After a long silence, I am back to find that most of the links on my front page are down and there have been a whole lot of spammers leaving junk mail in the comments of my older posts. It didn’t occur to me that spammers would be interested in blogs until I saw (and deleted) the multitude of ads about everything from free movie downloads to penis pumps. Feeling like it’s 1997 when spamming was still cool, I apologize to all my G-Rated readers who averted their eyes in my absence. And for all my readers, I’ll see what I can do about getting my photo albums and guestbook back in working order.

Now for an update… Since I have a lot to catch up on, I’ll start from the beginning of what will be a year long anthropology journey into the world of Yucatan. Over the coming week, I’ll do my best to continue catching you up to current day, though I’ll be juggling fieldwork, transcription and fieldnotes in the meantime. My goal is to get all the retrospection out there so I can get back to what I like best: writing about curiosities and delights of everyday life in my current surroundings. But for now, I begin with an update of the Mayan program. Hold on tight, because it’s a bumpy ride.

I officially moved out of our house in Florida on June 12th, when I flew to North Carolina to start the Maya Summer Language Program at the University of North Carolina.  I received a Foreign Language and Area Studies grant to cover the costs of the program and most of my travel expenses (Thank you UF Latin American Studies Program!). The program ran for a total of six weeks. The first three weeks we spent at UNC-Chapel Hill, then relocated to Valladolid, which is a lovely little cultural town in the southwest of Yucatan state. In North Carolina, I was lucky enough to lodge with my good friend Gypsy’s parents and their amazing neighbor Richard, who just happen to live about five minutes’ walk from the building where we had our classes. Gypsy had left her car with her mom while she was in Greece doing some summer fieldwork, so I even had a car most of the time I was there! Unfortunately, Gypsy and I didn’t realize I could borrow the car until the course really got underway.  Let me explain.

They don’t call it a six week “intensive” summer course for nothing. We six beginner Maya students were in class from 9am to 4pm everyday with a one hour lunch break. Each day, we had two professors who had very different teaching styles and often didn’t know how much homework the other was giving. The first week of the course, I didn’t have Gypsy’s car. Even though I had to take the bus to do my grocery shopping (a three hour ordeal), I still found time to relax and catch up with Joost on the phone. That was the first week.  By the second week, the work had really started to pile up at the same time that the work load itself had increased.

To give you an idea of how quickly time went by, we had a mid-term exam on the 7th day of class, or in the middle of week two. Of course, this wasn’t the actual “mid-term,”  but the middle of the first half of the class.  So it was the middle of our time in North Carolina and thus the mid-term exam of the two professors that would be teaching us in North Carolina, since they wouldn’t be joining us in Yucatan. It all went downhill from there. That Saturday we had a workshop, which nixed one of our free days. Then the next week, which was our last week in North Carolina, we had two tests and two projects. Originally I think they had four projects planned, but then realized how ludicrous that was and decided to “put off” two projects for the teachers in Mexico to do. They never did…

There were many times during the first half of the class that I was overtaken by a very strange and distantly familiar feeling. Around 2 or 3pm everyday, my brain would begin to scramble the messages that were coming in. At first it was just confusing, but when the messages didn’t stop, it started to ache. It wasn’t a painful ache, it was just uncomfortable. The feeling that accompanies utter brain exhaustion is hard to describe, so I came up with an analogy that I think most parents and anyone who remembers being a kid can appreciate. Think of a three-year-old that is hungry. Because she is still so young, she hasn’t yet learned that the pain associated with hunger is not life threatening or scary. In fact, it’s a very normal type of pain to which the remedy is easy, accessible, quick and often enjoyable. But to a three-year-old that is just learning the messages of the human body, the discomfort is indefinite, which IS scary. So what does she do? She complains. And what does she do if no one listens? She internalizes the discomfort. And then what? Well, mom and dad, she throws herself on the floor and cries, the tears streaming, face reddened and pride hurt because she’s uncomfortable and there is absolutely nothing she can do about it because she doesn’t know how. THAT’s what I felt like at 2 or 3pm everyday. I had to resist the temptation to throw myself on the classroom floor and cry at the fact that my brain couldn’t take in any more and I was helpless in doing anything about this unfamiliar discomfort. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I was the only one trying to cope with this discomfort and, for a group of advanced students like ourselves, the fact that this discomfort was associated with brain saturation was just too surprising and much to handle most days.

We made it through… physically.  It makes sense that when you spend that much time with people under so much stress and confusion, you get sick of them. So while we made it through physically, I can’t say the same about the social life of the group. And, if the reactions were intense in North Carolina, you can imagine what happened when we went to Mexico and were immersed in a different culture, a different language and a new setting. While the work load relaxed and there was a pool where the hottest tempered individuals could cool themselves, the social relations continued to deteriorate and everyone, from the professors to the teaching assistants to the students felt the effects. It was quite a difficult environment to learn in.

Two strokes of luck kept my feet on the ground. The first was that the Intermediate Mayan class was already in Valladolid when we arrived. I roomed with a lovely Mississippi gal named Maggie who brought light to an otherwise dark time. She introduced me to her classmates and we all got along swimmingly. We spent many a night at a little restaurant/bar down the street that had delicious tacos and fantastical drinks that tickled your five senses. How so, you ask? Memo, the bartender, worked in Cancun for a few months while one of his cousins was out sick. This man is a natural born bartender who quickly soaked up the thrill of Cancun and transported it back to his hometown of Valladolid. There were only a few drinks on his menu that could just be drunk normally. The other 90% required you to use a sense other than taste. The submarine, a true party drink, required you to listen, as the click of the tequila glass inside the beer glass signalled for you to pass the glass to the person on your left. The moped (they called it the muppet because, well, they sound the same to a Spanish speaker) is a concoction of beverages in a shot glass that, when banged on the table, erupts like a magical volcano. Memo handles the glass and makes sure it makes it to your mouth as you’re simultaneously preoccupied with being the center of attention AND trying to calm that big-eyed look of surprise at the overflowing glass. I don’t know about everyone else but, given how silly and cartoonish the whole situation felt, I thought Muppet was a much more appropriate name than Moped. Then there was the Ticket to Ride. This involved a very strong mixture of liquors, one of which was set aflame, and the shaking of your head as you try to swallow it all.  You really must see it to believe how ridiculous the whole thing is, but when someone bought me a Ticket to Fly, I firmly told Memo not to shake my head, thanks. I’ll leave the habanero martini, and its dreaded after effects, to your (wildest) imagination…

So that group and that place was lucky stroke number one. The second lucky stroke was that my advisor’s summer abroad course was in Yucatan the same time as the Mayan program.  It’s a six week anthropology course, mostly for undergrads, that is based in Merida during the week and travels all around Yucatan during the weekends. If you’ve been keeping track of me recently, you’ll remember that I was the graduate assistant to this program in the summers of 2008 and 2010. This year, my friend Carmen was the graduate coordinator and our other friend, June, was conducting preliminary fieldwork in Merida at the same time.

During my second weekend in Yucatan, we had a Friday off from the Mayan course. I’m still not sure what the occasion was, but I grabbed the bus by the horns and bought my ticket out of Valladolid for the weekend. I arrived to the bust station at about 8pm and, to my disappointment, the bus didn’t leave until 830 or so. I found myself sitting there, watching the red numbers on the digital clock above the bathroom tick by so slowly. Since Carmen was living in the place I had lived in Summer 2010 and was hanging out with Carlos and Alberto and all the other friends I had grown to love that summer, I felt like I was going home. The feeling of sickness at the inert numbers on the clock was made all the worse by the combined feeling of escape. I needed a break from the Mayan course. I needed someone to prick the pressure bubble I had been living in for the last five weeks so I could deflate. Finally the minute arrived and they called my bus. A military looking guy that was waiting for a bust to Tulum sternly insisted that he load my bag into the bus. I said thank you and the bus left.

I spent an absolutely wonderful weekend catching up with Carmen, June, Carlos Alberto and everyone that works on the summer program. It was like seeing my long lost friends… and just in time. We went to dance at the cumbia club, where I have the nicest memories of spending time with Carlos, Alberto and Joost. We drank the milk from giant coconuts as we walked down the beach and chatted about our summers. We summited two Mayan pyramids and saw flamingos, then I fell asleep in a hammock. It was fabulous. It was relaxing. It was exactly what I needed and everything I loved about Yucatan all rolled into one weekend. I went back to Valladolid refreshed and ready to fight the last week of the battle with calm and poise. The last week was far worse than I could have ever expected thanks to the greatest display of immaturity I have seen in my adult life, but that’s a story for another time and place.

So how is my Mayan? It sucks, to be quite honest. I did the best I could and am thankful for what I learned. At the end of the Mayan program, I got on a bus to Merida and only said good bye to one person. I said it in English, if that’s any indication…

To end and otherwise sad story with a happy note, there is another developing episode to my Mayan language study. You’ll read about my mom’s visit to Yucatan in another post, but while she was here, we went shopping with Carlos at the weekly art fair in downtown Merida. We dropped by the Casa de Artesanias (Artesan House? That sounds less glamorous in English) and Carlos saw a sign advertising Mayan language classes. After my mom left the following week, I went to check it out. Just like when finding my PhD topic last summer, I was sent round and round to different offices chasing down what turned out to be an outdated advertisement. BUT, in my quest, I walked into INDEMAYA, which is a state government funded office dedicated to the preservation and education of Mayan culture. The uncharacteristically stand-offish security guard at the front gate sent me to a professor named Felipe who informed me that classes wouldn’t start up again until the end of September. Because the classes are government subsidized, they cost around 5 dollars for about 10 weeks of classes, which covers the costs of materials. There is a beginner class on Tuesday evenings and an intermediate class on Wednesdays. Felipe said I could come to both, since one focuses on vocabulary and the other on grammar.

Felipe perked up when I mentioned that I was interested in his courses because I had attended the Univ of North Carolina Maya program.  I assured him it wasn’t worth getting excited over, but he told me that he was planning to apply for the UNC Master’s program in linguistics to formalize his knowledge of Maya and other indigenous languages.  He was interested in finding an English language partner to help him study for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), which is required as part of his application.

What luck! All week I had been thinking how great it would be to have a Maya-English language exchange. I doubted I’d ever find someone who would be patient enough and have the language training to be able to exchange with such a difficult language as Mayan. Through my experience in the UNC program, I found that there are a lot of people who speak the language but, because it isn’t taught in schools here, native speakers usually don’t know how to explain how it works. They’re very good at correcting errors, but for a beginner that is still learning the mechanics of the language, I can’t even really talk yet. So, despite my doubts about finding such a person, he was sitting right in front of me.  This isn’t the first time that dedication and serendipity have worked in my favor in Yucatan.

To update this update, Felipe and I met up last week to discuss our plan of action. We decided that, until Mayan classes start up in a few weeks, we’ll meet twice a week. I’ll be studying a sort of textbook that I bought from one of the UNC teachers (which Felipe happens to know backward and forward) and Felipe will be studying a TOEFL book that I downloaded from the Univ of Florida library. We’ll study at home as much as time permits, then we’ll discuss our difficulties and practice speaking during our meetings. It will be challenging to find the time to study at home, but I am motivated to overcome the insecurities I learned from the UNC program.  Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Diablos are usually men. The women generally wear obscenely short skirts with tons of frill underneath and a beady, sequined jungle of intertwined strings and designs on top. The vest can have anywhere from one to four layers depending on how intricate it is, and their braided hair is usually topped with some sort of flashy, matching feathers or hat that, believe it or not, outdoes the outlandish fashions some southern women wear on their heads for church or that swanky Aussie women wear to the horse races. Not to mention what a pot hole Oruro is, but this is their one big event for the entire year, so the girls go all out on the make up to the point where even the ugly ones are pretty. Well, most of them.

Finally, there are these big fuzzy bear costumes that are absolutely adorable. Their legs are really short with these big ol’ bellies so when the people inside them try to run, they look like they’re waddling. One group had some baby bears with kids inside them, so you can imagine we were all cooing at them. Unfortunately, I only took one of the kids’ little old-school photo project cameras because it’s not uncommon to have things stolen and I love my digital too much to see it go. So the pictures aren’t that great and they’re prints, so I’ll have to wait to post them until I get a chance to scan them into the compy.

Since we didn’t really get out of the hostel until about 11 and since I really hadn’t eaten anything but beer the day before, we decided to go find some decent food before we molded ourselves into our seats. We ended up walking a good few blocks and then having to cross the parade route to get to our seats. What a mess. Again, we were stuck behind the bleachers trying to get through this little fenced in passage way, but this time there was a wall about 5 feet from the back of the bleachers and about 40 extra drunk people creating an unsympathetic undertow. We were literally squished in the crowd to the point that if someone fell, they’d just get sucked right underfoot. I finally understood the logistics of how exactly people get trampled at concerts and stuff. Only one thing could part this crowd.

A dancer came off the street wanting to get through to the area behind the bleachers. As I mentioned in the last post, the dancers are sacred. If one comes through, even if he’s trying to go the opposite way as the current, everyone gets out of his way. Well, this dancer happened to be wearing a giant blue costume with lots of jutting out tiers and gold beads that took up the equivalent of about four of us squished people. He’d lost the head of his costume somewhere along the way, so that wasn’t getting hung on the bleachers and on people’s clothes like the rest of him was. Plus, he was drunk. Like, really drunk, which is why he was leaving the parade. I don’t think he meant to leave the parade. It looked more like his feet just took him that way and he went along with them. We know who was the captain of that ship!

Anyway, everyone moved out of his way, which squished some folks in even tighter. But no one seemed to mind as everyone was watching this lost boat of a man. A guy in a ball hat saw the dancer’s eyes rolling back in his head as he slumped against the base of the bleachers. Thank god his costume caught on the metal of the beams so he didn’t do an ass-plant in the mud and soil his pretty white trousers.

If you saw this, what would be your first reaction? Perhaps, “Wow, he’s dehydrated, he could use some water,” or even, “Whoo weee, he’s drunk.” I’m not sure which one of these got mixed up in Ball Hat Boy’s head but he rushed over to the guy, tilted his head upward with the grace of a first aid student in training, and proceeded to gently pour beer into his mouth. Jesus. I could be wrong but I don’t think that was the most logical idea.

About that time, the floodgates opened and the congealed crowd started sliding forward. We made it through the fenced gate and across the street without getting bombed at all. I’m not sure how. Our seats were only about a block away from there, so we kept walking, climbing through the forest of beams beneath the bleachers. We got sprayed here and there with a can of foam, had a few water balloons and trashed dropped down through the bleachers with a lot of close calls, no worries.

We found the backside of our seats and were trying to decide who would climb up first. About that time, a group of three guys about 23 years old started passing by. One of them lightly grabbed me around the back of the neck laughing as he sprayed me in the face. I had my hat on, so I just tilted my head down to let the bill catch the foam and keep the rest of it out of my eyes. After a few seconds, when he was still spraying, I had a flash of a thought that this was a little weird, but then they left.

