Why Things Went South with Panchita

In the U.S. I spent a lot of my time daydreaming. Maybe that had to do with my professions—over the years I’d been a writer and a graphic artist. But for sure it’s a lot easier to listen to your iPod and believe that you can sing and play the guitar than it is to learn to sing and play the guitar. And it’s a lot easier to watch Andy Roddick play tennis than to go out and practice and play tennis at a respectable level. And I won’t even mention the daydreaming that goes on when one watches a movie starring (fill in the blank with the actress or actor of your choice).

I’ve noticed that in Callanca I don’t daydream much. I’m busy actually doing things and the things I’m doing have actual consequences. If they turn out badly I can’t punch Command-Z and reverse the errant move. When my brothers Dwight and Tommy and I played together when we were kids, if a wall of the Alamo happened to collapse and kill half of Colonel Travis’s garrison, we’d say, “Let’s play like that didn’t happen, OK?” and stand the soldiers upright and replace the fortifications and start over again. That kind of magical thinking doesn’t get you far in Perú.

I’m even finding it difficult to keep up-to-date with this blog because thinking and writing about what’s happening here seems so foreign to the fact of participating in my daily activities.

But then at the end of the day when I count up the number of things I’ve accomplished it doesn’t seem to be much. So maybe the impression that I’m not daydreaming and that I am instead working a lot is in itself a daydream?

I visited Trujillo, in the neighboring department or state of La Libertad, for Peace Corps training and during my stay there I introduced myself to the proprietors of a couple of shops that sell the elaborate dresses that women in the north of Perú wear when they dance the marinera, the dramatic courtship dance that I described in another of my entries. A few artisans in Callanca embroider blouses, petticoats and handkerchiefs for marinera outfits. They sell them to middle men in nearby Chiclayo or Monsefú or Lambayeque and these merchants take them to Trujillo and sell them at a sixty percent markup. So my idea was to eliminate the middle man—offer our dresses directly to merchants in Trujillo.

So after contacting the Trujillo vendors I returned to Callanca and talked to several artisans with the ability and experience to produce embroidery that will satisfy the market in Trujillo. I found three willing to spend the money (34 soles or $12.50) to travel to Trujillo with me. The women worked on samples to take with them to show to the merchants. We picked a day to travel.

Two days before we were to leave I called one of the merchants to confirm that she’d be in Trujillo on the day we planned to arrive. She said she’d be out of town that day and so couldn’t meet with us. So I returned to Callanca, informed the artisans, and we’re trying to agree on another date when the three of them can travel and when the merchants are likely to be in Trujillo and not elsewhere at an artisan’s fair or business meeting.

That’s the way I spend most of my days. Doing things and undoing things sort of like Penelope with her weaving while she was waiting for Odysseus to get back from Troy.

The trip to Trujillo will eventually happen. The artisans will go with me, all three, two out of three, or maybe three different artisans. The merchants might or might not be in Trujillo on the day and at the hour that they say they’ll be there. We might or might not get a better price in Trujillo than we’re getting in Lambayeque. If we get the better price, the merchant that offers it might or might not pay it once the artisans embroider the merchandise. One just never knows.

Another example of one just never knowing: I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting fed properly with the family with which I’m living. They eat lunch at 2:30 in the afternoon and dinner at 10 o’clock at night. Even though they own a bodega they’re often out of food, staples like vegetables or cheese (or any other source of protein). So I arranged with a neighbor family to eat with them and to pay them what I’ve been paying my current host family. The health post helped me to arrange the deal.

I met with the family, we agreed on a meal schedule and a price, and I showed up on the first of the following month for breakfast. The breakfast was delicious and served at a breakfastlike hour. But when I’d finished eating and offered her the money for the month’s pension, Panchita, the neighbor, told me that she’d gotten an unexpected job offer from the jardín (kindergarten) and wouldn’t be able to cook on account of her duties at the school.

I knew that this could mean any of a number of things but that one of that number of things likely was not a new job at the kindergarten. The most likely possibilities were these: 1) Margot, the mother at the house where I’m living, had talked to Panchita and had told her that she was not happy with Panchita for bird-dogging her gringo; 2) the husband of Jackeline, Panchita’s daughter and the person who would have have been cooking for me on days when Panchita couldn’t, was jealous and did not want Jackeline spending time with the girngo; or 3) I wasn’t offering them enough plata to make the deal worthwhile for them given the potential problems with Margot and/or Jackeline’s husband.

