multipurpose room

Teresa, Magdalena, and Iris outside my favorite ice cream store

Me and Teresa in front of the ocean at the Malecón de Huaylas.

Project updates

2008-05-01T12:13:00.000-04:00

My first few posts this year have been so out of the ordinary that I haven't written much about what normal life is actually like here. Let's see.

Most of my time is divided between musical activities and teaching English. In terms of music, I am LOVING my fourth and fifth grade choirs in Fe y Alegría. The fourth graders started off with terrible behavior, talking while I was talking, talking while they were supposedly singing, running around and falling on the floor and hanging on each other and messing up the chairs instead of coming into my rehearsal space like civilized people. (I rehearse with them either in the auditorium, the library, or the chapel, depending on which space is available, and I always go early to set up the chairs in a half-circle, which they they proceed to destroy... It works better in the library where there's less space to move the chairs in.) They seem to be getting the idea of how I expect this group to work. Two weeks ago I gave them a good ten-minute talking-to about paying attention, working together, taking the choir seriously--and then started carrying out my threats to send people who misbehaved back to class, and it worked wonders. I guess they thought I wasn't serious before.

Since they have very good ears, they're way ahead of where last year's fourth graders were at this time. I'm trying to prepare them to sing a round for the Mother's Day performances... without me, because I'm taking my vacation time in the US from May 8th-19th! It hurts me to abandon my little pollitos, but I suppose it's worth it in order to go to Jamie's graduaton, Jen and Matt's wedding, see my mom for Mother's Day, spend my birthday at home, and see Maryland in spring again... (sigh of nostalgia.) Fifth grade will help the 4th graders with the round, anyway, and I'm leaving a 10th grade student in charge of saying, 1, 2, 3, go. He's preparing a little harmony on the zampoña (Andean pan pipes) that will go before and after the kiddies sing their round (later when I'm actually there to facilitate, he'll play it with them.)

With fifth grade, I have problems with attendance, because the kids feel stressed out because they miss their work. The teachers have told me that they won't do anything important during those hours, and every time I go to talk to them they say, Oh, yes, of course they can miss, it's no problem, normally we won't have group work on Fridays, it was just for today... But the kids still feel a lot of pressure almost every week to finish things they're missing. Grr. I need to talk to the vice-principal about it. Fifth grade is pure fun once they're there, though. Yesterday when our time was up, they all started saying, No, no, One more time! One more time! and then they asked me to sing them Oh Holy Night, which (thanks to last year's Christmas event in the church) was printed on the same page as their Virgen de Guadalupe song. I didn't, but it was really cute anyway. And then they all come up to kiss me on the cheek and say, Chau, Señorita! Tuesdays and Fridays from 4:30 to 5:50 is my favorite favorite time of the week. :)

My second-favorite job is probably my advanced English conversation group, a collection of friends and Caty's students from last year, which meets at my house in Tupac on Saturday and Sunday mornings. This is great because I just sit around talking my language with people, and they get to practice and ask me questions, and it's a bit of socializing outside the school. It's been harder for me this year to connect with other young people... probably because my social organizer decided not to renew her volunteer service ;), and because I'm busier, and my friends seem busier too. But last weekend, in full Peruvian style, every social event imaginable happened from the 25th to the 27th, after what felt like the whole month of April sitting at home on Saturday nights with nothing to do and no one to go out with. There were two birthday parties, a prayer group, a movie followed by live musica criolla and dancing, shopping (in the market of Tupac with Sister BJ for a cute little black dancing shirt!), conversation group, and a party with the sisters for Magda, who has recently gotten certified as an Energy Medicine practitioner. (aka: Jedi. Just so you know, I will be becoming her in the future. And then I will open a business at the Renaissance Fair, Rowena ye Energie Healer, and wear an awesome shimmery dress and unblock the flow of people's energy for money.) I slept a total of 11 hours from Friday to Sunday but it was worth it.

Then there's the church choir, as always. There's my students who come to the house on Tuesdays and Thursdays for guitar lessons (three 19- or 20-year-old girls who are really sweet) and English (José Osco who's moving to Australia and takes his English very seriously.) And Liliana, who I tutor in reading and writing in the special-ed program two mornings a week. Those kids are even more affectionate and even more terribly behaved than my fourth-grade choir. Every time I walk in, they scream, Señorita Catalina!!! and during their class they write me cards with little pictures and messages like, "Señorita Catalina, you are very beautiful, you are like my mother and you teach English very well" (I have never taught them any English, but they always ask me to speak it) "and you teach Liliana to read. Señorita Catalina I love you with all my heart thank you for coming and you are very pretty" etc.

Me, Sara, and the Adelante class. The one on my lap is Liliana.

Sara, their teacher, says that many of them come from broken families and are looking for affection that they don't get at home. Before starting the class, they get their school breakfast, a roll and a mug of Quaker, and Sara leads them in some prayers, which they really like. It seems to calm them and bring them together as a group. The kids are also constantly asking me if I'm married, if I have children, or if I'm going to get married. Last week Liliana told her teacher, "Señorita Sara, tell Señorita Catalina to marry a man!" I asked her, "What man, Liliana? Tell me that!" and she said with an air of exasperation, "A hot one, of course!!" (¡Con un hombre guapo, pues!)

(Quaker by the way is Peruvian-style oatmeal; the name comes from the brand name Quaker Oats, but the Peruvians pronounce it with the short A as in ball, "Quakker." They mix about 1 part oatmeal to 10 parts water and boil it with a ton of sugar, cloves, and cinnamon until it gets thick and soupy, and you don't eat it with a spoon, you drink it. It's delicious.)

Meanwhile, until Liliana brings me my hot man, I'm enjoying my role of temporary nun. I've implied to various Peruvian guys that I might enter the convent in the future, when it seemed like a good idea. And considering how much I like being here, I won't say that I was lying. One never knows about the future. But for now, I've realized that since two years is a long time, I have to live my life while I'm here in terms of going out with friends, having fun, seeing Lima, taking advantage of being here, instead of trying to devote 100% of my time to service.

Tragedy and change

2008-04-23T12:35:00.007-04:00

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

2008-04-18T15:46:00.010-04:00

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

2008-04-10T23:18:00.014-04:00

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

2008-04-10T11:57:00.004-04:00

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)

2008-04-09T22:35:00.000-04:00

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

2008-04-02T18:01:00.024-04:00

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.

Picking up this year's projects

2008-03-07T11:11:00.004-05:00

I've now been back in Lima for a week, and I'm slowly picking up my projects for the year one at a time. It takes a while for anything to really get started around here, and this week was the kids' first week of classes in school, so my choirs and tutoring work have to wait until next week to get organized and probably until the week after to really start happening. There's no point in trying while the students are still straggling in days after school has begun, or not coming in because they don't have uniforms, or coming in droves on the first day with their parents who hadn't signed them up ahead of time, etc. So this week I've had time to practice the ability to de-stress and be patient that I learned last year. I don't know whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that my American stressed-out sense of time has relaxed somewhat--I'm almost getting to the point where I don't feel like a bad volunteer for not having worked 40 hours this week.

But in their own good time, my projects are moving towards starting. I've met with the vice-principal to talk about what I'll be doing this year, and I also met with the director of IRFA, the GED program for adults, to arrange to tutor there beginning in April. The IRFA experience was so typically Peruvian, it made me laugh. I went up to the school at 2:30 because I'd heard the program started at 2, only to discover the teachers all hanging out eating ice pops and doing math problems because the classes don't actually start until 3. The teachers were a really sweet bunch of Peruvians, mostly young women, volunteering their Sunday afternoons to tutor the mostly older adults who never finished secondary school. The ice pops and math problems continued until about 3:30, when the first students showed up, and about that time the program director walked in too. I waited for a while while she ran around talking to various people, and then she sat down with me and explained a little about the program. About half of the teachers' students never showed up that afternoon, which apparently is especially typical in the summer when the students have to be home with their children... once again, the Peruvian experience of dedicating lots of time and effort to something that only half works at best is an act of faith that simply amazes me. In the US, we'd take one look at that and go, are you kidding? Get yourselves together and start functioning well, and then you'll be doing something worthwhile. But, as they say here, something is something, better than nothing.

I also went to an amazing talk last Saturday for the catechesis and confirmation teachers. I'm going to be a confirmation group leader! Once again I wonder if my Spanish will be sufficient; it isn't easy in any language to talk interestingly and meaningfully to teenagers... but the only way to do it is just to jump in, and trust the words will come. The guy giving the talk was an ex-priest who now teaches religion in a high school. He started with the world wars, talked about the cultural changes of the 20th century that led young people to see the world in a different way than their parents, how this might relate to the church and how Vatican 2 was all about letting the world change the church, gave the perspectives of various popes during and after Vatican 2 on progress, change within the church, and the struggles of Latin America to lift itself out of poverty--and related all that to the latest conference of Latin American bishops last year in Aparecida, Brazil, and the very progressive, pro-Vatican 2 document they released after their meetings. And all of this as a background to help us talk to young people who want to be confirmed. We have to think about why church involvement does not attract young people; what's unattractive about a God and a church committed to justice and changing the lives of the poor and treasuring the worth of each person, especially those whose voices are never heard? What are these teenagers looking for when they come to a parish group, and how can we give it to them?

It was an incredible talk, four hours long, and it left me absolutely on fire to talk more about this stuff. I have to read up on Gustavo Gutierrez and liberation theology, and the mostly disastrous history of US involvement in Latin American politics (Juan Bosco the speaker touched on that too), and then the document of Aparecida, especially the part where they talked about recognizing and nourishing the role of women in the church. The original document, says Juan Bosco, said "the ecclesial role of women," but the Vatican censors changed it to "the laical role of women." Juan Bosco looked straight at us. "These bishops were already talking about the priesthood for women. And now 96 of them have signed a petition to the Vatican to have their original document back, without those 200 changes that were made to it, because they too are the 'teaching church'." And with my liberal heart burning within me, I shot out of there to look up graduate theology programs online.

I don't know what it is, but something about the struggle for justice, in any situation where justice is being violated, gives a fire and a meaning to life that just doesn't exist when everything is chill--say, for example, in a wealthy US suburb where people go back and forth from their secure jobs and kids play soccer after school and everyone has everything they need and more. Theoretically that kind of life should be the ideal for everyone, right? And yet it means so much more for me to be here living among people who are struggling to survive--to be able to say, you know what? I stand with these people here, my friends, for economic justice, women's voices, the life in abundance that Jesus spoke of and that Latin America longs for. There is so much love of life here. People live in cardboard houses but always have dance music playing from inside. The next time you get annoyed at a bunch of loud, partying Latinos in the US--try not feeling resentful because you're working and they're not, and instead take the afternoon off to join them. And then let me know if you know of any good graduate programs where I can study the connections between theology, literature, and international development and economic justice.

It makes you wonder, if no inequalities existed, if everyone had what they needed in life, where would our fire and our meaning come from? Poverty and injustice are bad, but if we eliminated them the way we want to... we'd have to find something else to work for and believe in. Perhaps humanity as a whole is kind of like kids in the backseat of a car: one steals the other's stuff and they hit each other and cry simply to avoid boredom, and if you could ever resolve it to everyone's satisfaction, which you can't, they'd just go back to being bored and start hitting again. If the world didn't need saving, we healers and idealists and dreamers would be out of a job. Kind of ironic that answering one's highest calling requires the existence of the things your soul longs to fight against "with every fiber of your being," as John Edwards would say.

...Anyway. I'm having a good time as always singing with my friends in the church choir. And yesterday three of my girlfriends who speak English very well came over for a conversation hour, and we sat in the foyer because the other rooms were being worked on; the earthquake last year caused some hairline cracks in the walls.

Yesterday I also went for the first time to visit the sick like I did all last year on Thursday afternoons. That is always an adventure: yesterday, for example, I found myself hauling water out of a cement tank in one lady's front yard to take over to this sick old man living in a shack across the street. His water gallons were all dirty, so Estela--the organizer of these visits and the most Jesus-like person I have ever met, an incredibly peaceful and at the same time lively and resourceful little middle-aged woman from the sierra--wet the jug a little and scrubbed it off using only her fingers and more dirt from the ground. And what do you know, it rinsed clean. It can be incredibly sad to see the way these poorest elderly people in the community live, but at the same time it makes you appreciate the life and spark and happiness of your young friends.

Another adventure is having some of Sister Consuelo's relatives living in the house with us these past few weeks. Consuelo's aunt from Sullana needs an operation to replace a heart valve, so she and her two youngest kids, 19 and 12 years old, are staying with us somewhat indefinitely. The aunt herself spends a ton of time helping in the kitchen. When I'm cooking, she will come in, offer to help, and tell me lots of little ways to do things better, like if we got certain sponges at the market we could clean off the stains on the insides of the pots. "In the north, I have them looking like this!" and she taps the gleaming silver outside of the pot. To me this is like, woo-hoo, your pot is shiny, whatever... but I think she really doesn't have anything else (anything "better?") to do with herself, not even up north in her home, not after having gotten used to doing housework all day to raise eight kids. I don't see her reading much except for an occasional glance at a newspaper. She's a very sweet lady and I wonder what it's like to be her. She also cooks very deliciously. (For some reason, Consuelo has been acting surprised to see me cooking this week... even a little more surprised when my cooking turned out to be pretty good...)