Andy was fired up, smiling and asking me to hand him our can of spray. I dug it out of my bag, handed it to him, and he ran off after the guys. From his point of view, he caught up with them not too far down the sidewalk and started spraying them. He noticed they weren’t laughing but rather looking at him like he was crazy. Getting that feeling they didn’t want to play, Andy came back just in time to see the Bolivian mountain lady with the green and white striped accordion thingie pointing at my bag.

“Your bag is torn!” She said, pointing with an upset look on her face. Normally Bolivian mountain women don’t really have facial expressions other than deadpan, so it was a little odd. Being a slightly naïve person despite my traveling experiences, I looked down at my sliced bag and thought, “Well, hell, when did that happen? I don’t remember it catching on the bleachers or anything but…” Then I noticed the wound in my little bag… it was a clean cut, not ripped, as if it had been done with a knife. And there was a slit in the poncho plastic over top of it too.

Holy shit! My bag just got slashed! It was so quick and so unsuspecting! The one guy must have foamed my face to blind me while another one was slashing my bag. Weird.

I had heard so many stories about this. Many were just normal city stories and a good few of them were from Carnaval itself. No surprise there. I might be naïve at times but I know better than to carry anything of even slight value in a bag in South America, especially at Carnaval. Even still, a part of my brain was thinking there might maybe have been something little like keys that aren’t valuable but necessary. Andy and I just looked at each other trying to get a grip.

We went inside the open door of the building directly behind us to look and see what they got. Andy’s face was trembling by this point as he asked if I had anything in my bag. I said I didn’t and not to worry. I was surprisingly calm. At the same time, Andy was also figuring out that he’d just chased down the guys who had done it. They knew what they’d done and didn’t know how to react to this laughing gringo coming back for revenge. If they had thought he was as insane as he must have looked, he could have gotten knifed! Wow.

I reached inside my bag and started feeling around. I really hadn’t brought anything with me. Thankfully I’d left the camera at home that morning but even it wouldn’t have been that great of a loss as it was just one of the point-and-shoot photo project cameras that will be left in South America anyway. I found the crackers and apples I’d brought with me that morning. My ibuprofen and gum were still in there. What could they have taken?

I had a quick flashback of packing all the stuff in my bag that morning:

‘Ibuprofen in case of acute headache… check.
Snacks to avoid eating crap again today… check.
Toilet paper, oopsy, only have a little left… check.
Oh I should also put a tampon in with the toilet paper in case of emergency…’

Oh! OH! HAHAHAHAHAH! That’s what they got! A tenth of a roll of cheap Bolivian toilet paper and a tampon! Enjoy that, assholes.

Andy still wasn’t ok with it, understandably, as he’d unintentionally risked his life for a bit of toilet paper and a tampon. Then he got to thinking about how horribly wrong their operation could have gone. What if my hand had been in the way and got cut? What if he’d plunged the knife in deeper and it went through the bag and into my body? A thousand things could have gone wrong but thank goodness they were professionals… I guess.

The rest of the day was pretty much the same as yesterday with the same amout of water balloon throwing and foaming, etc. Come to find out, the parade groups are exactly the same as the day before only they reverse the order slightly. So there really wasn’t much new and we headed out a little early for dinner.

Later that night, as we thought the parades might be coming to a close, we made our way up to the plaza where the route ends. It turned out to be pretty cool as, when many groups finish, they add a few fireworks and do an extra jig to go out strong. The fireworks were, at best, dangerous as hell. Many of the dancers and music men were drunk by that point as they were basically “hydrated” throughout the parade with cans of beer, so it looked like some didn’t realize that fireworks actually do emit fire and explode most of the time. So they’d be standing right next to them, sparks from the cannon spraying all over their heads like they were kids enjoying a sprinkler or something. Thankfully, all the ones we saw moved away just in time and no one appeared to be hurt.

Overall, Carnaval was a great time. I can’t say it was anything more than I was expecting and I don’t think I need to go again. Wearing a poncho for four days straight is enough for me, thanks. But good memories, for sure, and worth going if you’re in the area.

Andy had said Friday night that he wanted to get up early to get to our seats when the parades started around 8am. I agreed with as much enthusiasm as I could fake and we fell asleep in our tiny little bed. But I’ll tell the truth. I woke up on Saturday morning at about 8am and quietly wiggled around to see Andy, still slumbering away. I could have woken him up. I should have woken him up. But I didn’t. I was scared of what would happen the moment we stepped out of the door. I didn’t want a repeat situation of the plaza bombing.

We got out the door at about 10am, Andy only slightly grumpy that we’d overslept. Swathed in ponchos, we took a left out of our hostel to try to walk down to our seats on the same road we’d walked the day before. We got to the end of the block to find they’d constructed bleachers on the parade route, effectively blocking us from passing through. Through the boards and metal of the bleachers, you could see pretty women with colorful feather-decked heads and blinking sequins shaking their hips to the beat of an ensuing band of men. Your whole body was engulfed by the sound, and the fear of having a pee-filled water balloon dropped off the back of the bleachers onto your head, which made the 1000 people we were waiting with a little impatient. We stood there for about 10 minutes waiting to get through until everyone started pushing. Andy and I decided it’d be best to take the longer but safer route around the train station to get to our seats. I can’t imagine I’d enjoy getting trampled first thing in the morning especially not in those streets. It was muddy and wet with God knows what.

As we were rounding the corner, wedged in the crowd, I felt my tummy grumble. Damn. I told Andy I might should get something to eat before we got too far in it or I’d be up again within the hour looking for food. In that Andy-not-happy tone of his, he reminded me that there would be vendors coming around to sell stuff, so I didn’t have to worry about it. “Wonderful,” I though, “street food. Fried, greasy street food that I wouldn’t normally touch with a ten-foot pole.” Andy got dysentery from eating street food the last time he was at Carnaval in Oruro. I could just imagine the hours and hours of bathroom time I’d receive for eating such things.

We approached the bleachers from behind and beneath. We were standing under there, about 50 people’s shoes hanging over our heads, watching a little Bolivian mountain women fill water balloons with a hand pump that looked like a neon green and white striped accordion. Great, water balloons, the bane of my existence, and there was enough for everyone! We found the backside of our exact seats (fourth row up, numbers 14 and 15) and proceeded to tap a gentleman on the back of the ankle so he could move over and let us climb up between he and his wife’s legs. Very classy.

On the topside of the bleachers, I found pretty much exactly what Andy had described. Row after row after row of bleachers lining the streets of the parade route absolutely packed with people, only the most uninformed of which were not wearing ponchos or wielding umbrellas. Down in front, on the street, you had an excellent view of the parade and just beyond that, you found yourself facing the people in the bleachers on the other side. Andy had told me these people were to be our archenemies in the water-balloon war that would inevitably begin once everyone had gotten a few beers in them.

Speaking of which, up walked a beer guy… Two please! And the drinking began. It would mark the first time in my life for a lot of things.

One: I had never bought a beer at such a wonderfully low price. Only 62.5 cents per can!
Two: I had never gotten drunk during the day before. Ladies only drink after 5pm… Well… 2pm, as my grandmother says.
Three: I had never drunk beer for breakfast.
Four: I had never drunk beer as breakfast.

The list goes on, but we’ll get to that later. The most important thing, maybe, was that I forgot that altitude makes alcohol a little stronger and that, when you don’t eat before drinking, it all goes straight to your head. Chug-a-lug…

In no time, Andy and I were best buddies and the five inebriated Bolivian guys sitting in the seats around us were like long-lost friends. We had mastered the art of clapping in time with the bands that passed by and hooting for the dancers to keep up the good work.

Sure enough, Andy was right about the vendors that keep the food supply alive. There were definitely more beer vendors than food vendors, though, and the selection of food was just about on par with what I was expecting but with more ice-cream and sweets. They’d just walk along the parade route in front of the stands and yell up at people. When someone on the upper rows wanted something, they’d pass their money down through all the people below them then the vendor would pass up the goods. Andy took great pride in being the passer-upper in our area as his hands touched 90% of the upward moving products and he wasn’t averse to getting up and stepping down a stair or two to help out… don’t ask me why. He can be extremely dutiful when he wants to be.

The only exceptions to this process were the beer vendors who, being a little more daring (or less caring), chose to throw the cans up to people. At first I was worried if drunk hands could really be accurate enough to catch a flying can but the drunker I got, the less I cared about it and nothing ever ended up dropping on my head. Also, by the end of the day, people stopped politely passing down their coins and just started throwing them into the street and letting the vendor find them amongst the dancers. With most of the vendors being men and most of the dancers being scantily clad women, I don’t think they minded too much.

In general, the parade came in waves. For two or three minutes, there would be non-stop dancers. Group after group would pass, each accompanied by their band, leaving us clapping and cheering away in our happy spots. But then there would be a lag as if one of the groups had fallen asleep up the way and clogged the parade route. We’d sit there for five or so minutes with nothing to watch. Then, thankfully, some dipshit in a poncho would actually try walking down the street in front of us so they wouldn’t have to make their way through the crowds behind the streets, and what befell them? About 200 water balloons, cans of foam, and fire-hose-sized streams of water from Terminator 2 style water guns. No man left that street unbombed. Person after person, tried their luck… men, women, children, families, Bolivians, gringos, everyone… all getting bombed relentlessly at the hands of people laughing at their misfortune. It made me feel 1000 times better about the plaza bombing the day before. They weren’t being malicious… well, not malicious in a personal way. It’s just part of Carnaval.

But when there were no idiots to aim at, the war of the opposing bleachers began. You’d see about 20 people on the other side leaning down and sticking their arms through the stairs of the bleachers receiving water balloons from the Bolivian mountain women with the green and white striped according thingies. You knew then you had about three minutes to get a bag of your own (10 balloons for 13 cents). But usually the bombing had begun while you were still crunched over kissing your own butt telling the lady that maybe you’d like two bags rather than just one.

You’d always have your certain people on the opposing side that you wanted to really hit, normally the ones that were really good shots and managed to hit you or your side with the most accuracy. When this happens, through the haze of alcohol, everyone gets this sense of unity like everyone on their side of the street is this big family under attack. So when the other side starts throwing, you see the older “mom and dads” bring out their umbrellas to shield themselves and the babies (yes, people did bring babies to the parades!!) Then the twenty to thirty year old “sons” would get up and start fighting back as if they were defending the homeland. Like proper little women, we “daughters” would be the ammo supply, holding the bag of balloons and feeding our gunmen, though some of us chose to throw too. Because they were facing the aggressors, the men also were in charge of blocking direct hits to the others. If they saw a water balloon flying at the family, they’d try their hardest to hit it with an open palm so the rest of us only got sprinkled rather than slapped in the face with a balloon.

Finally, you had the kids who were like little secret weapons. They would hop the barricade and fearlessly run to the other side, pelting the opposition, then run back and either take the hits or hide under Mom and Dad’s umbrella. Andy was up in the ranks with the best of the men. I was totally swooning over his balloon throwing ability. I was having a hard time throwing the water balloon all the way to the other side for lack of foot mobility, so I took to fending off the kamikaze kids down in the front. With all of us working together as one unit, we did a fine job for ourselves.

It is worth noting, though, that in war times, the dancers are sacred. As soon as they came back through, the fighting would stop. Occasionally you’d get that one drunk guy who’d continue to throw over the dancers’ heads but he’d be met with everyone on the other side giving him a scowl with a finger wag in place of the normal laughter. You don’t hit dancers. It’s not funny and it’s against the rules. Even the kids know it. Them and their costumes are to be treated with the utmost respect.

By the end of the first day, I was absolutely freezing. My poncho had kept my body dry but had managed to channel a load of water right down into my shoes. I was trying to take pictures, too, but my hands were too cold and unsteady to press the button without redirecting the lens too much. I finally gave up, especially when I realized that the beer had managed to take four 36-rolls of film! Oops.

At about 6:30, the sun started going down, as did the excitement level. Being in 12,000 feet of altitude, it was a little chilly anyway. Then take away the sunbeams and add a slight breeze and you’ve got a recipe for hypothermia if a water balloon catches you with your poncho down. It was a respectful war. On top of the weather, though, it seemed like everyone was pooped by that time. We’d been out there drinking and hollering and singing and playing since the morning, so it wasn’t surprising everyone ran out of steam.

I was probably the biggest victim of this as I almost crashed out on Andy’s shoulder. We stayed as long as we could, trying to live the last couple moments of the day. But I was feeling really dizzy and icky by that point, plus Andy reaffirmed that the parades would be going on until about 10 that night. We left around 7:30 and went back to the room. I passed completely out and slept until the morning. I vaguely remember Andy going out and getting a dysentery burger off the street but I can’t confirm.

After the first day, even though I was passed out cold, I wasn’t so worried about being in the big crowd as I knew what to expect as far as being pelted by water balloons. As long as I stayed out of the street on the parade route, we probably wouldn’t have a repeat incident of the plaza bombing. Tomorrow I knew I’d take better care of my feet by wrapping them in plastic so the water couldn’t get down in them, but that was really the only complaint I had. I figured I’d leave my camera at home so as not to take another four rolls of the same thing and I wouldn’t drink. Maybe then I’d have enough energy to last all day. But for the moment, I was sleeping more soundly than I had the entire trip.

Two days, five bus rides, and about 6 hours of sleep later, we arrived in Oruro, Bolivia, which is about three hours south of La Paz, the (unofficial) capital of Bolivia.  Oruro, though it’s a dump of a town 53 weeks out of the year, is known as pretty much the best place to go to celebrate the week of Carnaval.  (Carnaval?  Think Mardi Gras in the States with parades only add water balloons… lots of water balloons… will explain later.)  During this week, they deck out the town with paper machet animals hanging over the street, decorations in almost every window, and extremely high accomadation rates.  So when we arrived, our first mission was to obtain accomodation.  To make a long story short, we ended up finding a room for the three main days of Carnaval at only about 6 times the usual price.  Well, then you add in that the beds are somehow much smaller and maybe you could inflate it to 7 times the price, but that’s another story!

We arrived on Wednesday evening, knowing the main parades wouldn´t be held until Saturday and Sunday.  Andy was here two years ago for Carnaval, so he had a general idea of what to expect whereas I was just along for the ride (biting my nails the entire time hoping I’d actually end up enjoying the aggressive atmosphere).  He knew we had to buy seats somewhere along the parade route, so we started searching those out on Thursday morning.  He also knew, as everyone does from having heard horror stories along the backpacker trail, that there is A LOT of water balloons, squirt guns, and canned foam, generally aimed directly at unsuspecting victims, particularly gringos, unfortunately. 

Also along the trail, you hear that people put more than water in their balloons and guns.  I’d met several people who said paint and piss weren’t unusual ingredients.  Thankfully, they peddle panchos on the street to protect your clothes (and dignity) even if it is a little embarassing walking around in a garbage bag. 

I should explain a little about the pancho situation.  I bought one the first day thinking it would become a permanent part of my apparel for the week.  But looking around, I saw only teenage girls wearing them, so I thought maybe I could get away with not wearing mine until the actual day of the parade.  Just after buying my pancho and retiring it to my bag, a little kid walking the opposite direction in pedestrian traffic withdrew a can of foam and got me right in the face. 

