life in the slow lane, surely make you lose your mind

Sunday night, sorry to the some of my friends have heard this, but I had my first real awkward moment with my host family.  It all comes down to the central point, that sarcasm does not translate.  So I go to my family's tienda, where they serve me dinner everyday (which is pre-paid for by me).  After sitting there for an hour playing chess with the neighborhood children, which is one of my favorite ways to kill time since buying the set for 4 dollars, and watching other customers get served their dinner, I stroll on back at around 8:30 and notice there is no food being prepared.  I ask them, what they're going to do for me for dinner, and my host mother responds that all the food is gone.  Bothered and worried that I wasn't going to eat, I ask her why she didn't save any food for me to which she responds that I came too late.  I respond quickly that I have been waiting for an hour, and that several patrons had arrived after me and received full plates of food.  I then tell her, that in my believe if she's worried about running out of food, I should take preference because of how much more difficult it would be for me to find food on my own than it is for the other patrons, who likely can go to some other friend's house and ask for a plate of food (which is common practice).  My host mother doesn't really respond to this, actually sort of agrees with me and promises it wont happen in the future.  I go home hungry.  10 minutes later, the 13 year old girl that works for my family, comes to my room and tells me my foods ready and that they were just kidding.  Floored, I go and eat my food.  Now, sarcasm is very hard to pick out, and I still don't know whether or not my host family scrambled having seen my reaction and prepared something on the spot or if they were actually kidding.  I also don't see how that would be funny, but anyway, that's my story.

Monday morning was either a Catholic holiday or a Peruvian national holiday with Catholic overtones.  I woke up at 7 in the morning, and prepared for what I was told was a 3-hour-walk up and around our mountain.  What a beautiful walk, difficult, in need of a ski-lift, but beautiful.  I had never walked that far into the wilderness around where I live, walking past cows and one room adobe homes, probably at over 3,600 meters, looking down at clouds, its hard to explain where I live but its a trip.  Making it even better, it didn't rain, which can make you smile at any point in the day during the rainy season here.  So I walk and walk and walk and finally I get to a little town right out of the old west, called Rodeopampa.  Then I find out why I'm there, everyone from LLapa, which though tiny, is the Millbrook to Rodeopampa's Minehill, or the Midtown to Rodeopampa's Southstreet Seaport (out of the way but the same city), was to go to their little  candle-lit-church for a few hours.  I'd never walked so far to go to church.  As respectfully as possible, I truly don't understand, coming from my perspective, how you can have the 10 commandments hanging up on the wall (the second commandment says no graven images) and yet there is a statue of both Jesus and the Virgin Mary the latter of which seems to get prayed to directly, candles lit at her feet, and then carried around the "town" center on a float whilst the community sings songs.  I truly  can't resolve what to me seems like a huge contradiction in theological philosophy and welcome anyone to email me explaining how Catholics resolve the issue for themselves.  Until then, I conclude that at least Peruvian Andean Catholicism flirts with idolatry.  I'm not a religious bigot, so, hey whatever floats their boat, I just know that they'd tar and feather me if I ever shared this conclusion with them so I want to know how it is they themselves can solve the paradox.

