Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

 Today’s article is written for the Reach To Teach Teach Abroad Blog Carnival, a monthly series that focuses on providing helpful tips and advice to ESL teachers around the globe. The host for this month is Heather Richards, here you can find other similar articles. I’ll be posting a new ESL related article to this blog on the 5th of every month. Check back for more articles, and if you’d like to contribute to next month’s Blog Carnival, please get in touch with Dean at dean@reachtoteachrecruiting.com, and he’ll let you know how you can start participating!

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Slow travel is the best travel to me. It's hard to come by, and I think any travel is better than none, but to me, a quick week in Istanbul or a few days in Athens is so unsatisfactory. I'm left with some good times, great photos, and a yearning to learn so much more. 

Slow travel gives you a chance to be acquainted. You get a favorite little shop, and routes that you walk. You get a routine. If you are volunteering or teaching, you have responsibilities and deadlines and a work schedule. This might sound like the opposite of travel - all of the terrible daily regular life stuff that you were running from. But in a new country these little slices of "regular" life feel fresh and different. You name all your favorite stray animals. You know which store sells the cheapest eggs or which restaurant won't make you sick. 

 I travel to know the culture just as much as to see the sights. To me, coming away with an experience with local culture is far more important than a selfie in front of Big Ben (though I've definitely done that and I am not ashamed at all).

 A week in a place teaches nothing cultural except perhaps how people react to lost tourists. (Unofficial Observations: Yerevan is really friendly, but they don't usually speak English. In the Dominican Republic they will help you and then make you pay them by using guilt or persistence.) 

I think my love of slow travel is connected to the anthropologist in me. (Full disclosure: I'm in graduate school for anthropology right now!) Anthropologists have to spend two years in a different community and get at least one disease. They stay for around two years so they may see situations repeated - New Year's Celebrations, birthday parties, harvest rituals. They get a disease so they can have bragging rights. (Check!)  They study traditions and religion, local economies and kinship, gender relations and agriculture. The point is that the anthropologist, while always an outsider, should be so familiar to everyone as to be almost invisible. A part of the landscape. This familiarity allows them to understand and have access to the culture in a way which would not be possible for a tourist or distinguished guest.

The familiarity of schedule can do the same. It is only through routine and repetition that you as the traveler start to see patterns. I learned when my neighbors burned trash and when the preachers led revivals. I literally timed my evening walks by when the cows came home (have you tried to take a walk through a herd of cows? It's not pleasant). 

The benefit of slow travel is that you come away knowing something. You don't come away with just a fun story and a new profile picture, you don't come away with just a whirlwind idea of old churches and sweeping landscapes, you come away with knowledge, knowledge that changes you and your perceptions.

 Maybe the knowledge changes you because you've realized that how you do things isn't "normal" or "natural", it's cultural. Maybe the great scope of a history and people that you never knew about humbles you. Maybe knowing your neighbor's story shifts your priorities. Maybe you discover new passions from learning of art or music you never knew about. Maybe your heart breaks a little, and maybe it rejoices. 

My professor once told me a story about how World Bank officials, who make huge decisions about foreign aid, will be sent to stay in the place they may be allocating aid to. The length of that stay? Usually around three days. Three days.

In three days, you might be able to pick up several new facts and five new misconceptions about the people you are staying with. In three months, all of your preconceived notions and outsider biased misconceptions are shattered (hopefully) and through experience and relationship and study, you actually know a little about what that place and that community is about

Why I love anthropology is because it is firmly against outsider arrogance. Anthropologists don't claim to know a place until they have been there for years. And even after years, they would never presume to truly understand what living in that culture means. They are always aware of outsider bias.

We praise travel as a means to destroy prejudice, but "quick" travel can build it as well as destroy it. What does someone who spends a week in Port-au-Prince, Haiti actually know about the Haitian lived experience? What do they know from a week spent in museums Paris or Shanghai about the culture and values? Nothing probably, but now they think they know something.

 Assumed knowledge is more dangerous than self-aware ignorance.

(It's also just obnoxious. I know. I was almost that person.) 