I was shocked more than anything and a little distressed that he’d managed to blind me.  I immediatly began to fear that I wouldn’t like this experience of Carnaval after all.  I mean, being gringos, we’re targets for a lot of things and this was no exception.  It hurts a little to always be the ones singled out and fooled or lied to.  And anyway, how the hell was I supposed to enjoy my surrounding when my eye sockets were full of fun foam?  Sounds like a great pick-pocketing tactic to me… blind the victim with fun foam then releive them of their belongings.  So, from the first moment of action, I knew I drew the line at getting shot or hit in the face.  Target the bod, but don’t mess with the mug.  And my pride was a little hurt as my gringoness would really attract attention here.

Two seconds later, I saw another little kid face-foam a Bolivian girl, so I got over my gringo paranoia.  Whew… that made me feel about 10 times better to the point of being able to laugh about it rather than get down about being a victim.  But I still wasn’t cool with the facial targeting.

Thursday was ok.  I only sustained two shots: the aforementioned face foamage and another butt shot from a passer by.  The butt-shot managed to soak only one bun, which wasn’t enough to allow the cold mountain air to chill my skin to the point of uncomfortability.  Thankfully, we’d bought a can of foam just after the prior attack, so Andy went off after the guy and got him a good one in the face.  Take that!  I was laughing about it by night-time, and proud of myself for looking forward to the big parade days despite the threat of being drenched and cold.

Friday took a turn for the worse.  In the morning, we had to switch hostels to the place where we’d be spending all of Carnaval.  This is when we found out the bed was about 2/3 the size we expected even though we’d paid quite dearly for it.  We raised some hell in the lobby, which brought the attention of a Chilean guy and his family who was having a similar problem with bed size.  He ended up graciously giving us the key to his room, which was also a ”double,” presumable with a larger bed than the single-looking, one-pillowed piece of crap we’d gotten.  When we went and checked out the bed, we found the exact same size… small.  So it turned out it was all down to cultural difference.  A double bed in the Western world would actually be expected to accomodate two people, whereas a double in Bolivia is not a double at all, but a single, especially when it’s topped with only one pillow.  All smiles there as we tuck-tail sulked out of the lobby… double defeated with ”double” defined in the Western sense. 

Breakfast also turned out to be a drab.  We’d been talking about going to this one restaurant for breakfast as they supposedly served up a plate of hot pancakes.  I was also really excited as they have an extensive menu of fresh brewed coffee as opposed to the powdery instant shit you usually get. 

It turned out we weren’t the only ones who had the idea to eat there so the restaurant was packed.  We ended up waiting about 45 minutes for our food and, when it finally arrived, was all cold… coffee, pancakes, extra plate of unordered eggs that they’d try to charge us for later… all of it.  Obviously, they’d had it prepared for the last thirty minutes but just didn’t bring it out.  Why?  Because we’re in Bolivia, kids.  To top it off, I loaded my pancakes up with the honey they gave us.  Why not?  Honey is honey, right?  hahah… no.  They had, for some reason, added lime to it, giving it this soury-sweet sickening flavor.  I was reminded of when we accidentally bought 8 cans of green peas in Australia only to find they had mint in them (?!?)  We pawned them off on an Aussie couple… I pawned my sour pancakes off on hungry Andy. 

The real fun came later that afternoon when we went for a walk to the other side of the town to see some cool paintings they do on the road along the parade route.  To get there, we took side streets then decided to cut right, running us straight through the main plaza where a lot of the parade celebration takes place.  I had just gotten out of my mouth that today wasn’t a ”pancho day” and I could easily get away with not wearing it until the actual parade days.  Mmmm…

When we started to enter the plaza, we found that the sidewalk was lined on one side with the 15-20 year old boys who typically throw the malicious face shots with water balloons.  Damn.  By the time we saw what we’d walked into, it was too late.  They were actually nice, though, as they didn’t throw the balloons, the impact of which can really hurt, but just popped them on my clothes.  No biggie.  I was still laughing as we walked forward.

But then hell was unleashed.  From the bleachers (benches, as Andy calls them), a water balloon hurled through the air and hit at our feet.  We heard laughter.  Lots of laughter.  Then another two from above.  God, we were surrounded by bleachers and there were boys all over them with bags of water balloons.  They kept coming, hitting us from all sides.  Andy could see they were all being aimed at me (boys generally throw at girls and vice versa) so he tried to guard me by wrapping around me from behind.  It was no use.  The longer we stood there trying to sheild ourselves, the harder they threw.

By this point, I had already been hit so many times in the head and upper body that I was starting to get worried about getting robbed.  We kept pushing forward though, hoping that once we got on the other side of the bleachers, we’d be out of their reach.  Only ten feet away lain salvation but it seemed so unacheivable.  Hit after hit… there was water in my ears and all over my face.  My clothes were drenched and everyone was laughing and still throwing more balloons.  How could we have been so stupid as to walk right into this?!  I felt the anger boiling up into my chest.  I was pissed off at myself for not having been more perceptive.  I was angry at being attacked relentlessly knowing that the more it hurt the harder they’d throw.  I was embroiled at them getting so much pleasure out of my distress.

In the middle of everything, with my fear and anger and distress all churning around inside me, my fighting instinct surfaced.  With blinded eyes, I wanted to start throwing punches at the boys closest to us.  I pictured body-wrestling them to the ground, popping every f%·ing balloon in their bags all over their dry, fresh clothes and beating their faces into the pavement.  Dear God…  But if I did anything, all his friends would be on my back in a matter of moments.  Then I’d be the one with pavement bits in my bloodied face if I even survived.  I ordered my limbs not to fight back, just keep trying to get away.

We finally reached the gap between the bleachers and rushed past.  Finally, I thought there was relief.  But from behind the bleachers, more came.  First, a 13 year old looking boy with a giant smile on his face aimed a can of foam right into my eyes.  I wiped it away and blinked just in time to see a water-balloon headed straight for my face.  I tried to block it, to no avail, and it crashed into the side of my face.  I heard Andy bellowing from behind me as I kept blinking, trying to get the foam out of my eyes without losing my contacts. 

I kept walking, trying to distance myself from the bleachers as much as possible even though I couldn’t really see where I was going.  Thankfully, I hadn’t felt anyone touch me, so I wasn’t too worried about having been pick-pocketed.  Apparently, I passed an old guy that was standing in the door of his store.  Andy said he was just staring at me, not laughing or pitying, just staring like he was confused.  Maybe he’s never seen a gringo girl, clothes soaking, hair dripping, digging foam out of her ears and eyes.  I got to the other side of the plaza and didn’t know what to do.  There were bleachers everywhere with kids and boys and people weilding bags of water balloons.  It looked like we weren’t going to be able to escape without another similar situation.  So I just gave up and sat down.

I sat there, the cold air starting to make the goosebumps rise all over my body, my hands trembling, and my eyes watering from the foam and from on-coming tears.  I replayed the situation in my head.  I came to the part where I wanted to resort to violence and immediatly felt ashamed.  What on earth had happened that had made me want to hurt someone.  It was Carnaval and everyone was just having fun and we happened to have gotten in the middle of it.  I can’t remember ever having wanted to inflict physical pain on someone like that.  I didn’t feel like myself anymore and wished so much I could say I hadn’t thought it.  But I had and my trembling hands were evidence of it.  I was so disappointed with myself that I couldn’t say anything.

We decided to go home after I realized how horribly cold I was and how long it would take my clothes to dry.  We wrung out the long sleeved shirt I was wearing and Andy got a good bit of water out of the short sleeve shirt that was underneath.  While we were standing there wringing out my clothes, a poor man and his idiot friend came to spectate.  That annoyed me enough but then, through stained yellow teeth and bits of coca cud, he actually asked me if I’d give him my wet shirt.  We told him no several times until his idiot friend started asking for money… I couldn’t be bothered saying no anymore or explaining why him asking for my clothes and my money at that moment was completely inappropriate so I just walked off.  My dignity and humanity were absolutely shot to shit… obviously.  Then some asshole gringo speaking crap Spanish asked Andy why he hadn’t protected me.  I’d had enough.  I marched my ass home as quick as my shivering-cold little legs could carry me.

On the way back, I got to wondering why my mind had gone so haywire as to have suggested violence.  I narrowed it down to several factors.  First was the feeling of being attacked.  That’s something I’ve never really felt before as I was fortunate enough to grow up with an older brother who never pushed the limits and a mother who insisted that ”Please stop” means stop immediatly.  I’ve never been pushed so far knowing that it would only go further.

Second was the feeling of helplessness.  I was blinded and the constant impacts of the balloons kept me from opening my eyes for longer than a second.  My hearing was muffled with all the water in my ears.  So, essentially, three of my five senses were stunned if not rendered useless.  I panicked as I think most mammals would do in a similar situation, and fight seemed a more viable option than flight… it was too far away.

And finally, I couldn’t find any humanity on their part.  They were laughing and enjoying my uncomfortability and even pain.  I can’t say what they were thinking, really, but I don’t think they were putting themselves in my shoes.  Why would they? It’s Carnaval and they’re just having fun.  Maybe that last thought is the only thing that saved my ass and kept me from swinging.  It’s just awful to know that only one person is on your side and that’s the other victim! 

In the end, I was wounded internally by myself.  I’d get over the bruises from the water-balloons and I’d eventually be able to laugh at the situation, but I was upset with myself for having reacted that way.  I guess that’s sorta what traveling’s about though, isn’t it?  It tests your limits so you really get the true you in a variety of situations you’d never otherwise encounter.  Although the thoughts did enter my mind and although I am horribly ashamed of it, I can say my logic overcame, even in a time of extreme stress.  I guess that’s something, right?  Next time I’ll know not to go through the plaza.  But we’ll see what Saturday and Sunday bring with the parades.  They’re supposed to be quite wet as well.

I went to the post office to get the package. As I’ve mentioned before, trips to the post office are time consuming and just generally frustrating as you never know what they’re going to make you wait for next. I must admit, I didn’t want to go. We only have so much free time in the afternoons and I was sure this would suck up all of it. And to make matters worse, Andy couldn’t come with me as he had to make sure our new volunteer from New Zealand, Susan, got home from Pamplona rather than hopping off the combi with me.

I happened to get there at the perfect time. There were only about three other people in there when I arrived so I basically walked right in, got my form, had the security guard to help me fill it out as he had nothing better to do, and then sat and waited. After only three 80’s music videos on the TV hanging in the waiting room, they called my name. Looking around I realized about 15 more people had walked in. I really had gotten there right in time.

I went up to the counter to show my passport again, tell them my name again, show them my slip again, and turn in the form I’d filled out. At this point, they show you the contents of the package, which, as you can imagine, would completely ruin the fun of getting a Christmas gift in the mail. I had no idea what to expect. The inspector guy fumbled through the box for a few seconds then looked at me baffled as if someone had tried to send me a live kitten overseas without telling me. He pulled out a blue tampon shaped item and studied it carefully. It had the Summer’s Eve logo on the side. Oh ha ha!

“Pens?” he asked.

“Yes, indeed.” I really had no idea what it was either. Here’s where the inside joke comes along. See, for the last couple years, our family friend has worked for an enema company. At least that’s what we’ve always joked about. I think she works for a packing company for the enema company as well as companies that make feminine private wipes like Summer’s Eve. Anyway, she gets all these cool free gifts that often times make their ways to our house and all our friends’ houses (as gag gifts or just to extend the boundaries of our joke) in Alabama, the majority of which have something to do with enemas or are imprinted with the Summer’s Eve logo.

From hats to shirts to note pads, we’ve got an array of useful Summer’s Eve products. You can imagine this is particularly funny when the item is something that one of our dads can use, such as a hat, and you see a man running around with a visor that has a giant Summer’s Eve logo. Anyone who is familiar with the company (ie most women) begins wondering where a guy would acquire such apparel. The answer: Virginia.

The inspector studied the blue tampon shaped thing a little longer, folding and unfolding as he watched the pen mechanism function. He then looked up at me with his eyebrows lifted, pointing to me then acting as though he were sticking the pen in his breast pocket. Oh no way… he was asking if he could keep it. For about a half a second, I wondered if he would like to know what he was getting himself into, but I chose not to educate him. I smiled, gave him the thumbs up, and he happily stuck the pen in his pocket. I rejoiced a little at our spreading inside joke. Now there was a man at the post office in Lima, Peru who owned a Summer’s Eve pen. That’ll teach him to be so presumptuous as to ask to keep my mail!

Later that day, I explained to all the English speakers in the house about the pen incident. They laughed until they saw how cool the pens really were, then I started finding them all over the house. There was one on the desk, one or two in our pencil box, and one of our Peruvian volunteers, Ysabel, had one. They were everywhere and spreading like wildfire. I hadn’t meant to unleash the power but it seemed unstoppable at this point.

Right before our English class, I explained to Ysabel that Summer’s Eve was a feminine wipe company and that our family has always gotten a good laugh out of unsuspecting victims. She giggled nervously especially when my lacking Spanish vocabulary forced me to do a half-ass wiping motion to demonstrate Summer’s Eve’s use. Carla, one of Ysabel’s best friends and also one of our Peruvian volunteers, cracked up and even pointed the finger. Damn these girls can be brutal!

My English class was about the finer points of English pronunciation that night. Normally it’s just adults aged 24 and over but this month we have an eight-year-old kid who insists upon sitting at the front of the class. I was just in the middle of explaining what a long E sounds like when I looked down to see the little kid was using a tampon-shaped blue Summer’s Eve pen! I forgot about the long E and, in the middle of class, asked him where he’d gotten that pen. I think he may have thought I was accusing him of stealing or something because he got this look of distress on his face and turned around and pointed at Ysabel.

“She gave it to me!” He said, loud enough to distract her attention from her notes.

She smiled bashfully. “Yeah, I gave it to him.”

Cool. That’s exactly how it spreads. And you never know where you’ll see one next. First the post office, next, the world! This is the start of something big. Summer’s Eve is being heard round the world.

“They’re internationals.” She said. Hmmmmmmm….
“Internationals?” I asked. She nodded in reply. “Do we know where they’re from or why they’re reconstructing the building?”
“It’s a religious group I think but I don’t know where they’re from.” She said. Right. Not much information there.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Being referred to as a religious group, maybe I expected nuns and candy-stripers, I don’t know. But when we got there, I was horrified…. Shocked… Embarrassed… Gringos. Like, real live gringos. Not the British variety that is generally quietly polite and pleasing to the ear. Not the Aussie or Kiwi kind with sunkissed skin exuding genuine, homegrown enthusiasm, a sense of adventure, and a positive outlook on reality. Not even the rich Limeño kind that strives to be a gringo.

They were… Americans.

Americans in all their glory. For one, they looked like a little army, each wearing their uniform of t-shirts from various events they’d attended, sleeves rolled up to expose their sweaty white arms; Umbros or other athletic shorts rolled at the waste revealing a culturally unsound amount of sun-thirsty leg; and, of course, tennis shoes with little bitty white socks hiding their little cotton heads as if they were also ashamed of being associated with these people.

