Streets of Lima

Last week was a long one, marked for me by my first week of spanish class 4hrs per day. It's a great program, but getting to the other side of town by 9am is an endeavor unto itself. I am spending a lot of time on the roads of Lima, and there's a lot to see on the road.

My class is small, with a German kid, a Brazilian woman and a Texan guy. It is satisfying to finally discover some of the spanish grammar that has been swirling about me. Learning a small rule doesn't seem so small when it means I can suddenly comprehend something. Of course, on Wednesday, when the señora came running out of her house to yell at me because I had blocked her driveway for 4 hours, my spanish was clearly still so weak that she yelled at me in english. To be fair, it was totally bone-headed and I should have known better. People fit their cars into incredibly small spaces and, in this example, my gringo eyes just didn't even register that it was possible to put a car in her spot. When you get a ticket here, they put 3 giant stickers on your windows, so in addition to being fined you have to stand there in public humiliation for 5 minutes laboriously peeling the stickers off. Kind of an awesome penalty, actually...

 All over Lima, you find traffic police, most of them women who look remarkably alike. With their tight stretch riding pants, big black boots and sidearm, they perfectly fulfill someone’s kinky fetish. Not mine. When the intersection in front of us is unmoving for 10 minutes, we do dream of their arrival as they motorcycle around from traffic hot spot to hot spot. Police here are, in general, viewed through the lens of race and class. It's a potent combination, having power but being disrespected...so I choose to obey my local policia Limeño.

 Intersections have street-performers busquing for coins in 60sec intervals. Jugglers with pins or flame, break dancers, acrobats, musicians...all there. Last week, Jen and I saw a juggling clown pinned by a drunk seriously conversing with him. When a clown's expression translates as "Someone get this drunk out of my face!", it makes for a funny tableau. Completely unfunny are the apparently unattended children smaller than Carter who lean on car windows piteously. Or the Quechua-speaking grandmother, in her garb strait from the village, "selling" chiclets and pity. Younger mothers will beg with children strapped to their backs in a shawl, though when the child is 18mos it is old enough to hold the cup and press it toward you, some of their first words being those of begging. I need to start a deep, philosophy blog before I can truly explore the question as to why I have given coins to jugglers but never to beggars. It's only in true in the car, too, so who knows?

 One interesting thing in a poor country is that the streets are rife with the micro-economy. Wouldn't you like to have a woman on a 3-wheeled box-bike come along to sell you still-warm bread rolls? Or simply put some scrap on the sidewalk, and in a couple hours it is gone? Or park at the supermarket and have the guys pulling rolling barrels of water around wash your car by the time you get out?

Security Subconscious

I am just finishing a book called The Monkey's Paw by an American journalist named Robin Kirk. It is a collection of accounts, somewhere between reportage and subjective experiences, that provides a small window into the tempestuous 2 decades when the Shining Path and government forces spiraled into an orgy of violence. I recommend it to anyone interested in firsthand accounts from the personal perspective of a narrator that is at least honest about the limitations of what an outsider can know. [it's available on Amazon]

In addition to frothy, stone-cold terrorists, there are vivid accounts of security force depravity and a horrible "ends justify the means" extravagence on the part of police who routinely stuffed people in the trunk of a car, never to be seen again. Unlike many other countries that have "truth" commissions, Peru decided that there was nothing to gain by poking at the wounds and, after a general amnesty for any government misdeeds, just moved on. (to which I explicitly demur from expressing any opinion)

Meanwhile, the embassy has warned that whether it be venal crime or political crime, Peru is not  out of the woods yet. If someone knocks at your door delivering Pardo's Chicken, but you did not order Pardo's Chicken...well, do not open the door.

So today at Carter's taekwando, across the street from the embassy and next to the hotel where we lived for 6 weeks, the grandfather of 2 students who started at the same time as Carter came over to chat with me as usual. He appears to be in his low 50s and has lived in the US for 18 years driving trucks, currently in Massachusetts, but is down for half a year to see his son and grandsons. But today he starts the conversation with "Terrible what happened in Libya, those terrorists...". After some political chitchat that I kept tugging towards the shallow end of the pool, he then proceeds to tell me that people now don't want to remember what was really going on. He was a policeman, I am told, who trained in Spain and fought terrorism undercover in Lima, Bolivia, Ecuador. His brothers, he said, were also policemen, killed by the terrorists. He had to leave, he had a target on his back.