I could give examples of times when assumed knowledge was dangerous -  from historical colonial rule or anthropology or recent international development, but then you would be depressed. 

I lived for six months in Peru, four months in Georgia and another four in the Dominican Republic. I do not presume to fully know the lived experience of being Peruvian or Georgian or Dominican. But through study, reading, immersion, and really just time, time spent in long, slow days sitting on stoops and around kitchen tables, I did come away with knowledge that changed me. The sense of healing from violence and connections with the land in Peru, the ancient depth of history and pride in Georgia, the constant hustle and social intensity in the Dominican Republic. I don't know much, but I know something. And I know far more than from my whirlwind trips through Istanbul, the Greek isles and Armenia.

Quick travel can be amazing. It can be fun and life changing. It can be a needed escape or relaxation or mind-shift. It can raise questions about what you are seeing and experiencing, but remember, you aren't always getting answers. You aren't always getting depth of knowledge. I'll always choose quick travel if the alternative is no travel, and often those are the choices. But slow travel memories are my favorites. Slow travel is what made me who I am. 

Maybe you don't care about cultural insights, or culture at all. Maybe you really do just want to see sights and nothing more. Well, I think you are entirely missing the point and also missing out on a lot of fun, embarrassing stories, friendships and changes to grow. But you probably think I'm an overly academic weirdo who probably made up their field (anthropology, what??), so I guess we're even. 

Maybe you would love to experience slow travel and gain cultural insights, but don't have the time. Often, life is too fast for slow travel - or even slow travel might not feel like enough time. How do we slow our travel down enough to garner meaningful cultural insights and come away with some local knowledge?

Some slowness tips:

1. Read. Get a novel or an in-depth non-fiction account about the place you are visiting. NOT a travel guide - those are well and good, but I'm talking about an in-depth cultural study. Get something by a local author if possible. Or maybe the book that every school kid is required to read while there, whatever the locals find essential reading. Read it before you go if you can, as it will open your eyes to phenomenon you otherwise might overlook.  I read Bread and Ashes while in Georgia, and In the Time of the Butterflies and Feast of the Goat  after my time in the Dominican Republic (I couldn't find them in country - but after is better than nothing!). 

2. Have a free day. If you are only passing through, but have a little extra time, build in a non-scheduled day. If you are there for a few months but are kept super busy, clear your calendar for a day. Don't sight see, don't go on a tour, don't call home. Just wander. Sit in the square. Take a walk. Talk to vendors. Read that book in a plaza. Run a few small errands. 

3. Study the language. This is touted all of the time, and it's true that you cannot understand a culture without understanding a language. Study before you go and while you are there. Even just a few phrases will help. Slow down by having a slow, stilted, grammatically erroneous conversation with a local. 

4. Ask a local AND do the tourist stuff. Sometimes, locals never get around to their own tourist sights (I've done that...), but they might know the very best little pub. Tourists sights are usually popular for a reason and bring insights of their own (here's looking at you Hagia Sophia - you blew my mind.) Try to do both. 

So take it slow. Sip your tea. Chat with your neighbor if that's culturally appropriate. Read books. Be open to change.

And maybe study a little anthropology while you're at it. 

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.

Public Spaces of Miraflores and Villa El Salvador: Peruvian Social Reality 3

(another blog post for my class. Educate yourself.)

The public spaces of Villa El Salvador and Miraflores are naturally very different, reflecting both the economic and historical differences of the two districts but also the difference in symbolic meaning these spaces hold for the respective residents.

As Setha M. Low writes in her paper on public spaces in Costa Rica:

"ethnographic approaches to spatial analysis are crucial for any adequate analysis of the contestation of values and meaning in complex societies. Further, they highlight the most valuable anthropological contribution to the study of urban space: the ability to integrate the localized discourse with larger political and economic processes" (Low 1996:863).

Now, I am no spatial analysis expert and I only know one small part of both Miraflores and Villa El Salvador but I will attempt to tease out some of the differences (and similarities) here.

