Goodbye to the Hogar

During my first days at the Hogar, I thought I would never survive five weeks; the days were incredibly long, and there were so very, very many children. But it has come to feel like a home away from home, and our five weeks went by like no time at all. I'll try to put down some of my strongest memories from my time there, knowing that I will be back to visit for a weekend or two or three during the rest of my year.

During the week we usually help the little kids get bathed and dressed in the morning, go into Lima with them to their appointments if needed, or else hang out at the house helping with their lessons or playing. I, however, always enjoyed Saturdays most because it was market day. On a typical Saturday morning I get up at 6:45 or 7 to be downstairs by the time the kids finish breakfast at 7:30. (Wake-up call: the sound of Tony yelling from downstairs for the kids to finish their breakfast ("Angela! Avanza!"). Some of them just sit there staring at their food until barked at, which I do not understand.) Coming down from my room, I never make it past the second-floor landing, because there are little boys with leg problems sitting in chairs by the nurses' station who call out to you to bathe them, take them downstairs, or brush their teeth, all at once. It's both exhausting and hilarious to be greeted every morning with "Senorita, pichi!" or "Catalina! Catalina! Tu me banas!" I've gotten good at saying "No, I can't right now," if I'm too tired to deal with it that morning, but most of the time I kind of like it--it wakes you up kind of like a cold shower, which I am also learning to appreciate. I prefer to get the morning chaos out of the way before breakfast so that my eating won't be rushed with requests to go upstairs and brush teeth, etc.

At 9:30 or 10 on Saturday mornings we would go to the market. Dr. Tony drives one of the 15-passenger combis that are ubiquitous in Peru, with the volunteers, one of the cooks, Tony's friend Frank who is like a grandfather to all the kids, and usually one of the boys as well. The highway goes in between two chains of mountains that are nothing but stark, bare, gray-brown rock, but in the valley there are trees, houses, flowers, a river. The weather for the most part was sunny and relatively clear in Chaclacayo. We went to three different markets because Tony's favorite places to shop for vegetables (including 48 kilograms of potatoes every week), fruits, and meat are in three different places. Frank (Tio Fransicso to the kids) always bought a mano of tiny, sweet bananas and gave one to everybody. Among all the delicious food that we had at the Hogar, I think the fresh, sweet mangos we bought at that fruit market were my absolute favorite. On our last day at the market, Catherine and I bought a Peruvian cookbook, so now we're going to learn things like ceviche, papa a la huancaina, chicha morada... yum!

Later on we would take the kids to the park after lunch. I haven't yet managed to inform all of Peru that their custom of throwing water at women in February is disrespectful and unacceptable, but we did manage to have some great water fights among ourselves at the park (shh, don't tell Dr. Tony.) My friend John, a volunteer from Ireland and one of the nicest people I've met here, went and bought one of the boys a water gun, at which point we female volunteers taught the girls that the proper response to such a thing is not to scream and run, but to run at them all at once and take away the water gun! It was hilarious, especially since they kept giving the water gun to the blind kid, Jose Luis, or Arlis, who's in a wheelchair. I like Carnevales much better when it's among friends and/or when the people who have the most water are blind or immobile.

One of the most intense parts of our stay for me was being with some of the young women in the house, Anita and Marleney, when they were in pain at different times. Just before we left, Marleney had an operation which I didn't entirely understand, but which left her lying in her bed groaning in pain for hours even after they gave her painkillers. I had nothing to do but sit beside her and hold her hand. I sang songs that my mom used to sing to me as a baby, and then we prayed the Rosary together with some of the younger girls who were standing nearby in concern. Marleney was in too much pain to even pray along at some points, but later she thanked me for staying with her and taking care of her. It was a difficult but deeply touching experience to be there with my friend even though I felt I couldn't do much to help her. I did, however, go find Tony and ask for more painkiller for her, which seemed to work wonders in a few hours. When she felt better, we sat around chatting the same way we usually do in the mornings when she helps the cooks clean the little stones out of the rice before it's cooked.