Leaving Chaclacayo

2008-03-05T15:39:00.009-05:00

Well, I'm back in Lima. Last Friday there was a great end-of-summer party for the kids at the Hogar with masks and costumes and dancing and cake. The sisters' friend and taxi driver Carlos arrived right in the middle of it to take me back to Lima, but we invited him in for cake so I didn't have to leave right away. In Peru you can do things like that and people don't freak out about getting off schedule--Carlos came in and sat down quite happily to his cake and ice cream, not at all concerned about losing half an hour of his time.

(This is not Carlos. From left: Jocelyn, Milusca, Angela, Luz Maribel, and me. Check out more pictures from the party at:
http://umd.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2241675&l=bce39&id=5742334

The other big event during my three weeks at Tony's was a trip to the beach. Tony has a North American friend named Bonnie who lives in Lima and runs an organization called Friends of Tony, which does a lot to support the house and the kids. The Monday before I left, they paid for a bus to come pick up all the kids from the house and drive two hours to a beach south of Lima, where one of Bonnie's friends has a nice house right on the shore. There were tons of (mostly white) adults there to supervise the kids for the day, equipped with blankets, umbrellas, sunscreen, and bag lunches for everyone. It was an amazing day! The shore has the same barren, windswept look that I remembered from last year; we were in a wide, shallow bay area between two extensions of sand-colored rock portruding out into the ocean. The waves crashed too far out to swim out beyond them, and the surf was less than rough but definitely fun. Within 10 minutes I'd left the kid I was supposedly watching playing in the sand with other little ones and their chaperones and jumped in with the teenagers.

Some of the kids come from the mountains or the jungle of Peru and had never seen the ocean before. Jefferson, a 4-year-old whose whole face is covered with burn scars from when he survived a fire as a baby, but who has more energy than any other 2 kids of the Hogar combined, kept asking me as we drove south along the shore with the sea clearly visible out the window--"Where? Where's the ocean? I don't see it." I guess he just didn't know what to look for.

At one point John and one of the 2 new American volunteers picked me up out of the comfortable beach chair I found and tossed me in the water like a sack of potatoes, which I suppose made up for the fact that I managed to escape being attacked during Carnavales this year. I definitely prefer being tossed in the ocean by friends to being attacked with water balloons by strangers on the street. These new American volunteers, Mark and Sam, arrived shortly after I did and fit in great at the house; they're both musicians, and besides playing and singing for the kids, we enjoyed staying up on Friday nights with guitars and a bottle of wine on the roof where the volunteers' rooms are.

The only thing to put a damper on our day at the beach was a kind of uncomfortable discovery for me: Bonnie's husband, whose work enables her to fundraise and organize so many wonderful events for the kids, is an engineer at a mining company. Mining, in the northern village of Tambogrande where the Peruvian SNDs all come from, is the Dark Side, the forces of evil, the industrial giant threatening to destroy the agricultural livelihood of the people. The people of Tambogrande and many other rural communities in Peru have spent years fighting to keep wealthy, international mining companies off their land, because when mining comes in, the land becomes useless for growing Tambogrande's famous mangos and limones, which is what the people there live off of. The mine provides work for a few peope for a few years, and then leaves when the gold is gone, and there's nothing for the people to do anymore. So it was a shock for me to look around at the beach and go, All this fun for the kids, all the donations this group has given to the house, all the good they've done... all of it comes from mining money.

And I watched all the wonderful, sweet, helpful, rich white people there playing with the kids, and thought, what can you do. Today these kids are having the time of their lives thanks to these people's generosity.

three beach beauties and Bryan

the guys looking chill

Mami Terri dunking a screaming Victor underwater to everyone's delight

And so my three weeks at the Hogar went by much too quickly. Even more than last year, I surprised myself by enjoying my time there so much. As a teenager I always hated babysitting, but I guess the dynamics of me and kids have changed a little now that I'm older. It's true that you can't spend 24 hours a day in the Hogar or you go crazy; but with frequent escapes to the Internet cafe or the coffee shop or just to take a nap, I always came back refreshed and not only ready but actually eager to spend more time with the kids. At one point, when we went to the farm where Tony gets his milk and the Argentinian owner of the place delights in entertaining the kids with horseback rides and snacks, I even thought to myself--Maybe I won't be miserable when I have kids!! What a surprising thought. As long as I didn't get stressed about keeping to the schedule (which no one should do in Peru anyway), it was really fun to watch them all swimming in the farm's pool, change the little ones into bathing suits, put my feet in and spray water on the kids, and jump in and get my pants soaked to the knee because Victor, who has no arms and only one leg, was sliding off the little ledge yelling for help before he went under.

I feel I should say more about the kids' disabilities and poverty and all that, but the fact is... you stop seeing that stuff after a while. Maybe another day I'll write about how my 25-year-old friend Marleney described her life in Cajamarca, living by herself in a little apartment outside of town, where she raises and kills and eats her own chickens and walks to town to carry water so as not to pay a bill for it and uses candles so as not to pay for electricity and supports herself knitting and washing. And all she wants is to get her operation so she can be back there living her own life, maybe with the guy who writes to her to say he's waiting for her, rather than being stuck in a house full of 60 kids in Lima. Or about Jaime, a 20-year-old who always wears a hoodie pulled up over his ears to hide burns on his neck, but is studying English in nearby Chosica in between his operations to remove the scar tissue. Or about a one-year-old named Raul with a double cleft palate who weighs what a three-month-old baby should weigh, because of malnutrition; or about the concerned mothers in the hospital who always want to talk to me about him, asking me if he's my kid, how he manages to eat with his mouth like that, some reprimanding me for being a bad mother and not putting socks on him (he had them on but one fell off and we lost it), others kindly helping me to change diapers during those crazy hours of waiting for the doctor. Or about the group of mothers I met in the hospital that were 15, 17, and 20 years old, all talking about what their babies had and what to do for them.

But at the end of the day, what I remember most about Chaclacayo is Mami Terri saying prayers with the kids in the great room at 8:00, and then helping to take the little ones upstairs to bed, and getting tons of hugs and kisses on the cheek and hearing "Buenas noches, Catalina!". And then heading down to the park for a few drinks with the volunteers, to relax, talk in English, and help each other figure out what on earth we're doing here.

Chaclacayo again

2008-02-22T17:26:00.002-05:00

I don't believe how natural it feels now to live at Dr. Tony's in Chaclacayo. While last year I spent all my quiet moments here marvelling at the gray mountains, the flat-roofed houses, and the buses barrelling by on the highway, now this neighborhood feels like the Peruvian equivalent of my parents' neighborhood in Ellicott City. Quiet, beautiful, lots of green (comparatively speaking), and a VERY full house of kids to be with. Tony and Terri are still here, of course, the dad and the mom of the house respectively; the cooks, the teachers, the nurses, and about ten or so of the kids are still around from last year and doing exactly what they were doing back when I first got to Peru. Plus, my good friend John is back in Peru from Ireland, which is like having your big brother around again. So the Hogar even more than Lima feels like coming home.

There are about six or eight young kids who take up probably 50% of the volunteers' time. Two are in wheelchairs and three more can only walk with walkers, and they need help with tooth-brushing, going upstairs to the bathroom, putting on and taking off leg braces, opening the door to the patio, pulling other kids off them when they start fighting and end up squirming in a pile on the floor, etc. My favorite of these is Rocely, a nine-year-old mentally retarded girl who is in the house to receive therapy so she'll be able to walk. She gets this sneaky sort of grin when you look at her, and when I ask her, What?, she goes, What? back, and giggles, and I tickle her, and she laughs and laughs. My other favorite, who was around last year, is Mallco. His actual name is Juan Carlos Mallco, but last year there was a Juan Carlos Malchi, so they both went by their last names. Mallco came to the house last January as a tiny little five-year-old who scrambled around on the floor and jumped up on you like a puppy when he wanted attention--he has cerebral palsy, so he couldn't walk at all. He also didn't speak any Spanish, having come from a Quechua-speaking home in the mountains. His only way of communication at first, therefore, was to whine, and in a country where whining is an acceptable way for kids and adults to get what they want, this kid beat everything I have ever heard before or since. Now, however, he speaks great Spanish, has grown several inches and a little pot belly from eating the mamitas' abundant cooking twice a day, and is walking around the house with a walker and leg braces. He still whines, but not nearly as much.

Last Saturday my friends Sara and Celina from Lima came to visit and play with the kids, and at night we went out to Chosica to a karaoke bar. I had never been to a karaoke bar in my life and was expecting terrible suffering of the ears, but it was great! Those who couldn't really sing just did popular cumbia songs with their group of friends, and those who could hold a tune did so. My friend Ever kept ordering one jar of sangría after another, which may have accounted for my fearless renditions of Mariah Carey's Hero and Bette Middler's Wind Beneath My Wings.

During the week I usually have to go to Lima with the kids to their medical appointments, and the waiting is just as terrible as it was last year: there are no appointments beforehand, so you have to show up early, essentially take a number, and then wait for two to five hours for the kid to see the doctor. It's an utterly ridiculous system, there are huge crowds of people in the hospitals, and Tony's employees in charge of these trips usually have to push their way to the front of the line or get a friend who works there to give them special privileges ahead of the waiting crowds, in order to get the kids in. After one of these trips, which can last from six to eight hours there and back, I am utterly useless for the rest of the day and usually take a nap. It's amazing to me, given the extent to which the system doesn't work--the fact that the care the kids get is so often not what it could be--that Tony keeps running this whole operation day after day, dedicating his whole life to it, so that these kids can get even the insufficient medical care that's available. Because otherwise, they'd have no care at all. Dedicating your life to something that can never truly work as well as it should... is an act of faith.

But of course, don't get me wrong, there are many, many success stories from the house of kids who have gone home well to their families. And Tony says the doctors they see are good, it's just the logistics and resources that aren't there. And in the everyday reality of the house, you hardly think about the kids' treatment, you're thinking about the park and toothbrushes and finding Ronaldo's walker and getting out the guitars to play with the other volunteers... it sounds trite, but it's a whole house of people who are very far from their families and so become a family for each other.

And thanks to John, at least once a week we're down at the Chaclacayo park for drinks with the volunteers, for some badly needed relaxation after the kids go to bed.

Back in the 'hood

2008-02-07T12:16:00.000-05:00

I feel like I've been going between waking and dreaming for the past year or more--but I can't figure out which of my worlds is the dream and which one is real.

The change from Maryland to Lima is so fast and so complete that it really is like waking up and going to sleep. After a few hours of dozing on an airplane, EVERYTHING changes: the weather-- it's in the 80's and sunny in Lima right now; the landscape, dry and sandy with palm trees, brown hills covered in brown-orange brick houses one or two stories tall; the look of the people, short and black-haired and brown-eyed with skin anywhere from dark brown to light almond; the market, the buses, the ramshackle look of a city built up by its residents instead of by building companies. The noise: yesterday I knew I was in Peru again when I heard a guy driving slowly down the street shouting something unintelligible through a megaphone out the window, announcing something he's buying or selling. Very, very different. I was just getting used to my quiet suburban street in Howard County, with those incredibly tall and slender trees looking brittle in the winter; fresh cold air and bright sunlight at once; quiet, privately owned cars shusshing by on smooth paved roads with sidewalks and finished curbs; shopping at the mall, where it really didn't take long for me to swollow my aversion to American materialism and buy myself lots of new clothes; having a credit card and making good use of it to enjoy the marvellous comforts of America with my friends (if you have not been to The Melting Pot, go there, and then try to reconcile the utter heavenliness with the fact that you're spending more money on a meal than some people make in a month.)

And then beyond the environment, the mindset, at least mine, is worlds apart in the two cultures. In the US I found myself looking ahead to possibe Master's degrees and/or career paths and stressing out because, never having been the kind of person who knows what she wants to do with her life, I have many ideas but no set plan. There I feel an urgency to establish myself as something--which of course means to find a well-regarded job--to "get somewhere" at least mildly impressive, and then stay there. Very constricting. Here, in Peru, anything, and I mean anything, can happen (for example, the first indication I had that I was in Latin American culture again was on the plane, where a young woman comes on carrying this enormous, furry, floppy stuffed dog over her shoulder. Only in Peru do you see people hauling random, unweildy items half their own size onto public transportation and not expecting anyone to blink) and I can do anything I like that contributes to the school or the parish community. So despite the separation pains of leaving my home once again, it feels liberating to be here, ready to start some more adventures.

But what a difference between arriving last year and arriving this year! I got to Tupac at 1 in the morning and felt like, Oh good, somehow in all that traveling I wound up somewhere familiar... now I can crash for a while. It felt very surreal the first day, like I had gone back in time to visit friends from a long-gone era, and the next day I would wake up back in the real world again... My friend Sara came over for lunch with me and the sisters, and we went to the market to get a few things I needed, and in the evening there was Ash Wednesday mass, where I saw more of my friends and started to realize that maybe I was really in Peru. Last year feels very distant, like perhaps all that was a dream too, except that now I remember everything I see around here and I have friends hugging me and welcoming me back. And I'm even mentally prepared for Carnevales!