What was worse was that you could hear them from about two blocks down the hill. Those grating American accents trying to squeeze out every Spanish word they knew with no consideration to how they were pronouncing the words. Ow. It hurt to hear what I sounded like just 3 months ago, before Martin and Juan and Miguel had teased my accent so much that I finally realized how painful it must have been to hear it. Even if you never can shake your native accent, why did they have to talk so damned loud? The stereotype is true, friends. Americans could blister your eardrums with how loud they talk and what they talk about, too, as if it’s so interesting that everyone would want to hear it. Argh.

My pride was suffering as I walked past their immaculate tour bus double the size of most people’s houses in the area. They hadn’t even bothered to take a combi! Didn’t they know anything about the culture they were working in? This modest, quiet culture had been pierced with their ignorance and infiltrated with their presence. They cruised in here on their little boat of money and security to help these poor wretches who worship God in what would be classified as an utter shit hole when compared to the First Baptist Church of Trussville (lovingly referred to by skeptical Trussvillians as Fort God and Six Flags Over Jesus to name a few). They didn’t bother to consider what people in Peru wear, or how they act, or what they find embarrassing or immodest. They didn’t think about how they would be perceived and certainly didn’t evaluate what type of stereotypes they would create or perpetuate. All they knew is they were here to help someone and that was enough to justify all their cultural faux pas.

From our temporary classroom, I could see them working on the playground right outside. Half of them were building (or repairing) something and the other half were playing with kids in the street. Mostly they were just smiling and chasing the kids around with a ball and tickling them when they caught them, no doubt having already convinced themselves that a smile is the same in every language and can replace the words you can’t speak. Fair enough. But then I noticed most of them could only say a few choice words in Spanish, which bothered me to no end as I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind that their church had come up with a list of useful words and phrases that they memorized on the plane on the way down. Gag. And what’s worse, they were using their ‘useful words and phrases’ to play with our kids; the kids we’d been working with for the last three months; the kids that had been able to get past our accents and verbal errors enough to trust us; the kids who called us Mami and Papa King Kong because we’d spent so much time caring for them and making sure they were having a good day. So, add jealousy and disbelief to the list of emotions that hit me that morning.

I tried to put it out of my mind, disassociate myself with them as much as possible, and just work it off. After all, I had eight kids to welcome into the new school year. The trouble was that we couldn’t find the woman who had the key to our temporary classroom, so we spent a large part of the time walking around and waiting outside the school. That meant more exposure to the gringos. I was absolutely sure they had seen me by the time we decided to have class on the football pitch rather than wait outside all day. I was sure of it! But no one had even acknowledged my presence. No one had said hello or waved or asked me what the crap I was doing out there, another indication that they hadn’t looked at their surroundings and noticed we were the only white people in Pamplona. And if we were the only white people out there that day, what white folks would be left when they were done with their little mission trip? I raise my solitary hand…

We had a meeting with the kids to explain what would be happening this year. At that point, we only had eight kids, which would seem a dwarf class when considering the 30 five- to eight-year-olds we have in our class now! Wow. After the meeting and after we ate our bread and tiny little pears for lunch, Thaily, Carla, Ysabel, and I walked up to the reconstruction site. We just stood around watching for a while, sort of waiting for someone to acknowledge us and then perhaps let us entertain them with a few questions. Carla and Ysabel started teasing me about being a gringa. I was embarrassed enough already, then they started in and I found myself in the midst of this weird self-pity thing that I haven’t felt since Andy convinced me I shouldn’t feel bad for being a gringo. I used to beat myself up over it, for real, so this was an unwanted visit with an old, familiar feeling that made me want to avoid eye contact with anyone, especially my Peruvian friends who were brutally teasing me.

I had just started mentally cursing these people for interring those feelings when I noticed a guy walking toward us. He had been talking to someone, gave them a high five with this big cheesy smile, so he seemed friendly enough in that dorky, didn’t-get-the-memo-about-public-high-fives-being-kinda-old-school way. He was more South American looking but, as if the high five weren’t enough, he was wearing the gringo uniform and carrying a grotesquely large camera with a flash you wouldn’t bother with in the Limeño summer sun. He asked me if he could “help” me as if he should be wearing a blue Wal-Mart vest.

I felt like maliciously twisting his nipple but I decided to be civil. I launched into a stream of questions, not realizing until later that I hadn’t introduced myself or our kids that were collected around our legs looking at him and his worker cronies as if they’d just murdered a puppy. Whew. I wasn’t the only one with a wall up! But then I wondered if the kids had put their wall up following my unintentional, non-verbal cues… hmmmm.

From our conversation, I found out this guy was from Colombia and had joined up with this Youth Coalition of Peace and Justity (or some other official, yet whispy sounding name), which was a Catholic organization presumably based in the States. There were about thirty of them from colleges in Colorado, Indiana, and some city he couldn’t remember the name of. They would be working from Monday to Wednesday in Pamplona and then go to another site in Huaraz, which is a gooood long way from Lima up in the mountains in the north of Peru. I asked him if he could show us around the new school so we could see all the changes. He said sure and lead us down the road, dodging groups of over-enthusiastic Americans chasing and tickling little Peruvian kids.

He said they had planned to double the size of the building by concreting in the back yard and extending the walls down the length of the concrete. In the process, they’d go ahead and rip out the pressboard walls that the parents of our kids had just bothered repainting a fresh yet vomit-worthy lime green about a month ago, and replace them with a varnished-looking wood with windows in the front. I asked about the bathroom that was previously a concrete hole in a flimsy wood outhouse in the backyard of the school. He said they’d concrete over that and just add a new bathroom to the inside of the school. And, of course, they’d put on a new (complete) roof and electricity.

By the time I’d gotten all my information and was ready to go, I realized he had no idea who we were. He hadn’t asked and didn’t seem like he was going to so, in a really unintentionally forceful manner, I volunteered the information. I tried to explain we’d been teaching kids in the church during the week, that we worked for an NGO, and that I had been in the country for the last three months. The kids were clustered around my legs watching the workers climb up on their old school desks to lift the roof piece by piece off the building. Little Angel looked horrified and confused as he would never have been allowed to stand on those desks and now they were covered in muddy footprints and buckling under the weight of these full-grown gringos. Why hadn’t they brought (or borrowed!) a ladder? I asked Thaily who the desks belonged to and, even though they’re kid sized, she said she thought they’d belonged to the church. Whew.

Walking down the hill, Carla and Ysabel asked what all they’d said so I explained the best I could through my now over-consciousness of my American accent. They could tell something was up and started asking me what I thought about them being there. I tried the best I could to sound pleasant, not portraying any of my feelings of jealousy or disbelief or shame, and ended up saying it was just weird seeing other white folks that high up in Pamplona. I started joking about how loud they were as we were squeezing past their big tour bus that was conveniently parked in one of the narrowest streets in the neighborhood. I didn’t know what else to say. I felt stupid and I just wanted to leave.

The next day, Tuesday, I woke up with a feeling of dread in my stomach. They’d be there again today. Buttmunches. They were making me not want to go to work. I just wanted to wait until they left to go back to Minas but I wanted to see all the kids and I had promised Benedicta the day before that I’d be there on Tuesday when she came to take her make-up test. It made me shutter to imagine her walking through gringo-mania to get to our temporary classroom. Hopefully she wouldn’t ask if they were my friends or if I knew them. And God forbid she said anything about us having the same accent! Anyway, I was stuck. I had to see them again.

That morning, Thaily realized we needed to get the broom, dustpan, and hand-washing bowl from the old school so we could use them in the temporary classroom. Thankfully, their tour bus hadn’t arrived yet, leaving the school unmanned. With Angel, Jhon, and Stefany at my side, we walked in through the newly hinged and varnished door, which no longer made that old, familiar squeaking sound that used to alert us to anyone entering. We stood there at the door for a moment looking around at the massive expanse of concrete there was now that that they’d extended the building. In only a day, they had managed to change everything. Nothing but the original concrete floor and the wooden support post in the middle remained. Even though our little school had been nothing more than a shack with ugly paint and a half-finished roof, it was filled to the top with memories. How much laughter had bounced off this same floor and how much brilliance had those walls seen? Standing on the cold concrete, it felt like an empty warehouse with a lot of memory-making to do after construction was complete. But now we were in search of the remaining artifacts from a past era.

Jhon walked in and started digging through their scattered building materials in search of the broom. Stefany spotted the hand-washing bowl and ran to save it but Angel was still hiding beside me with this petrified look on his face. Jhon called us over to help him sift through some wood pieces while Stefany dumped a bunch of rusty nails out of the hand-washing bowl.

Only then did Angel start exploring. From one end of the concrete to the other, he walked, looking up and down at everything like a four-year-old contractor in training. He asked me where the bathroom went and I explained it had been covered over but that they were going to put another one inside the classroom. I was trying to be cheerful in case they were taking my non-verbal cues. Maybe I tried too hard and the Oh look how different it is! and the Oh look how much space we’ll have! came off sounding phony. After looking around a bit more, we decided the broom had perished in the rubble along with the dustpan, but we’d salvaged the hand-washing bowl. Just as we were leaving, Angel spotted the dirty old rag we used to wipe the desks off with and ran over and swiped it. Might as well loot the place, right?

It turns out while Angel was walking around, he had been forming his expert opinion. As we walked back to the school in pensive silence, he looked up at me and said,

“It’s ugly.”

I didn’t know what to say at first. I certainly wasn’t going to agree as I didn’t want to promote the looking of a gift horse in the mouth. So instead, I said it was ‘different’ not ‘ugly’ and started talking about how nice it would be to have more room and electricity and stuff like that. He didn’t look convinced. I suppose I didn’t either.

At the end of the day, we went back to the school to ask if they had seen the broom. It was quite a chore to find someone who cared. A few of our kids and I walked through the entrance of the school and walked amongst the builders waiting for someone to notice we were there. The kids got impatient and started messing around with building supplies and looking off the edge of the concrete into the backyard of the school’s next door neighbor. I finally snagged someone and asked if they’d seen a red broom. It being a different person who was looking at me like I was stealing from their organization for asking for a red broom, I explained again that the building had been our school during the week and that we didn’t get a chance to take our things out before construction started. The girl looked around briefly and said she hadn’t seen one but that I should ask everyone else. She said she was from Colorado and actually started asking me questions about Bruce Peru and how long I’d been in Peru and everything. Finally, a nice person! I gave her the run down and we went around asking everyone about the broom. No one had seen it.

I walked out of the school to find Thaily, Ysabel, and Carla waiting for me and watching these two American girls lead a group of Peruvian kids in a game of Down by the Bank. In case you don’t remember this old American classic from grade school, you basically just get around in a circle and place your right hand, palm up, on top of the next person’s left palm. You sing a song (“Down by the banks of the Hanky Panky where the bullfrogs jump from bank to bankie…. Remember?) and go around the circle tagging your neighbor’s right hand with your right hand. Whoever gets tagged last when the song ends is out of the game. Carla and Ysabel asked me what they were doing so I explained. The only trouble was that the girls leading the song were yelling it really loudly rather than singing, so I was distracted again by my embarrassment and trying to talk over them. Again, the Americans knew we were talking about their game and watching but they didn’t bother smiling at us or anything… they just kept screaming. How annoying.

On Wednesday, Dennis asked around to see if anyone wanted to switch schools. Andy mentioned going to Minas and I said I’d take his place at Nazareno. I felt like a wimp for chickening out on account of the gringos, but I didn’t want to see them again or be associated with them for another day. Two days was good enough. But, to be honest, I didn’t want Andy to see them either! I mean, I’m still an American, no matter how hard I try to kick my bad habits like talking too loud and stuff like that. And Andy, being the normally quietly polite Brit, still calls me out for committing those silly American abuses. I was terrified to hear what he would say about these folks and I didn’t want him to liken me to them and further remind me what an overwhelmingly culturally inept country I come from. I’ve been working for over a year to get Andy to appreciate anything about the US but him being around these obnoxious specimens could make ruin of all my efforts.

Everything turned out OK, though. He didn’t have to come in contact with them really as we’d already looted the school and had no reason to go back. He didn’t even walk down the hill to see how the construction was going. So really, all he had to do was see the tour bus and them chasing kids out in the street, which didn’t bother him nearly as much as me.

In the end, their intrusion had made me feel more connected to this place and the people. The Americans were strangers in our strange land, making me feel a little more at home. I hope to achieve expert status one day as I plan to aim my anthropological focus here. Until then, I hadn’t really thought of myself as anything more than a traveler who’d landed here for an extended stay. But I’m more than that, which made me feel a sense of urgency as far as learning the rest of Spanish and making sure any information I had about this area was not just hearsay or assumption but actually qualified by personal interviews. If I was going to act all snobby about these people being here, I should be a better representative myself.

I realized also that I was mostly being paranoid, which means I’m paranoid about being an American. I’m not sure what to say about that. I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing and I think the answer would depend on who you ask, another American or someone from another country. But also, I realize that I work hard to be the better type of American - the culturally aware one - and I pride myself for it. When these goobers sailed in there with their money and their superior skills and made of themselves everything I strive not to be, I started associating myself with them just because I thought everyone else had already tossed me in with them, and felt ashamed all over again. No, I’m not ashamed of being American anymore. At one point, yes, but not now. Rather, I’m ashamed of people who perpetuate negative stereotypes with their inability to see the world from anyone else’s perspective. And I’m disappointed that so many happen to come from the same country as me.

Finally, I was forced to see, again, why Peruvians and people in other developing nations have certain stereotypes for gringos. They think we’re rich because when we go out of the country, we transplant America with our tour buses and flashy tennis shoes and when we see someone in poverty, we give them money since one of their Soles is only 33 US cents. They think we’re arrogant because we can do everything better. If they’ve got a church, we can build it better. If they’ve got something to say, what we have to say is more important. If they have cultural norms and values, we don’t have to follow them because we’ve got our own. The list goes on and on and, while a good amount of it is just misconstrued (i.e. Americans must have too much money because they spend it to come down here and help others), we are guilty for our own stereotypes. I could go for ages on this, but I’ll spare you.

A little preface so you can understand the situation. First of all, for those in the Northern Hemisphere, remember we were around the beginning of summer. Basically, the school year ends around the middle of December meaning Christmas and New Year’s are all wrapped up in a sort of summer break that lasts until the kids start the new school year in March. So, we were not only on the verge of Christmas break, but also the end of the year. At the end of every Bruce Peru year, the kids have to take their final exam, their performance on which determines if they will be accepted to a national school and, if so, to what grade. To make a long story short, if they don’t pass, they don’t go to school and much of our work with them as far as their education goes, has been unproductive. A huge disappointment…

Well, the kids at Minas had only started their final exam the day before. Prepare as I launch into a soapbox… Half the kids, when asked if they were ready for their test, sweetly replied, “What test?” This bothered me, to say the least, as this test wasn’t just some ordinary little pop quiz they’d spend ten minutes on during class. Nooooo no… this was THE test that measured the value of our hard work and the future of these kids and for some reason, they seemed oblivious of it.