The day before we left the Hogar was the birthday party for Terri. Terri is a missionary who felt called to sell everything she had in her home in Belgium and come to Latin America to work with the poor. She is a wonderful presence in the house--the kids call her Mama Teresa, and she is always very peaceful, joyful, and down-to-earth in the midst of all the chaos. The kids put on a musical show (Jose Antonio on the zamponia (pan pipes) and Jose Luis on the cajon (box-drum) playing traditional Andean music!) and a fashion show for her in the afternoon, and there was dancing and cake and ice cream on the patio. Then in the evening, all the volunteers, nurses, Tony, Frank, Terri, and the teachers went over to one of the teachers' house for a very authentically Peruvian party. We had baked chicken with aji sauce and salad for dinner, and then the teacher's husband played his trumpet (he used to be in a salsa band in Las Vegas) and their grandson played the drums, and everybody danced salsa and merengue. The younger teacher, Jenny, and her son did a dance to the trumpet music that involved white hankerchiefs and twirling and audience clapping. Victor and John ended up dancing in circles of women because they were the only guys around besides Tony and Frank, who didn't dance much (but even Tony got up and danced a little!). What an incredible way to end our stay. In the middle of all the fun and music I liked translating between the English-speaking volunteers and the Spanish-speaking nurses; Frank, who likes speech-making, kept making me his translator so that everybody would know what he was saying to Terri. All the volunteers chipped in to buy a nice bracelet for Terri, who was always our contact person whenever we needed anything in the house.

And so the day of our departure arrived... and it was discovered that all the girls in the house had head lice, and so did we. So the morning we were supposed to leave, Catherine and I treated our hair and started picking out the nits while we waited for the taxi (with the help of some leftover cake and ice cream to get us through). Back home in Delicias, we had to wash all our clothes in hot water, which means dumping boiling water from the stove onto buckets of soapy laundry, then wringing it out later and hanging it to dry... fun times. Now, after many nights of us combing through each other's hair, the little critters seem to be gone, knock on wood. I'm calling it part of the authentic Peruvian experience. We hope to go back and visit the Hogar soon, because we both miss the kids--but I'll be sure to put my hair up and wear a hat when I do.

Tourism in Lima

Two weeks ago, a few of us volunteers took the weekend off to be touristy in Lima. What a great way to relax! We stayed in this great little hostel in Barranco called The Point, which I would recommend to everybody. It is right across the street from the cliffs that overlook the ocean and very clean, with a garden patio, hammocks, ping pong, a kitchen, and an in-house bar with cheap drinks. We took a colectivo into Lima and got there in time for lunch, which we had at a delightful little restaurant just down the street. I had been in Peru for a month and this was my first meal in a restaurant, and wow! I had the best fish I've ever had in my life, cooked with tomatoes and onions and rice in a delicious sauce. They also brought us a free appetizer of ceviche, a typical Peruvian dish of seafood covered in lime sauce, onion, garlic, and other wonderful things. You can get it with just fish or with fish pieces along with shrimp, scallops, etc. None of it is cooked, which is why we had to wait to get it in a good restaurant--but it is delicious!! We also had chicha, a purple drink made from some type of corn with apple slivers and lime juice, which is awesome. The day was sunny and beautiful and we walked along the coast of Barranco up to Miraflores, the rich, touristy section of Lima. The coast is amazing because it is all high cliffs overlooking a thin strip of beach, and at the top there are footpaths going along among trees and gardens with beautiful flowers. I told the others that I didn't care about living in a poor area of Lima if I could just come walk along the coast looking out at the Pacific every week! Sadly, everyone has been telling us that Lima is covered with fog for the entire winter... so we were very lucky to have that weekend be so beautiful.

Wandering around Miraflores, we came to a plaza with a huge sign that said Dia del Pisco Sour. They have a whole weekend celebration of their national drink! I couldn't believe it. There was music set up in the plaza and a pavilion with lots of different vendors of pisco (a liquor made from grapes) and pisco sour (a mixed drink involving egg whites, syrup, and other good things.) We got lots of free samples and then I bought a little glass of the best kind. Farther down that street was a whole strip of painters selling their art, much of which was gorgeous. I'm saving my shopping for later in the year, however.

