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here's a picture of me in my front yard here

31 January, 2005

hi dear ones,
i got into lima yesterday at 8am and my flight to piura was at 5:20. so me and the owner of the school and his brother in law walked about lima. it was fun, and it was some holiday involving parades of brightly costumed masked and dancing figures behing a banner and a cross. in a museum they opened a comparative exhibition of artifacts related to women in the prehispanic cultures in mexico and peru with a dance of an indigenous group of the peruvian rainforest. that happened to happen as we walked by and the musem was free that day. sunday i guess, that explains the free part. what a lucky one i am.

my family has a mama and two siblings, ages 23 and 22. 22 is interesting, studies vetrinary medicine, talks more seriously. miluci, the older, has finished her studies and works in the movie theater, gets excited and gushy and likes to shop and dress well and such.

today i went to spanish class, which was too easy and too many fill-in-the-blank grammar exercises. tomorrow i'm going to the other class, should be more appropriate. at five i get to check out the english classes. looks like i won't be working too much to start with.

happy birthday to me. once again, it's a great experience to arrive where i'm going on my birthday. and i got kisses this morning. :-) copared to mexico it's more of a "tú" country and less of "usted". haven't seen much else. went for a run and played guitar already. go me. and downstairs of the language school is a gym, to which my membership is part of being associated with the school. so maybe this is the year i get strong arms, who knows.
love and hugs,
beth

19 February, 2005

i saw blue footed booby birds! whole flocks of them off the coast in punta sal, about three hours north of here. i remember seeing videos about them and especially their mating "dance" in elementary school and who'da thunk i'd be hanging around them for real....

so here i am in piura, peru, living with a family teaching english in the evenings, visiting nearby cities on the weekends. it's good. the city is big and has many universities, people from all over. read: the culture is not as different from what i know as it was for me in chiapa de corzo. i go out with my students after class, listen to music with my host brother and his friends, practice guitar, walk around town with milusy, my host sister, download songs and discussion topics from the web. i'm teaching advanced english to advanced adult students and loving it. i enjoy seeking out topics and roads to opening up discussion and i enjoy hearing what the stundents have to say.

there's a lazy river running through town, a narrow strip of wet in a wide, dry bed. egrets and storks live there, under the traffic of many bridges. the river divides the city of piura from the city of castilla, which function really as one urban center. you can walk accross, or take a private taxi, a collective taxi, a motorcycle taxi (three wheeled), or a regular motorcycle, all with different prices and rules. there aren't very many private cars, still around one o'clock it's hard to get from here to there; everyone's on the move, getting home for lunch.

me and my host siblings

i always eat with mirian and ramiro and milusy. they say they'd mostly been eating separately until i got here, but now we wait for each other and have yummy conversation with our food. they're a family who pokes more fun at each other than mine (how did we get so earnest?) and there's a lot of laughter and sometimes briefly flashing tempers as well.

my neighborhood is called miraflores and it's full of parks. every three blocks you come to another one, irrigated grass and carob trees, concrete paths crossing in the middly and a statue or monument. there's one between home and school where posses of trainingsuited señoras walk around the perimeter while kids gather huge sacks of carob pods from the grounds.

sometime soon i'm going to have ramiro take me over to the universidad nacional. maybe i could take a history course. wouldn't that be interesting? and i met some mariachis at a birthday party who say they'll trade me guitar lessons for english conversation. so the spring/summer is already taking shape -- i'm looking forward to it while simultaneously looking forward to being home afterwards. so that's it from me for now, dear ones. let me know what you're up to! much love!
beth

Mid May, 2005

My Nana Dies:

I went home for a week, to California, to San Diego, to my Nana’s house where the shaggy green carpet smells like my childhood and every tiny element, every towel and pillow, stove and freezer, glasstablecorner and candy dish, the photographs and the little gifts made by us at all ages, they are all saturated with the memory of her. And equally they’re saturated with the memory of me, of all the different becomings she nurtured, or challenged, or didn’t challenge in me, in us.

