Vaccination-giving Mormon miners who can get you to Iraq

Well, I leave Friday for Piura; Monday for Guayaquil, Ecuador; the wee hours of Tuesday for the United States; and will be in Detroit Tuesday afternoon. My brother is getting married, and Andrew and I are going on a quick jaunt home to wish Mark and Kristin well, see our families and friends, and eat the food that we have so sorely been missing for the past eight months. Peruvian food and I get along fine generally, but there are some things that are just not easily approximated by anything in northern Peru (that I can afford, anyway). They include:
- bagels and cream cheese
- sushi
- tofu, particularly a Red Hot Lovers tofu pop, which this blog indicates I have been craving since last October
- waffles/pancakes/French toast and maple syrup (they had this at Semana Santa in Máncora, I ate it every morning)
- chocolate chip cookies
- really good pizza
- hamburgers that don’t sort of taste like meatballs
- meatloaf

Not that I intend to eat every single thing off that list in my 7 days in the Midwest. I would settle for the top five. I will be back at site at the latest on the 26th, as there is a party to attend here that night.

It’s Humberto’s birthday today! The chicken has already been killed and everything. Happy birthday, host brother with whom I am on permanent usted terms!

If I haven’t mentioned the trip home, I think it is because I have been trying not to think about it too much so that I wouldn’t get incapacitatingly excited too soon before the trip. I did indeed prevent this from happening. The thing I was most nervous about, the reason I didn’t decide to go to the wedding before leaving in September, was the fear that I would get on the plane thinking, “Whatever happens, it’s okay, it’s only for eight months.” I wanted to at least start the journey not knowing how long I would be gone. The last week or two at site have been rough sometimes, but I think Santo Domingo and I are going to leave on good terms. I think two weeks away, in which I am constantly explaining what I do and what I like about it, will be good for my ganas upon returning.

I broke up these 15 days at site with a quick trip 2,000 feet up the mountain to my friend Casey’s site in Chalaco. Peruvians generally, by my standards, overstate the coldness of climates, but Chalaco really was a lot colder than here, as I have been told a million times. It blew my mind to see my breath; it has been over a year since that happened. Chalaco is a lot like Sto. Domingo, but slightly more campo, if you will. They have kind of the same chaotic scene of development projects and two replacement Volunteers as well, though. It was wonderful to spend some time with Casey before heading out. We were almost at the same level of excitement, as her parents come into Peru the same day I get to the U.S.

I started asking my Peruvian friends what they want from the U.S. As the U.S. is in their minds a wonderland of any consumer good they could possibly dream of, their eyes usually get wide and they can’t come up with anything when I ask. In that case, Michigan t-shirts, all around!

I met a guy on the bus back from Chalaco who desperately wanted to immigrate to the U.S. so he could go to Iraq. It was a weird conversation. He initially didn’t talk to me because he thought I was a Mormon missionary, which I thought was legitimate. Once he did start talking, though, he was convinced I could help him in his mission to get to Iraq (and then back to the U.S., where the benefits of citizenship would be much more available to him as a veteran). I tried to explain that I really don’t have anything to do with the army, and I only know one person who’s ever gone to Iraq, and he’s already back and, so I have heard, embittered. I did mention, before I understood where the conversation was going, that I had heard there were a large number of non-citizens in the armed forces in the U.S., to which he widened his eyes, nodded vigorously, and pointed to himself. Not helpful, Alyssa.

Today I gave a charla with Juan, the leader of the trash collectors, to the preschoolers about how to separate the trash. That wasn’t supposed to be the only goal of the charla, they were supposed to come out of it caring about the environment and understanding on a deeper level why they separate the organic from the inorganic trash, but YOU try getting four-year-olds to care about anything but snacks (the charla came with a snack, it was the best part). Nonetheless, it went well. Maybe the cutest part was at the end, we did a non-competitive relay race (YOU try getting four-year-olds to care which line finishes throwing away their trash first) where they ran, each with both a piece of inorganic and organic trash, and had to throw it away in the right place before they came back. The whole charla almost had a horrible beginning, as I went in to the preschool and several kids began crying or hiding behind their teachers. I heard the teacher tell one of the kids, “She’s not going to vaccinate you! She just wants to talk!” I responded with an impassioned speech to each class about how I could not think of a thing I would rather do less than stick children with needles and that I hate needles more than anything on earth (with the exception of poorly-sorted trash). This is true. I estimate that I have the fear of needles of no fewer than 7 whiny four-year-olds combined.