I wasn’t at Minas the day they started taking the test but Andy and Sean were and they said it was a fiasco. It sounded to me like the kids came in with the giggles and took the test day to chat with their friends or play around rather than concentrate. Clearly, they had no idea of the importance of the test, which was problem number one, and they talked the entire way through it, which was problem number two as they shouldn’t have been allowed to talk at all. On top of this, because they were playing around, many of the kids didn’t finish the test. Over the course of 3.5 hours (longer than the normal day as the volunteers stayed on in hopes they’d finish!) they didn’t manage to finish the test.

Someone came up with the wonderful idea of having them come in at 8:30am the morning of the Chrismtas party to finish it. Because the party would be held at Nazareno, about a 20 minute walk from Minas, the test takers would report to Minas along with Andy and Thaily (the kids’ teacher), finish the test, then walk to Nazareno so we could start the party with everyone there at 10am.

Now, maybe some kids could handle it but these kids were SO incredibly excited about the Christmas parties so there was no way they were going to be able to concentrate on a test when they had gifts on the brain. Yet again, I can’t understand why they knew about a playtime Christmas party months in advance but had heard no mention of the final exam… sigh. Sean called it from a mile away saying they’d never finish it by the time the Christmas party was scheduled to start at 10am. So many of them had too much left to do and weren’t going to be any less chatty the day of the Christmas party when they had so much to look forward to.

Sean was right. Down at Nazareno, the party actually started at 9. That was no surprise as school usually starts at 9 so they just got there the same time, but they were ready to play and celebrate. We told them they’d have to wait until the Minas kids finished their test before we could start the party, so we tried a few activities to tide them over. These included a few games of Twister scribbled on the pavement with chalk and the aforementioned art project of Dennis’ called Ojos de Dios with the yarn and the crossed Popsicle sticks that makes a kite-looking thing.

Twister was a flop. The kids looked at the pitifully scrawled circles and, even with explanation, they couldn’t understand what we wanted them to do with them. Finally, the kids from the national school came over and started playing. We let them join in to get our kids playing but they just weren’t having it. So essentially, we ended up playing about four or five games of it with mostly national school kids and maybe one or two of our kids mixed in. Fun. Great party.

This wasn’t the first time this odd phenomenon of play (or lackthereof) had surfaced. Once Dennis tried to teach the kids at Villa el Salvador to play dodge ball. He lined them all up on the wall and was explaining that you have to throw the ball at people and when they’re hit, they’re out of the game until only one person is left. They didn’t understand and ended up just taking the ball and playing soccer. The same thing happened when I brought my Frisbee. They looked at it like it like I was asking them to toss around a turd and all attempts at organizing a circle to throw was frugal. Basically, the only game these kids have ever really played that has any sort of organization is soccer and half the kids don’t even play that. So when you ask them to join in something organized, they don’t get it and would rather just do their own thing. The national kids were fine with it as they play organized games in school all the time. Very interesting.

So after the Twister debacle, we tried with the Ojos de Dios. Ha ha ha. The problem was that Dennis (or any of us for that matter) hadn’t first tried to make one himself and no one knew how to do it, we just knew what it was supposed to look like. So Dennis tried to teach it but all the kids just ended up with a ball of yarn with a Popsicle sticks poking out the sides. At first they were really proud of their art, marveling at it just because it was colorful. But then they started getting frustrated, wondering when they’d know they’d finished it. Would they just keep balling up yarn the entire party?

After about 30 minutes of balling up yarn, we were losing the kids’ attention. The boys seemed to be realizing they were effectively sewing… decidedly UNmasculine… and few kids had started to get up and run around the classroom. All the while I sat there, frustrated at myself for not being able to figure this simple project out quicker. I kept wrapping, unwrapping, twisting, knotting, and winding until, with furrowed brow, it came to me. I had worked out how to do it and managed to make the little kite-looking thing. While some were long since lost, some of the kids were very impressed, rejuvenating their interest in the project. That’s when Sean came over and reminded me what a crap party I had planned, as if I needed to be reminded.

We played with the Ojos de Dios for another 30 minutes or so. By this time, it was already 10:45 and we hadn’t heard anything from Minas. I was in a state of disarray with all the botched plans and screaming wild, crazy kids with thoughts of presents so thick it may as well have been leaking out their ears. To make matters worse, we had told everyone we were waiting for the Minas kids to arrive before we ate or drank, so half the kids were whining about being hungry or thirsty and wanting to know where their gifts were and all this. Just when I was about to start crying, Andy walked in with Minas kids hanging all over him. Everyone started clapping and sat down to eat our Christmas bread, fruit, and ham sandwiches, and drink our Kool-Aid.

That’s when things started getting good, at last. Laura and Thaily, our teachers, stood up at the front of the class and started handing out backpacks full of goodies like the toothbrushes and toothpastes, a plastic drinking cup, a pair of shoes, and a ball or a stuffed animal. But they didn’t just call a name and have the kid come up, they actually did a little presentation for each kid, saying what his or her strengths were in class and what they’re known for. Like little Angel, one of our favorites, who diligently collects the cups after we eat everyday and Xilary who is best known for hanging all over the volunteers and begging them to carry her. It was great fun listening to all the funny stories from the year then watching each kid, SO excited, give the teacher a kiss on the cheek and walk off marveling at their new backpack.

It was during this hour-long gift giving session that I realized why we, as volunteers, are here. Unfortunately, by this point in the year, I was feeling incredibly frustrated with the lack of appreciation the Organization has for us volunteers. Our hopelessly disorganized attempt at the Christmas party coupled with all this junk about the final exams just really tired me out. But sitting there listening to all the stories we’d made and seeing how excited the kids were, well, I started to understand.

Apparently the kids got it too as the first one started crying right after we’d given out all the backpacks. I caught him tearing up and asked him what was going on. It was Jhon, who is no stranger to tears and sulking, but him crying now was incredibly contradictory to what he was feeling 10 minutes ago and to all the happy cheers from everyone. He said he didn’t want to talk about it but then absolutely burst into tears. I hugged him as long as he would let me, then he went and sat with some of the older girls from Minas, still sobbing.

At last, he started talking. Through the tears, snot, and excessive saliva that inevitably make words sound like gurgles when a kid cries, I couldn’t understand a word he said. The girls sitting around asked him to repeat it, then translated it for me. It came out as, “He says he doesn’t ever want to leave. He wants to spend all his days together with you guys.”

While it made me so proud and appreciated to here him say it, I also got a knot in my stomach. Back when we were feeding Queri, the starving puppy at Villa el Salvador, I wanted to give him all our dinner scraps at one time but everyone said someone who is starving can’t handle so much at first. You have to increase the food little by little or else they could pop their tummies. Sitting there with Jhon, I started to wonder if we’d popped these kids’ tummies. Here they were receiving all sorts of new things from us and enjoying all this nice food and a Christmas tree and fellowship with their friends when they probably wouldn’t receive much at all, if anything, from their own families. I don’t know what Christmas would have in store for them later but, by the looks of it, this party had been more than they expected, almost too much more.

It only got worse as we started talking about the party being over. Suddenly, I was surrounded by crying girls. Shirley started it. She sat next to me and stuck her head in her new backpack and just lost it. At first I tried pulling the backpack off her head but she obviously didn’t want to be seen crying, so I just hugged her and told her we’d be ok. Then I started tearing up, silly as it may sound, me hugging a girl with a Barbie backpack on her head. Then Benedicta came over to give me a hug and she didn’t let go. Maybe she saw me tearing up and that made her give way but she just hugged me and cried into my dribble-spattered Bruce Peru vest. She said she was scared she’d never see us again and that she would miss us over the break. She asked over and over again if we would come back in January and what would happen if she went to a national school. I reassured her we would be back.

The worst was when Yuliana came to say good-bye. This girl is about as gansta as a 15 year old can get, from the way she walks and her fashion sense to her insistence upon ghetto-blasting reggaeton every day at the end of class. She’s sorta the head of her little clique, which is known for caring but acting like they don’t if you know what I mean. They try desperately to put on this Too-cool-for-school persona, so I was only just realizing that they really are sweet girls. She approached me with her normal nonchalance looking as though she would just give me the obligatory check kiss, possibly say thanks, and head for the hills. Instead, she gave me a pretty strong hug and backed away with this stiffened but puffy look on her face. She was trying to hold back the tears, which made two of us, so I told her she couldn’t cry or I would too. In accordance with her gangsta reputation, she took a deep breath to suck back the tears and said she wasn’t going to cry. Whew.

We packed all the Christmas supplies up as the kids were starting to leave… by “leave” I mean loiter around outside the classroom snagging volunteers for their 10000th last hug. I had fully intended to help pack up with everyone but I made the mistake of pulling out my digital camera to take one last photo. Then, all of a sudden, there were 30 kids surrounding Andy and me begging to either be in a photo or, worse yet, take a photo. I could just imagine 300 little ham-sandwich-coated fingers poking the many buttons and smearing the LCD screen on my new digital camera. Nope… we’ll have to settle for being in pictures. We must have taken 100 photos out there while everyone else was laboring away inside.

In about an hour, the inside team had rolled everything up and was ready to go. Somewhere along the line, they had decided to ride a combi back rather than take a cab, which meant the five-foot Christmas tree would be riding along with us. To get to the combi stop, you have to walk about 10 blocks through the streets of Pamplona, winding around stores, the football pitch, and finally down the main street to the market.

Imagine this: about 20 Peruvian kids, aged 8-14 tagging along side 9 adults, 5 of which are Gringos (white folk), one of which is carrying a Christmas tree over his head. It was a very odd scene, explaining why everyone we passed stopped what they were doing to stare at us. If Bruce Peru hadn’t made a name for itself with the positive work it does for the community, it certainly made one for itself that day if not in the name of altruism than in the name of circus freaks everywhere.

The combi ride was enjoyable as the branches of our Christmas tree blew in the wind from the opened windows and occasionally scraped across the skin of boarding passengers. A few people looked really surprised at its presence but I think most people just assumed the combi driver and his fare-collecting assistant had gone a little overboard with the decorations. Nonetheless, we rode along, the whole way home, thinking about the day. While it had started out quite distressing, it had obviously ended up alright. The kids banked in terms of gifts as each one went home with a new backpack, a pair of shoes, a doll or a ball, a new toothbrush, toothpaste, and a few other things plus all the wonderful surprises they found stuffed in their little bag with the photos. All the adults were happy as, even with all the problems, we had managed a pretty good party and tomorrow would be much easier. Not only would there be no children taking those ‘unexpected’ final tests, we also had an idea of what to anticipate. But my day wasn’t even close to being over.

The rest of the day, I sat in my room stuffing the goody bags for Villa el Salvador. Using the rest of the little surprises the women’s club sent, I stuffed about 28 bags full of glow necklaces, toy cars, lollipops, marbles, playing cards, all sorts of other things and, of course, the photos each kid had picked out. By the end of it, I was in dire need of a nap seeing as how I hadn’t slept more than 5 hours a night in the last week. But there were places to go and people to see, so off I went without resting.

Later that night, around 10pm, Andy and I hopped in a cab to pick Michael up from the airport. His plane was supposed to land sometime around 11pm, so we stupidly decided to get there early. Around 11:30, we started wondering what was up so we checked the board and both flights from Atlanta had been delayed though we didn’t know by how long. Around 12:30, we had seen so many Michael look-alikes that we were just bored… who knew there’d be so many fuzzy-headed, beefy little Cuban men running around the Lima airport?! At 1am, we thought how nice going to sleep would feel. And finally, at 1:30am, we saw Michael walking out with backpack on the back, another bag hanging off the shoulder, and yet another massive rolling suitcase trailing behind him. He wasn’t joking when he said he had gifts for the kids. We taxied it home quick as we could and were in bed by 2:30pm. The night wasn’t long enough as day broke in the middle of my first dream. Off we went again.

So on Sunday before the parties that were scheduled for that Friday, we were all clueless as to what we were going to do… decorations, food, activities, gifts. So I took the initiative, sat down alone (save for the company of Gnarls Barkley) and came up with as many ideas as possible.
My thoughts were these: organize the room into a circle of stations. There would be food stations, gifts stations, and art stations interspersed around the room. The kids would come in at 10, as we’d told them that´s when the parties were to start, and begin at the Candy Tree. Essentially, this would be our little 15 dollar Christmas tree decorated with candy and gift bags for each kid. When they entered, they could pick their bag of the tree along with some candy then move around the room to the other stations. At the end, we´d all sit around the stripped Candy Tree and read Christmas stories and sing songs until we gave out the big gifts of backpacks, shoes, etc.

The stations around the room would include a few games of Twister, an art station to color Christmas ornaments for the tree, a few food stations to get Christmas bread (Paneton) and chocolate, one to get sandwiches, and another to get drinks. We even thought of having a piñata which scared the poo out of me thinking about some of our more rambunctious kids running around blind folded swinging a stick. And Dennis had this idea for an art activity called Ojos de Dios or Eyes of God where you wrap yarn around crossed popcicle sticks to make colorful squares. A great idea, right?

Well, I pitched the ideas to the other people in the house and out floweth the suggestions. First of all, let´s not have stations as too much organization will lead to frustration and probably failure. Good point… leave it to Anna to over-organize even after having seen through the photo project that any attempt at organization doesn’t work with these kids! So instead, we´ll all do each activity together. Yes… good idea. And about that Candy tree, no way. The kids will gripe about who got what candy and someone will take another person’s bag. Better to just hang up the bags or put them under the tree and give them out to each kid individually at the beginning. And as for sitting around the tree singing songs and reading stories… let’s not be silly. The kids won’t be able to stand sitting there looking at their gifts. The songs will turn to shouts of impatience and the stories will be ignored. Let’s just call names out and let everyone clap for each kid as they collect their gifts. We unanimously agreed the piñata was a horrible idea from the beginning. And, finally, we all liked the idea of giving the kids their gifts then sending them home so they could be overly excited OUTSIDE the classroom! So there it was… Now the hard part.

We had about 45 pairs of shoes and, thankfully, Jos had managed to collect most of the kids’ shoe sizes either by tracing their foot on paper or asking their numerical size. So,while everyone was out enjoying their Sunday afternoon, I was in the living room comparing shoes and putting them in size order. When that was done, I compared the shoes to the traced outlines and found about 10 of the 28 kids a fitting pair both in size and fashion. But the trouble with the numerical sizes was that they were in Latin American numbers (ie 34, 37, 42) and all the Canadian shoes were in North American sizes (ie 3, 7, 10M). I did the best I could comparing the few that had a traced foot and a numerical number. Another 2 hours later, I had about 20 of the 28 a good match but we didn´t have info for some kids and others simply didn´t have a shoe in their size. Uh oh… T minus 5 days.

On Monday, I wrote out a list of all the things we needed from foods to art supplies to other materials and we elected Jos and Dennis to skip work on Tuesday to go to China Town to find what they could. I was thankful I didn´t have to go as I was incredibly busy with the photo project. See, we´d promised each kid that they could have two of their photos, which meant I had to somehow take anywhere from 100 to 300 photos to each school, let the kids pick them, then have selected ones from over 25 rolls reprinted. If it sounds like a mess, mutliply it times about 55 and that’s how many hours it took me to do it all, even with Andy helping on occasion. And then we decided to give each of the teachers an album of our favorites and the ones that the kids picked out. I should have started much earlier on the Minas and Villa el Salvador photos but couldn´t have done much with Nazareno as we´d only started the project there the week before… Shall I tell you the solution?