I have a lot of plans for this year that don't include English groups in the school. Heheh. I'm going to keep going with my singers from last year and start with another group of fourth graders; keep tutoring the most dedicated of Catherine's and my students from last year in English; keep singing in the church choir and the group that went to the competition (by the way, THANK YOU to everyone who bought CD's from me in the US! $7 per CD goes a long way here and we're planning to use the money to record an album all our own!); plus I'm going to look into being a catechist in the Confirmation program, maybe teach in the adult GED program IRFA like I always wanted to, except it moved at the beginning of last year and only just returned, and--my big idea of the year--I'd love to start a group of high school girls that would watch a movie together once in a while and use the movie to talk about girls'/women's issues, like respect, equality, careers, relationships, anything. Who knows. For now I'm just working on getting adjusted again; classes and all that will start up in March after I get back from Tony's, where I'm going on Monday.

My friend Adrian told me last night at church that it was like I'd never left, but I said, nooo, it's very different. Last year I had left my home for a strange world and hadn't been back since; now, I've been here, I've been there, I know I'll be back there again, but I also know my way around Lima and can relax a little and enjoy this world for another year before going back to that other life. My great dilemma will be finding something I can do in the States that will give me the same sense of community and purpose that I have here--the sense of just surrendering your life to the crazy forces of Life in general and giving whatever you have to offer to the people you find yourself near. Somehow, without really meaning to, I've become something between a Peace Corps worker and a nun.

Cool.

Help support my work with NDMV for 2008!

2008-01-12T17:50:00.000-05:00

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.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

2008-01-12T11:30:00.000-05:00

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.

Thanksgiving... and I'm almost home

2007-11-23T10:10:00.001-05:00

The first two weeks of November were insane with the Lord of Miracles, the chorus performances, a late-Saturday-night birthday party followed by Mass at 8:30 am, plus regular English classes, plus trying to find time in the evenings to record a song with the other chorus I'm in. I've been participating in a group of young people, sort of connected with the parish because it's some of the same people, that gets together on Sunday nights to sing. We were trying to enter a song in a competition and had to record it and send it in, which meant getting everybody together at the same place and same time, plus the instrumental accompaniment, during the week--almost impossible!... but somehow we got enough people there to put in all the parts, and made the recording and sent it in, and believe it or not we got chosen to go to the competition! We have to sing live on December 1st, and before that, we have to go record the song in an actual recording studio. The time I put into this group, and I do put substantial time into it, isn't exactly "service" on my part, but it is pretty sweet just for my personal enjoyment in being with my friends and getting to make music at a higher level. The group and the competition is exciting for everyone else as well because they've never done anything like this before... not to mention that the song is an original one composed by the director, in typical saya style with drums and zampoña and a flute-like thing called quena and three-part voices. Very cool and it totally deserves to be performed live. My only concern is that the voices and their tuning issues won't do it justice, because they usually don't.

So that's how the beginning of November flew by. Then this Tuesday, just as things had quieted down a little, our friend Jess from Maryland flew in to visit us! She and I had coordinated her visit since October as a surprise for Catherine. All the sisters knew about it. All I said that day to Catherine was, "I'm going to bring you a surprise... something you haven't been expecting." And when I walked in with Jess and asked Catherine to step out from her tutoring for a moment into the hall--priceless. Jess speaks Spanish very well, so she has had a great time meeting everyone from the parish and seeing the center of Lima a little.

Three gringas seeing the city from Cerro San Cristobal

...and our very decorative lunch.

That Thursday the three of us spent all day cooking a full-blown Thanksgiving dinner for the sisters and our friends. I learned to do turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie from scratch... some of it turned out kind of weird but it was all good! I was so unbelievably tickled to be eating turkey and stuffing and pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce (Jess brought it in cans from the US) on Thanksgiving! The holiday was a hit with the Peruvians. It was kind of nice having to explain why we do Thanksgiving, too, instead of just saying, Oh, it's Thanksgiving... ok, let's eat pumpkin pie. Before the meal everyone shared something they were thankful for--Catherine and I were of course thankful for all of the people there to share the day with us, but I was really touched at how all the Peruvians said they were thankful to us for inviting them, for choosing them to be with us on our special holiday, and for having met us this year. Of course, one has to make a few cultural concessions--instead of football on TV, there was dancing after dinner. :)

Turkey feet!!!!

Peruvians discovering Thanksgiving dinner

...and dancing afterwards.

And now there is UNDER FIVE WEEKS until I am getting on a plane to Washington, DC! Unbelievable.

The weather is warmer--sometimes I even go out in t-shirts--and sunnier, and it seems like that long, gray, stale, changeless winter of plodding, pointless English groups in the school and students who didn't come... has finally moved into something with more life and more possibility. It's amazing how much you can put up with cheerfully if the weather is nice. (It's very weird though to think that it's almost Advent and almost summer at the same time. Gah! Brain spazz.) I'm already planning my possibilities for next year... who I'll teach, fourth AND fifth grade choruses in the school, maybe getting into the Confirmation program... and am very happy to be coming back. In a way very characteristic of my Enneagram type (the nuns got me into the Enneagram this year), I just know in my gut that it's the right place for me to be next year. Call it, if you like, the blessing of finally realizing clearly (after many many months of being torn in two!) what my friend Naomi ironically but wisely said to me over a year ago: "Why are you going to Peru? Because God wants you to go to Peru."

I say this because there are times when it's the only conceivable explanation I can think of for why I am staying another year. Peru and I have a love-hate, love-frustration sort of relationship. I'm either crazy busy or painfully bored; I often feel utterly useless; my social life and my students and my projects have minds of their own and do not respond to my efforts to plan or control them in a structured way, but rather go their own way if and when the spirit moves them to do so. For an American raised on the idea that "if you can dream it, you can do it! Go out, work hard, organize, apply yourself, and make it happen!", this is excruciatingly frustrating. So many of the quotes we have read this year from Saint Julie, the foundress of the Sisters of Notre Dame, are about patience and waiting for God's time... and I'm trying, trying, trying to learn to do that.

It's especially rough when this is true of your friends, the people in your life... sometimes they show up to church choir, and sometimes they just don't and you don't see them for weeks... but then they come to your Thanksgiving dinner and want to take you out the next day to go dancing and you get an invitation the same weekend to go to another party. You can't force anything and you just have to sort of go with the flow. I might as well also share, since it's no secret to anyone around here, that this has been exactly the dynamic of the something that may or may not have existed between me and a certain guy here. There, not there. Extremely frustrating. So frustrating in fact that it has been almost a relief to discover recently, beyond all doubt, that it is definitely not there. So, ok. I'm just concentrating on finishing up my year. In Peru, the ideas are always big and marvelous, and every now and then (when you're least expecting it) they burst into reality in surprising, exuberant, beautiful ways... and the rest of the time, they fall flat. No han venido.--"They didn't come."

For all these reasons I can't wait to go home right after Christmas. After that, we'll start thinking about coming back in February.

The Pollitos perform

2007-11-20T13:00:00.000-05:00

The week after the Lord of Miracles procession, my fourth grade chorus at Fe y Alegría performed twice. Friday was the concert at the school itself: The art teacher had organized an afternoon of theater with the secondary-school kids, where they performed skits they had written and directed themselves, and I coordinated with him to have the chorus perform on the same program. They had a red curtain strung up from the rafters of the auditorium and rows of chairs set up for the parents and students and teachers in the audience. My singers presented three songs: the Spanish version of Frére Jaque in a two-part round, a Christmas song I sang in middle school and translated into Spanish, and an upbeat church song in two parts. Unfortunately my two strongest singers were absent that day, so the tuning was not good. But they were trying really hard and did pretty good getting their entrances in the two-part sections. Everybody duly applauded and the kids were really proud of themselves. I congratulated them a lot because they really have worked amazingly hard this year, all those twice-a-week rehearsals when I'm yanking them out of their class or their break and they whine and say, Nooo, Señorita! and I say, You have to come or you can't sing any more!! and then they come and we sing do-mi-sol and practice listening and breathing and vowels and watching me for entrances... It's been a big committment for them and I am so proud of what they've accomplished. They couldn't sing at all when I started with them in March. At all! And even though the concert didn't represent their best, I have heard them do incredibly well in rehearsals, so I know what they're really capable of.

The day before that, however, was the real triumph for me and four of the kids. On Thursday we went to the Museum of Art in the center of Lima to participate in a city-wide school arts competition! I had to run around like a crazy person getting all the details worked out beforehand. There were forms to fill out and send in by email along with a picture of each kid, the school's and the principal's contact info, etc; there was musical accompaniment to work out with some older students; there were permission slips to make and print and get them to bring back signed; there were details to communicate to all the kids and their parents, which I wrote up in nice little information slips that nobody read--they all looked unimpressed at my little slips, glanced at them once if that, and then proceeded to ask me a zillion questions until I'd explained it orally to each and every one of them, one random question at a time. The vice-principal told me to make sure we had transportation, with the helpful advice that in the past they'd contacted a combi driver to take an instrumental group to perform; I called two taxi drivers and got it all arranged, only to have the other vice-principal have a heart attack at the cost and tell me to just walk them down to the park and take a couple of taxis like normal.

Then there was much angst and drama because the competition set a maximum of FIVE participating students, and there are eleven of them in the chorus, so I had to choose the five that would make the best small group and be able to sing in two parts at the competition. There were six girls that I thought might be the best ones but wasn't sure. I made the mistake of first telling five of them they would be going, but then going back to listen to the six of them in different combinations just to be sure. Finally I chose one that I hadn't chosen at first and had to tell one of the original five she couldn't go. It was pretty terrible of me but I felt like I had to do what was best for the sound of the group (and it did make a substantial difference). The poor thing who'd gotten her hopes up was crushed and said she wasn't going to sing in the chorus any more. It broke my heart, but all I could do was tell her, You have a wonderful voice, you're one of the best singers, it's just that your voice isn't as similar to all the rest, and we have to have similar voices in the group, that's all... (The truth, that the other girl sings more in tune, was not a wise thing to admit in this situation.) For about three weeks she didn't come to rehearsal despite my repeated, gentle invitations to come back whenever she wanted and that it would really be a shame for the group to lose her because she sings so well. Then one day, when we were getting ready for the concert--she came back, and after one rehearsal, she was back for good with a big smile! Little Leslie had the bravery to get over it and keep singing anyway. I am prouder of her than of any of the rest of them because she's had to something much more difficult than perform in front of a crowd.

Anyway the competition went very well. I went with Catherine, two older boys who accompanied us on the guitar and zampoña, the four little girls (because one of them didn't show up at the last minute, despite the fact that her mom promised me on the phone that she would be there!), and a few moms to the Museum of Art. They have a big amphitheater and each little girl got her own microphone and there were microphones for the instruments and everything.

The kids were nervous, especially waiting backstage, but they did really well! It wasn't perfectly tuned and when they split into two parts they messed up a few times but we were all so happy with ourselves that it didn't matter.

In the picture above, from left to right: Rafael on the zampoña, Pedro (a blind kid with a great ear for music) on the guitar, Jacki, me, Claudia, Natali, and Keyssy. Alison didn't show up at the last minute but she and Leslie were there in spirit.

The Lord of Miracles

2007-11-17T19:00:00.000-05:00

October is the month of the Lord of Miracles, the biggest devotional celebration I've seen here. Churches are decked in purple all month, and processions go out from tons of parishes, including the Cathedral of Lima, carrying the image of the Lord of Miracles. The story of the devotion goes like this:

In the 17th century, when slavery still existed in Peru, an African slave painted an image of the crucified Christ in Lima. It was called the Cristo de Pachacamía, Pachacamía being a place where slaves were bought and sold in the city. Tons of slaves went to this image to pray and call on God for help in their suffering. In the image of the crucified Jesus they found a God who understood the hell they were living and who could be there with them in all the ways they were dying every day. Eventually the devotion grew so popular that the local authorities considered it dangerous and ordered the image removed from the church where it hung in Lima. But when they tried to remove the image, an earthquake shook the city and destroyed the church, the surroundings, everything--except the wall on which the image hung. (The painting did in fact survive an earthquake in the 17th century.) For those who stop to think about the reason for the processions, therefore, the idea is that God intervened through a miracle to keep this image of herself present to the oppressed people of Lima, as a way to say, I am with you in your sufferings and I hear you when you cry out.

The festival itself, though, becomes something like Christmas in the US in that people gather for the pomp and ceremony of the processions themselves, and if you asked them why, would probably say, "It's the Lord of Miracles!". There are whole societies of devotees to the Lord of Miracles who dress in purple robes to carry the image around the city. In the center of Lima hundreds of thousands of people come to see the original painting get paraded around; in our neighborhood, probably several hundred came and went during the six-hour course of the procession. The image is mounted on a big wooden platform like an altar that has four wooden arms sticking out from the corners, two front and two back, and decorated with gorgeous flowers, balloons, lights, everything. It takes twelve people to lift the thing and carry it around. Three people get under each bar, which when the anda rests on the ground is about at elbow height, and the guy in charge hits a bell on the front and says, "Ready!" -- Ding! -- "Arriba!" and the twelve people stand up under the huge weight. Everyone applauds because this takes considerable effort. Once it's balanced on their shoulders they begin to sway back and forth, right, left, and with each sway they take a little step forward. And thus the Lord of Miracles advances slowly out of the church and down the street. There's a brass band walking behind him and when people see the procession, they come to walk along for a while and then go on their way. Every hundred meters, or about 20 minutes, the carriers put the anda down and a new group takes over.