Miraflores is well know for having once been a beach resort town, a playground for the wealthy. It is still one of the wealthiest districts and has some beautiful parks such as the infamous Parque de Amor and Parque Kennedy. I live in-between the two and, while I avoid the Parque de Amor due to the uhhmm..."amor" one can see between the visiting couples, I am often at the Malecon and Parque Kennedy. And I love both - the Malecon on a summery Saturday is full of puppies and babies and bicyclers and ice cream sellers and para-sailers and a handsome group of capoeira practicers. Parque Kennedy is always busy and on weekend nights there are performances and vendors and friends meeting to go out. These public spaces are well used, with all sorts of groups practicing their trades. In both you can also find many tourists and non-Peruvians (such as myself).

The Malecon off Alcanfores

The public space of Parque Kennedy being used for a marinera performance.

There are parks in Villa El Salvador as well, though I know them less. The first time I traveled to Villa on my own I asked a colegio student next to me where my stop was.

"It's one of the big, main avenues." She told me.

"Like this one?" I asked, as we drove through a big intersection, where the road was split in the middle by a grassy park.

"Oh no," She said with a chuckle, "The one you want doesn't have grass."

The way she said it made it seem that the fact that my stop did not have grass said a lot about the area where it was (and indeed it did, as I was later to see.)

Near the Municipalidad in Villa El Salvador during the 40th Anniversary Celebration.

(There are green spaces in Villa, but I do not have photos of them)

The people I have met in Villa are very proud of their parks. The first time I visited I was told repeatedly about the parks and had them pointed out to me multiple time. I go to Villa twice a week now (though not to frolic in a park unfortunately) and recently took another tour of Villa. I found it interesting that a US friend of mine noted that she felt like the speaker on the tour was "trying to sell us something".

The public space of Villa, as seen above, is used for parades, processions, vendors, performances and, I'm sure, friends meeting to go out, much like Miraflores. But the significance of having a public space is very different. If you type Villa El Salvador into Google, most of the images that pop up look like this:

Find the original link here

As that is the image of the district, no wonder its inhabitants want to make it very clear that they have public spaces consisting of more than just sand, but of grass and trees, concrete and benches. In Villa, green parks means having water in a district that is built on sand dunes. And as I have seen written on a water tower in Lima- Agua es vida. Water is life. Water is also wealth.

In Miraflores, parks are simply a fact of life. I never had anyone talk to me about Parque Kennedy or even the Malecon nor take me to see them. Instead, friends took me the Plaza de Armas downtown or to the discotecas en "el Sur". Miraflorans appear to love their parks and use them frequently, but their symbolic meaning is not tied up in a sense of needing to "prove" oneself or differentiate one neighborhood from another in terms of socioeconomic status. Parque Kennedy (or PK as I am trying very hard to introduce into the vernacular) is Parque Kennedy is Parque Kennedy - it's part of home. (I find it interesting too that it is named after a US American President...)

As Low concludes in her study of the conflict of modernization and history in public spaces in San José, a situation such as this "highlights the importance of spatializing culture and human experience as an analytic strategy for understanding people’s negotiation of cultural values and representations of those values" (Low 1996:876).

The symbolism and meaning of public spaces in Miraflores and Villa El Salvador appear to be very different. Their uses are much the same, but the meaning for the residents vary.

Of course, more study needs to be done to be able to postulate further, but I would stand behind this hypothesis. Or within it really, as I highly enjoy parks.

(What would also be interesting to study is not just similarities and differences between these public spaces, but the physical connection between poor areas of Lima and the public spaces in Miraflores. Vendors from other (poorer) districts are often found in Miraflores, selling candy, ice cream or jewelry. Or my favorite, the women selling roses at Parque de Amor who will stick the flowers right in between the faces of two amorous lovers and stand there until they buy the flower. It is incredibly forceful commercialism of "love" and cracks me up every time.)

LOW, S. M. (1996), spatializing culture: the social production and social construction of public space in Costa Rica. American Ethnologist, 23: 861–879. doi: 10.1525/ae.1996.23.4.02a00100