Fresh Attempt at Saving Sanity

This is how my semester started...with a tree having fallen on our library.

Yes, we have a Starbucks in our library.

It's been nearly a month since I wrote, though I had all the best intentions to regale you all with some funny and touching stories from Peru as well as my deep thoughts on being back in the District and struggling to not grow up. But alas....

Instead, I recently had a few weeks in which I had a strange allergic reaction and ended up in the ER, turned 22 years old, forgot about multiple class assignments, crowd-surfed, made new friends, despaired of my life, was excited by my life, and locked myself out of my room last night and am running off a few hours of terrible sleep on a too-small couch.

And I've been missing this place a lot. Lima.

It's been crazy, but I have realized, as I have gone about three weeks without a journal, waiting for my birthday present journal I get every year (it arrived and is cute!), that perhaps writing my stories and thoughts is just as important to my sanity as living off more than brownies. So I think, along with my journal, I will try to return to expressing myself a little bit here. And eat veggies.

Hold your breath for the next installment of my far too exciting life. I know not many people read this (though I can't be sure since multiple friends refuse to make a little profile and follow me) and so I feel silly writing on here and somehow expecting an audience. But oh well, I also feel silly locking myself out of my room and falling on someone's head while crowd-surfing. That's just how it goes.

Starbucks Good Times

I'm sitting in Starbucks in Lima.

Now, before you accuse me of being a super commercialized American, this is my first time in Four and a half months that I have come to Starbucks. After a morning of paper editing, I am set to start on my next and final essay and staying in my apartment for the rest of the day was simply too terrifying of an option. I also wanted something sweet and the internet, so here I am.

My name is Maria today. Well, ok, my name is Maria everyday in Peru, but usually Maria Elena.

I had to fight for a table. I consider myself a city Starbucks veteran, but these people are fast...I missed two good tables before I could nab a third.

They are playing Girl in the War, by Josh Ritter, one of my favorite songs (though its very sad. as per usual, listening while you read will give you such a better blog reading experience).

Also, WHY do so few Limeños clean up after themselves in restaurants?! Seriously, everyone just leaves their cups and plates on the tables....the trashcan is right by the door, people.

These students at Catolica are not going to clean up their tray.
USA says: Jerks. Peru says: other people are paid to pick it up.

And after that rant...

It's doing it's very best to rain which means, in Lima, heavy mist that still manages to make puddles. From the window I can see the umbrellas of Pinkberry and the steeple of the lovely baroque Catholic church.

It's all very surreal and very everyday, at the same time.

I spend far too much time in Starbucks in DC, mostly because it's close, 24-hours, and on my meal plan card.

Too much Starbucks in DC. (Not all mine...)

And now here I am at the end of my semester, sitting at Starbucks in Miraflores, Lima.

As a kid, I always pictured myself jaunting around international cities, being really posh and taking weekend trips to Machu Picchu. Well, I don't look very posh and cities is more like one city, but hey, I did go to Machu Picchu... and while I have plenty of regrets from this semester (why didn't I take those salsa classes? Why did I speak so much English? Why did I eat those tamales that one time??) I'm still living the dream.

Thanks God!

(oooo now some song with a harmonica intro came on. I love harmonicas.)

This post is dedicated to Kristin, who is bold and snarky and often seen at Starbucks.

Sendero Luminoso: Peruvian Social Reality

The barefoot, ragged boys in the Diagonal attack every car like a pack of dogs, offering to wash it, guard it, scrub the whitewalls. Others wander from table to table, offering to make the customers’ shoes shine like mirrors. (They say the bomb that exploded here was placed by boys like these.) (149)

This quote from The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta is an observation from the protagonist as he sits in the late 1980’s in the Miraflores restaurant Haiti.

I walk by Haiti nearly every day. It looks lovely now and is always crowded. One would never imagine that it had once been a place of violence and fear. Vargas Llosa's book helped me to understand a little better the terror of the days when restaurants could become killing fields.

Many people are loath to speak about this time of fear. I was able to speak to my host family’s empleada about the time of Sendero Luminoso. She lived in a rural community as a child during that time, and she told me that even gossips were targeted, that if you simply talked too much Sendero could come. She said that if someone didn’t like someone else, they would denounce them to Sendero. She talked about it as a time of great fear, but yet somehow detached. Perhaps because she was only a child, or perhaps she did not want to delve deeper. I did not press about it.

This monument stands in Miraflores, at the sight of a bomb that killed numerous people, placed by Sendero Luminoso.

Sendero is not only a thing of the past.

