8.03.2006

Feeling at Home

Sometimes traits that can be annoying can be a blessing. Take, for example, my host parents´ habit of repeating stories they´ve already told me. When I first arrived, I could only understand part of what they were saying. Now I can understand it all! Or at least, for the few details I don´t understand, I can ask for clarification of without being too annoying or disrupting the conversational flow. Also, interesting new details always pop up.

After dinner tonight, my host parents again took off full speed ahead into a conversation about the ´83 El Niño. What I didn´t know earlier though, was that my host sister, Jenny (the one getting married) was born amidst the storm when the sky had descended so close to the earth, it made the rooves tremble at its thunderous warning that the world was about to end. They caught rainwater to cook and clean, a novelty here in the desert. Watching the news on TV, they realized how fortunate they were for clean water as their counterparts in countries on the other side of the globe looked on at the useless black floods charging through their unfortunate towns. Although the rains were so heavy that a woman who lives across the street got swept away by the temporary sea outside and survived only by clinging onto an uprooted tree until reaching safe ground, nobody´s life was claimed. After 8 months of living in their house, I´ve earned the right to hear about how my host grandmother had hoarded sugar and gas in some abandoned houses up high. This enabled them to escape the fate of less cunning households, who got their supplies taken by the Municipality for distribution to other people who lacked those essential supplies. Whether you call that being smart or selfish is your call, but at the very least realize the equation is complicated by the cultural concept of the role of a mother and the poverty they were trying to escape.

Onto another subject, staying at home during the Peruvian Independence holiday was rather uneventful. What may have justified my decision to waste free vacation days, I missed for a long bike ride (although that bike ride felt pretty damn good). You know how I´ve been complaining about how I´m sick of parades? Well, that made me decide to miss the school parades. I thought it´d just be another boring parade, but I saw the taping on the local TV station, and it was ridiculously lavish. There were itty bitty girls dressed in piles of lace and chiffon waving at the crowd on top of large overdecorated floats. Nevertheless, I´m nowhere near heartbroken for having missed it.

What was even cooler was the Peruvian government´s Independence Day parade. There were soldiers hanging out of helicopters, officers dangling off the front of tankers, women soldiers performing shaky arabesques on the back of speeding motorcycles and even dogs walking on two legs and jumping through two burning hoops! On a more political note, Michele Bachelet, the new female president of Chile accompanied Alan García at the parade, who entered office on Independence Day. It´s another confirmation that Chile and Perú will try to develop stronger political and economic relations. This is a wonderful idea, but the relationship is marred by Peruvians´ lingering bitterness of Chileans due to the late-19th Century War of the Pacific, which was essentially a territorial dispute with Chile. For example, my counterpart advised me to change the name of "Chilean flamingo" to "Flamingo" on one of the bird factsheets I made to prevent wounding the children´s national pride. At the governmental level however, it doesn´t seem to have much effect.