Andy and I went through the photos from each school and picked about half (ie the best ones) to offer as options that the kids could have. We stuffed them in little photo albums, put sticker labels on each page along with the name of the photographer, and then took the albums to their corresponding school. The kids could then select two photos by writing their names on the sticker label on that page. Then, I searched through all the negatives and made lists of each photo I needed to copy and placed the negatives in individual envelopes with their lists.
Monday through Wednesday, I went to each school doing this, having the prints developed as quickly there after as possible. The Kodak store, who charges 20 centimos more per picture did an amazingly wonderful job. The other store, San Luis, who has always been known for its inability to organize anything, did a terribly subpar job that left me in their store trying to convince them that a black line down the side of their pictures was not acceptable quality. That’s quite a long story, but I got what I wanted… another indication that my Spanish has improved (whew).

Once printed, I had to compare the names in the photo albums with the prints and put the two selected pictures from each kid into the envelope with their name. And, because we decided to give the photos out in the gift bags, I was in charge of picking out toys for each kid and stuffing 28 gift bags with the photos and smaller of all the lovely gifts Mom and the Women´s Club sent. That adds another 6 hours of work.

All this to say, that is why I was glad Jos and Dennis went to buy the supplies on Tuesday rather than me. This also put them in full charge of the backpack and shoes issue where they had to find out extra shoes sizes and buy the shoes of sizes we didn’t have. They did a great job with it, even though they forgot to take the f$%&ing list it took me an hour to make.

T minus 2 days…I had asked for a meeting with the teachers to be held on Wednesday after school so they would know what would happen at the parties and to get their suggestions. After all, because they are members of this culture, they would know exactly what the kids would be expecting, such as Paneton (the Christmas bread) and chocolate, and because they’re teachers, they’d know what all the kids could handle… On Wednesday morning, after I’d already told most of the teachers and volunteers about the meeting, Dennis decided to cancel it. I rather forcefully disagreed and, in the end, Dennis realized the teachers might actually want to help organize and divvy up the gifts which would also lighten our load. So it was on… thank God… and the meeting went well with many suggestions and lots and LOTS of help afterward. Essentially, they labeled a backpack for each child then stuffed a pair of shoes and a doll or a ball into each one. It doesn’t sound like too much work but it took 7 people about 3 hours to do!

Then that afternoon, they realized they didn’t have all the shoes. So Thursday, T minus 1 day til showtime, Jos and I took a day off from school to go back to China Town to buy the rest. We also went to the grocery store to buy all the more perishable items we would need for the sandwiches, drinks, gift bags, etc. This turned out to be a blessing as I had a bit of extra time to work on the albums for the teachers.

On Thursday night, we prepared as much as we could and went to bed with crossed fingers. It had been a hellishly long week. I was tired as I hadn´t slept more than 4 hours each night with all the preparation for the photo project. On top of it, Michael would be flying in at midnight after the party, so there wouldn’t be any time to catch up on sleep before the party on Saturday and the beginning of our two-week long journey around the continent.

So, Friday would be a whirlwind but we were all (except for Sean) anticipating a good time… The worst was over.

Around the 27th of November, I got my letter in the mailbox saying I had received the box of gifts Mom had sent to the kids for Christmas. See, in Lima, when you receive a package, the post office (named SerPost) delivers you an official looking letter on proper letter head with all the information about when it came and who it’s from, etc. You’re then supposed to take this slip and your passport across town to the collection office where you generally have to wait about 2 hours to sit through the queue, pay a little, then, at long last, get your property. Or you could just pay them about 15 extra dollars to deliver it to the house… hahah… no. Having talked to Jos and Dennis about their experiences collecting at the post office and knowing that Pam Thompson had sent a package on behalf of the Women´s Club four days after Mom sent hers, I decided to wait until both had arrived to minimize wasted time at the post office.

Well… I waited about four days and still hadn´t received the slip telling me Pam´s package had arrived. Finally, around December 3rd or 4th, I got a telephone call. Jabbering away in rapid Limeño Spanish, I managed to work out that the man on the phone was asking why I hadn´t picked up my package from the post office yet. I tried to explain to him that I was expecting another package and couldn´t be bothered waiting two hours for each when I could just pick up the two packages at the same time. He seemed discontented and continued on to tell me he was a vigilante, not a post office worker. Vigilante? Hmmmmmmmm…. He was just beginning to say that he would stop by the house when the phone was suddenly disconnected in that inconvenient way only a phone in Peru could do.

I had to admit, I was a little scared. Some dude had just called our home phone number, explained some poop I really couldn´t understand, and now he knew our address and was going to be standing on our doorstep. WTF? So I waited, and sure enough, about 30 minutes later, there was a nappy looking sweaty man standing outside our gate asking for me. He smelled horrible and his the fibers of his clothes (a Cosby sweater in 85 degree heat!) were lined with that dark black traffic dust that coats most everything that stays outside in Lima. His fingernails were dirty and his skin had those baby little bumpies of grease on it that indicates the desperate need of a shower. In his hand was a SerPost package slip… MY SerPost package slip!

From his side of the iron gate, he started talking immediatly, for some reason a little more clear than he´d been on the phone. I finally understood what was going on. He said he did not work for SerPost and that he was a vigilante (which I still don’t understand) who works for a company that collects packages and processes slips for SerPost. When my slip arrived to his company, he took it upon himself to personally deliver it to our door. He withdrew a grubby piece of paper from his pocket that had my name, address, and telephone number on it… alone… not listed with other people who he might be so graciously delivering a slip to that day. Skepticism overwhelmed as he held the paper out to me and asked if that was indeed my information.

He then went on to explain that, for an economical price, he would be happy to take my passport down to the the post office and collect my package for me then deliver it to the house…. ….. ….. ….. ?!?!?

Of course… how convenient! I could give this nappy man my passport so he could collect (::cough cough:: steal) my package, and PAY him to do it! What a wonderful service as I could lose my passport and package all for one low price. By this point, my only thought was how to get my package slip out of his hand so it would be safe on our side of the gate.

Yanet, our housekeeper and cook, was standing there with me, not needing to say a word as the confused look on her face said enough. So the man could hear, I asked Yanet if she´d ever heard of this before and she said she certainly hadn’t. I looked at the man and he looked back blankly as if Yanet´s Peruvian accent had not already discounted his tale. To ease his confusion, I explained that my friend was PERUVIAN and she´d never heard of such a service and that I had had a slip delivered by a SerPost employee less than a week before and expected this to be the same. The grub made the mistake of handing my SerPost slip to Yanet to inspect. She said it did look like an official slip and started to hand it back to the guy. I seized it and took it immediatly inside. Just inside the door, I looked at the delivery date of the slip… November 30!! He´d had it for days! When I came back out, I explained again that a SerPost employee should deliver the slip. He looked confused (lost, astonished, saddened as only a guilty person can look) and began the Peruvian whimper you´d have to hear to believe.

He said if I didn´t want him to collect the package for me, all I had to do was pay for his ride back to his company. ”Just 2 soles” (about 60 cents US) as he´d ”taken time off work” to come ”all the way” to my house to deliver my slip. I told him I really didn´t think that was necessary as I hadn’t requested his service and had actually expected an official to deliver the slip for free. Again, he looked confused, even saddened, and, despite my less polite phrasing, couldn’t seem to comprehend that I wanted him off my door step and on his way without any of my money. Five minutes later, he still hadn’t left so I got Dennis from his room. Though Dennis appears pleasant in that priest sort of way, he isn’t afraid to unleash the terror and shoo dishonest grubs off the doorstep!

Sure enough, Dennis came down and, with a few forceful words, had the guy trucking in less than a minute. We stood there for a moment trying to figure out what had happened. How could this man possibly have gotten my slip? I had two thoughts:

1. The day I´d received my first slip, we were standing in the doorway of the house talking to a bunch of our students. The mailman just sort of waved me down through the gate and handed me the slip without checking for identification or anything. For all he knew, I could have just been someone visiting the house or one of the students. Perhaps when the mailman was delivering the second slip, the grub had been loitering on the street and just told the mailmain he lived there and would get it to the right person. Slip in hand, all he had to do was make up the story and hope the stupid gringos would fall for it.

2. Our mailbox is basically just one of those slots in the door with a box clinging on the inside of the door to catch the mail that falls through. It wouldn´t be impossible to stick a hand through the slot and take out whatever was there. So maybe he was just passing by the house, saw the sign on the front that announces our gringo-ness and thought, ‘Hey, I bet a bunch of gringos live in this house. I’ll snatch their slip and invent some story to get a passport, a package, and some money and they’ll fall for it because they’re not from here. Damn I´m good!’

So who knows how he got the slip but both of them are very likely possibilities. In the end, I got my slip although it was folded with the grub’s dusty filth lining the creases. The post office didn’t seem to mind as Andy and I received my packages in a timely fashion… we only had to wait 1.5 hours! And when the post office employees opened the packages to inspect the contents, toys a plenty bursting at the boxes’ seams, they looked at me and just said ‘Niños?’ Yep… for the kids.

I got home from the post office and ripped into the boxes. I couldn´t believe how much stuff my mom and the Women´s Club had sent! All sorts of schools supplies, glow bracelets, a big bag of assorted Cracker-Jack-type toys, candies, gum, gift bags, stuffed animals, hair clips, Matchbox cars, stickers… oh the list goes on and on. I felt like a little kid myself. There were so many of the gifts I could already assign to certain kids. Xilary would love the hairclips and Marilyne and Shirley would go nuts for the stickers. Martìn and Miller would be amazed by the glow bracelets and Benedicta would love one of the Snoopy dolls.

As I was sitting there digging through all the gifts thinking how wonderful this Christmas would be for the kids, I have to admit I was a little suprised at myself. The Anna 3 months ago couldn’t have really cared less about kids. I mean, sure, happy kids were the best type of kids as they’re less likely to cry and make niusances of themselves but now I was actually getting excited thinking about how each of our little ones would enjoy the gifts.

Not only was I shocked at my being truly stoked about the happiness of a kid, I also realized that, in the last couple months, I had gotten to know each one of these little people. They were friends now as I cared about their safety and their futures, shared stories and memories with them and made them laugh and supported them when they cried. We had become parents to them, or at least parent enough to fill in the void where so many of their parents failed. They looked up to us and anticipated every day they’d spend with us. In their often harsh and dangerous world, we were their safety just as much as they were ours. Three months ago I would have never believed I´d be sitting on the floor of my room so excited to be digging through two big boxes of Christmas gifts. What have these kids done to me?!

And on top of it, I was getting a glimpse, for the first time, what Christmas must be like from the perspective of a parent. Here I had always experienced it as a kid, looking forward to receiving gifts and being nestled at home by the wholeness and support of my family. But there’s a completly other side to it. This year I´d be among the ‘parents’ picking out the gifts for our kids and nestling them into the wholeness and support of our great big family. At the same time, though, these gifts were given to the kids by all my friends and family back in the States, so I was just a middle-man parent. And because the kids would end up with a really great, joyful Christmas, I felt like they were also a gift to me. I’m not sure many people get that unique perspective of Christmas both from the point-of-view of child and parent. Quite a Christmas miracle if you ask me! This was sure to be a different sort of Christmas… =)

There’s a 12-year-old kid named Rogerilio that goes to school at Villa el Salvador and has had the same pair of sandals for as far back as anyone can remember.  Looking at them, you can almost hear them begging to be put out of their misery… thrown in the trash for God’s sake as they wouldn’t even be of any use to a scrap pile.  They were in one piece.  I can say that, but just barely as the strappies had long-since come unglued from the insoles and the insoles from the rubber soles.  One shoe was in pretty good shape with most of the straps still connected to the soles.  But the other one was connected by only two of the straps and even that was threatening to come undone as they’d been sewn together before and the decaying white string they’d used before was on its last leg.  I also had to dig a few rusty nails out of the insoles as someone had used what tiny bit of shoe-repair knowledge they had to produce a temporary fix that more resembled a risk of tetanus.

Luckily, I had a few large (like, extra GRANDE) sewing needles as I have been trying rather lazily to make curtains to replace the seventies-style lemon-lime blinds in our room.  With these needles and a ball of yarn, I went to work tyring to repair these well-worn sandals for the 5th or 6th time in their lives.  As I worked, I got to thinking about it… How is it that I came to a point in my life where I´m sitting on the floor in Peru sewing together a pair of sandals for a poor kid that I´ve really only hung out with once or twice.  Taken completely out of context, I´d never believe it either.  But here I am, thinking I´m just a little volunteer that helps wrangle kids long enough for them to learn something.  Turns out we’re good for a lot more, which is always fun to know, and I was really excited to use my homegrown sewing skills to act as a shoe repairperson for a few hours. heh heh heh… 

And in the end, I was thinking of Mom.  Since she taught me to sew at the age of (what? five?), I’ve sewn together the most random things from ripped jeans to book covers to curtains, but never shoes!  Even though he’ll probably never know that my mom was responsible for his shoes lasting a few more months, Rogerilio will be happy to get a little more use out of them, especially now that he won’t be poked in the foot by rusty nails.  Thanks mom!

We’ll try to give them to him on Friday.  In the mean time, he’s wearing a new pair of purple high top (off brand) Converses that someone from Canada donated through one of Bruce Peru’s volunteers.  He seems to like them, despite their purpleness, especially because his friend Steven expressed some envy for them.  So hopefully, in the end, he’ll have a choice of footwear, probably for the first time in his life!  We’ll see what Andy’s new hot glue gun can do about keeping the insoles and the rubber soles together.  Maybe that´s a good ol’ Alabama duct tape job!

Another problem has arisen… We have no oven and my unfilled Southern-girl desire to cook is beginning to agitate under the weight of far too many rice-based meals with little-to-no protein.  We do have these:

a microwave

a gas stove

an electric water warmer

So if you can send stove-top or microwave recipes that don’t include rice or potatos (as that’s literally the staple of every meal we’ve eaten at the house that we didn’t make for ourselves in protest), we’d be very appreciative.  Tonight, we’re planning a meal of roasted chicken bought pre-roasted from the local supermarket coupled with a few veggies including roasted potatos at the insistance of Andy and fudge for dessert, if I have anything to do with it!!  =)

One reminder on sending recipes… The more basic the ingredients the better as Peru doesn’t import a lot of the pre-packaged ingredients found in my cookbooks.  For instance, there’s no marshmellow cream and I haven’t yet found corn syrup or brown sugar.  They do, however, have A LOT of yummy fresh vegetables and about 300 varieties of potatos to choose from… No, Idaho potatos is not one of them.  But hey, you can always give suggestions and I can improvise! 

Send any ideas to picturingperu@gmail.com and I’ll let you know how it turns out!  Thanks y’all!