As it got dark, we walked a lot through the city and took a bus to the center, where we saw two famous plazas, and in between them a street full of crowds, clothing and cell phone stores, and questionable-looking food places--Norky's, for example, looked like Boston Market but greasier. One of the plazas had an amazing cathedral that must have been from the 16th or 17th century, huge, dark and cavernous inside, with beautiful statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary lit up in the chapels and covered in gold adornments. I've been noticing that lots of the statues of the crucified Jesus that I see here are more graphically realistic than the ones in the US. In the Delicias church, for example, there is a model of Jesus crucified and lying in what looks like a glass coffin, bleeding and wounded--very arresting, and it's literally not far removed from the people, because they walk by on their way out of church and lay a hand on the glass to pray. In contrast, here in the suburb of Chaclacayo there is a mural on the church wall of different scenes from Jesus's passion, but no blood anywhere in the picture--the images are more stylized and Jesus himself looks almost as healthy as the people hurting him, so that the whole thing has an air of sadness rather than violence. The contrasting images remind me very powerfully of the difference in the lives of the rich and the poor and what they have to deal with. The residents of Chaclacayo are saddened by the suffering in the world, but it's the people of Delicias who really want a god who bleeds and dies, who can relate to their suffering. I'm sure I don't even understand this now as fully as I will later; I don't know if I can ever truly understand it, coming from my comfortable background; but I can tell it's there.

Anyway, that night in Lima we went out with a group of gringos from the hostel to a dancing place. The live music was very cool, but I came back early at 3 am to go to bed and get a good sleep. The next day we wandered around some more after a comfortable morning sleeping in at the hostel and then came back. I'm looking forward to trying more typical Peruvian foods in the future--Catherine and I have bought a Peruvian cookbook for when we go back to Lima and have to take turns cooking for the house.

Llama count: still zip.

Carnivales

Disclaimer: Carnivales is clearly one of those things they warned us about in our program orientation, where the customs in another county seem downright WRONG to you, but perfectly normal to the people here... so read the following with a grain of culture-shock salt. All I can recod is my own expeience; perhaps later on I will come to undestand this better, but there are certain aspects of it that I hope I never come to approve of.

So February in Peru is the time of Carnivales, something that was probably originally related to Mardi Gras but has now become totally different. Instead of one day, it's the whole month, and instead of any celebrations that I can see, the custom is for young people to throw water at random passersby on the streets, especially on Sundays, especially off the main roads where they can wander around in groups waiting for potential targets. Water balloons, buckets of water, hoses, and water guns are all included. Now I don't mind a water fight between friends, especially since it's summer and hot, but to me there are several things very wrong with this little custom.

1. It can be dangerous. Kids throw water balloons at passing buses and cars, and Dr. Tony says he has known them to shatter the windows. And water balloons thrown at people on the streets can hurt. (See story below.)

2. It is disrespectful. In Lima, the throwing can include paint as well as water; here in the suburbs it is a little calmer, and they stick with grass clippings in their buckets of water. Not to mention the fact that they do it to complete strangers who may not want to be soaked!

3. It is a battle of the sexes. Boys soak girls and girls soak boys; when we took the kids to the park for the first time in February, some of the male volunteers were very sternly lectued by the boys for being traitors and thowing balloons at them instead of the girls. Now this is not a bad thing when there are plenty of boys and girls all throwing water at each other, like when we all go to the park together from the house. But what happens in practice is that groups of boys roam the streets targeting girls to soak. Last week, Catherine and I were coming back from the Intenet cafe in the evening and we decided to take the back road through the pretty, quiet suburban neighborhood... or so we thought. We didn't even notice that there were eight or ten teenage guys nearby until we had passed them, and suddenly they yelled, Now! Let's go! and ran toward us with water balloons and buckets. One of them came up three feet behind me and pegged me straight in the butt with a baloon. I couldn't believe it. They tossed a bucket of water and grass clippings all over us, which Catherine got most of, and there were balloons exploding eveywhere around us. We didn't want to scream and run, but we basically had nothing else to do. These were not little kids; they were young men in their late teens, ten of them, laughing and soaking us as we stuggled to comprehend the situation and remember our Spanish curse words and failed at both. We half-ran away and quickly turned back to the main road, where we have not had problems so far.

