The first two weeks

29/9/2008
We recently learned of a Peruvian myth about a monster called the Pishtaco. The Pishtaco (spelling?) sounds like the rough equivalent of the “Boogie Man” in American culture, except that he has a very definite appearance. Apparently, he looks just like me or my friend Brian: a super-tall white dude with blonde hair and blue eyes. And he eats babies. Sweet.

28/9/2008
Last night I experienced my first – of many, with luck – Peruvian wedding. I am viciously hung-over. It was a ripping party, and volumes-worth of culture in a single night. My involvement with said event began when my friend Lindsey, who lives in the next town over from Chacrasana (just up and east over the desert mountains which surround our little pueblo), invited me to accompany her to a wedding her host family was attending that evening. She asked me at about four in the afternoon while our whole group was in a massive, very Western shopping mall outside of Lima. That place sucked. Anyway, we had to get back to our respective towns, shower and change, and be ready to go at six-thirty. Time is a loose concept here, though, and we didn’t end up leaving her house until about eight. The ceremony was taking place at a church right on the main drag, on the other side of Chosica. Lindsey’s little four-year-old host sister was all dolled up to walk behind the bride (her teacher) and hold up her veil. But as a result of our late start, we arrived halfway through the mass – which, beyond the girl’s disappointment, was no problem at all given the wide open front door and high volume of human traffic through the back of the church even in the midst of arguably the most pivotal moment of a Latin American’s life – and seated ourselves near the rear.

The church, as I mentioned, was right on the main road through Chosica, and was quite unassuming from the outside. The walls, like I’ve found most interiors here to be, (particularly in the case of homes), was largely bare except for cuadros depicting the stations of the cross lining either side. The front wall was broken up by neon green and blue bar-style lighting on either side, which framed statuettes (of virgins?) built right into the concrete, about eight meters up. The pulpit was likewise an interesting fusion of featureless brick – this was interrupted only by a huge crucifix and the words “Gloria al Senor” spanning the top – and, in my North America opinion, really tacky, harp-playing angel images on either side of the message, which resembled giant stickers that one of the countless roaming toddlers might have stuck up there.
(As a side-note, I think I’d like to be reincarnated as a little kid at a Peruvian wedding. It’s like little kid heaven: tons of people, tons of other little kids, great food, you get to stay up super late, you can totally trash your nice clothes by wrestling in the lawn or doing whatever else you want, and you get all hopped up on as much Inca Cola as you want and no one cares at all. Then you pass out wherever the hell you want and your parents carry you out to the car where you sleep til they decide it's time to go. Pretty ideal.)

The mass proceeded casi igual to an American wedding mass, except that, like most things here, it took significantly longer. More precisely, the mass itself took about as long as I would have expected, but the subsequent picture-taking and greeting session roughly doubled the duration of the whole event. In what would become the theme of most of the night, it seemed as though every single person in the house had to walk up and take at least one photo with the bride and groom. One other surprise was the lack of communion-takers. Only a handful participated; Lindsey thought it was because of the tradition that one doesn’t partake unless he or she has gone to confession sometime in the preceding week. Which would say a lot about the eighty-five percent of the population that identifies itself as nominally (or “culturally”) Catholic; only about a third of them actually practice week-to-week. My favorite part of the mass was the music. With the exception of a few standard, a capella Catholic hymns in Spanish, this was provided by a two-man band consisting of a guitar and a keyboard. And they played Beatles tunes the whole time. Lindsey and I had just begun to attempt to decipher the oddly-familiar melody of one song set to Spanish-Catholic lyrics when the duo launched into a half-hour set of “Let it Be” on repeat. It was hilarious.

Finally the newlyweds were ready to retrace their steps up the aisle and into (presumably the husband’s) awaiting car, a small beige sedan covered on hood and trunk with flowers. Rice and flowers were heaved in large quantities at the pair as they proceeded, and before exiting the premises there was another greeting/photo session at the entrance to the church. As they pulled away – the groom driving, to my surprise – Lindsey’s host father Eduardo (with whom I would grow amazingly close by five in the morning) explained to me the Peruvian tradition of the siete puentes, in which the couple is supposed to cross seven bridges in the city before rendezvousing with the awaiting guests at the reception. This tradition takes up to a few hours, and we couldn’t decide whether it was just really hard to find a bunch of bridges, or whether that’s a euphemism for other wedding-night activities.