Don’t worry!  I’m here!  I’m still safe!  Life here has been really crazy hectic recently.  Aside from spending all my extra time trying to get to know this crazy city I live in, I’ve also added another English class to my day.  Before, I just taught a beginner level class from 6-7 in the evening but I’ve since added an advanced level class from 8-9.  It’s been really great so far as it’s a class with three or four people who speak English pretty well and are just looking for practice in conversation.  Me being anthropologically minded, I have really enjoyed talking to them about Peru and why it is the way it is.

But I did want to write a quick post to tell everyone that all is still well… better than expected really!  I have had a horrible time with the computers down here as we do not have internet access in the house so we have to go to internet cafes.  No offense to Peru, but it’s not exactly the technology capital of the world so I am currently writing on an outdated PC with Windows 98 and an English keyboard that’s somehow formated to the Spanish alphabet.  Anyone who has traveled in a Spanish-speaking country can empathize then, that finding the aprostrophe key is a commitment and there’s no hope in fighting the odd accent mark that gets thrown atop a letter. 

Being technologically challenged, you can imagine loading pictures onto the website has been an awfully frustrating task.  For one, the internet connection is subpar then try using the 20 computers in an internet cafe on the same connection with half the people playing those blasted online fantasy games and others trying to download music.  It makes the connection slower than molasses requiring about 2 hours to load 14 pictures onto the website. 

After wasting 3 hours last Sunday and returning to the house near to tears, I started mentioning to the people in the house that I was looking to rent a laptop until Michael brings my sweet little Mac to me in December.  Miraculously, it turns out my house mate Dennis has a computer that he rarely uses and said I could use it whenever I wanted.  So… the writing will begin again soon!  And I anticipate the quality of writing to be higher also as I will be writing when the desire strikes me from the comfort of my own home rather than when I’m forced to because I don’t want want to spend any more time in the loud, slow internet cafe than necessary =)

I still don’t know what to do about the pictures but if I have to sit here for 2 hours to load 14 pictures… I’ll do it!  This is especially because Andy and I found a photo developer that can digitize the kids’ photos at a wonderfully affordable rate.  So keep an eye out for progress on the photo project and I vow to write more about it soon as there are a lot of really exciting details!

So you’ll better understand little Christian, I’ll tell you about a situation that happened the day I met him.  As the only volunteer at Nazarena that day, I was in charge of picking up the kids and getting them down the hill to the school.  Basically, I walked up to the top of the hill to get the kids from that area of town then we all rode down together in a combi.  By ‘down’ I mean we got in the bus for about 300 meters then hopped out and walked the rest of the way to the school.  Yes, I’m having trouble understanding why we don’t just walk it, but I figure that’s yet another way to keep these kids interested in going to school.  Maybe they would be less likely to go if they had to walk?  I can’t say.

But little Christian and Jherson are among the kids that live at the top of the hill, so they were part of our envoy.  From the get-go, Christian was stuck to my arm.  I think what attracted him to it in the first place was this little bracelet I’ve been wearing since I was in Ecuador last year.  It having been there so long, I don’t really notice it that much and most of the time it’s obscured by my watch.  But you know kids… they see everything so before I knew it, he was fiddling with it trying to get it off my arm so he could keep it.  I looked at his wrist and saw about 3 other bracelets… apparently he collects them.

So it went, little Christian sat beside me on the bus and when Jherson saw him getting all the attention, he sat on the other side of me and tried to get some for himself.  He saw Christian messing with my bracelet so he went one step further and started trying to take my watch. 

“Give it to me.  Give it to me.  I need a watch.” He said as he tried to work out how to undo the band.  I explained to him that I need to know what time it was too and that if he took it, we couldn’t get to school on time.  I then pointed out that we were already late.  By this time, Christian had fallen silent at being overshadowed by Jherson.

After the bus ride, we started walking toward the school through the labryntine streets, around little buildings and blocks that, confusingly, all look the same.  This was only my second time to walk to Nazarena and my first time to walk alone with the kids so I was letting them lead the way.  We came to one intersection where Jherson wanted to go one way and Christian wanted to go the other.  When Christian wouldn’t cede his opinion, Jherson reached around me and popped him a good one in the face. 

You know when you’re a kid and something terrible happens how it takes you about 2 or 3 seconds to process it before you start crying? In that two or three seconds, I saw Christian’s little expression turn from complete disbelief to a visible attempt to just brush it off to a little mix of anger and fear to full on tears.  It was amazing.  It was like you could see his brain clicking away trying to work out what to do and then the sting set in and he couldn’t help but give in.

For the first time that day, he released my hand and put it to his little reddening cheek, then turned and started walking away.  I called him name and asked him to come back but he didn’t react, just kept walking.  I turned to Jherson and asked him why he did that and if he was proud to see his brother crying.  I told him he should probably just go home instead of coming to school because we don’t allow hitting.  He had a really weird look on his face like he was slightly amused at me repremanding him. 

With one kid walking away and the other standing there like a bump on a log, thinking about whether to head back home or not, I realized I was lost.  I had no idea where the school was and this recent mutiny meant my guides had left me to the wolves.  I took off after little Christian who’d managed to walk about a block up the hill.  Calling after him, he wasn’t paying much attention, just walking weakly with his hand still to his cheek.  When I reached him and he refused to stop walking in the opposite direction of the school, my first instinct was to beg… I was desperate.  I was lost.  But I started by telling him that the school was a safe place where he wouldn’t get hit anymore and that he shouldn’t neglect school because it was his brother that hit him.  He didn’t look convinced… I felt like Christopher Columbus trying to convince his sailors not to turn back after a month of not seeing land.  Then I just told him the truth. 

“Look Christian, I need your help to get back to the school.  You’re obviously the only one that can get us there so show me the way.  If you leave, I won’t be able to find it.”

He perked up almost immediatly.  There were smeared tear tracks down his cheek when he looked up for the first time.  He kinda looked at me questioning whether I was serious or not.  Clearly I was, so he grabbed my hand again and started shuffling back down the hill toward the school.  Jherson, refusing to go home, followed along side trying to make conversation.  I told him he should probably just be quiet if he was going to join us.  He never really did shut up, though.

Seeing this situation introduced me to Christian.  He probably gets overlooked by his parents all the time just because Jherson demands so much attention.  It’s easy to see Christian loves going to school and interacting with all the other kids, talking about coloring techniques and what kind of snacks are the yummiest.  But above all, he adores attention from adults.  Even if the teacher is being terse and didactic, he hangs on every word she gives to him.  So, having me around to hold his hand and walk beside him was like being on cloud nine.  But he kinda had this little bit of apprehension on his face even though he was clearly enjoying the attention.  I figured he’d probably hear it from Jherson later and get made fun of out of jealousy.  Who knows.

But the story for the second day was that I brought my Frisbee.  Normally, the kids have a choice between volleyball and soccer with volleyball being almost exclusively feminine.  But Christian loves volleyball and doesn’t seem to mind only playng with girls and is completely oblivious to the boys’ attempts to get him interested in a soccer game.  So there’s usually a soccer ball and a volleyball to play with but this particular day, the volleyball was hiding. 

At first, Christian and I tried playing volleyball with the soccer ball and it seemed to be going pretty well.  But after a while, both of us started noticing the welps on our forearms and Christian asked if we could just go back to the classroom.  I pulled out the Frisbee and asked if he wanted to throw for a little while.  We got to throw for about 5 minutes before the teacher called us in to start the next lesson or whatever.  He was learnng like a champ!

So at the end of the day, we got another chance to play outside and I immediatly started with the Frisbee.  We were just passing it around casually, me giving advice here and there on how to make it fly better, when Adres, another kid, came out with the soccer ball. No body was really intersted in playing soccer so he was kicking it around by himself, getting rather rowdy as he started trying to intercept the Frisbee and play two sports at one time. 

Somewhere in there, another girl started throwing the Frisbee with us.  About the time she was just getting the feel of it, Andres came through with the soccer ball and gave it a nice hard kick, sailing it right past my head just as I threw the Frisbee to the girl.  While I was distracted looking for the soccer ball, the girl threw the Frisbee to Christian who, unfortunately, was also distracted by the flying soccer ball and Andres who was standing beside him.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been hit with a Frisbee but it’s guaranteed to hurt as it’s hard plastic flying at body-chopping speed.  Poor little Christian had his head turned when the Frisbee made contact with his face, hitting just under his bottom lip.  I was still messing around with the rolling soccer ball when I turned to see Christian walking toward me with a dripple of blood smeared from his lip to his chin.  Oh shit.

He came to me and planted his little body against my leg, crying at a suprisingly minimal level.  Just looking at it, all I could see was the little puncture wound with a little blood.  Nothing too serious but enough to shake up a kid.  I escorted him to the classroom, all the while telling him he’d be just fine.  The teacher cleaned him up and looked at the wound.  She pulled down his lip and looked on the inside to find that the puncture went all the way through!  Dear god, his bottom left canine tooth had stabbed through his lip!

I felt terrible the rest of the day.  I was so worried his entire lip would blow up and that it would scare him.  Crap.  What did I do?!  I was just trying to give the kids a chance to play a sport that I really love and sure enough, it ends up hurting the one kid in the class who thinks the world of me.  Great.

By the time we were saying good bye, he said it still hurt but didn’t seem too bothered by it.  Then the next couple days I worked at Minas so I didn’t see him.  Finally, on Friday, I saw him for a few minutes when we all met up after class.  It was healing really rapidly and he said it didn’t hurt anymore.  Good.  Whew.

But the lesson learned is this: When you’re teaching a kid to play Frisbee, one of the first things to remind them of is that you have to keep your eye on it so it doesn’t hit you because if it does, it’s gonna hurt ESPECIALLY if it hits you in the face!  Knowing this now, after the fact, I realize Christian will never touch a Frisbee again in his life, which is really unfortunate as it’s a great sport.  I just can’t believe that, of all the kids who got injured by my desire to introduce them to new things, it had to be sweet little Christian who looked up to me so much.  Strange how things work.

In Lima, Bruce Peru runs three schools. We live in Miraflores, which I previously mentioned is one of the the more wealthy barrios of Lima. The schools are in the poorer districts at least an hour from Miraflores. To get to either school, you have to catch a combi, which is a van that has specific routes it runs through the city. Usually, you just look at the number on the top of the van but if not, you can just listen out as there’s a guy that hangs out the window to tell you where they’re going. Sometimes he’ll even hop out and try to get passengers to come in the van as if they might be able to be persuaded…. Peruvian logic.

In any case, there are three schools which are in two completely different areas of town. Pamplona is the first district and there are two schools there, Nazarena and Minas. Villa el Salvador is the second and there’s only one school there. Pamplona was said to be drastically poorer than Villa el Salvador but the children, in both schools, are much better behaved. At Villa el Salvador, some of the kids are really great students but others are completely obstinant and even dangerous when they get upset for being repremanded.

On Wednesday, Dennis and Jos decided Andy and I should go to Pamplona, presumably so we wouldn’t be scared off! hahah! We woke up at 7am to get ready, eat breakfast, and help butter the bread we’d be giving to the kids for lunch. By 8:15, we were on combi 33 jetting out of Miraflores. For the first 20 minutes of the ride, we were standing up. Well, I was standing up. Thanks to their being taller than 90% of Latin America, Andy and Jos were hunkering over, all of us gripping the hand rails as the little combi swung around corners, honking and swerving to miss cars and pedestrians. Balance is key.

So for the first 20 minutes of the ride, all I could see were the tops of passenger’s heads and Andy swaying around the inside of the combi, trying in vain to hold on to the bag of bread and the hand rail while still maintaining balance. As soon as the combi cleared out, all three of us found seats, the boys wedging their bohemoth Western legs between the seats. Now I could look out the windows.

See, the buildings in Miraflores are often two or more stories. There are tall apartment buildings, little parks here and there, and fast food restaurants just like in the States. There’s even a Gold’s gym… weird. When I sat down, we were still in a section of town that resembled Miraflores. Same architecture and cleanliness for the most part. I started talking to Jos and couldn´t have been talking for more than 5 minutes. When I looked back out the window, the cityscape had changed drastically. Where there were fast food restaurants and parks, there were tightly packed edifices half-finished openly displaying unpainted brick. The roads were no longer paved and lined with gutters and trees… now they were all dirt, mud actually as the morning mist had saturated the top layer of dirt. There were no longer signs on any of the buildings and, upon closer inspection, it looked like businesses were interspersed with residences. Where there was a department store in Miraflores, there were little home owned places, mostly the typical little general stores and snack shops with cement floors and bars over the entrance.

I was amazed. In a matter of moments, we’d passed from the first world to the third world (or whatever terms you want to use for developed and less developed areas). It was like there was a line drawn between the two and I had missed it. I promised myself I’d find the line on the way home, but for now I was flipping through mental snapshots of different places I’d been that looked similar. La Paz, Bolivia came to mind, particularly in reference to the unfinished top floors of the brick buildings strewn alongside the road.

Whether it’s true or not, someone told me that, in Bolivia, the goverment pays a little extra to people who are building their homes. To continue receiving this extra money, many people begin building a second or third story on their houses with absolutely no intention of finishing it. As long as it’s unfinished, they’ll continue receiving money, so when you’re riding around town, you see that most houses have an unfinished top floor with rebarb sticking out the top and bricks laying around up there. I wondered if the same was true in Peru, warranting all the unfinished buildings in this part of town.

Our combi continued through these areas, winding around small hills, through seemingly endless haphazard habitation. Where did it end? Jos said you could drive for another hour and not find the end of it. Looking around at all the people living their daily lives, I got that old familiar feeling of exasperation that I hate so much. It makes me wonder what the point of life is and often times I can’t answer it in reference to the people who live in these tiny places with little or no impression on the outside world. But then I look at my own life and wonder how useful I am. If they’re happy, why wonder if there’s some other purpose in their lives. Maybe that IS the point of life… to be happy. But there’s a lot of people who are happy who don’t matter. Aren’t there? It seriously puts me off to think about crap like that but I can’t help it. Everytime I drive through a one-horse town I do it. I’ve done it since I was a little kid riding in the camper passing exits in the middle of nowhere and wondering what the people who live there do. I feel ashamed for doubting the purpose of people’s lives but hear me when I say I usually can’t find any greater point to my own life when I turn the microscope on myself.

Anyway, I digress. We arrived to Pamplona around 9:15 and started walking. Upon exiting the bus, a few elements of the town struck me. First, the smell. It was unlike anything I had ever smelled before and it was kind of unexpected. It wasn’t like the putrid worn-leather smell of a Bolivian bus or the fetid stink of stagnant, drying urine on urban concrete. It was sort of a mix of hot soup, mud and maybe a slight twinge of garbage, but not overbearingly so. Although it may sound odd, I couldn’t decide at first whether it was a good smell or a bad smell. I mean, there was the soup but then there was the little bit of garbage. Hmmmmm….