Interesting, right? But since I started this post referencing my reading material, I am sure you are now, as I was then, feeling a few hairs up on end. Sure, he may be a Peruvian in the US so long that he is lonely in his own country and specifically picks me to befriend at the twice-weekly taekwando. But really? Would an ex-secret-policeman really choose to chitchat about his intense past, in public, across the street from the embassy? It almost seems designed to turn my desire to connect directly with this country into a weakness, to exploit my naive egoism.

One of the things about the way we got ourselves to Peru is that, for better or worse, we are part of the diplomatic corps. This means that a veiled stranger with bad intent may want something more of us than our North American wealth. It means that even I, a spouse of a Peace Corps employee, am forced to suspicion. And of course, the sad part is that the guy may just be what he presented...a lonely man with a checkered past ready to talk about it at last. I mean, he bought his grandsons the full kit of expensive taekwando equipment!

This evening, directly after relating all this to Jennifer, our doorbell rang at 9:20pm. We did NOT order Pardo's Chicken. Jen asked who it was through the intercom, but got only garbles in response. Eventually we went and stood by the perimeter door and she hollered "Who is it?" Repeated queries never received anything more than "Señora Mariza" (our empleada). Mariza nervously couldn't fathom who would be asking for her at all, let alone this time of night. At this point, we called the embassy security who had the local car there in minutes. It was the pool guy apparently worried that he had left the pool filling to overflow. More likely, the household agrees, is that he is incoherently drunk at the end of the day and unwisely decided to pursue a crush on Mariza.

And that's a small account from behind the perimeter wire in our little corner of Peru.


PS: Lest anyone feel inclined to say "Be careful!" because my flip language here seems to lack seriousness about these things...be assured, that is not the case. This post is, if nothing else, a description of what it feels like to constantly be saying to oneself "Be careful."

Pachamanca in Pachacamac

It's like some bizarre word play, but Jen went to a place just south of Lima called Pachacamac...and while there, enjoyed the Andean cooking tradition called Pachamanca.

 Pachacamac is known as an important religious and cultural center of pre-Spaniard times, but we have yet to have a chance to explore the several ruins there. Interesting to me is that as various peoples conquered the area, they maintained the center's significance. Even the Inca, when they conquered it, allowed the Pachacamac priests to operate independently of the Inca priesthood. The Inca, though relatively small in population, seemed to be wiley administrators as well as military masters.

Pachamanca is a way of preparing large amounts of food by burying it in a hole with hot rocks. Jennifer was at a Peace Corps gathering and pachamanca meal. In one huge hole, the cooks have gotten rocks and coals nice and hot on stacked metal racks. They then transfer those racks into another hole, but interspersed with racks of meat, potatoes, sweet potatoes, little sweet tamales, etc., and plenty of herbs.

Photo one to the right shows a rack with slabs of ribs being lowered, photo two shows that they then throw in whole stalks of herbs, photo three shows a rack of chicken and, I believe, the tamales. More layers are added, including straw, until finally it is all covered in dirt and allowed to roast slowly. It is my impression that in the mountain villages it is much more of a rustic hole in the ground, they may not have the brick-lined hole and the fancy racks.

Back at the end of July, I sampled pachamanca, but didn't see the preparation. It is somewhere between stew and BBQ and it's a mystery how they get the savory juices out of the hole to your plate.

On a different note: here's a Vermillion Flycatcher sitting on our electrified perimeter wire. They pop by occasionally, more frequent are their cousins, the yellow Social Flycatchers that visit the bush outside my window as I work. Still haven't caught one on the camera.

We went Friday night to Chili's to watch Peru vs Venezuela play a World Cup Qualification match. The whole country watched it (and the replay on Saturday too, I think!). We had heard that Chili's would be full of fans because of all the TVs, and it was true. It was packed and I had to park using the Chili's/Starbucks valet (!) parking. Carter fell asleep on Jen's lap (only to be woken when Peru finally took the lead). Over our shoulders, pressed to the glass peering in at the TV were the intersection's police-man and the traffic controller. No traffic, and any self-respecting Peruvian criminal would be watching the game too, so why not?