Along with a couple of friends from the parish, I managed to get myself on the committee that organized this event. I'd never seen a real Latin American-style religious procession and I thought it'd be cool to see one from the inside, so to speak. Thanks to several colorful personalities, the organizational meeting was a 2.5-hour argument / complaint session about why things didn't work last year and what the president of the committee had to do about it. (Don't get me started on the Peruvian tendency to back off from committment, or to commit to something and then not show up, but then come back later and angrily criticize the work of the one or two people who have actually take any responsibility for getting whatever it is done.) But I did discover the kinds of things one has to think about in order to have a procession. The whole route has to be marked beforehand, at night, with stops every 100 meters where the carriers will switch off. At these stops the people often gather their religious pictures, rosaries, etc and arrange them on tables with flowers, making a nice sort of image for the anda to stop in front of for prayers and blessings. Sometimes the anda actually makes a little bow to these gatherings of people and items--the carriers in front stoop down and then stand straight again at the sound of the bell, very difficult to do, and everyone applauds. People also take advantage of the stops to bring their babies up to the anda so that the guy in charge can lift the baby up-down-left-right in the sign of the cross in front of the Lord of Miracles. This was funny when the director, Martín, was all stressing out about the time and moving the procession along and they kept passing him baby after baby.

Before the day of the procession you have to put out flyers to all the houses it's going to pass by, so they can be ready. We drafted the church choir to do this one night and the whole group of us ran up and down the neighborhood in the dark, walking in pairs and scurrying quickly past the unlighted sections, slipping papers under people's doors. Then somebody has to think about who's going to carry the thing and have refreshments available for the carriers when they finish; call the band and make sure they will actually show up (the first shift didn't, the second did); invite the mayor, the local functionaries, etc, none of whom actually come; argue with the committee president about why the priest says he can't say a Mass beforehand and yell at him to convince the priest to do so, etc. My job, supposedly, was to sign people up in groups to take turns as carriers. It was complete chaos because I was running around in the crowd looking for people of about the same height and asking them to take a turn, except there was no way I could remember the faces of group after group of twelve strangers dispersed throughout the crowd, much less tell each one when it was their turn, and they didn't all step forward when the lady with the megaphone took a break from the songs and Rosaries to call them. So Martín, the guy running the whole thing, was yelling at me to come up with people to carry and I had no idea where the other five people I'd asked had gone, and we ended up sort of shouting for volunteers each time the anda stopped. I was so stressed and begging my friends to help me, until Eymi told me, Relax, Kata, there's never any carriers. Every year we end up doing this.--It would have been real nice if somebody had told me that before. As usual my expectations were for everything we planned to actually function the way we planned it, thus stressing me out when this did not happen... but the Peruvians knew better. My mistake.

By the time it got dark I'd decided to resign myself to the chaos, ignore Martín's yelling (he's just one of those people who likes to yell), and enjoy the whole plodding, sprawling, noisy, glorious shebang. A few more of my friends showed up and in a spur-of-the-moment decision, once more lacking people to make up the next group of twelve, I jumped in with them to take a turn carrying. Finally I was out from under Martín's yelling and just had to listen for the bell, stand up!--shift the weight, balance it--steady!--and then just think about walking, swaying, right, left, pulling forward and trying to stand straight under the swaying weight of the anda on my shoulder. I was right in front on the same bar as my friends Victor and Alfredo (our girl friends took a turn later but very few Peruvian women are my size, so our group was mixed). It's really, really important for the three people on a bar to be the same height, because if not, the taller person can't stand up under the weight and it's painful for everybody. I think this may have been the case for me because I had a cramp in my back after about 10 minutes, when we switched sides to change shoulders. After my 20 minutes were up I stepped out gladly, feeling almost like I'd been swimming because the exhilerating tiredness of hard exercise was not in my arms or shoulders but in my whole body.

After this experience I was utterly astounded to see that about eight women from the community--all moms in their thirties or forties and all exactly the same height, 5 foot 0--jumped in to carry when a group of shorter people took over towards the end, and didn't leave for the next hour until the anda reached the church again. We kept asking them if they wanted relief and they said, No, no, we do this every year! We're good! Their faces were red and wet with sweat but they were smiling and determined. The groups of tall men in their purple robes had gone long ago, after very chivalrously and self-importantly taking the first four or five turns in a row; now the Lord of Miracles was left with his most fervent devotees, these short, average-looking, amazingly strong women from the pueblo, to carry him on the last long uphill stretch home. And that wasn't all. When they got to the door of the church I thought for sure they'd let the thing drop. But this is Peru: before retiring, the Lord of Miracles has to dance. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Right at the church door the band suddenly struck up a lively marinera, and I heard my friend Luis say to the carriers, Ok, I don't know how you all are going to do this, but we're gonna make this thing dance!, and the group of carriers started skipping around and turning from side to side so that the image was actually dancing the marinera. I was speechless. All I had energy left for myself was to go get the tray of hot chocolate and rolls for the band when the whole thing was over. (It was the best hot chocolate I have ever had--it tasted like Señora Sofía had put in cinnamon and honey and who knows what else.) One of the band players did a funny little eyebrow-lift thing whenever I looked at him. And that was the procession of the Lord of Miracles.

We Got Books!

2007-11-09T23:38:00.001-05:00

Two weekends ago, Sister Iris and I finally found a Saturday morning to go into the center of Lima and buy books for the school with the money donated by you, my friends and family. We had a total of $255 to spend, or over 750 soles, which goes pretty far when most books are between 15 and 35 soles! There's a street near the Plaza de Armas that has all these little bookstands one after the other, and at one point a whole market-like plaza of bookstands under a tent, selling an eclectic selection of everything from classic English literature (translated into Spanish of course) to modern Latin American writers to cookbooks to cheap romance paperbacks. Iris and I had a great time, two literature junkies browsing from one stand to another saying, This is great! Have you read that one? They have to have this! We got one copy of each of the following titles, except for the abridged Moby Dick and The Little Prince, which we got about ten of. All will now be available for the students to check out of the library.

My picks:

Pride and Prejudice

Moby Dick

The Lord of the Rings

The Canterbury Tales

Iris's picks:

The complete works of Isabel Allende (13 novels)

The complete works of Paulo Coehlo (10 novels)

Travesuras de la Niña Mala, Mario Vargas Llosa

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Emilio, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Libro de Buen Amor, Arcipreste de Hita

Novelas Ejemplares, Cervantes

De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

Cuentos de Amor, de Locura, y de Muerte, Horacio Quiroga

Elogio de la Locura, Erasmus de Rotterdam

Las Flores del Mal, Baudelaire

Rimas, Gustavo A. Bécquer

And with all this, plus our bus fares and a snack for the hardworking book-buyers, there is still about 70 soles left. Iris couldn't find any poetry by Gabriela Mistral, but we'll have to see if we can locate that or other Latin American poetry to spend the rest of our allowance on. Meanwhile the books are staying with us until they can be checked into the library, so I intend to enjoy The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende in my spare time... Thanks again to everyone and please know that although you will probably never meet the kids in Fe y Alegría, you can be certain that somewhere in Peru there will be more than one young person who falls in love with a certain book and has her life changed by it because of your help. If you've ever had that experience yourself you know what a blessing it is, so I will just say, thank you for helping to give that to the kids here, and may the Lord repay your kindness with tons of blessings!

...but my life is still awesome.

2007-10-21T17:30:00.000-04:00

Since my last post was an angry rant on the things that annoy me about Peru, now we'll talk about some coolness.

October is a great month because I have a good amount of time left here this year, but not too long, and I'm looking forward both to coming home for SIX WEEKS! in January and then to coming back here. (It will be Carnevales again when I get back! When my guy friends here heard how strongly I reacted to Carnevales in February, they promised me with glee that they'll be waiting with waterguns, water cannons, buckets, etc for me to walk out of the airport. I've warned them that I'm bringing a water balloon with each of their names on it back from the US.) Plus, it is finally spring here! The sun is coming out almost every day and staying out for hours at a time, and it's drier, clearer, and warmer. I now go around in only 3 layers and none of them is a heavy sweater. Yesterday we took an hour-long walk down past the Pantanos de Villa, a very green wetland preserve, to the beach, and it was beautiful walking weather and a gorgeous afternoon on the shore! The sun was partly hidden behind clouds but it shone through palely and made the water silver. It amazes me that that much beauty has been so close by all year, but I never came to see it.

I'm working on signing my fourth-grade chorus up to participate in a city-wide school arts festival in the Museum of Art in Lima. They are so excited, but the contest's rules state that no more than five students can participate in the category of Vocal Arts--clearly it was not designed for real choirs. I've chosen out a small group to represent the whole. Typically of Peru, things like the transportation and what other adults are going with us and who will accompany them on the guitar have not been decided yet, but I suppose they will all fall into place. I also asked the art teacher when his end-of-the-year theater performance will be, because the principal suggested I combine my concert with that, and he said, "November 26th. Or if not, the 3rd or 4th of December." Then last Friday he said that it's been moved up to the 3rd or 4th of November, so we'll just have to sing what we have ready! The kids and I have become dear to each other, and some of the most committed ones have even begun policing the less interested, saying things like, "Señorita, she never comes when you say there's rehearsal, and when she does she talks the whole time! Señorita, she's not paying attention!" Every now and then they have moments of really good music-making; these come unexpectedly, like something pure and shining suddenly flashing out within a clumsy work of art you're struggling to form. It's amazing to me that they knew absolutely nothing about singing when they started. Even more amazing, I feel like I've hardly done anything with them--I've only been the vehicle for something greater than me to reach through to them, just like it reached through my middle-school choir director over ten years ago and began to enchant me. Last week I gave them a note and said, This is do. Where's mi? and they sang mi PERFECTLY!! I blew them kisses and practically jumped up and down with delight. Then I started teaching them a song I remember from those middle-school years when I fell in love with choral singing for life, and as they sang I had this powerful sense of being very, very near to that time and place far away when I first learned it. The same thing that happened for me then was happening for these kids now (I can see it in their faces! at least for some of them, the ones who are really interested) and my being the vehicle for it is a far, far greater blessing than I have ever deserved. I actually cried when they left the library (each one kissing me on the cheek to say goodbye). God is too good to me. I have to write to Mr. LeJeune again and tell him how great they're doing.

(Funny, isn't it, that something like teaching a group of kids to sing do and mi can fulfill you so deeply. It's like sharing a secret, a precious treasure... and for whatever reason, it fulfilled me when I learned it, and it fulfills me now to teach it.) The next rehearsal, of course, they were talking and pulling each other's hair and interrupting me and I don't know what else. So you just keep on doing what you're doing.

My English students are in their normal state of flux, some coming, some not, even some new ones at this late point in the year. Catherine and I are learning more Peruvian recipes; on Saturday we invited a group of friends over to teach us ají de gallina, and we taught them brownies in return. We had a great time, and afterwards we sat around chatting with the nuns about how this group of sweet, generous, friendly guys hadn't thought to offer to help us with the dishes, and what in the world we (women) were going to do with them. The thing is that their mothers don't demand help from them in the house. One of them said his mother refused to teach him to cook, because she'd made that mistake with his brother, and now, horror of horrors, his brother's wife doesn't want to cook for him because she knows he's capable of doing it himself. And this is his mother teaching him this! It's so obvious that the reason things don't change is because women don't demand it. I'm going to be good at demanding things.

I've started playing guitar for some of the Masses in the parish, mostly out of necessity, because Alfredo says he can't come on Wednesdays for the next month (monthly schedules again!). I don't really like it, but if no one else is going to, I'll do it. I really just don't enjoy being the one leading everything and having the whole church looking at me; I much prefer following one of the Peruvians and adding harmonies or playing the tambourine. But oh well.

On a future-oriented note, I'm leaning more and more toward pursuing a Master's in theology or religious studies when I get back to the US. An article in Teresa's English newspaper reminded me yesterday about one of the biggest reasons I'm glad to be here for another year: the religious-political climate in the US right now is almost insufferable for me. Politicians, especially President Bush, loading their speeches with religious rhetoric as if that will prove their piousness and guarantee the vote of the Christian right--the fact that, in the eyes of the media and in the popular imagination, churchgoing voters concern themselves with teaching Creationism and abstinence-only sex education and prohibiting gay marriage while supporting the President's tendency to violently invade other countries--the expectation, even among my educated Catholic friends at Maryland, that because I came to church every Sunday I must have been rejoicing when John Kerry lost in 2004--the scathing parodies of "religion" and "the religious right" by people like Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, which are all too accurate and at the same time completely ignorant of what faith really is... it's enough to make your head explode. Ironically, religion is much less of a political issue here, where no one has heard of the idea of separation of church and state and there are huge public statues of Jesus and Mary in parks. It's just something that's there, public, present, and people can do whatever they want with it or nothing at all. So while I am not planning to become a nun any time soon, I'm having a great time hanging out with them in a place where my faith can breathe freely, so to speak. It's much better for my health and sanity at this time.