It turned out that the problem was probably none of the above. It’s most likely that Gregorio, a neighbor who’s a relative of Panchita and who lives between my family’s house and Panchita’s house, got wind of the plan and went to Panchita and told her not to get involved in the care and feeding of the gringo. Gregorio is a good friend of the family with whom I’m living and was responsible for negotiating my living arrangement with the Peace Corps in the first place. He probably felt that it would reflect badly on him if I jumped ship on this family.

I’ll probably never know the real reason why things went south with Panchita.

As I said, I spend most of my time here arranging things and then unarranging them or watching while someone else unarranges them without my knowledge. Perhaps I don’t spend every day daydreaming because in Callanca every day is in itself a daydream of sorts.

“Yuck, what’s that on your cockroach, man?”

We’re raising ducks and chickens in a pen upstairs outside my bedroom door. The upstairs is an unfinished area where the family was planning to build an entire second floor. But the money ran out when they’d finished two bedrooms. So the effect is similar to what you see in a partially finished basement in the U.S. In such a basement you find a couple of habitable rooms alongside an area with a concrete floor and a drain, a washer-drier, lawn implements and storm windows, and, for a ceiling, criss-crossing waterpipes. But instead of those basement features here we have an upper storey featuring unfinished brick walls, rice sacks full of plastic bottles for recycling, old broken furniture, piles of sand for mixing concrete, a clothesline and, now, the poultry pen. The ducks and chickens exit the pen, peeping, at dawn and dusk to gobble up insects and then return to the pen where they spend the rest of the day or night roosting or pecking at table scraps. The future of these animals is not a pleasant prospect. They’ll either be slaughtered and eaten at a family birthday dinner or sold to a neighbor in whose home they’ll encounter a similar fate.

The conditions in the rest of the house where I live are not all that much better than upstairs nor do I eat a whole hell of a lot better than the ducks and chickens, pecking at their table scraps and chowing down on crickets and earwigs.

For one thing, there’s the refrigeration problem. Many Peruvians believe that cold foods are not good for you. That’s why, instead of putting the leftovers from lunch in the regrigerator, they leave them in pots on the stove and heat them up again for supper. That’s true no matter whether we’re talking about rice, potatos, chicken, fish, soup or beans.

When my neighbror Rosa gave me a plate of food in exchange for helping her boys with their English homework, I put the food in the refrigerator after returning to our house. My host mother asked me when I was going to eat it. I told her probably tomorrow. She said, “Won’t it go bad in there?”

When I caught a cold, my host mother said, “But you haven’t eaten even one chupete. Have you?” Chupetes are skinny frozen sacks of juice that kids suck on in the summer like popsicles. My host mother believes that eating cold foods makes you catch cold. I guess it’s not all that different from when my mother used to warn me after a bath not to go outdoors with wet hair.

This week my host mother let the bathroom go five days without a cleaning, which wouldn’t’ve been so bad were not six people living in the house, three of them children. After the third day there were clumps of mud, soggy cardboard cylinders from rolls of toilet paper, pools of water, empty shampoo packages and worse on the floor, and in the toilet the diarrhea of one of the children. Not surprisingly the kids get diarrhea frequently due to the sanitary conditions or lack thereof in the house and due to the fact that they continue to eat with their hands in spite of those conditions or I suppose in a weird way because of those conditions. It’s amazing but the gringo has rarely suffered from gastrointestinal difficulties. It’s a tribute to 50 years of having lived as a bachelor, I imagine.

Sometimes I stare longingly at the pen where the chickens and ducks live and envy them their nests of shredded newspaper, orange plastic tub of drinking water and the treats that nature provides them to supplement the heap of banana peels, wilted lettuce and crusty rice on which they nightly dine. But I’ve noticed that sometimes not even they will dare to finish those leftovers from the family table. When one duck snags a morsel of passing vermin exiting a pile of my host mother’s discarded rice, the other duck asks: “Yuck, what’s that on your cockroach, man?”