It was kind of a scary feeling because we were really helpless, but I was more ouraged than afraid. It was not a water fight because we had no water; it would not have been fair even if we had had water because they were ten young men and we are two women. It was absolutely sexual harrassment because he hit me in the butt with the balloon. But what really set me off was how the kids laughed at it when we got back. Incensed, I told my story about how they attacked us ten to two and hit me in the behind, and one of the boys said, Oh yeah, the girls always hope the water doesn't get them here! and pointed to his chest. I don't have time right now to go into how this mentality really really scares me. Suffice it to say that it shows how the machismo of this culture, the objectifying of women, goes waaay deeper than I'd thought, and you'll never convince me that this water-throwing is unconnected to the early sexualizing of young Latina girls and the issues with respect for women here. The kids try to tell me that it's a two-sided battle and that girls throw water too, but you don't see groups of girls roaming the streets and hitting solitary boys in the crotch with water balloons. That's all I'll say. I was ranting angrily about it all night, but the kids were all laughing, and what troubles me is that I don't know if I can make them see why it's a problem.

Anyway... rant over for now. The next day in the park, I got out a lot of my anger by pegging one of the more obnoxious boys in the house with a balloon--while he was running, too. It was very satisfying. Especially because he hit me first with two balloons and then sprayed me and the other girls with the hose, after I told him I wasn't playing. To their credit, John and Victor, the American volunteers, were very suppotive in equalizing the playing field a bit among the kids and chasing down the more troublesome boys so that the girls could have a chance at hitting them. Sheesh.

Rich and poor

This past week we got to see the immense contrast that exists in Peru, as in the US, between the very rich and the very poor. The part of Lima we live in, Las Delicias de Villa, is definitely a poor, third-world area. Not all the streets are paved and there is dirt and dust everywhere; some of the houses look finished but others are literally shacks made out of some brick and some random pieces of siding material. You wouldn't think anyone lived there except for the laundry strung up inside. Many houses don't have running water, electricity, or both, so there are always wet patches on the streets where people toss their water out the front door, which sometimes get unattractive if people drop fruit peels or other things that can attract flies. There are knee- or waist-high piles of dirt everywhere, which I can only explain by guessing that the people were moving it out of the way to build their houses and had literally nowhere to put it. Rich people can take dirt "away," but where does it go? A question I had never asked myself.

Chaclacayo, in contrast, has pretty houses with gardens, a library, a nice central park/square with coffee shops and laundromats and a bar or two. No piles of dirt. And there really are some very rich people here, because last week Dr. Tony and all the kids were invited to the home of some friends from church for lunch. They live in a gated community right at the foot of the mountains. They have a lovely house with lots of windows and glass doors, a pool, a patio, a lush green lawn which has to be irrigated to be that way, a trampoline, two new-looking cars, and four or five domestic servants, plus a full-time nanny for their little granddaughter who was visiting. The couple seemed like very nice, unassuming people; you would never guess that they were rich until you saw their house. Dr. Tony told us that they invite the kids over twice a year and send their servants' children to school. The kids loved the trampoline and pool. What an amazing contrast to see.

Peruvian hospitals and other types of chaos

We've been at Dr. Tony's for a week and a half now and are starting to get the hang of things. We basically have two types of jobs as volunteers: hang around the house, spend time with the kids, and help the nurses and the teacher; or go with groups of kids into Lima for their medical appointments. There are people hired to take the kids in to the hospitals, but often they need extra adults to hold hands or carry little ones.