Third-wave culture shock

2007-10-18T12:07:00.000-04:00

Between all the trips that I take so many pictures of, I feel I'm not really capturing the day-to-day life I live around here. At this point, more than 3/4 finished with the year, Peru is a weird double reality for me of "normal" things that I do so often I feel used to them, and things that seem to shock me more deeply as time goes on, as if digging deeper into this culture I periodically run into the taproot of certain behaviors or customs that bother me, and am shocked or frustrated or outraged to see how deep their roots really go.

Responsibility and the idea of honoring committments is a big issue for both me and Catherine right now. Peruvians just don't seem to take things as seriously as we would expect them to. We are sick and tired of arriving for our classes and hearing No han venido ("they didn't come") or todavía no llegan ("they're not here yet"). Students or adults, you have to know the person individually to be able to judge whether they are the kind of person who can be counted on to show up to what they say they're going to do when they say they're going to do it. Some Peruvians are capable of this and some just are not. A few weeks ago our English class at night in the parish pushed us over the limit when the first person walked in at 7:15 to a 7:00 class; we cancelled class that night and said that from now on nobody comes in after 7:10. But more frustrating than the actual lateness (which was not that bad, relatively speaking; with many of my music classes in the school, the kids come waltzing in at 3:40 and seem to think that counts as getting there at 3) is the attitude behind it. Our adult English students don't get the idea that for the class to move ahead, the same group of people has to be there at the same time consistently. They will vanish for two, three, four, six weeks at a time, and then randomly see me on the street one day and say, "Hey Catalina, is there English class this week?" blissfully ignoring the fact that they have missed whole verb tenses and will be lost if they try to come back. Nor do they understand why we get upset at this. One of them got very indignant when we cancelled class because of the group's lateness, protesting, "You never said anything about getting here by 7:15!" To me this is unbelievable. They know the class starts at 7 and we have asked them to be punctual. But rather than being there to get everything we teach, their idea seems to be that they show up for whatever classes or parts of the class they feel like coming to, and pick up a little English here, a little there, as if they were visitors in the classroom... except that this mentality is shared by every student in the room. They aren't taking the class, they're auditing it--taking as much or as little as they please of what we are offering without having to commit to anything themselves. And that is frustrating and leaves us feeling taken advantage of.

I audited a class my last semester in college because I wanted to hear the discussion but didn't have time to write the papers. I learned a little, but not nearly as much as I would have if I'd done all the assignments. I didn't get any credit for it either. That's the way it goes! Hanging around an English class at your leisure without ever committing to actually showing up won't teach you much and it certainly won't earn you any credit. To me it is inconceivable that they can flout this basic principle of learning so casually and then get offended when we refuse to teach them any longer. But it seems to be a cultural thing here. From what I've seen, lots of Peruvians get involved in things, participate wildly for a month or maybe two, and then get bored and walk away when something new grabs their attention. An example of how they fall away: One of our good friends stopped coming to the English class, and when we asked him why, he said, "I can't, I have dance class during that time." Not I've decided to switch from English to dance, but I can't, I'm busy on Tuesday and Thursday nights, indignant that I was reprimanding him, as if to say I had no right to expect him to be there. The new thing gets priority. We started with almost 20 students in our parish class and are now down to 4, or 5, or 6, depending on whose attendance you consider consistent enough to count as being in the class.

People's supposedly fixed schedules change monthly because of this committment ADD. The two main English institutes in Peru, ICPNA and the Británico, structure their classes accordingly: each level is five days a week, two hours a day, for one month. You can take one month of intensive English, do something else the next month, then go back to the next English level, if you remember anything. That works for them because they're big institutes with a ton of teachers, but Catherine and I are individual tutors, and when our students simply vanish and don't call to say what's up, we are left with nothing to do, sometimes waiting around in our house for the better part of an afternoon for people who don't come. This is why we get a little angry at the people who vanish for weeks at a time and then come back later asking what time we can teach them, because their work changed and now they want to do English again. I had one prospective student who never even showed up to her first lesson, nor did she call to explain why; I heard nothing from her for two months, and then yesterday she called me asking, not if I could teach her, but what time she could come by, because now she's studying English again and needs extra help. I told her pointedly that I can't because I'm busy with students who come every week. This is not quite true but I wasn't about to take on the headache of dealing with her unreliability.

The Peruvian way of giving orders and making demands is also frustrating when you realize, yes, as unbelievable as it seems, it really is like that. I have yet to figure out how a culture so concerned with polite speech and formulas like "Señorita Catalina, buenos días" can teach people to shamelessly ask you for things that are completely outside the realm of what our relationship entails, professionally and/or personally. I have to think this through more thoroughly later, because it's midnight now... but again it has to do with me feeling taken advantage of, like the terms of my relationships with people here are not mutually understood. And I'm sure that in fact they are not.

And of course, as long as we're talking about deep-down, irreconcilable culture shock, there's the harassment on the street. It still amazes me how the students can learn so little English in the school (because they are taught to memorize phrases instead of using the language creatively), but all come out knowing how to say "Oh my God," "Hello baby," "I love you," "Very beautiful," or sometimes "F*** you," any of which you may hear shouted after you if you walk by a group of idle men by yourself. Today I was coming back from the market at 3 pm and some confused guy started yelling after me, "Good night! Good night! Buenas tardes! Hello, good night!" Sometimes I go for weeks without hearing much of this, and then all of a sudden I hear it every time I go out for a few days. I've gotten very, very good at pretending people do not exist when in fact it would be ridiculous to think I didn't hear them. But such is life.

The rest of Tambogrande, and being back in Lima to stay

2007-10-05T15:10:00.000-04:00

After the day of Marleney's vows, I spent most of my week in Tambogrande with a few new friends. Sister BJ was the other visitor in the Tambogrande convent that week--she is from Arizona but is staying in Peru for 5 weeks to see if she would like to come for a few years and work here. She speaks a little Spanish but needs classes, and so one of Sister Meg's English students, Maria, came to tutor her. Maria brought her brother Carlos, who also studies English, and the four of us hung out most afternoons speaking Spanglish and wandering around Tambogrande in the cooler part of the day.

Carlos is an amazing visual artist, and I was blown away by the paintings he'd done when they invited us to their house. (Theirs was a pretty decent house--unlike some of the houses farther out from the center of town, it had real walls with drywall on them, concrete floor, a computer in the front room. I didn't see whether it has a back wall or whether the rooms farther in open onto the garden like most of the houses do here.) He also has a motorcycle, and so a few days after my back-of-the-truck experience, I went for my first ride on the back of a moto, hanging onto a guy, no helmet, zipping down the little rural streets with the wind in my face. It was great! In the traffic circle at the edge of town we had to dodge a herd of about 20 sheep. When we rejoined Sister BJ and Maria, we went up to the mirador, a lookout point at the top of the highest hill in town that is crowned with an enormous statue of Jesus. Apparently sometimes you can go up inside Jesus like the Statue of Liberty and look out, but that stairwell was locked, so we just hung out at his feet and looked out over the town as the sun set.

(The view westward from the mirador with BJ and Maria taking pictures of the sunset.)

On Saturday night I went to the wedding of Sister Miriam's cousin Corina. It was great because I had met Corina before when she came to Lima, and I'm good friends with Corina's little sister Matilde, who works in Lima not far from our neighborhood. There were three couples getting married in the same Mass, but Corina and her fiance were the best-looking of the three. :) There were no bridesmaids or goom's men, only a few little nieces dressed up in white dresses to be the "little angels" accompanying the bride. The party started off with the newlyweds dancing the Blue Danube Waltz at least six or seven times: first together, then with the "godparents" of the wedding (Peruvians have godparents for everything, not just baptism), then with his mother and her father, then with any family members that wanted to come up and dance a few measures with them. Then they got all the single women together for the bride to toss her bouquet. There were only five of us, and guess who caught it! ... The bouquet came flying straight at me and I couldn't dodge without looking silly. So they played the Blue Danube Waltz one more time and I had to dance with Corina's new husband while she danced with her "godfather." Apparently I will also be the next person from among those five single girls to get married. I'm sure this was all very confusing to the people there who thought I was a nun.

the beautiful bride and groom

the cousins, Miriam and Matilde

It was a great party with tons of dancing and we didn't leave till 2 am.

Very shortly afterwards I was woken up by the sisters' neighbor Simón. Simón is a citizen of Tambogrande who does a radio broadcast every morning... except it's not on the radio. The man has a megaphone and speakers in his front yard which he uses to talk and play music like a radio jockey, loud enough for half the town to hear, every day from 6 to 7 am. He calls the show "Segundo Simón" (Second Simon). He puts on music that sounds like it's coming off a grainy 1940's gramophone, talks over it, tells the weather for the day, and shares his thoughts for the day on the state of today's youth, the local government and its individual functionaries, how to be a good Catholic, or whatever else comes into his head. He's not particularly insightful. He is, however, possessed of a loudspeaker and convinced that everyone in the area can benefit from hearing his voice for an hour every morning.

The sisters have to do their morning prayer at 5:30 because it's impossible to do it once he gets going. Apparently people have tried to shut him up in the past, but there are really no enforcable laws about noise in Tambogrande or even in Lima. Peruvians are way more comfortable with noise than Americans; they really just don't have our concept that "my neighbors have to respect my peace and quiet." Example: Waino Sundays, in which a group devoted to a particular saint has its parties near our house here in Tupac and plays very loud, very repetitive, very high-pitched yippy music from late morning until after midnight. Or that time in Cusco when a "procession" went by our hostel at 4 in the morning, i.e. a group of people with an image of some saint or other troops by with a couple of brass instruments playing the same melody over and over and somebody enthusiastically whacking a drum. Don't get me wrong, processions and devotions to saints are a really neat part of the culture here; often a group will come into Sunday Mass with a beautifully decorated statue of the Virgin Mary carried between four people, and the devotees themselves all dressed up in traditional Andean outfits, and then go outside to do traditional dancing (they play big string instruments that look like a cross between a harp and a violin) before heading off down the street in their procession. I always stay to watch a bit. The only part I don't like is the fireworks, which are not actually fireworks since they don't set off any lights, they just go up and make a big BANG that sounds like a gun. The noise is part of the celebration.

...so anyway, Peruvians like noise, and Simón was my alarm clock, because I was getting up that morning to go with Maria to visit her cousin in the nearby city of Paita. Paita is a little town right on the ocean and it's cooler there than in Tambogrande because of the constant breeze off the water. The day and a half I spent there was a weird experience of very common, everyday Peruvian life. The town and its beach reminded me of Ocean City, Maryland and its boardwalk carnival, except smaller and kind of boring. There was a Ferris wheel and arcades and a moon bounce and shoot-the-clown games along the beach, and dirty streets with cheap trinket stores just behind, and the Peruvians all thought it was great, especially the Ferris wheel, which they called a "rollercoaster" and squealed with terror when it went fast. I was not impressed, but I enjoyed seeing the pelicans and a sea lion when we took a ride in a boat on the bay.

In the evening there was a cumbia concert, and since Janet from TV was going to be there, Maria's cousin and her husband just had to go. It turned out that Janet from TV isn't even a cumbia singer, she's just the personality that stands there "animating" the crowd and organizing the thing. The cumbia groups were pretty good, actually very good, but the attention mostly went to the dancers, four girls in little pink bikini outfits who came out and shook their behinds in front of the cameras. It was pretty tasteless. Maria, me, and Maria's cousin's daughter--a smart, sweet little 11-year-old named Yessenia who gave me a pair of earrings she made--were all exhausted by 11 pm, but Yessi's parents were loving the cumbia and Janet and the whole show, so finally at midnight or so they let the two 20-somethings take their daughter home in a mototaxi and go to bed, and they stayed until 2 am. They were really nice people but I think they had no idea what to think of me. They had never met a foreigner before, and they kept talking about how all the gringos come from abroad to stay in their summer homes at the nearby resort towns, because that's the extent of their familiarity with white people. I think they were confused too about my religious/lay status. But they took me into their home very generously and invited me back in the summer when it's beach weather.

(Possibly the best part of all this was watching a bunch of guys trying to set up before the cumbia show. They had a huge cylinder-shaped advertisement balloon without enough air in it that said CLARO in huge letters, and they were pulling on ropes and jumping up to push it and poking it with poles to get it to stand up. Every time it almost righted itself, it would slowly flop back over on top of their heads again like a big fat worm. It was hilarious. By the time we got there there was a good crowd watching them. The owner of the nearby cafe said they'd been doing it for three hours already, at which point I gave up all hope. They never did get it fixed.)