The reception took place back near my neighborhood, at the Club Los Angeles, off Calle California, which Eduardo explained as a club for members of the Peruvian military and their families. The several-acre campus, like the one down the road at Huampaní where we spent our first two days in-country, consisted of some open spaces and playgrounds, but was mostly characterized by free-standing bungalos and larger buildings for meals and events. The colonial-style clubhouse itself was impressive, well over a hundred years old with high vaulted ceilings supported by wooden beam-work (as opposed to the standard ribar-reinforced flat concrete floors, walls, and roofs here). High up on the walls were large, faded depictions of the 16th century conquest of the Incas by Pizzaro and his armies. This was the first visual reference I’d seen yet to this ancient empire, and I wasn’t quite sure if the intended message was one of cultural pride or rather the sheer power of modern weaponry, it being a military hang-out and all. After arriving and realizing that the newlyweds weren’t due for a couple hours and that the bar wasn’t yet open, we went into Chalacayo for chifa (Chinese) and returned to await the festivities. Little did the two gringos know they wouldn’t kick off for several more hours.
As with the photo session at the church, each individual in the place (by now probably a couple hundred) had to first greet, and later dance with, the bride and groom. Before and during this, there were extended toasts (though still no booze) by the couple, each of their parents, and the godparents on either side. The throwing of the bouquet and garter were the only events I really recognized, and even those took forever; before actually tossing the bouquet, the bride for some reason had to fake it four times, with each false alarm introduced by a long-winded pep-talk by the MC over the mic. When she finally did let go of the thing, none of the single women apparently wanted it, and because it fell to the floor, the process had to be repeated. By the time things started getting interesting, most American weddings would have been reduced to only the hardiest partiers.

And around two in the morning, things did start getting interesting. The band started up, and would be playing until dawn, alternating with salsa and raggaeton beats from the DJ. With the exception of some radio pop songs, it could have been a scene out of a Garcia-Marquez novel. The band was a sight in and of itself, and was one of the highlights of my night. Made up of eight men, they were mostly elderly, short, and plump. Most of them slept through the first several hours of niceties. But when their five saxophones, stand up bass, fiddle, and percussion section came together, it was unlike anything I’d ever heard. The dance is called Huayno - it comes from the Peruvian sierra culture of the same name - and to my untrained ear it resembled some kind of Indian or Hindi melody minus the tambourine effect, and injected with a sort-of Celtic folk sound from the fiddle. This was the only thing they played all night, and it probably occurred two or three times an hour. The dance consists of four or five separate parts, each lasting a few minutes and broken up by a short respite. It’s the same tune over and over, but it gets increasingly intense with each segment. Participants can dance as pairs (as most did “early” in the night) or as a larger group holding hands in a circle, sort of like at a Jewish wedding (which virtually everyone was doing a few hours later). It’s pretty unstructured, though there is a definite arm-swinging rhythm to it, and the circles were more like shapeless amoebas than real circles. Sometimes they turned into conga lines. The footwork is by far the coolest part. Also up to ones own interpretation, the only real requirement seems to be that you keep the beat and move your feet as much as possible in little shuffle steps. And that you do so faster and faster as the dance progresses. The really good old timers looked like they were tap-dancing by the end of round four or five. And more and more so as the beer flowed more and more easily.

I knew drinking customs here were different, and until last night I thought that also included less consumption than I was used to. Not necessarily the case, turns out. The basic set-up is that whatever group you’re hanging out with will pass a glass or plastic cup around, with the (generally room-temperature) liter-size beer bottle preceding the cup to the next recipient. You pour yourself a shot or two’s worth of chela, chug it in a couple sips (or just one), and then dump the remaining foam out on the floor or in another cup, depending on the venue, and pass it on. Last night’s situation started out as a pour-the-foam-in-the-designated-foam-cup kind of affair, but pretty quickly manners went out the window and people just flicked the foam wherever. At one point a woman sprayed a beer bottle, champagne-style, all over the group of dancers. She was probably old enough to be a grandma.

Until last night my experience with the copa had been that I wound up drinking significantly less that I was accustomed to. But when you do it for a few hours with people who are out for a once-a-year kind of night, you quickly lose track of how much you’ve had or why it even matters. Which can be dangerous, I’m sure, but it also made it a hell of a lot of fun. By five we had all relocated to a circle of chairs to really focus in on the drinking above all else, and I was slowly passing out in my chair. Which I think Eduardo picked up on, and we took off shortly thereafter, with most of the party still in high gear. I got home to find my Papa awake, incredibly. I felt terrible at first, assuming that he had waited up all night, but he explained that he had been up since four-thirty boiling the tamales he apparently sells on Sunday mornings. I had one for breakfast, and next time you’re in Chacrasana I would highly recommend them.