On my first full day in the house, Dr. Tony asked me if I would be willing to donate blood for one of their patients, a 25-year-old with aplastic anemia who seems to need transfusions almost weekly. Tony assured me that all the needles and medical facilities are safe and hygenic, and I admit that his being an American doctor made me trust his judgment. Ridiculous fact #1 about Peruvian health care: there are no blood banks to speak of. If someone needs a blood transfusion, they have to go find a friend or relative to donate specifically for them. So I agreed and took the bus into the hospital in Lima with a very nice employee of Tony's named Norma. The hospital was an old building but clean enough, but the disorganization left me pretty much speechless. In order to donate blood, we had to get an order signed by somebody, except that nobody seemed to know who that somebody was, and Norma couldn't get anything helpful out of the nurses for a long time. When we did get the order signed, we had to go back to the front of the hospital to pay 70 soles for the donation (ridiculous fact #2.) Then there was more waiting, a very nice young lab technician who flirted politely with me while I sat around, a bunch of questions in Spanish about my medical history, and then the actual donation. Then Norma had to go wandering around the hospital (with me in tow drinking Gatorade and eating cookies to get some blood sugar back) looking for Hipolito's doctor. No pagers, no schedule of where the doctor is at what time--Norma, not the nurses, had to go walking around asking people if they had seen the doctor. This lasted for about 15 minutes until we discovered that the doctor was not in that day. So instead of leaving the proper paperwork with the nurses, Norma was told to come back tomorrow to give the donation slip to the doctor, who would then give my blood to Hipolito. Meanwhile, as Norma is looking for the doctor, the nurses and various people in the hospital wing are standing around a big Nativity scene for the Bajada de Reyes, which is a lovely little ceremony in which the baby Jesus and the rest of the nativity figures are taken down to singing and clapping. I don't know which was a bigger shock to me--the fact that the Catholic faith was so public, or the fact that they were all singing and taking down the figurines while poor Norma went wandering around looking for the doctor. Luckily Hipolito didn't seem like he needed the blood right that minute; he was sitting up and talking to me and hugging people who came to visit. He's a very sweet person and he has since come back to the house, but he hasn't stopped needing blood donations.

Probably the biggest surprise to me is that the hospital chaos, like the chaos that is Peruvian driving, doesn't surprise anyone here. On another occasion I went with a group of kids to physical therapy, and the therapist that two of them see wasn't there when we arrived, so the kids just shrugged and said they would come back tomorrow and settled down to wait for about two hours while everyone else was seen. It was unbelievable.

The house is more relaxing than going into Lima, but it too has its organized chaos. The kids get up before 6 am and have breakfast at 7. We usually help the little ones who can't walk to bathe and brush their teeth after breakfast, or else I go downstairs to hang out with the older kids and help the teacher by reading to them or putting on music for them to dance to on the patio. The babies come downstairs to play for an hour at 10. Lunch is at 12 and the kids always want to go to the park afterwards, where the older boys play soccer, some on crutches which is very impressive, and the others swing or run around playing. It's a beautiful area and a very nice park with lots of green grass and flowers around. In the afternoon the adults usually take breaks, often at the little coffee shop down the street; the kids eat at 5, Dr. Tony goes to daily Mass at 6:30, and when he gets back the adults eat dinner. Catherine and I have been trying to do English lessons for the bigger kids from 8-9 at night, and then they go to bed. I'm starting to learn all the kids' names and to enjoy their wonderful different personalities... more later on individual adorableness.

The kids got stuffed wool llamas as presents yesterday, so my llama count is officially up to 0.5!