My only other adventure in Tambogrande was going with Sister BJ to visit the nearby convent of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. BJ and I took a colectivo and a mototaxi through the countryside to where Sister Lucy and her congregation live at the edge of the mountains. Their house was full of plants, cactus, desert flowers, with a huge almond tree in the center courtyard. We climbed up the nearest hill with Sister Lucy and looked out over the valley. Everything was green because of the canals irrigating the land, but the mountains themselves were desert and their trees all looked dead and dry. Sister Lucy told us a story about a volunteer who came from Germany to work with them and ended up becoming a nun... I could see the appeal, when she talked about coming up to those desert mountains to pray, with the green valley below... There's a U2 song about all this, I think.

me and Sister Lucy

from the mountain near the School Sisters of Notre Dame

My trip ended well and I am now back in Lima. It's good to be back where everyone you know is. (I say that now... I can only imagine what coming back to the US in December will be like!...) And the weather here is changing! It's a little warmer, so showering is not so painful, and yesterday I actually woke up to sunshine that lasted all day until afternoon. (Today was cloudy again, but the clammy humidity of winter is gone and with it a lot of the chill.) Since I've decided I'd like to be more involved in the parish next year, I am checking out opportunities there as well as continuing with my English and music classes. Today I had my first rehearsal with the Pollitos in a while, and they were so cute! I missed them! They are learning to watch my conducting and use their head voice a little. I'm working on getting them entered in a city-wide school arts festival at the Museum of Art in Lima, but I found out today that I can only take 5 singers. It seems there aren't many real choirs that participate in these things. The group as a whole will have to wait until our concert at the school in December.

Earlier this week I told one of my students he can't come back any more. He had been bringing me little gifts and telling me I'm an angel and saying if he had a girlfriend, he'd want her to be like me, etc., for quite a while. Every time he started up like this I would be quite clear that I wanted a purely professional tutoring relationship with him, and he would say, "Oh yes of course, I understand that, I respect you, but you know these flowers are just a little sign of my admiration for you, as a teacher... I understand you have other friends, but I know you and Catherine go out dancing with them, and it makes me sad that we don't have the same kind of confidence and friendship as you do with them..." I was putting up with it and putting up with it until he wrote me an email in which he said, "I want to thank you because even though you know what you mean to me, you still give me English classes. Any other girl would have kicked me out of her classes and her life" by now. This made me really furious. It was as if he'd said "thank you for being too weak to give me what I deserve." So I gave it to him, in a very angry reply email that told him I'd had it with him and that he was not to come back to my house for classes or anything else. Apparently I scared him off because he hasn't come back for his Tuesday tutoring with Catherine either. Yesss, verbal-electronic slap in the face does its job! I felt so great after letting some of that righteous anger flame off... very powerful and very light of heart... I laughed a lot that day.

And so with just over 2 1/2 months left of this year, life is good--except for my latest weird/gross health issue: I seem to have picked up a flea in Tambogrande and can't figure out how to get rid of it. Figures. Catherine says it's no worse than having lice or parasites, but somehow to me this is way more gross... maybe because lice and parasites didn't give me little red itchy bites on my stomach!... Teresa says you have to actually look through your bedding and clothing to find the tiny jumping flea, and then trap it with a wet bar of soap. I tried this and it is 0% possible. (I saw nothing to trap.) On my list of Peruvian randomness, next to riding in the back of a pickup truck between a nun and a cross-dresser, is hunting fleas in my bed with wet soap. My life is insane.

Tambogrande again

2007-09-23T18:43:00.000-04:00

(The bridge from Tambogrande to the outlying caserio of Locutos. The bridge is made of sticks and packed dirt and they build it from scratch every year when the river goes down. When the river is high, in the summer, it sweeps the bridge away and the people cross over in rafts made of inflated tires and pulled by somebody swimming. At least this is what they tell me.)

I'm in Tambogrande once more. It's sunny and warm and beautiful!!! That 14-hour overnight bus ride seems like it took me from Lima winter to Bethany Beach in the summer, except less humid, more breezy, and deliciously cool at night. "Winter" in Tambogrande means you sleep with a light blanket, go around in your jeans and t-shirt in the morning and evening, and lie around doing nothing from 2 to 4 pm because it gets HOT. The last time I came here, in March, it was the end of summer and the HOT was all the time, barely even cooling off enough at night to let you sleep. It's not humid like it is in Maryland, but I'm sure it passes 100 degrees Farenheit every day (right now it might get up to 80 or 90), and you just feel like you're baking in a still hot oven.

The locals talk proudly about how those who aren't used to the calor fuerte of the North usually can't take it. They build their houses with high roofs, make them of brick or bamboo instead of wood, and some of the more rural ones don't even have doors and windows that close, just openings in the walls... and even the walls aren't all there; most houses have a few rooms in front and then a back room that opens straight out under a woven-bamboo roof onto a garden, with flowers, trees, chickens, etc. The gardens are not at all neat but profusely alive. This helps me understand a little why so many Peruvians who move to Lima and build houses in the pueblos jovenes don't put back walls on them. The house is not meant to seal you off from the outdoors. (What a concept!... and it works great here... just not in Lima.) In the heat I also see why the women, no matter what their age or what they look like, are much more comfortable than North American women with wearing stretchy skirts and midriff-baring tanks. It's less formal and more comfortable here in the rural North of Peru.

On Sunday we all went to Sister Marleney's final vows, a beautiful, happy celebration at a Mass in the countryside where Marleney teaches in a Fe y Alegría school. The school was in the middle of nowhere down these dirt roads that wind through a half-desert landscape. There are trees and the occasional stream and sometimes whole fields of vibrantly green rice plants, but the ground is sandy and dry. The Mass was under a white pavilion run with green ribbons and decorated with tons of sunflowers, the symbol of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. It was hot.

Before Marleney professed her vows, the priest gave her the microphone and asked her to talk to everyone about how she got to be here. Her testimony was really moving. She talked about the "human ties" that led her from one step to another in her journey toward becoming a Sister of Notre Dame; she said she didn't want to even hear about religious life at first, but little by little, sometimes fighting with God, she discovered that "this is my happiness." The priest asked her if she'd ever been in love and to talk about what love means to her. She said yes, of course; she's a woman, a complete person, and yes she had had a boyfriend years ago, and she is happy now that he is married with kids while she has found her happiness here. "Love, to me, is to give yourself completely and be left with nothing, but at the same time to receive everything. I know that for the rest of my life I will be thirsting for this God, and I am here to give myself over to Him completely, not 'until death do us part' but until death unites us."

I was sitting in the front row with the rest of the sisters and I'm sure everyone there thought I was a nun too. It was kind of awkward to be the only non-Peruvian without an ND cross around her neck, but I tried to make myself useful as a photographer. After the ceremony the whole crowd of at least 200 people wanted to hug Marleney, and while some waited in line the others ate the beans and rice and goat that quickly appeared in the hands of the caterers. There was folkloric dancing by the kids in the school and a neighbor of the sisters sang musica criolla for everybody to dance to.

To get back to Tambogrande, the sisters' truck went first with those who were leaving that night for Lima. Juana Jaqueline and I didn't want to wait for the second trip, so we hopped in with another family... in the back on the truck bed! I got to be one of those Latin Americans you see going by all crowded together in the back of a truck, standing up to fit more people, like a bunch of horses or something being transported home. So ghetto and so very typical around here. We even stopped to pick up more guests who'd started home on foot--the people on the truck bed started whacking the top of the vehicle to get it to stop, their friends hopped up, and they whacked again to say go ahead. It was great. The sisters later said they saw us flying by while they waited at the bus station, and they knew it was us because they picked out my hair right away.

And so I have now ridden in the back of a truck down dirt highways in rural Peru, in my nice clothes, squished between a nun and a cross-dressing Peruvian named Karen (he got out of the car before we took this picture.) This just about makes my year.

Next year

2007-09-17T19:05:00.000-04:00

So, it's official: I am renewing my service committment with Notre Dame Mission Volunteers for 2008.

I took a retreat this weekend to think about it, and I had a very relaxing day and a half of reading, sleeping, playing the guitar, praying the Liturgy of the Hours with the retreat house community, and napping outside in the sun. The retreat house I went to is in sunny pretty Chaclacayo, and it had lots of green grass, hanging flowers, pretty gardens, a white-walled house with tiled arches to wander through and pictures of the Virgin Mary in front of the ocean (la Virgen del Carmen). I was so worn out from trying to make this decision that I couldn't tell what I wanted any more, so instead of trying to decide I mostly just relaxed. By the end of the weekend I didn't come to a clear "answer," but I did have more of a sense of peace about it all, so I came back on the buses to Lima thinking that I would decide my fate based on whether or not they can find another volunteer to replace Catherine next year. Staying "alone" still felt too daunting, especially after a long weekend of solitude.

But I got back at night and dropped in on the chorus rehearsal in the parish, and it felt like home! In the end it wasn't the retreat, but the coming back afterwards, that convinced me that I belong here for another year. I also had another conversation with Sister Miriam, a professional counsellor but also a good friend, which really helped, especially in terms of thinking of new possibilities for my work next year that would "give me more life" and less frustration. (No more English groups!!--more parish involvement--working with all my friends in the Confirmation program... so exciting!) So last night in chorus rehearsal I let everybody know and got hugged/strangled by half of them. Then we stayed there until 10 pm singing and laughing at the circus-like antics of Luis Alberto and Dante (everybody was really high-energy for some reason!) and I was absolutely dead this morning when I had to get up at 6:30 to teach at 8. Also, my stomach was acting up in such a way as to suggest I may have parasites again. Ah, Peru.

So: if anyone knows anyone who is female, 21 or over, speaks Spanish, and is interested in helping out in a poor but vibrant parish and school in Lima for 2008, please let her know about Notre Dame Mission Volunteers! (Information available at www.ndmva.org, international service sites.) The opportunities for volunteer work are really limitless, any kinds of talents or interests can be put to good use. Being Catholic is not a requirement, but one has to be willing to live in an overwhelmingly Catholic country and help out a bunch of (very cool) nuns in their work.

Thanks for all your support and prayers! I will be home for six weeks from Christmas to early February, and I can't wait to see everybody!

Two-Thirds-of-a-Year Reflections

2007-09-06T16:06:00.000-04:00

Wow, it's September.

In school terms, there's still a whole "semester" to go, but it feels like we have no time left at all. Somewhere around late July I got really busy, and August flew by in a blink after we got back from vacation. I'm still working with the small groups on English in the school, and at long last we have actually moved on from "to be," describing people, and questions like "Where are you from?" and "How old are you?", to starting the present tense and describing what you do every day. Some of the groups remember nothing of what I did with them the last time I saw them (back in May). Others pick it back up with a quick review and move on eagerly. So I suppose we are actually getting a little done in these groups.

[Cute story: One of their exercises is based on a picture of my sister Annie that mom sent me. I wrote a few paragraphs of, "Hi, my name is Annie and I'm from Maryland. I'm 17 years old. I have a brother and two sisters..." using "to be" and "to have" to talk about oneself and one's family. The students have to read it and understand it and try to write one of their own. One of the guys was very impressed with this American girl he was reading about and asked me, "Miss, do you know her? Can I get her email? What's her phone number?", telling his buddies how cute she was, etc. Then at the end, I defined the word oldest for them and said, What does it say about Annie's oldest sister?... and Annie's admirer turned beet red and moaned, "Sorry! Sorry!" when someone finally figured out that she was my sister. It was great. I said I would pass on his compliments.]

Besides the groups, I have a lot of private tutoring students for English, which is great because they are adults and they actually show up. Although even there, there are always adventures, particularly with the guy students. One of them keeps bugging me and Catherine to go dancing or go to lunch with him and his friend, insisting that he wants to be "better friends" with us, and bringing me little gifts like earrings and "little rocks" (his bad English translation of "piedritas," little plastic-looking "stones" that one could string on a necklace). Just what I wanted. Not so much interested in English, that one. Next time I am going to tell him straight up that I do not want to be his friend... he's getting on my nerves. Another of my students came over last week and did grammar obediently for half an hour, and then when I was in the middle of a sentence he interrupted me in Spanish with, "Do you know the origins of the Catholic Church?" He is very disturbed about his religion right now. He also thinks that the Internet is a reliable source of information. "But it says on the Internet that Jesus used to be called Cupid and Mary was Aphrodite! Do you believe everything you read on the Internet? Why not?" Teresa very generously agreed to talk to him about religion (and the Internet). Who knows if he will keep coming to English class. But my female students are delightful. Besides Sister Miriam, my favorite student is a 27-year-old woman named Olga who lives nearby with her mother. She went to college to be a history teacher, but she can't find a job right now, so she has time and interest to study English. She is so sweet and really knows how to learn, being accustomed to studying. She always makes my day when she comes over.

I am still working with my fourth grade chorus and loving them more every week. The other week I got them singing a song I learned from my friends in the parish that has two parts on the refrain. It's simple, and they didn't do it really in tune, but I just thought as I listened to them, My God--they're singing in two parts!! When I started with them in March they couldn't sing at all! And my most recent job is teaching my friend Miguel voice lessons. He is really into classical music and Italian opera, and he has a great voice, he just needs a little ear training and music-reading and tips on technique. It is so much fun! I was nervous about teaching voice lessons because I've never done it before, but when he started singing I realized immediately that I had tips to give him, so it's all good. It's so amazing to find someone who appreciates the beauty of classical music around here--I hadn't realized how much I missed CSPAC and the music world of Maryland. And his lessons encourage me to practice my own singing, and when I do I am almost surprised at how beautiful and fun it is. My voice, like the rest of me, is growing and maturing here even as I take a break from the lessons I had in college... almost without my noticing, it's becoming freer and fuller and less self-conscious. Amazing.

