The end of Perú Diary. The beginning of Jamaica Diary.

NOTE: Seriously, this is very much just a diary of the final months prior to leaving Lima, nothing very sexy. So unless you are my mother (Hi Lois!), you may wish to skip this post and just wait for something juicier next time!
Sitting here in Kingston, one month after moving here from Lima, and I finally have the urge to write again. Our final stretch in Lima, from roughly Halloween until just before Christmas, was a mash of preparations for departure and social events (with each seeming more like a good-bye than the previous). Now, though we miss our friends in Lima and several Peruvian things, we can stand on our terrace on the 4th floor and look out over the roofs of Kingston to the Caribbean and the green, green hills that ring Kingston. The city here is a little under a million people, compared to Lima's 13 million, so things are quieter, main arteries sometimes seem like backroads and traffic will seem underwhelming once I get used to driving on the left side of the road. We live very close to the well-swept business center of New Kingston, where one can find a Burger King and a Pizza Hut, yet Jen was unsurprised to come across a flayed goat carcass hanging from a tree in a lot nearby. But more on Jamaica later, I need to wrap up Perú.

Halloween
Jen spent the last half of October and the first half of November in Washington DC for training, but we got a little Halloween spirit before she left at the 1st Annual Perú terror festival where we saw Julio's short film among others. But after that, it was just Carter and I. Carter decided on Robin Hood, and we toured the Embassy Trick-o-Treat with Julito and little Emma as Mini Mouse. I was decked out as a Mexican sugar skull and headed out later to a very fun grown-up party. It was the kind of Halloween party I like, where most everybody clearly enjoyed the dressing-up part. I parked close to the party at the house of some friends, and walked over with them (he dressed as a famous local butcher, her as bacon). He is a Canadian mining executive and, as such, has received some threats so has a full-time bodyguard. It was extraordinarily surreal walking back with them after the party, tipsy, followed the whole time by a stern, large man.

Robin Hood steals from the rich and gives to the poor!

Carter and Mariza go to Washington DC
I was busy (as I wrote in a different post about going to the Bolivian jungle border), so we wanted to have Mariza accompany Carter to DC to visit Jennifer during her training there. Typical for us, we waited too long prior to sorting out the paperwork for Mariza and it was only by the narrowest of margins that we succeeded. The process took several days, with shuttling back and forth between ministries and the embassy and the notary. At one ministry, I was literally told to "…come back at 2pm, pick up the embossed certificate, take it to an official translator to process, he will give you a translation tied in a red ribbon…". At a different ministry, I waited 45-min in a line (futilely, I might add), most of which time another man in line decided to use the opportunity to preach hellfire to the masses. In the end, Carter and Mariza did go and visit. Mariza was the adult, but Carter's English and his travel experience meant he was the guide. Mariza had a lovely time in DC, though, amazed at how clean things are. She also figured out that she could go into any store and if she just kept speaking Spanish, eventually a Spanish-speaking employee would show up.

Thanksgiving & Despedida (Farewell Party)

Hogar folk at our house for Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving this year was bigger even than previously. We had 80, including 50 or so Peace Corps volunteers but also a handful of kids from the Hogar and a couple of the volunteers there. One of the kids was Julia, coming straight from chemotherapy. It was a joy, as always, though many of the Peace Corps volunteers used this as their chance to say how sorry they were to see Jen go. At one point, all the volunteers were chanting enthusiastically "J-White! J-White!" A couple days afterwards, we had our official going-away party at the house of her boss, Parmer. There were speeches and dancing and drinking. A couple had been hired to show some Peruvian dance, so we got to see a Marinera and an Alcatraz (in which couples have paper napkins tied to their rears and chase each other around with candles, trying to light the napkin). Jennifer and I, for better or worse, were dragged up on stage for both dances. The Peace Corps people had been very nice to remember me and made a point of inviting my 3 buddies from the Amazon Raft Race and their wives. Of course, by the end of the night Jeremy and Ben had managed fall backwards on a table, later fall and smash the flower bed and, finally, to piss off their wives. It was a damned good time.

The Marinera

Jen to PDX with Cat

Allison

So it turns out that it is 99% impossible to bring a pet to Jamaica. Hint: the only viable way, assuming your pet is not British already, is to take your pet to England for 3 weeks and make them and a British animal. So before we tried this option for our cat Allison, we figured we could find her a nice home in the States until a better option was apparent. What finally happened, however, was a comedy of confusion and error that saw Jennifer fly for 12 hours with an unhappy cat and then 4 days later fly home with that same cat. The good news is that Jen got to spend 4 perfectly Portlandia days with her friends in Oregon, which is probably just what she needed prior to taking on her new role in Jamaica. 

My litho stone

Stone Litho
Ben (my raft race buddy) is an artist and took the time to walk me through the ancient art of stone lithography. It's an amazing, multi-week process in which limestone is smoothed, worked with acids and oils, and finally made into something that can print to paper with very high resolution. Ben helped me create a stone with an image I created from a photo from Lake Titicaca. Sadly, I am not thrilled with the image I created, but the chance to experience a very, VERY hands on craft was great. It's not something I will do again (partially because of all the specialized equipment), but Ben did get me thinking about what I am going to explore next: screenprinting. So far, no luck finding a screen-printing teacher in Kingston.



Final Days

With Rosario

And then we hit our final weeks, in which got everything packed up and organized. I had my last class with Rosario, having at least tested into lower-intermediate Spanish. Mariza's still-unidentified nervous condition seemed to worsen as the day that her "gordo" was to leave came ever closer. By the end, we were living out of our suitcases.

With Ana Lucero

There were several Christmas parties, one for embassy personnel, one for Peace Corps, and, of course, there was the annual handicapped kid festival (at the embassy). That last one, that's the one where 2 years before I met Jefferson and got introduced to the kids at the Hogar. So it was wonderful to be at the Christmas festival again, this time good friends with the kids, for one last hurrah. We went out to the Hogar several weekends in December but those Saturday and Sundays are chock full of charitable groups coming by to entertain and give gifts. A lot of the Hogar's larder gets stocked during this important time there, but it was not conducive to a nice, quiet goodbye. Jen and I drove out one Wednesday night so we could have that goodbye. The kids were sweet as ever, funny and irreverent as always, and Jen and I held it together until we made it into the car where we masked our emotions by cursing instead of crying. OK, crying a little.

Julito's birthday party

It was all hard on Mariza. We also had to say goodbye to Maureen and Julio and their whole family who had all but adopted us. Carter and Julito bore it like troopers, but it was clearly one of the first heart-breaks either had ever experienced. I know we will go back to visit, but that's small consolation. There's a sad flip-side to the joys of the nomadic, expat life we're living right now…and it has to do with leaving people. Kids. Friends. Compadres. Vamos a estreñarse mucho, mis amigos!

Last few days at the Hogar de San Francisco de Asis (with Shayla)

One last visit to The Cricket Club with Julio and Maureen and little Emma.