The New York Times reported in 2007:

LIMA, Peru, Jan. 10 — A ruling by an international human rights court telling Peru’s government to honor 41 leftist rebels killed in a 1992 prison raid has provoked public indignation, and the government is considering withdrawing from the court.

The article reports that Peruvians were enraged that these prisoners, killed after they had surrounded history tells us, would be at all honored. This shows how much, years later, people are still (and rightly so) sensitive to the topic of Sendero. There is naturally still fall out from such an atrocious period of time.

Only recently (June 5th 2011), Sendero acted again, Milenio reports:

Tres soldados muertos y otros seis heridos dejó el sábado una emboscada de presuntos miembros de Sendero Luminoso a una patrulla que se dirigía a custodiar los comicios presidenciales del domingo en una zona del sureste, dijeron autoridades militares.

Sendero has become involved in narcotics trafficking, keeping their activities in the jungle area of drug labs, as you can watch on Al Jazeera's short documentary.

The New York Times had a hopeful tone when they reported in 2006 that new and more peaceful times had brought a growth in literary art in Lima.

But Lima is once again one of Latin America’s brightest literary scenes, and in the last year, Peruvian writers have won prestigious literary prizes in the Spanish-speaking world for novels that deal with fallout from the war years and, in doing so, add to a growing literature of terrorism and the risks to democracy in fighting it.

Alonso Cueto is a famous Peruvian author.

But the article ends with this ominious quote:

“This was the man who was within a breath of leading Peru,” said Jorge Bruce, a psychoanalyst and social commentator. “Now he is marginalized and shunned, but tomorrow who knows?”

Tomorrow is now, and Ollanta Humala,

whom the quote references, is Peru's next president.

Ollanta

Who knows what will become of Peru?

As a study abroad student who has never lived through violence or fear, it is hard for me to wrap my mind around the daily life of a Peruvian during Sendero Luminoso. Even having read novels about it, watched movies such as La Boca Del Lobo, I simply cannot imagine how brutal such a life was, nor how people can be socialized to become killing squads. Watching Youtube videos of Senderistas in prison shows them to be a disciplined army. I would be interested to read further about the sort of training new Senderistas undertook to allow them to go from being university students to ideological killers.

Perhaps (and hopefully) I will never understand Sendero Luminoso fully. I only hope that the conditions that supported their birth have been understood enough to have them changed.

Bugs.

I just got back from teaching English in Villa El Salvador,

after an hour and a half micro ride.

The take turns rule doesn't seem to apply here when traffic lights stop working....

I sat down to get started on homework and placed in the center of the dining room table are the bugs my host mom was given. They are for eating and have health benefits, I am told.

Now, I know a lot of people have the wrong idea of Peru as only a mountain range full of Incan pueblos where eating bugs is the norm, but that is not the case.

In Lima, you can eat some of the best food in the world.

Or Pizza Hut, KFC, McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts if you so desire.

This is me looking askance at the little buggies.

I am an adventurous eater and have consumed guinea pig, alpaca, homemade chicha (corn beer) from the street, and all manner of foods here. I love Peruvian food. Also, after living in the woods for two months and regularly waking up to spiders on my face, bugs do not frighten me. But for some reason, this is putting me off my cafecita.

“How will we find it?” “Just shout - donde esta Shakira!?”

(Another Weekend Story)

Venders in Lima, and the informal economy in general, astound me. There are people selling anything you could imagine anywhere you could imagine it. Want a book to read while on the beach? Someone will be walking around selling it. On the beach. Maybe your pen broke while on the bus and you desperately need to write down the number of the chica sitting next to you? Well, it wouldn’t be strange for a pen vender to walk on your micro. My favorite are the ice cream venders (or ice cream ambulantes) – they are my new Starbucks. In DC, it felt strange if there wasn’t a Starbucks on every block. In Lima, there is an ice cream vender on every street. Thank God. Of course there are also the children selling candy and the women with babies begging… but that is an entirely different blog. (My GWU blog in fact.)

There is an ice cream vender on his bike!

Selling books on the beach. He had the new Mario Vargas Llosa!

When we arrived at the Shakira concert (that is linked to my fave Shakira song. Con letras!) it was like an Atlanta Braves game times seventy. The venders were out in full force. While standing in line we were presented with beer, candy, ice cream, chaufa (fried rice) in huge pots rolled on carts, binoculars and Shakira themed everything. Venders had set up makeshift restaurants and it seemed like half of Lima was at the concert to either attend or sell. There were also women who, for 5 soles, would help you get ahead of the line. In the US this would be a VIP pass. In Peru, it is a women who simply guided you into line ahead of (now angry) people. Essentially, you were paying them for their chutzpah. (Until someone would complain to a cop and they would make you move.)