In two weeks I'm taking a trip to Tambogrande to be there for Sister Marleney's vows and the wedding of Sister Miriam's cousin, whom I met earlier in the year. (It's going to be warm there!! Although I can tell it's starting to move toward spring here, thank God.) Very exciting.

And so life is going along swimmingly here. And recently that insistent something inside of me that has been pushing me this whole time towards staying another year... has reasserted itself. I've already told NDMV that I'm going home, but they haven't found anyone to replace me yet... and just this weekend, a plan has unfolded in my head that seems simple and natural. It's scary in more ways than one, but it takes away my anguished feeling of being torn in two between Peru and the US. And it runs thus: This year from now till December, I study for the GREs. (Catherine will be nice enough to bring my prep book back from my house when she visits the US for her sister's wedding.) Then I spend a good month (or 6 weeks?!) at home in January, take the GRE's, talk to my profs at Maryland about grad schools to research, meet my new baby cousins, spend time with everybody, etc. Then I come back to Peru. From February to September, in between my teaching here, I can read (at the suggestion of my teachers) things that will help me prepare to study for a PhD in English, concentrating on spirituality in literature. I can do my graduate applications from here starting this time next year, and in 2009, assuming I get in somewhere, I will have over 6 months to live at home before starting my grad program. ...And the little voice inside me, the one that said "What if I stayed?!" even back in March when nothing was working--that small but undeniable urging quiets down. It's an idea that brings the two worlds together a bit. It gives me purpose and direction in my American life, keeping me in touch and moving toward a career in that world, but lets me spend my time in Peru in the meanwhile, with the culture and the people that have become dear to me this year. (And doing something good, too, now that I'm familiar with the system and can continue my projects.)

Of course all the other voices inside me are saying, "What are you, insane?!" But really I think I have been wanting to want to stay another year ever since I got here, and now I may actually be ready to take that seriously. I need to talk to the sisters about it. (I've already talked to my parents about the possibility... they took it extremely well.) I would like to take a retreat to really mull it over. Today I went to lie down for a nap, and the neighbors started up their Waino again, and I just burst out laughing and crying at once over how unbelievably annoying that stupid music is, and how they're going to do it for the next twelve hours nonstop, and keep me from sleeping, and at the same time how it's so fabulously Peruvian just like everything else that drives me crazy and makes me love this place, and was I really going to spend a whole nother year here?!, amazed at how I was unable to say no even during a Waino Sunday to the insistent something inside me that says Stay and will not be argued with. Just then my friend Matilde came in and listened to me spill all my thoughts about all this, and gave me hugs, and said she thought my plan was a good one. She is Miriam's cousin and is far away from her family like I am, working in Lima to make money to go to college. We don't see each other that often, but she and Consuelo's sister Eliana are like younger sisters here to me and Catherine. They are really sweet girls.

I'm not committing yet. But there you have all my thoughts. I would appreciate any good-decision-making vibes or prayers. Thanks.

Earthquake

2007-08-25T19:08:00.000-04:00

I was sitting at the kitchen table a few Wednesdays ago, eating dinner with Catherine and Teresa, when the floor started to shake. Catherine and I looked at each other; the shaking got stronger. It felt like being on a ride at an amusement park where you have to walk across a floor that vibrates and wobbles under you. We got up, uncertain of what to do--neither of us had ever been in an earthquake before, but we recognized what it was, and I went and stood in the kitchen doorway because I had a vague recollection that that's what people should do in earthquakes. "Teresa, what do we do?" asked Catherine. Teresa, preoccupied by the shaking that showed no sign of stopping, jumped up and scooted straight out the front door without answering, and stood in the open space across the road. Iris had come out of her room when the tremor didn't stop after a few seconds, and the three of us went outside together, leaving the door wide open behind us.

For another minute the ground didn't stop moving. Everything had stopped: dogs were barking, people were leaving their houses with the doors swinging open. It was night and the yellow street lights of Villa El Salvador were marching away over the hills in long lines. I saw the clouds lit up by lightning twice; later I found out that lightning is almost never seen in Lima, and people were terrified by it. A man drove by in a taxi and stuck his head out to ask, "Sister, what's going on? Is there an earthquake?"--it seems that the suspension in cars can prevent people from feeling tremors. Iris was pacing around looking worried. "This is the worst one we've ever had," she said. Catherine and I just nodded--for all we knew, this was normal for Peru.

There was no damage to our house except a few pictures that fell off the walls. Most of the houses in the area were fine too, as was the school, although the bookshelves in the English classroom had toppled over and dumped a huge mound of textbooks onto the floor. The aftershocks recurred during the next few days, including once when I was teaching in the auditorium. We hurried outside and joined the rest of the school on the blacktop, but by the time we got there it was over.

It was an odd experience, but it didn't seem too dangerous at the time. I couldn't really understand why all the Peruvians were so panicky. I gathered that slight tremors are indeed normal around here and usually pass in a few seconds, leaving little to no damage; and yet in the days that followed, some people told me they had thought it was the end of the world, others that they grabbed their children and started praying for their lives, others that they were sleeping fully dressed with keys in hand so they could run outside during the night... I didn't get why everyone was freaking out so much until the reports started coming in of the terrible damage in Pisco and Ica, cities about 100 miles south of Lima near the epicenter of the quake.

Many of the houses there, especially in the rural areas, are made of mud bricks, and they just crumbled. A church in Pisco collapsed on a funeral Mass, killing hundreds of people who were inside. One of our friends from Chaclacayo, Ever, went down to Pisco the day after the earthquake with a group from his work, since he does social work for the government and knows something about first aid. He said it was utter chaos. People were fighting over water, there were bodies all around the main square, there was no food to be had and Ever had to pay 5 soles for a tiny can of tuna and crackers, and tuna and crackers was what he ate for three days while he was working there. A week later, drinking tea in our calm, undamaged house, he told us the story in a quiet voice with a haunted look in his eyes. He said he vomited twice at what he saw while working to excavate the living and the dead from the ruins of the church. Later, however, he decided that he preferred pulling out the dead to trying to attend to the homeless and hungry survivors, because the first slow trickle of supplies sent in was not enough, and the crowds just attacked the cars as they came. There was no way to get down and hand things out calmly unless the military was there. But when the soldiers were there, he said--and at this Ever burst out laughing, so far past stressed that this was hilarious--a kid came up to ask for bread, and one of the soldiers replied, "You want pan? Here, have some of this! PAN! PAN!" and mimed shooting his gun so that the kid ran away. And on top of all this, at one point someone started yelling that the sea was coming in in a tsunami. Pisco is right by the beach. Apparently the water did come up two blocks into the town, but it never reached the main square.

Catherine's first reaction on hearing this story: "If you go down again, let me know, because I'd like to go help." I was floored. In my head I asked, "Did you hear what he's been saying for the past hour?!" I suppose I'm just more cautious or fearful than she is, but Ever's stories about sleeping in a tent with no blanket (he gave his sleeping bag to a homeless mother) and not finding enough food or water for himself, let alone anyone else, and the crowds fighting for supplies, did not exactly inspire me to jump up and go there. I feel unsafe enough in our own neighborhood of Delicias/Tupac, where we get our guy friends to walk us around at night and don't take taxis by ourselves after dark and have to endure various levels of whistles, catcalls, and verbal harrassment just walking down the street... I would simply be too scared for my physical safety to go somewhere basically chaotic like Pisco was after the earthquake. But Catherine reasoned quite sensibly that since some time had passed, there were aid organizations going down that she could go with as a volunteer. (She was right, as we learned from the news in the next week.) She hasn't gone yet, however, because our friends kept saying they would go and then not doing it after all.

Our parish collected clothes and food items to send south... and that's been it as far as the earthquake around here. But we know there is an incredible amount of rebuilding to be done, and that thousands of people are still homeless. If you want to support the relief efforts, you can donate to the American Red Cross's work in Peru at http://american.redcross.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ntld_peru&JServSessionIdr006=o5vhiluha1.app194a.
Thanks on behalf of the people who have lost everything and will benefit from your help.

...oh, and speaking of help: The money donated by my readers to get books for the Fe y Alegría library is here! Sister Iris now has $255 to get some good literature for her students. Thanks so much to all who donated and I will keep you updated on what the money is used for!

Machu Picchu

2007-08-21T11:39:00.000-04:00

Catherine, Chrissy, and I left Cusco at 4 pm with the two taxi drivers and headed up out of the city into the highlands. We were still mad at our drivers for upping the price on us at the last minute, but they were very attentive and anxious to be of service, telling us the names of all the small towns, pointing out the fields where the people grow potatoes and telling us how they harvest only once a year and keep the potatoes dried to eat all year round. I had bought a new, larger memory card for my camera (the old one only held 24 photos!), and in response to Josue's assurances of "anything you need, anything at all, just ask," I asked if he had scissors to open it. He didn't. The next thing I knew they were pulling over next to a little ramshackle house on the edge of Cusco, and Josué runs in and comes back out with a blunt steak knife, with which he proceeds to free my digital memory card of its plastic. Classic Peru moment.

The drive to Ollantaytambo was beautiful. We went first over long highways rising and falling with the curves of the hills, and then down a long switchback descent into the Sacred Valley itself, to the small city of Urubamba. The mountains are not gradual in the Sacred Valley; Urubamba is on flat land perhaps a few miles wide, with steep, bare rock mountains towering straight up on either side. Their shadows fall early on the valley in the evening, and it seems like dusk in the town while the daylight still shines on the mountains themselves. We passed through Urubamba and wound through more hills, following the river now, to Ollantaytambo. It was getting dark when we got there and the stars were coming out. The train station was a ticket box next to two sets of doors where people could pass through to the train tracks--one door for Peruvians, the other for tourists. The two groups sit on different sections of the train and pay (so I hear) vastly different prices, just as they do for Machu Picchu. In the yellow lamplight we waited in line with our backpacks, watching the crowds mill around with all their stuff in between the little puestas selling everything from chapstick to chullos to fried-egg-and-cheese sandwiches cooked on the spot over tiny gas flames. When the train arrived, the Peruvians returning to Ollantaytambo came out the doors running and literally raced each other up the hill, I suppose to get places on the buses and taxis congregated farther up with their drivers standing outside yelling "Cusco! Urubamba! Cusco! Taxi to Cusco!"

It was too dark to see anything out the train windows. As soon as we stepped off the train in Aguas Calientes, we were swept up in the river of tourists pouring up the hill and found ourselves in the central plaza. We made plans with some people we'd met on the train to meet at the plaza at 5 am to hike up the mountain and be at Machu Picchu at dawn; then we made our way up the brightly lit main street to our hostel. Aguas Calientes is made up almost entirely of hotels and restaurants, as 90% of its population is tourists. As we scrambled up the hill, I looked up long enough to see the mountains, or the shadows of the mountains, blotting out the sky and the stars on all sides like enormous waves in a dream. We felt them rather than saw them--the awesome, unseen presence of the mystery of the place, towering just beyond the little lights of the town.

We found the hostel, but when we gave our names, the guy looked away and said, "No, that wasn't for the 29th, I had you down for the 19th." Translation: they hadn't kept our reservations. At this point it was 10:00 and Chrissy was fading fast. Suddenly a random Peruvian lady was at our side saying she had lodging for 25 soles per person; we shrugged and followed her. Her hostel was off the main road, noisy, but clean enough. It was warmer here than in Cusco, and humid, and we could hear the river close by as we fell into bed.

The next morning, instead of feeling better, Chrissy had diarrhea and nausea and didn't want to get out of bed. Our visitors were dropping like flies! We hated to leave her. Would she be better later? Catherine and I took turns going out to get Gatorade and other foodstuffs, and I got to see Aguas Calientes in the early morning.

Finally at 9:30 we had to face the facts. We paid the hostel lady extra to let Chrissy stay in bed during the day, and Catherine and I set out, the only ones still on our feet, to the sacred summit.

The tourism industry around Machu Picchu reminds one of Disney World. It has taken over the city of Cusco and created the town of Aguas Calientes. But once you get up to the ruins, all of that falls behind; you leave it below in the valley. The bus from Aguas Calientes follows the river around the base of a mountain--the mountains go straight up like tapering fingers, practically piled on top of each other, so that it's no wonder nobody got through to discover Machu Picchu for years--and then starts the switchback climb. We watched the river get smaller and smaller below us, and then we were there at the entrance...

We took a walk up toward Inti Punku, the Sun Gate, but I was too tired to make it all the way. On the path we met some llamas and offered them chocolate, which they were not interested in.

Catherine sat down to write a letter to her boyfriend, and I drank in the view.