Looking around, I worked out pretty quickly where certain elements of the smell came from. First of all, it was muddy, which was befuddling in itself. Why was it muddy when it hadn´t rained? Looking around, you saw that you were standing in a cloud. Somehow our little combi had secretly transported us to the top of a pretty significant mountain. The geography of Lima is a lot like Los Angeles. It’s on the Pacific Ocean, so there’s that misty, watery cloud of humidity that comes off the sea. Normally, it would burn off or the wind would transport it away but Lima is surrounded by mountains that don’t encourage circulation. The effect in Miraflores is that it’s always cloudy. And here, on the side of one of the mountains that blocks in the humidity, you find yourself standing in the clouds you can see in Miraflores. With all the wet clouds, the ground is constantly saturated, not to the point of making puddles but definitely to the point of maintaining a thin layer of stinky mud.

Another ingredient of the smell, the soup, became obvious as we began walking. Just in front of us, an older more indigenous-looking woman with battered skin stepped out onto the front stoop of her house with a giant red plastic bucket. Judging by the way her body strained and swayed slightly under the weight of the bucket, I assumed it was filled with liquid. Assumption affirmed… with one swift movement, she guided the bucket from her shoulder, around the back, and out onto the street, all the while maintaining her grip. The contents of the bucket, now flying through the air, were a thin brown with little chunklets and bits of forcefully sqeezed lime peels. It hit the ground about 20 feet uphill and began trickling down to us, a waft of salty soup reaching us first. So that not only explained the soup smell as the bucket content was probably lots of left overs from dinner the night before or just cooking waste, it also explained the thicker patches of mud.

The garabage ingredient wasn´t too hard to identify either as you didn´t have to look far to see a pile of garbage. Each one was surrounded by skinny, mange-consumed dogs picking around in ripped open bags and fighting over scraps. Strangely though, the smell wasn’t inundated with garbage. I guess the dogs ate most of what makes that typical garbage smell.

A second element of the town that struck me was the prolific amount of dogs running around. The poor pups look completely battered too with scars on their faces, skinny but not emaciated, and many absolutely ravaged with mange, some to the point of not being able to tell what color they’d be as they have so little hair. One dog I saw was about 75% scab and still scratching away at the bleeding areas. It made my heart hurt and I suddenly felt so horrible for throwing out my dinner scraps last night. I should have saved them for one of these pitiful-looking dogs.

What’s worse, you notice that none of the boy dogs are neutered and many of the girl dogs are heavy laden with obvious signs of recent pregnancy. You don’t have to observe too long to notice that the dogs are constantly hard at work making new dogs, so there will always be way too many dogs in those neighborhoods. It’s terrible to think that survival of the fittest still befalls animals that humans domesticated. I could go on a soap-box about our responsibility as humans to take care of the animals we domesticated but I’ll spare you.

A third thing that struck me but that I had been warned of was the architecture, if you could call it that. Really, it´s more a matter of building materials. Most of the houses there are one room, maybe two, made of plywood and topped with either a piece of plastic or a piece of tin. But at least here, there’s a bit of space between the little buildings. In Bolivia, they were all strung together, which seems like it would offer a really uncomfortable living situation as a thin peice of plywood certainly isn´t sound proof and offers little privacy.

With such little houses and clearly no running water, I started wondering where they took baths. Jos said he’d happened upon a guy taking a bath in front of his house once. He said he was walking past trying to work out what was going on, staring all the while. Eventually he recognized it as bath time but didn´t think, “Oh gee, maybe I shouldn’t stare at this peculiarity as the gentleman would probably like some privacy.” Eventually, the bather whistled at Jos to repremand him and only then did he realize he’d been staring. Sounds like something I’d do!

We walked up the hill to pick up four girls and walk them to school. I’m still not sure why we had to pick them up as they walked most of the way by themselves. I think we got on a combi for a while, so maybe we were just there to pay their ride down the hill. It’s little expenses like this that keep kids from poor families from going to school, I guess. That’s part of what Bruce Peru does: pays the expenses to keep these kids in schools. Then, if they make it through a year in a Bruce Peru school, we try to get them enrolled in normal schools.

We arrived at Nazarena at about 9:30 or 9:45… about 30-45 minutes late, which is probably not the best example to set for the kids. Oopsy. Nazarena may actually be the name of the larger school where our classroom is housed. I’m not sure. But I was suprised when I got there to enter a normal school… quite a large building in a sort of U shape, wrapped around a basketball/soccer area and properly walled in from the rest of the community. The Bruce Peru school is just a classroom, tucked away in the corner of the larger school. I think it was once a storeage room.

I met the teacher, Laura, just long enough for her to point out two little girls about ages 4 and 5 and tell me to work with them. I can’t say for sure what my reaction was to seeing how young the girls were but I’m pretty sure I visibly winced. For some reason, I had in my mind that I’d be working with 10-14 year olds that could go to the bathroom by themselves and talk audibly. I smiled and said ok, reluctantly approaching the girls. From the moment I sat down with them, I regretted being so apprehensive. They were really sweet girls. The younger one definitely had some trouble concentrating and was clearly more interested in fishing crayons from under the table than doing her assignment. The other girl was very studious, coloring shape after shape and insisting upon reveiwing the colors with each new shape.

About 45 minutes into the class, the littlest girl looked at me with baby doe eyes and asked to go to the bathroom. I said yeah, go for it and she just kinda looked at me blankly. When I reassured her she could go, she walked over to the teacher and started talking to her. She must have said something like “Teacher, the new girl won’t give me any toilet paper and wants me to go to the bathroom by myself.” Laura came over to me and asked where the toilet paper was. Someone handed her a roll which was directly transfered to me and the little girl grabbed my hand, dragging me to the classroom door. “Jesus. How awkward is this going to be?” I thought.
Sure enough, it was awkward as hell as I had to stay with her and, presumably, watch her pee and help when she couldn´t work out how to pull her pants up. Reason number 348 not to have kids. To my chagrin, when we got back to the classroom, the other girl said she needed to go too. Shit. Again, an awkward situation but you get through it, you know?
I was just getting tired of trying to focus the little girl’s attention to her work and getting frustrated at not knowing the word in Spanish for crayon when Jos rounded up me and Andy and hearded us to the other school. On the way over, we started talking about why the school day is so short. In Peru, kids older than about 8 only go a half day to school. Their parents can either choose to send them in the morning (about 8am to noon or 1) or in the afternoon. Bruce Peru chooses to teach in the morning because the afternoons are more dangerous to be out in the communities. Apparently, and this is what I was told, many men who don’t have jobs drink all day rather than go seek work. So they sleep late then wake up around 11 or 12 to start drinking. In their depression over not being able to provide for their families, they get violent in their drunkeness. So, around 2 or 3, bad things start happening out there. Several volunteers have returned to the communities in the afternoon for whatever reason and many have met trouble. To keep us all as safe as possible, we leave the communities by noon.
To get to Minas, the other school in Pamplona, you have to walk straight up a hill. The downside is that it’s literally straight up a hill. The upside is that it’s good exercise and offers a really great panoramic of Pamplona. From the top of the hill, you can see that Pamplona is built in the crotch of two mountains. The main street runs straight down the center and people live on either side of the valley. From there, Andy noticed a black streak running down the side of the opposite mountain from where we were. Like Andy said, it looked like a fire had blackened the ground and a lot of the little flimsy houses around it, reducing them to what looked like even more fragile and less careful constructions. Jos said it was a pig pen. That big nasty black streak was a pig pen… hmmm. Right in the middle of everyone’s houses.

I got to thinking about how much conquistadors suck. It has been said that everything terrible that has happened in South America has been the fault of the Spanish who came over during the 1500s and forced their culture upon the natives. From religion to commercial city living, they screwed everything up, insisting that people do it their way even though they didn´t understand it and didn´t know how to make it work. So here are these people who are used to living in artesan and agricultural villages that are stuffed into major metropolitan areas like Lima and trying to survive by buying and selling rather than trading and helping out their neighbors. 500 years later, it seems native knowledge of survival has died and methods of agriculture have died along with it. I would be suprised if the people in Pamplona know to rotate the pig pen to different places and plant a garden in the fertile soil left behind. I know that’s true for cow pens… maybe I’m wrong about pig pens. But I don’t remember seeing a garden in Pamplona, which is what gives me this impression. I blame the stupid conquistadors for this situation. Granted, the majority of the people in Pamplona were born in the country side and migrated to the barrios of Lima in search of greater monetary opportunities, so I would think they would at least know a little bit about agriculture even if they are mostly forced to leave it behind when moving into such an overly populated place.
Minas is pretty far up the hill and is actually a church, but definitely does not look like it. From the outside it looks just like any other of the plywood edifices but squeezed pretty tightly between the neighboring buildings. It is completely different from Nazarena, though, as it is not a room inside an already established school and the kids are mostly 7 and above so you won’t find many of the tiny kids in there like you would at Nazarena.
Just before we entered Minas, Jos pulled us aside and told us about a girl named Lourdes who is mildly mentally challenged. I hope y’all don’t mind me using the word “retarded” as that’s a direct translation from Spanish and is much easier to say than mentally challenged even if it’s not the most PC term. But, in Spanish, “retarded” may mean any sort of mental deficiency even if the person doesn’t fit our traditional definition of retarded. Anyway, Jos explained that Lourdes has a tendency to want to hug and kiss people excessively. To avoid feeling uncomfortable, he said, just count to three then push her away. She’ll keep trying though so you just have to keep doing it and usually she’s pretty good about obeying if you just ask.
We went into the school and I immediatly began working with a sweet boy named Victor who was doing his math and another kid whose name I can never pronounce properly who was trying to draw triangles. Both were pretty eager to keep doing their lessons so I didn’t bother them too much, just instructed the littler one with the difficult name that a triangle has three points and three sides.

I was just sitting there watching them do their work when I met Lourdes. She came right up to me and gave me a huge hug and a kiss on the cheek. She started talking to me about something or other when her friend came up and started asking me what my hair looked like. It was pulled up in pigtails with ribbons so I told her it was about shoulder length brown and curly. She held out her hand and asked for a piece so she could see. I pulled a loose peice out of my pig tail and held it up. She grabbed it and started messing around with it then took it over to her friends and started bragging about it. Before I knew it, I had 5 kids asking me for a piece of hair. I couldn´t find them fast enough and a little hand reached out and ripped about five good hairs out of my head. I saw the crinkled bits the kid had in his hand and immediatly stood up and tried to escape. There was no where for me to go but at least if I was standing up, they couldn´t reach up and pull it out of my head again. In this way, I was able to pull the loose ones out and divvy them up.
Victor ended up getting a really curly one and was just amazed by it. He kept boinging it and flattening it out then watching it curl back up. At one point he had it twisted around the wrong way, you know like an old phone cord that has one curl that’s twisted the wrong way. I took it and fixed it back into a spiral and he started giggling and boinging it again. He must have played with it for the next 20 minutes, laughing and showing anyone who was interested how it would boing.
A while later I started helping Lourdes with her math. Her task was to write the numbers 1-100 that are divisible by two. To teach her this, I explained the idea of evens and odds, which is “pares” and “impares.” She was so into her math that we worked on it non-stop even while they were passing out the bread, fruit, and drink for the kids. At 11:30 we heard the teacher call everyone together but we were so engrossed in our math that we just kept right on going. Turns out they were huddled together to do the prayer. Jos said he could hear the children saying their sweet little prayers and hopes and in the background was me saying “PARES, IMPARES, PARES, IMPARES!” Heh heh… oops.

We walked down the hill after school seeing kids to their houses. Unfortunately, Lourdes lives almost all the way down the hill so she walked with us the longest. I say unfortunately because she had already fallen in love with Andy and wanted so much to hold his hand and make smooches at him while we walked. Andy wasn´t having it partially because he’s not really good at outward affection and partially out of fear of it being misconstrued as something else to anyone watching! Jos agreed with him that this was a valid fear as natives are known for trying to peg Gringos for doing something wrong because they know they can get money out of it. eek eek!

So Lourdes was flirting with Andy and he was obviously disturbed by it. I tried to ameliorate the situation by telling Lourdes that Andy was my boyfriend and that he was only allowed to hold my hand. She looked around at us and asked why we weren´t holding hands, so I dragged Andy’s hand out of the haven it had found in his pocket. She didn´t look convinced, probably because Andy’s hand was like a statue’s, stiff and unbending as if it was a burden to have to hold his “girlfriend’s” hand. So Lourdes continued to make smoochies at him and eventually began bickering with me about who he belonged to, me or her. “Mio, mio, mio” She´d say and I´d do the same thing right back, all the while making a game out of blocking her view of Andy with a notebook so she couldn´t make smooches at him. He looked majorly put off but sometimes he looks like that and is actually quite content…
We rode the combi home, twisting through the one-story communities on damp dirt roads. Again, I turned and talked to Jos, this time only for about 30 seconds and when I looked back up, we were back on paved roads in the two-plus story part of town again. I looked out the back window, baffled as to what the line was. To me, it looked like maybe there was a bridge that went over a rather large interstate. On one side is the less developed area and on this side was the more developed area. So there it was… I think. I still need to double-check that.
After school, we have lunch, prepared by Yanet, a precious-looking Peruvian girl about 23 years old. She’s a really great cook and thus far has made us some really great traditional Peruvian food. I always look forward to lunch and dinner knowing she made it! One thing though, there´s always rice involved. I vaguely remember this from traveling last year but Dennis put it best when he said his insides are all made of rice now because you have it about 4 out of every 5 meals. And if it´s not rice, it´s noodles. Fine by me!
I´m not sure when we had our chat about Lourdes, whether it was during lunch or sometime afterward but her home life came up as an aspect of her mental incapability. Apparently, she has been sexually molested a lot in her life. Her mother´s boyfriends tend to the biggest problem. To think of the implications of this makes me shrivel up inside, so I´ll spare you an personal thoughts and just leave it as that. But suddenly, all the joking around from earlier that day had a different meaning. To her, a 14-year-old, that was a part of life… all the more reason to worry what it looks like to anyone watching. Yet another reason to be thankful I’m an automatically-assumed-innocent woman.
After lunch we have a bit of a break before English classes start. Recently, Jos has been teaching a rather large beginner class with about 6 people in it. They became concerned that 3 of the 6 were true beginners while the other three were a little more advanced. The three true beginners seemed really lost so they were hoping to let Andy and I teach them in a different class. We agreed and, Wednesday night, did our first lesson. We kept it really simple just doing pronouns, the vowels, and the first half of the alphabet. Dennis said we did a really great job and that the students looked so much happier when they left this time. So that was definitely a success. So now that’s our normal class to teach. Since then, Dennis has organized another class of younger people (a group of 8 kids that are about 10 years old, I think) that he and Andy will co-teach. So I´ll probably end up teaching the beginner class alone, which is ok with me. It’s a nice class to start out with and I must say I´d be much more comfortable teaching the adults than the kids! Don’t ask me why but I’m slightly intimidated by kids… but you know this!
After classes, we have dinner, which ends up being around 9pm. Kinda late, yeah, and I´m not a big fan of trying to sleep on a full stomach, but you do what you have to, right? So we finish dinner around 10pm then try to be in bed by 11 so we can get up between 7 and 730 the next day. Inevitably, Andy and I end up talking all night and not getting enough sleep but there´s a lot to talk about with all the new situations, so it never gets old. I´d rather be tired in the day than miss a conversation =)