I bought some ice cream and carried my trash for half an hour looking for a trash can. Once I got to the gate the man told me I couldn’t bring it in. “It’s trash – where is the trash can?” He took it from my hand, made a point of looking around, and tossed it on the ground next to the sidewalk. Well then. No wonder Earth Hour didn’t go so well in Lima.

We passed through the gate and were each handed a few packages of pads. That’s right, feminine items. So the concert was mostly attended by women and their boyfriends but still – did they think that much estrogen might be an issue? The concert itself was amazing; Train and Ziggy Marley played and then Shakira came on and definitely lived up to her reputation. (Let that mean what it may.) It was a great show. We left a little early to beat the crowd and exited the stadium to be met with an absolute mob of venders, crowding the exit, along with riot police on foot and on horseback. It was a gauntlet, and I’ll admit that it was nerve-wracking to be the first to forge the path through the stands of meat and stacks of posters shoved into our faces. And really – riot police? Come on guys, we have our pads to keep all the woman-crazy at bay. As much as Shakira’s abs may dishearten us, someone somewhere is selling chocolate.

For 37 seconds now, I have been thinking over whether or not eating the un sol (around 30 US cents) chocolate ice cream every day is worth giving up ever having abs like Shakira. Tal vez, my friends, tal vez.

Adonde Vamos?

Yesterday my host family invited me to go with them to El Centro (the downtown area of Lima). I was very excited, as this is a tourist hotspot, with beautiful architecture and a lovely plaza. I wasn't sure what we were going to do there, but then, I'm never 100% sure what is going on when existing in a Spanish only environment. I think it's good for me though, as I can tend to focus too much on schedules and on everyone being happy with the plan all the time. (Those are big and/or bolded so that you can experience my intensity.) Living in Peru, I just can't really live that way...and that's ok.

So we caught a microbus to downtown. On the micro was a man playing guitar and singing (quite normal). He was very good. We bought ice cream from the vender on the bus. People often complain about Lima's public transportation, and with good reason, but come on - you can't buy ice cream and get a free concert on the metro in DC.

We got out of the micro not at the Plaza, but into the most crowded streets I have ever been on (exempting Chinatown, NYC during the Chinese New Year). Most shops are closed on Sundays and this was the last Saturday before school started, so everyone and their mothers (literally - very family oriented culture here) was out shopping. Women with babies strapped to their backs jostled with venders selling boiled quail eggs. Men pulled huge stacks of boxes through the street. It was sweaty and loud and colorful. I didn't mind the crowding, or the smells, but at one point a man started yelling (still unsure why) and I suddenly thought: what if a panic happened? What if people started to run? A lot of people would die. This didn't happen but it's a real danger I never thought I would encounter. This was not what I expected when my family said El Centro. But hey, all about the flexibility and surprise.

We found a vender with good prices on school supplies. Shopping (at least at crowed center such as these with multiple hole in the wall shops and venders) is completely different from in the USA. For at least 30 minutes we had the vender as our personal shop assistant as my host sister read out the list of items we needed. Every item was tested and looked over, the bill was checked multiple times - the intensity of the transactions amazed me. How different from the casual way I am used to shopping! But then, that is also because I just hate shopping most of the time. We stood in the crowded corridor of shops, with puppets (school supplies? I wish my classes had puppets) and lunch boxes hanging from the ceiling. I started at the Jonas Brothers pencil case inches from my nose. For 37 seconds I tried to simply take in the mass of humanity around me, the noises and smells, the pain in my back when boxes were shoved into it, the placid kindness of the people squished near my elbow. I was sweaty and stinky and, in a strange way, I loved it.

We eventually did go to the center Plaza, walked around some beautiful cathedrals, watched couples taking wedding photos, ate some fried bread and Inka Cola and had a wonderful evening. But this is the difference in studying abroad and in being a tourist: any tourist can go the Plaza de Armas in Lima. Not any tourist can have the experience of the frenetic intensity of school shopping in Lima - why would they? Why would they ever venture into that area with its reputation of danger and theft and really cheap notebooks? By the way, I got six good notebooks for 15 soles - that's 90 American cents per notebook. As much as I sometimes just want to backpack around South America, instead of attending class, this is why I am here - to be more than a tourist, to know more than beautiful buildings.

Hurrah for the everyday errands!

PS. No pictures, because I didn't bring my camera due to theft.

pps. Also - I finished my plate at lunch and dinner yesterday. Peruvian stomach strength and 20 pounds heavier, here I come!