Overall I think I held up pretty well at the wedding, regarding both the drinking and the dancing. I’ve been doing the first for some time now, and for a big white kid in a room lacking both height and fair skin, I could have done worse on the dancefloor. The fact that Lindsey has studied dance like, all her life helped. We escaped with only a few embarrassing moments; the worst was the realization halfway through a song that I was dancing to lyrics which roughly translated as “the men are trash.” Indeed, upon looking up I realized that very few men were on their feet, and that a large group of them, as well as some women, were laughing hysterically at me. But for the most part, my pride remains in tact.

26/9/2008
Tonight a truck came and dumped nine-thousand large bricks in front of our house. My brother-in-law Reni (who works in Lima in a law firm and also, as I recently found out, drives his car up and down the hill as a taxi service on Saturdays) had told me recently that he was planning to take all of October off from work to help build the second story of our house, but I didn’t know when or how it was actually going to happen. As it turns out, about ten other volunteers were over having burgers in front of our house when this massive truck pulled up full of bricks.
(Side-note: My sister Raquel, the older of the two, cooks hamburgers in this little portable stand every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday evening out in front of our house to help make some extra money. They’re thin little patties, about the thickness of Canadian bacon, but they’re delicious and she loads them up with fresh-cut fries right in the bun – that’s how they do it here – along with lettuce and all kinds of different sauces. She also fries chicken wings (alitas) and drumsticks, and sells it all for about a sol and a half per plate. She could charge double that or more, but I don’t know if it’s my place to be dishing out financial advice just yet. I’ve been bringing her some pretty solid business, though, and she definitely appreciates it. The next-door neighbor’s is an all-you’d-ever-need-for-a-party store – namely beers – so that makes our front “yard” a good hang out spot after training on Fridays.)

It’s going to be interesting to see how the construction unfolds. What I know is that these things don’t tend to progress very quickly around here, that building materials are exorbitantly expensive in Peru right now, and I may or may not be moving several thousand bricks up to my roof sometime in the near future (not entirely sure if Reni’s serious or not about that).
After burgers and bricks we went down to my buddy Brian’s host family’s house where they get international cable and we watched the first presidential debate. Very cool to be able to do that, and totally unexpected.

24/9/2008
Today I killed a chicken. It was rad. I learned a lot about the insides of poultry. Like the fact that a big rooster has big cojonoes: “Lucky for the hen, right?” according to my aunt.

22/9/2008
Yesterday afternoon, after my family pumped me full of spaghetti and potatoes with an amazing sauce made from saltines, milk, and spices in a blender, a bunch of us went for a hike up in the hills rising directly east of town. Several neighborhood kids came, too. It only took about half an hour to get pretty high up, and we could see a ton as the day was relatively clear (meaning you could see at least a mile or two in either direction). We were all surprised at A) how nice our town of Chacrasana looked from up top, and B) the striking disparity between our town and the others like it, and the private country clubs lining the Carretera Central, or main highway between Lima to the west and Chosica to the east (the latter is the municipality to which Chacrasana, Yanacoto, and other nearby outlying towns belong).

Chosica is about a ten minute combi ride from the bottom of our hill. What the hell’s a combi you ask? Picture an elongated WV hippie van with seats for about twenty but apparently room for anybody who wants a ride. You rarely get a seat, and predictably, they aren’t even close to tall enough for anyone over about six feet tall, so many of us arrive at the training center or other destinations with major neckaches. It’s gotta be pretty funny for the Peruvians to see, though. You pay the attendant according to distance, generally fifty centimos for a short ride to Chosica or Chaclacayo, where the training center is located. The attendant spends most of his time either in the doorwell jingling his change and asking for payment, or hanging out the door, depending on the number of riders. And these things get packed. The guys at the wheel aren’t what I would call defensive drivers, either. It’s an adventure every time. The other night my buddy thought the attendant was trying to hose him, and started yelling at him and said something about his mother. We got away paying what we thought was fair, only to realize the guy had been right all along. Win some, lose some I guess.

Back to the hike. We turned back before reaching the top, both because the going was getting tough for the little kids (a couple of them had to be no older than four or five) and because we’d been hearing rumors about there being landmines in the hills, near the electric towers which encircle Chacrasana. Apparently in the nineties when the Shining Path terrorism was at its height, the guerillas would hide out in these hills, and Fujimori had mines planted to keep them away from the infrastructure. I first heard about this from my Papá, when I told him at breakfast after a run that I had gone all the way up the western hill and had seen an incredible, early-morning view of the fog-covered valley on the other side. He advised me to stay away from the towers. We’ve heard other conflicting reports, but I didn’t feel too good about being responsible for a bunch of local kids in a potential mine field. However I’m definitely going to head back up there one morning and take a pic of that view, showing only the Martian-like mountains, the fog, and the electric towers like weird, futuristic rigs in a mountain-spanning oil field.

