Peregrino soy en tierra ajena

If any of you have foreigners living in your midst, I urge you to invite them to dinner, seek them out, make an effort to talk to them, welcome them, and listen to what they have to say to you in their broken dialects. It’s impossible to describe to you how absolutely alone one feels living as a stranger in a strange land.

That’s Exodus 2:22 for those of you with little or no Bible background.

For one thing, Callancanos don’t hang out. That’s to say, they’re often at home, though at unpredictable hours, but there’s little or no hope of actually carrying on a conversation with anyone because of the familial chaos that reigns in the households of Callanca. First, entire families live under one roof, and I mean entire. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, fathers, mothers, children. Or if they don’t live in the same house they live in adjoining houses and come and go as if they lived in the same house. Animals wander in and out—ducks, chickens, pigs, guinea pigs, dogs, cats, what have you. There are always small children around to be cared for and often in significant numbers.

The lack of anything approximating privacy makes one wonder how these children were ever conceived….

If you show up hoping to talk to someone your conversation will be interrupted innumerable times by children falling down and hurting themselves, a relative stopping by to borrow money, another relative appearing in the doorway and communicating some complicit arrangement with a few gestures and numinous phrases unfathomable to a foreigner, the arrival of a large truck delivering propane tanks or beer if the family happens to run a bodega, or sometimes a couple of guys herding cows through the living room to their corral in back of the house.

It’s difficult to maintain the thread of a conversation under these circumstances. Therefore whatever was on your mind stays on your mind, you never really get a chance to express it in any coherent fashion.

This seems to suit Callancanos fine. They seem to get more out of simply being present as a group, together in one place, than I do. They’ve learned to communicate their needs quickly, in those brief gestures and phrases I mentioned, instead of rambling on and on about what they’re thinking or feeling, as Americans tend to do. I think they’re also kind of sick of seeing each other every minute of every day and so don’t need or want to make a big deal out of sharing their thoughts or feelings. On the other hand, they can be physically very affectionate with one another, at least the women can. Mothers and daughters, sisters and female friends walk down the street arm-in-arm and touch and embrace freely and warmly in public.

But that’s not the way we do it and so it makes it difficult for an American to have what an American would call a real friend in Callanca.

Loyalty to the family is of The Godfather proportions in Callanca. The artisans will share work within their own families but sharing work with women outside the family is practically unheard of, which has made it very difficult to form an artisans’ association that truly benefits the members since the members’ primary loyalty is to themselves and their families and not the association. Even at their own birthday parties, the female members of the family work like slaves, cooking for and serving the guests, instead of enjoying a party supposedly in their honor. This is because the quality of service to one’s family—representing the family in a responsible fashion—is so highly valued. In public projects is nepotism rampant? What do you think? And because loyalties within the family are so important, this of course makes it doubly difficult for an outsider to develop any kind of real friendship with a Callancano.

Also, there’s really no public place to get together with a friend. There are no bars in Callanca and because the land is valuable—productive farmland—there’s no public square or market as in most Latin American communities. All the land is either under cultivation or has a house built on it. There are many restaurants but nobody who lives in Callanca goes to them, only visitors from Chiclayo. Callancanos consider it a ridiculous idea to pay 10 or 15 soles for a meal when you can cook it at home for 2 or 3. Plus, if you go to a restaurant, there’s bulla. Noise. In any public place in Perú there’s always lots of bulla, usually cumbia at high decibels. Again, the emphasis seems to be on just being together, not really communicating in any very sophisticated manner.

Language is of course a problem, too. My Spanish is good, but even in English it’s difficult to communicate coherently concepts like “I need to work with you professionally because you are an artisan and I like you personally and you seem to be an intelligent human being so I would like to talk to you; however, this does not mean that I want to be your boyfriend or marry you and take you back to the U.S. with me.” Drawing these lines is difficult enough in English. Imagine attempting to establish and maintain these distinctions in a foreign language and with a person raised in a culture entirely different from your own. What do I maen by cultural differences? Here, for example, is a range of possible ways to address a married woman in Callanca:

“Señora” = always correct and safe

“Señora Felícita” = also acceptable but indicates more familiarity

“Felícita” = getting into dangerous territory

“Fela” = watch out

“Chiscas” = her husband definitely hates you

“Chiscas” combined with the “tú” form of address rather than the “usted” form = you’re dead meat

Because a large part of my job here consists of working with the artisans to improve their prospects of marketing their aresanía, it’s essential that I work with the women of Callanca because all of the artisans are women. But Callanca is a very conservative and traditional place, the older married women will not even shake hands with an open hand, they offer you their fist, fingers down, and you grasp their wrist to greet them. So it’s a tricky situation to dance twice in one night with the same girl at a wedding or walk down the street alone with a woman. The next day everyone in town is saying that you’re novios.

So that pretty much eliminates 50% of the population as potential friends. The men work all day in the fields or at other jobs and when they gather socially they drink themselves into a stupor and fall asleep, so again this situation does not lend itself to deep and meaningful dialog. There are many exceptions to this rule but another stumblingblock to any orderly exchange of ideas is the Peruvian tradition of holding forth eloquently and at great length on the topic at hand, so even on the rare occasions when I find myself talking to a sober Callancano I often find myself listening rather than talking.

My conclusion is that probably we have way too much time on our hands in the U.S. and that communicating with people is a luxury and perhaps is a skill that one develops only after one has achieved a certain level of economic stability and formal education. The rest of the world couldn’t care less what we’re thinking or feeling.