The ruins were impressive, but I have to say the mountains were more so, and most amazing of all was the light. I felt I had gone from glasses to contacts or gotten an adjustment to my prescription, it was that sharp and brilliant and clear. I thought, whatever the hardships of the people who lived here long ago, they knew nothing of smog or of Lima fog. Their wars and their sacrifices and their sicknesses and feasts were all lived out under infinite skies, always in the presence of majesty and beauty. Up on these mountains, all you have to do is wait and walk, and one after another these amazing sights open up to fulfill you. In Lima I had been so starved for a glimpse of sun and space and beauty, and here was all that beyond anything I had thought of...

We wandered through the ruins, listened in on tours, and tried to pet the llamas frollicking on the lawn. We were only up there for about two hours before I got dehydrated and had to go.

Incas were short!

(The llama and I both blinked.)

On the way down the mountain, as I drank my Gatorade on the bus, there was a local boy dressed in traditional clothes who ran down the hiking path to wave at the bus at every switchback, yelling a long, singsongy phrase in Quechua. It was charming and all the tourists were looking for him by the end and waving back... but then it turned a little sad when, at the foot of the mountain, he climbed on the bus and called in the same beautiful, high voice, clear as the air of his home-- "Thank you very muuuuuuuuuch! Muchas graaaciaaaaaaaaaas!" and went around collecting tips from the tourists.

...So that was Machu Picchu.

That night we went back to Cusco the same way we came. Tuesday was our last day in Cusco, and it was a day of frustrating decisions because I'd been leaving my mom and sister behind the whole week, and now they didn't want to go on to Arequipa like we planned, because Marissa just needed to get home asap to recuperate. In the end they decided to return to Lima for the two days before their international flight. Catherine wanted to go on to Arequipa, and I chose to go with her mostly because I didn't want her traveling alone, but also because part of me really just needed to leave all the sick people behind and have a few days of vacation not worrying about anyone else. So we got on an overnight bus to Arequipa. Mom and Marissa would have one more day in Cusco in which to go on a tour of the Sacred Valley, which made me feel better because at least they'd have seen something.

But, in keeping with the rest of our vacation, Arequipa did not go as planned either and we ended up spending a total of 15 hours there. It has a very pretty plaza, on which we enjoyed a nice breakfast after our overnight bus ride... very quiet and restful after the stress of Cusco.

We saw the cathedral (much simpler than Cusco's but beautiful) and went to Mass, then went back to our hostel and slept. In the afternoon we went to a tourist agency and arranged a tour of nearby Colca Canyon, the deepest canyon in the world. But the tour was not to be. At lunch I started crying because my family was in Peru and I was not with them, and twenty minutes later Catherine was sick to her stomach. So we gave up and changed our bus tickets to return to Lima that night. And I had two days of hanging out in Delicias with Mom and Marissa before taking them back to the airport on Saturday night.

Cusco

2007-08-13T18:53:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the delay in posting this! I am determined to get caught up because there are new things happening that need blogging too. So here goes our vacation.

On the morning of the 26th we got up at 4:00 am to make it to the airport by 5:30. We were on two different flights to Cusco because of some rather frustrating mix-ups with the travel agent beforehand, namely, that she did not get back to me in time for us all to get on the same one. In retrospect it seems this was an omen of how the rest of the trip would go--one detail after another going just wrong enough to keep us from doing things all together, and us scrambling to somehow make things happen anyway.

The flight from Lima to Cusco was amazing. We got up through the cloud layer and out into the sun, and looking out the window I could see mountains hemming the clouds in, the natural barrier that keeps Lima covered by fog all winter. It looked like a white lake was lapping against brown hills. As we flew inland, the edges of the cloud-lake crept in little rivers up between the fingers of the mountains--and then, as the mountains got bigger and wider, the clouds stopped dead. At a certain point the blanket of white just ended, with one little poof like a cotton ball broken off from the rest and floating inland, and down below in the valley was a silvery road where people driving away from Lima would come out of the fog into the sun.

And we were over the sierra. I always thought of mountains as a long, narrow string that you crossed over and were done, but this was true highland--mile after mile of tumbled hills and shadowed valleys. The mountains were steep and brown and looked inhospitable, but as we went on some of the slopes turned greener and I could see towns and farm areas perched on them, reached by little ribbons of road winding over and up and down. The lakes looked like sheets of metal and flashed as we went by. Later I learned that I was lucky to be on the left side of the plane--the right side going inland is apparently tilted up and gets none of the same views. Mom and Marissa missed out for that reason. Chrissy and Catherine didn't seem to care about the vistas as much as I did, but maybe they were just being polite about my having taken the window seat.

In the airport at Cusco we all found each other. We were driven to our hotel by a pair of taxi drivers/tour guides who had a very comfortable minivan and kept offering us rides to all the sights in the Sacred Valley, until Catherine answered, "No, tour guides cost a ton! We're not made of money!" which seemed to get them off our backs... for the moment.

Mom and Marissa in our first hostel. It was cheap, no heat, but generally clean and the sun warmed the top floor where we were during the day. The only problem was that Mom's rooom smelled really bad because when the toilet flushed it kind of sprayed little drops out onto the floor... she didn't stay there for long.

The first day I was lightheaded and short of breath from the altitude. Coca tea, an infusion of the leaves that the native peoples chewed for extra energy in wandering through the mountains and modern people now refine into cocaine, helped. Marissa felt sick at lunch and so Mom took her back while Catherine and Chrissy and I wandered the city. Cusco is absolutely beautiful--all the buildings are white with orange-brown slanted roofs, and the mountains surround it on all sides. It's so isolated, and the air is so fresh and clear, that it really does seem like it might be the center of the world the way the Incas thought. It also helps that the city revolves completely around tourists now, so everything in the center is kept beautiful and entertaining. In our wanderings around the plaza at night, I bought alpaca socks and Catherine found a dress for her sister's wedding, of all things.

(Light and shadow in Cusco is amazing.)

On the first morning, Catherine felt a little sick to her stomach, but she stayed in bed and was better by lunch. The rest of us spent the morning in administrative details: first getting another hotel room for Mom, in the beautiful tourist hotel around the corner from the cheap hostel, then buying our train tickets to Machu Picchu, then our bus tickets for the end of the week from Cusco to Arequipa. It was beautiful and sunny and I was loving the incredibly clear, fresh air, even though we hadn't "seen anything" yet. Then after lunch Mom felt sick with a fever and chills. She went to lie down in her new (heated) room. Marissa and I went and bought the last of our many tickets, the "tourist ticket" that admits you to many of the sights around Cusco... but then discovered that it didn't let you into any of the churches, which was what we wanted to see. In retrospect, I should have just paid the 10 soles and taken my sister in to see something already, but I was so sick of spending money on tickets that I wanted to actually use one of them. So we walked through the museum of the Quorikancha temple site, where the Church of Santo Domingo now stands. It was small and not very interesting.

Iglesia de Santo Domingo, from the outside, with a random guy's head.

One thing we could use the tourist ticket for was a performance of native music and dance at the Cultural Center in the evening, so we did that. It was full of brightly colored costumes and traditional huayno music, which uses a lot of string instruments and high-pitched voices all on the same (often very repetitive) melody, and dances with a lot of little foot-stomping jumps and interesting interactions between the dance partners (at one point the men put ropes around the women, at another the women kicked the men to the floor). We hear a ton of huayno in Tupac, and it gets really old really fast when your neighbors play it really loud for twelve hours straight on a Sunday to celebrate their patron saint--but it wasn't annoying at all in its natural setting, so to speak, of Cusco and the traditional dances. I feel like I understand it better just from seeing the landscape it comes from.

On our second morning in Cusco, Catherine, Chrissy, and I woke up early to go hiking. At last we were going to really explore the city. We followed my guidebook's directions up small cobblestone streets between white walls, up to an old, out-of-use church with a view over the whole city. On the way was a street called Purgatorio. This is us in Purgatory.

This is us on the church's plaza overlooking the city. By this time we were all hopelessly addicted to chullo shopping; here we are wearing some of the first ones we bought. I bought a belt from a señora here who showed me how she weaves them by hand.

We contiuned up the road and out of the city, up a hillside, shopping for more chullos and other gifts at the tourist stands set up along the way, to the ruins of Sachsayhuamán. It was a beautiful day and we took our time rambling around the remains of the Inca fortress that once stood there...

...and we met llamas!

We walked down the road to another hill, where there are ruins of the ancient temple Q'enco which was used (I found out from eavesdropping on a tour guide) for ritual sacrifices and telling the future, among other things. You could go inside the temple underground and walk around the tunnels, and we saw where they would pour chicha into rivulets in the stone to predict the future by the paths it took. We took a picture of me as a sacrifice on the stone tables, but unfortunately it was on Chrissy's camera and not digital.

Meanwhile Mom (who was feeling better) and Marissa went out to see the inside of the Cathedral, which houses a famous painting of Jesus at the Last Supper eating cuy (guinea pig), a traditional Cusqueñan dish. By the time we met up it was evening. They were in yet another hotel, because the nice one they'd found had only one night available; this one was cold because the room got no sunlight, and now Marissa was sick with the same chills and fever.

I went out again to go to Mass and to bring foodstuffs back to the hotel, feeling very tired and anxious about us getting to Machu Picchu. The church on the Plaza had an altarpiece two stories high and so covered with gold leaf that it hurt to look at, especially after all the sun we'd gotten that day up on the hills. The plan was to set out early the next morning to take buses around the sites in the Sacred Valley, arriving by 7:00 at the town of Ollantaytambo, where our train would leave for Aguas Calientes, the little town at the foot of Machu Picchu itself. The buses don't go any farther into the mountains than Ollantaytambo because the hills get so close together that it would be too difficult to put in roads; everyone who goes to Machu Picchu goes by the train, which follows the river winding in through the mountains. I hated the idea of leaving Mom and Marissa behind, but the train tickets couldn't be moved to another day.

That night I myself got the chills, at which point my goal went from getting everyone to Machu Picchu, to not dying and leaving my mother and sister stranded in a cold hotel in Cusco. In the morning I felt fine, but now Chrissy was sick and Marissa was still not up for the journey. We called the taxi driver/tour guide who had given us a ride from the airport, Josué, and asked him to drive us to and from Ollantaytambo as an alternative to taking the bus. He said he could do it for $40 each way; then he came to talk to us, we agreed on a time, and he went from $40 to $50, because he could see we had no other option if we wanted to get to our train. So we said okay. Meanwhile Mom had managed to contact an English-speaking doctor through her travel insurance and get him to come see Marissa and give her medicine to take. In the afternoon we moved Mom and the still-feverish Marissa to their fourth and final hotel, upscale and heated like the second one and much more comfortable than the third, and left for Ollantaytambo with Josué, our luggage, a still-half-sick Chrissy, much angst and guilt, and those precious, non-transferrable train tickets that were going to take us to Machu Picchu.

Visitors in Lima!

2007-08-07T17:31:00.000-04:00

Well! Quite a lot has happened in a short time during our mid-year vacation. I'm back in Lima now and feeling surprisingly rested, or at least refreshed, after a trip that rivals National Lampoon for things gone wrong on a vacation. The good news is that I got to see the sun, Cusco, llamas, the sun, Machu Picchu, the sun, about 27,000 chullos (those Andean wool hats with the ear flaps), the Sacred Valley of the Incas, and most of all my mom and my sister. And the sun.

On July 21st I went with Carlos the taxi driver to pick up Mom and Marissa from the airport. I realized that I really like airports--I love going, being on the road to a new destination, and also meeting people who are coming to see me, and airports are good that way. Having my family come visit was the next best thing to visiting home myself; since I couldn't go home, home came to see me. Marissa had finished the new Harry Potter on the plane and I'm not sure she entirely stopped thinking about it at any time during the two weeks that followed. She felt a little out of place because of the language barrier and being the only teenager around, but Mom was fearless, jumping into any and all conversations with whatever Spanish she had available. This was actually quite a bit, and she got along with the sisters (and pretty much everybody else in the pueblo) as though she'd known them forever--chatting with the people in our English class, meeting the music group after Mass and trying out her skills on the drum, telling slightly weird stories about her friends' pets during our welcome lunch with the sisters, etc. It was great. As always, the sisters were amazingly hospitable. They cooked us a wonderful lunch the first day the visitors were here, and Iris gave up her room for Catherine's friend Chrissy who also came to travel with us.

We did a little tourism in Lima the first few days. This is us in the Convento de Santo Domingo, where we learned about San Martín, my new favorite saint. Our friend Ever took us around the city center and we saw the cathedral, which was very impressive. (Only about an hour after the tour ended did I realize I had actually seen the same cathedral before, in February with the volunteers from Tony's... clearly Peru is driving me out of my mind...) There was sun on the Plaza de Armas and very crowded buses on the way back home.

The Cathedral of Lima...

Mom and Marissa also came to my English classes at the school and in the parish. My students really loved asking Marissa how old she was and where she was from, since they are the same age. On the last day of class before the Fiestas Patrias vacation, the school puts on a display of typical Peruvian foods from the different regions of the country, so our visitors got to see that, plus my chorus sang everything they've learned so far in front of the rest of the school. It was darling and they were so proud of themselves.

Wednesday night the sisters said goodbye to us with a lovely little bilingual tea, and on the morning of the 26th our journeys began...