I was talking to Matt Trokan, my longtime friend whose currently getting his Masters in Latin American History at Florida, about the attitudes of the Peruvian Andean poor, particularly the men.  I explained to him my take on the political roots here, that being poor and uneducated, it was easy for them to be leftists.  It's easy for them to look to Lima and say, "look how well they're doing," even though in a global sense Lima lags far behind.  It is easy for them to think, "they should be helping us here in the mountains, after all we are the cultural roots of all Peru, they need us too".  Its easy for them to want higher taxes on their urban countrymen, and here in the mountains we have become accustomed to relying on government redistributive or NGO handouts to sustain what are essentially non-sustainable communities.  Seeing that we don't make anything here, other than non-added value agricultural products, which in reality, even though labor is essentially nothing, are still produced at much higher cost than by big-agro in other parts of the world.  I see this region as having little economic competitive advantage in any of the products we make.  We are not equipped for the global marketplace.  The politics here is often described to me as the cities of Lima, Trujillo, and Arequipa vs. everyone else.  With all the political candidates being some version of leftist, the real difference between the candidates isn't their ideology, but rather who it is that they are looking to put that ideology to work for, which means identity politics and generally, populist candidates.  And yet, the communities here strive to join the international economic community, and indeed are forced to, considering that Lima signed a free trade agreement with the United States and others in 2006.  We are nowhere near ready.  I've spoken before about the intellectual drain that my community faces with its young population.  Anyone that's remotely educated flees LLapa for the coastal cities, if not to university, as it is NOT easy to get into the universities, then simply as general labor.  The only careers here that actually pay are the miners (Cajamarca is home to the 5th largest Gold Mine in the world, Chan Chan) or the vendors, who are not producing, but selling to the general community.  I am therefore left to work with the older community members, trying to teach the ones left, business insights such as vision.  I think that you can teach vision to a general population, in any group the numbers say that there will be a certain number that have vision and a certain number that don't.  My problem though is that up here in the mountains, the people that naturally had vision, all left for the coast, and I'm stuck trying to artificially teach it to the people that lacked it to begin with.  It's not the same as finding those people that have it naturally and turning on the switch, its taking the people that don't have it naturally, and trying to force it into them.   It would be against my Peace Corps mission of improving the community of LLapa to tell the people left, "hey what you guys seem to need to actually improve your lives is a little reinvestment in skills education and some cheap housing on the coast, ya'll need to just pack it up and move".  And yet, those left up here are the old and stubborn, the one's that couldn't, for a million reasons, embrace change and urbanization to begin with, and I'm stuck trying to help them, when all along they were the ones that could never plan for their futures.  And they're so accustomed to receiving government and NGO help, they want me to bring them the global market.  They want me to sell their products for them, believing that their products and marketing aren't the problem, it's simply their location.  If only someone could bridge that one gap, their entire business would turn around.  Note for a moment, that we struggle mightily simply selling our products to other Peruvians.  Ignoring for a second the fact that I've been out of college for 6 months, all of which I've spent in Peru and have no legitimate business contacts, their leftist "how can you help me" attitude is the wrong one.  The world is flat, and they need to go to the global markets, no one's going to come to them, and no one that doesn't own a Peruvian boutique shop in SoHo is capable of bringing it to them.  Thomas Freidman writes that if you have an idea and you don't do do, don't despair just wait for it to be realized on someone else's watch for their profit.  He is right, and if my artisans don't change their thinking, their campo tranquilo attitude to life, the free trade agreement Peru just signed is on the verge of drowning them.  

  

So I said this, or some version more hastily put together, and Trokan thought for a minute and said, so are you disillusioned then with the prospect of helping these people?  I responded no, that I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for this.  Again he thought for a second and he said pensively, that he felt similarly during a stint as an urban school teacher in Trenton.  The kids weren't ready systemically, and didn't have the skills set.  They weren't "college bound" and yet that's what they wanted to be and that's what they expected him to bring them towards.   He knew what he was getting into when he signed up for it.  I guess the moral is, the size and complexity of the challenge doesn't mean there's no value in trying, every little bit helps.  My father says, "its a waste of time".  

Yesterday, I took a trip to Chilete with 2 of my artisans for a series of lectures provided by the government concerning how they were going to dole out money this year.  While I didn't hear the lectures because the artisans had set out a table at a fair, and we're deathly afraid of them being stolen, I got the gist from their report.  They want more government money than last year and so they have to show up to these meetings more often because its all politics.   As I sat by the table talking up our products and our artisan group to passers-by, I couldn't help think that this was a perfect example of what I have just talked about, you sell our products Mateo and well look for ways to play the system for more handouts rather than work.  I had to wake up at 5 to do this, and it was early in the day so I got to drive down from the mountain, through the fog and clouds that would eventually make its way up the mountain to LLapa in the afternoon.  Its absolutely surreal how the clouds do this.  The clouds, perfectly horizontal, and the moutain peaks breaking though the fog as volcanic islands jut from the sea.

Class ended today, there is no more school until March, my host sister goes to Trujillo where she will work for the off period, only coming back for Christmas and Carnival.  I get the feeling that Christmas goes something like this (as all the rest of the holidays have so far):  Yay, wahoo, our Lord is born, lets drink!

Over and Out,

Mateo