“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?”