19/9/2008
I have two new favorite expressions. The first, which I’ve been using a lot, is “Barriga llena, corazon contento,” which means “Full stomach and a happy heart.” They feed me a ton here. Not that I’m complaining, because the food is great. It’s heavy on the starch in the form of rice and potatoes, but you’d be surprised at how much you can do with just those two ingredients. I’m sure it will get old (maybe very soon), but for now I’m enjoying it. Protein comes from chicken. Period. Two out of three meals involve chicken (which by the way comes right off the roof where we keep both chickens for slaughtering and lots of smaller ones for eggs). My Mamá makes really good ají, which is a sort-of all-purpose hot sauce made from peppers and other vegetables. I’ve taken to it pretty quickly, and they even give me a little bag of it in my lunches, which are generally last night’s dinner leftovers (copious amounts of it, again). In the morning my parents prepare three little bread panzitas, usually one with this awesome, fresh mozzarella-type cheese, one with butter and marmelada, and the third is a grab-bag, surprise-type deal. Could be this uber-processed ham of some kind, could be plain with more jelly, or could even be a little egg-and-chopped-hotdog thing that is actually quite good. They also serve me café con leche, which ain't at all a bad way to start your morning.

My other favorite expression is “Después de la ducha, fresco como la lechuga,” which means “After a shower you’re fresh as lettuce.” My Papá (they both insist on being called by their informal names) said that the other day. Cracked me up.

15/9/2008
Woah. I’m in Peru. It’s hard to believe. But this place is amazing. We arrived a couple days ago and spent our first two nights in bungalos at a retreat center near Chaclacayo, about two hours east of Lima. During the day we went through a series of orientation programs, Spanish assessments, and brief training on useful information (like how to differentiate between real and counterfeit Soles and how to ask for more toilet paper). On the second night we had a big bonfire. Two of the other male volunteers brought guitars, and a third had a harmonica that he brought out as well. It was fun to play, and I’d really like to get my hands on a guitar while here.

Which, oddly-enough, segways right into my host family for the next three months of training. They’re awesome. I have a Mamá, a Papá, two older sisters who each have young daughters (ages three and four), and one brother-in-law, all under the same roof. The other brother-in-law is in the marines and right now is stationed on a ship somewhere off the Pacific coast. They’re some of the warmest people I could possibly imagine, and I’m hoping that after a couple weeks the niceties wear off and I don’t feel so waited-on. We live in a one-story house in the little town of Chacrasana, with a big living/dining room that the front door opens into, three bedrooms off to the left for the three families, a bathroom in between, and the kitchen in the back on the right. My living quarters is very nice, in a little separate one-room structure out behind the house. It’s perfect.

We have two parrots, Pépe and Aurora. I haven’t had much interaction with Aurora because she’s generally caged (for yet unknown reasons), but Pépe doesn’t like me a whole lot. Apparently parrots are just like a lot of other pets, in that they know who they know and don’t generally like anyone else right off the bat. But I mean this bird freakin’ hates me. I’m trying to get him to walk onto my hand like he does with everyone else, but no dice. He just squawks and threatens to bite me. My Mamá and sisters think it’s obvious that Pépe “no me quiere” because we’re both guys, and that I would get along better with the female Aurora. They get a kick out of that. Updates to come on the parrot situation.

I am the second volunteer to live with my family, and the first was in the group before ours, so he just left a couple months ago. James (pronounced either “Ha-mes” or “Jane’s”) was a big hit around here, and it kind of feels like I’m just James version 2.0. The first afternoon here the family had me sit down as listen to a CD of his music (apparently he’s a badass musician, which is really cool...ie the guitar connection). The thing is, they can’t really understand what’s going on in his songs because they’re – obviously – all in English. So I translated a few as best as I could with comments like “Esta trata de una chica” (“This one’s about a girl”) and other deep thoughts. I actually talked to James when he called the other night, and he sounds like a great guy. I’m hoping I’ll get to meet him at some point, maybe when we both come back for Christmas, as my family is already assuming we will. He's from Chicago, so I've been explaining everything about where I'm from and where I've been in relation to Chicago. I think I made it sound like I live right outside town, rather than 6 hours south in a totally different major metropolitan area.
I'm struck by how arid it is here. We're in the desert, and barren, sandstone hills rise on all sides of our little town. Would like to get up top and see the view one of these days.