Dr. Tony´s house

Yesterday we left Lima for the Hogar San Fransisco de Asis, an hour from our house in Delicias by taxi. It´s in a suburb of Lima called Chaclacayo, which is a much nicer residential area than where we´ve been living. There are large, pretty houses and quiet streets to walk down to the park/playground. The house seems chaotic when you first go in, but it´s actually very well organized. There are cooks, nurses, and laundry people there, plus volunteers from the US and Ireland, to run the daily life of 61 young people from newborns to people in their mid-20´s. About half of the kids are from Lima, the rest are from various parts of Peru, and all of them need medical treatment in the city´s hospitals, which they wouldn´t be able to afford or get transportation to if it weren´t for Dr. Tony. They are all adorable. My Spanish is improving quickly from hanging out with them. It´s fun because we don´t have to police the kids too much; there are nurses to do that, so we mostly just play with them, take them to the park, bring the babies downstairs from the nursery to play, etc. The kids all have chores, and they keep the place quite clean, sweeping and washing the dishes after every meal. Everybody has a job to do. Those who can walk do the sweeping, those who can´t, dry the dishes; the older boys pick the little ones up out of their wheelchairs to carry them upstairs, and almost none of them do much whining or complaining at all. It´s really amazing. The house is absolutely full of religious pictures and statues, and Dr. Tony leads the kids in prayer before every meal. It´s encouraging to look at a picture of Jesus with kids when I feel overwhelmed... it reminds me that just being there for them is one of the most valuable ways I could spend my time. The kids liked my guitar playing and one of the boys kept requesting songs by Greenday, Coldplay, Dido, and Alanis Morrissette. ¨Feliz Navidad¨was the only song we all knew and could sing together. Not that all of them were there listening, of course--the house is too big, and the kids wander off and amuse themselves during their free time.

All of which takes my mind off the fact that the accomodations are less comfortable than in the nuns´house. Catherine and I share a room with Terri, a Belgian woman who has been working there for a year and who snores like nothing I have ever heard. She´s very sweet and knows that she keeps people up at night, so she´s offered to sleep in the clothes-storage room, which is actually bigger than our room and has a mattress... we feel bad kicking her out, but we also want to sleep at night. The room is smaller than a single dorm room at Maryland and has a bunkbed and a twin bed and not much room for anything else. The mattress and pillow are pretty lame and the shower doesn´t always have hot water, but then again my towel is big enough to wrap around me and we don´t have to stand in a bucket. So whatever, I´m learning to chill out and go with things--something in which I definitely take my cue from the kids.

Catherine and I are going to start some informal English lessons for the kids who want to learn. A lot of them do. It´s fun to be in a bilingual house where actually only three or four people are really bilingual; the volunteers speak English, the nurses and cooks and kids speak Spanish, and Catherine, Tony, our Belgian roommate and I can go either way. Somehow, though, the rest of the people manage to communicate through the language barrier. It´s also great to have the adult society of the volunteers (with their great accents!) who all eat together after the kids have had their dinner. They´re good at taking sanity breaks, such as Dr. Tony´s daily coffee break at 4 pm.

Catherine is beating me mercilessly at the cockroach-killing, so I´ve decided to stop keeping count. There aren´t any at Dr. Tony´s house anyway. I forefeit with a score of 3-6.

Llama count: still 0. Cows grazing on the side of a rather large highway next to a car mechanics shop: 1.

p.s.--There are mountains around here that are huge, bare, uninhabitable hills of brown rock and dirt. Very starkly beautiful, especially when the mist lifts and the sun or stars are out.

A little background info

Perhaps not everybody knows exactly why we're here or what we're doing. Catherine and I are spending a year in Peru as Notre Dame Mission Volunteers, which means we will be serving as tutors in the spirit of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, who dedicate themselves to educating the poor as a work of justice. Our placement is at the Fe y Alegria school in Lima, Peru, where we will be tutoring English and reading (and maybe a little music, now that the sisters have discovered my modest guitar abilities). We are living with three very nice sisters in a house five minutes away from the school. The Peruvian school year starts in March, because the seasons are the opposite from the Northern hemisphere, so between now and March, we will have another volunteer opportunity at the Hogar San Fransisco de Asis, a home for kids who need medical treatment. The home is an hour outside Lima; it is run by an American doctor who moved to Peru to work with children whose families can't pay for the operations they need. Dr. Tony provides a place for the kids to stay and organizes their treatment in the city hospitals. There are over 50 kids living there, with a cooking staff and everything, so they mostly need volunteers to play with the kids and spend time with them. Apparently this is great language training as well... if you know me and kids, you may have guessed that I'm also bringing lots of books to lock myself in my room with when they get to be too much.