At least the children didn’t think we were miners, which has also recently happened, or so I hear. Casey’s host mom was in Santo Domingo for a meeting and heard a campesino say as Rachel and I walked by, “There are the gringos who are here to steal the riches of Peru.” I have to laugh at this, first because being mistaken for a miner in South America is sort of an “if you don’t laugh you cry” scenario, and second because the conversation Rachel and I were probably having was much less,
“Hey, want to steal the riches of Peru today?”
“Yeah, I’m down,”
and much more,
“Hey, want to watch ‘Friends’ later? I’ll make popcorn on the stove!”
“Neat! I hope we have enough money for orange soda!”

Oh, white people. We do it all.

April 28th

Today was a stellar day, in the gastronomical sense, but other senses too, I suppose. It started out okay, I went to go teach my last English class, for which I had prepared nothing (intending to call it a “review”), only to discover the school door was locked, decided to do nothing to remedy the situation, left a note apologizing to the, oh, 3 students who might have shown up that day, and called my mom to wish her happy birthday. Then I hung out in the weavers’ office until I got up the ganas to go down to Juan’s chacra, where I was promised lettuce awaited me. When I walked past his house on the way, he was standing there with his horse Espártaco. Horses are rare here; since you can only make horses carry so much crap, donkeys are much preferred. I told him I was on my way down to his farm to get lettuce (I am allowed to go whenever I want to pick vegetables, it is beyond fantastic), when he pointed to the horse, a cute chubby gray creature, and asked if I wanted to ride him down to the farm. I couldn’t remember the last time I rode a horse, but it was definitely no later than the dude ranch swim team trip sophomore year of high school. I thought the prospect of riding a horse through town, and moreover, through the ankle-deep mud on the way down to the farm, was a pretty sweet idea, so Spartacus I rode.

People stared at me on my horse, but honestly, people are always staring at me, so who really knows if the horse had anything to do with it at all. I fear this type of insensitivity will follow me to the U.S. for some reason, like I’ll walk through a mall naked and think people are staring at me because I’m white. Señora Teo, for one, shouted at me that I looked guapa on the horse. Anyway, there weren’t stirrups, which was just sort of confusing. Luckily, Juan told to lean back when we went downhill, or else disaster might have occurred. So I got down to the farm, dismounted in a not graceful fashion (again. No stirrups), and picked vegetables. I then walked back into town, finished vegetable shopping, and ran to the weavers’ office to tell Rachel it was salad day.

If my last entry read like a book report, this one will read like a cookbook.

So Rachel and I had a rice-less lunch (which are few and far between in Santo Domingo), a salad with lettuce, spinach, radish, tomato, red pepper, cucumber, oil and vinegar, and sprinkled cheese. It was delicious.

But the real triumph was dinner. After I spent the afternoon working more or less diligently on my final report, I got up to make fajitas with squash, red pepper, and onion. I even made homemade salsa with tomato, onion, a very small amount of a very spicy Peruvian pepper called rocoto, corn, garlic, lime, and salt. I had no idea making salsa was so easy. Juan came over and ate the fruits of his (farming) and my (cooking) labor with us. I was proud of myself for entertaining. I don’t even own three plates. Rachel ate off a Tupperware lid. It was so satisfying, partially because I managed to make a delicious dinner in my kitchen (which is really just a 6-foot table with a stove, three shelves, and a dish drying rack), but also because almost all of the ingredients were bought, and potentially grown, locally (except, admittedly, the tortillas. Whatever, it could have been over rice and still been delicious).

I don’t feel like I’m cheating myself out of some level of authenticity of living in Peru by making myself semi-American meals when I feel like I’m using the same ingredients that are available to people in town. I also don’t feel bad when I share what I make with Peruvians, though this can be heartbreaking, because a lot of people just won’t try new food. When I made scrambled eggs with green pepper, tomato, onion, and cheese, Humberto’s cousin refused to eat it, despite the fact that Peruvians eat four of those five ingredients ALL THE TIME. It just looked new, and that is unappetizing to a lot of people. He tried to disguise the fact that he was refusing to eat it by taking small bites of it, and then immediately taking large bites of boiled green banana. He couldn’t fool me, though. I’ve employed that tactic too many times, often, ironically enough, to force down boiled green banana. It is definitely not going to be one of my priorities to change people’s vegetable consumption patterns; though it’s a worthwhile goal, I just don’t have the ganas. Cooking vegetable-based dishes more of a personal pleasure for me, one I didn’t know I would enjoy so much before I got here and vegetable-based dishes seemed to be in short supply. Rachel declared the fajita “like the best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth,” so I think I did okay. We’ll ascertain this when we have identical fajitas for dinner tomorrow night.