I’m glad i went. How could i have understood if it had just disappeared? Nana was a being so full of love she can never disappear; she lives on strongly. But the riches of memory of her house will disappear. The things will be dispersed, some put to good use, some held as loving mementos, some sold or thrown out. The carpet will be torn up and replaced, the house will be sold to someone else. I’m grateful for the opportunity to get on an airplane and and go be in the rich saturation again, to share it for a few moments with other people whose set of memories overlap mine, to hold symbols of her tenderly before we let them go, knowing that Nana’s true essence is real and permanent and there’s no need to hold on.

4 June, 2005

oh i’m ready to come home. It feels good, like finishing a POW writeup for your jr high math class when your heart says, “okay, i’ve done this and i’ve done it well.” and you close the little packet of papers and smooth one had over the cover and you’re DONE.

i’m closing one chapter of my life and starting the next. of course life chapters aren’t like separate, distinct essays. like the chapters of a novel there’s continuity; what happens in one chapter follows from circumstances and foreshadowings in in the previous ones. and yet there’s still a difference. i’m not just turning a page, i’m handing in the completed project.

and i’m proud of it. six months ago it wasn’t finished; there were things i needed to make good here in peru, lessons learned but not yet lived out. a big part of it is something deep inside about the relationship between individual identity and communal identity, about the harmony between being true to myself and considering the needs of others, also in terms of how they need to see me.

a student's son and i on a nearby beach

it’s like choosing a common language in which to speak. everyone could speak only their “own” language all the time, and in that language they probably could express their feelings and ideas the most aptly. but to communicate with someone from a different place i can learn a language that’ll be common to both of us. i’ll be lacking many words at first, i’ll describe around the missing bits, simplify, muddle through, say the closest thing i CAN say rather than the crystal-clear truth. and yet we will be communicating. we will understand each other much more than we would from within the boxes of the unrelative clarity of our own languages. though there my not be exact words for what i want to say, as a communal being i’m expressing myself best when i choose words that you can understand. friendships across linguistic languages – english, spanish, german – mirror the reality that we live across different personal languages. we each have a very-own language inside, the way we perceive and filter and out together and respond and formulate, and we each get the opportunity to learn to faithfully compromise that language in order to bridge the gap to others. sometimes i need to sink down into the realness of my own language to figure things out. then i reemerge to share what i’ve learned in whatever language you and i can best share in.

that’s the lesson of this chapter. and now i’m coming home!

26 June, 2005

i watched the sun rise pink behind the amazon river this morning while listening to rich echoey harmony from the diosesan chapel on one side, kids still out from their saturday night partying on the other, and mototaxi motors behind me. the last few days have been fun, we got ourselves boated 140km upriver and into a tributary called yanayacu (“black water” in ­ o dear i forget the name of the language) whose water really is the color of weak coffee, swirling together elegantly with the chocolate milk of the amazon at its mouth. there we stayed at a pretty lodge called muyuna (whirlpool, eddy), where we were eduardo’s tourists. he took us hiking or boating and told us about trees and fruits, helped us not to miss the monkeys and sloths, snatched baby caimans from the shallows to show us up close, taught us the names of birds.

hilary and eduardo in the boat

my favorite part was when we took a motor boat and then a hike and then a canoe into this quiet quiet lagunita. the afternoon sun was slanting across it, goldening a carpet of floating plants and the huge spiny leaves of victoria regia, strong enough to support ten kilos (if you put it down gently). the wooden canoe scraped through the plants as it opened its path -- this was my favorite sound throughout the trip --­ and all kinds of different grasshoppers and spiders leapt aboard to be oohed at by me and eyed nervously by our buddy paul. all along the shores there were these funky palm trees, slim trunks with rings of long pokey spines and then a little spray of green at the top. from the tees on the far side we heard the croaking calls of a “prehistoric bird” which we never saw. apparently it has an extra toe.

anyways, we just sat there in the canoe, safe from the mosquitoes of the shore, feeling the last of the sun, listening to the little sounds add up to quiet…. and that was my favorite moment of the last few days. more stories, including river dolphins or the surprising scarcity of beetles, available of request.

now i’m back in iquitos, it’s motorcycle loud and seems otherwise a perfectly nice city. there’s nothing missing from my trip now, i’m ready to come home tomorrow. and lucky me ­ i’m gonna!
love, beth