We've been here for eight days now and are getting the lay of the land a bit. Living in a desert climate is very different--everything is dusty, including the unpaved street in front of our house, and most of the world is brown, tan, or dusty red brick, except the brightly painted houses and the little green patches of garden or cactus. The houses in our neighborhood look like they´re falling apart, but actually they're being built up; people here start with one floor and build upwards a little bit at a time, as they can afford the bricks. There are knee-high piles of dirt and/or bricks all over the place. Sometimes you see a very nice-looking house literally across the street from a shack of metal and wood that wouldn't look like a house in any sense except that there's laundry strung up inside it. Our house is very nice because it has running water and electricity; we cook on a gas stove that you light with a match, or in the oven. We boil all the water that we drink or use to wash food because the water isn't safe to drink or brush your teeth with. There´s no water drainage system to speak of, so when you shower, you have to stand in a bucket so that very little goes down the drain. Then you pour the water into another bucket and put it by the toilet so it can be used to flush. Fact: if you dump any old bucket of water into a toilet, it will flush. Who knew. Other than that, we haven´t had to change our lifestyle too much. The lack of Internet in the house actually hurts most, because I´m so used to having it at my fingertips to talk to people... we do all our Internet work from little cafes that have tiny little cubicles with old-looking desktops in them, but the connection is fast enough. There´s a TV that we watch the news on for language practice, and a radio/CD player. ...Oh, but before I talk about not changing my lifestyle too much, I still need to wash my clothes by hand. We'll see how that goes this weekend.

Cockroach count: Catherine 4, me 3. Llama count: 0.

Busy first week

So no, I haven't met a llama yet, but that's about the only thing Catherine and I haven't seen during this first week. Animals that we have sighted include tons of dogs in various states of cleanliness, live chickens and little chicks for sale in mesh bags in the market, some birds in the nearby nature reserve, a very fluffy and very dusty sheep coming out of a neighbor's house like a dog, and a few cockroaches in our house (killed so far: me 2, Catherine 1).

Lima is a city of unbelievable contrasts. A twenty-minute bus ride takes you from Tupac, our fairly poor neighborhood where people throw their water out on the streets, to a shopping center called Metro that would fit perfectly in a Maryland suburb. (Metro itself is a superstore that combines something of a Giant, a Sears, and a CVS together. I bought NoAd suscreen there, the exact same brand that I use in the US.) The bus system here is organized chaos incarnate--it really does work, and there seem to be prescribed routes that different buses follow, but mostly it consists of vehicles from small minivans to large buses going along with a guy hanging out the door and yelling where they're going to, like so: "BarrancoChorrilloHuaylas! HuaylaHualyaHualyas!" If you want to ride, you stick out your arm and they stop for you. There are very few personal cars on the streets. And if you think US driving is bad, the drivers here pay zero attention to lanes and honk to let people know they're going around them. It's kind of fun to sit back and watch the chaos as long as you don't have to do the driving.

Well, our time is up... more later.

I'm in Peru!

Hola a todos desde Lima! Catherine and I got in last night at about 12:30 and were met by Sr. Therese, who waited patiently holding her sunflower for us to appear out of customs. Our flight was uneventful. We took a taxi right along the coast of the Pacific Ocean to get to our pueblo, Las Delicias de Villa. It's a poor area, and our first introduction to the mercado street this morning was a quite overwhelming experience. There are little stands selling everything imaginable, all in bright colors; dogs and people dodging out of the way of tiny "moto-taxis" that resemble a child-carrier on the back of a bicycle, except with a motor and a driver (we rode in one back to the house and it was kind of fun!); the streets are dusty and unpaved, and nothing is as clean as we're used to in America, but the people are dressed like anyone you'd see in the US and there are stores selling Puma sneakers alongside homemade jewelry stands. The open-market food, which we have been warned not to eat, doesn't look too tempting because everything from raw meat to fruit is exposed to the open air, with nothing to keep away flies. Many of these houses I'm sure have no running water, and yet here we are with internet and cell phone stores next to the food stands. Anyway, it's been an overwhelming but exciting first day. Next time I'll write about the showers in our house. ;)