CHARlez

As some of you know I returned to the U.S. on August 28 after serving for three years in Peace Corps Peru. Wish me luck. I’ve arrived with no iPhone or iPad, not even a Facebook page, and with version 10.6 of the operating system running on my Mac. 

I’m arriving in Maine in time to enjoy the last few weeks of summer and leaving behind the very temperate season (the temperature sometimes dips into the 60s) that passes for winter in Peru. That difference pretty much sums up the differences I’ve sensed and experienced between my life in the U.S. and my life as a rent-a-gringo. Summer and winter. Night and day. Here are are a few things about Perú that seem odd to a gringo.

In Perú:

• when you take a photo you have to include everyone from head to foot even if that means that their heads are the size of BBs in the photo

• nobody drinks his own beer; you share a bottle, you share a glass; fortunately the beers are 650 mililiters (22 ounces) so they last awhile

• nobody runs a tab; if you plan on drinking a lot of beer the waitress brings an empty case to your table and you and your friends fill it up with bottles as you drink and pay for the number of empties in the case at the end of the night

• it’s also interesting that you can’t walk into a supermarket and buy a 650-mililiter bottle of beer without bringing in an empty bottle to exhange; makes one wonder how one buys one’s first bottle of beer in Perú….

• people love and I mean love cologne and perfume; if you want to be Dudley Studly in Perú, bathe twice a day in English Leather

• nobody dresses bad; even if you’re down to your last céntimo you spend it to get your shoes shined and your pants pressed

• if you’re wearing a khaki vest with a lot of pockets everyone calls you “ingeniero”—“engineer” (in the U.S. they would think you’re a trout fisherman)

• fat is OK; big butts are OK, too, in fact attractive

• old is also OK; old is good—people listen to you, people ask you for advice, people respect you; even if one is twenty years old, one does not think of a person over sixty as unattractive, addled or useless (and, possibly as a result, they usually aren’t)

• if you’re a gringo you want a taxi; if you’re a gringo you want to change money; if you’re a gringo you don’t like spicy food; if you’re a gringo you grew up eating processed food and canned food and you have no idea what a cucumber is

• when you’re introduced to a woman you give her an air kiss beside the cheek

• you don’t hug; the only time you hug somoeone is on his or her birthday

• if someone offers you food you never turn it down and you eat every morsel on your plate; food is love and who would ever say to someone, “No thanks, I just loved”?

Because of my intense involvement with Perú and Peruvians, I came very close to making some really bad and possibly irreversible mistakes during my three years in Perú. But by the grace of God or of Whomever in fact is in charge of looking out for the foolish and the clueless, I came out of my three-year experience (assuming I make it to August 27) enriched in every way by that experience instead of defeated or diminished or embittered by it, which with a little more bad luck or bad judgment easily could have been the case.

Most of the mistakes I made came about as a result of totally or partially (mostly totally) misunderstanding the culture in which I was living. Confronting people about what I saw as their mistakes was possibly the most consistently stupid thing I did. In Callanca if I were to shoot your dog a really combative way of approaching the situation would be for you to say to me, “At times some people do destructive things as a result of motivations that are not at once clearly discernible but that nonetheless do much damage to those affected by their actions, whether that damage be intentional or unintentional.” Then you would sneak into my yard at night and poison my dog.

As a result of failing to understand this phenomenon my dogs were continually getting poisoned until I finally understood that I needed to stop confronting people and speak to them in “indirectos” like the example offered above.

A close second would be the mistake of pointing out that people were stealing, cheating, taking advantage, being selfish or self-interested. In the U.S. we’ve reached a level of affluence that allows us to be philanthropic and do stuff like volunteer in another country for three years. Here, volunteerism or public service is virtually unknown. If you run for public office it’s so that you can pocket 20% of the budget of every infrastructure or other project that passes through your hands. If you write a project for teaching workshops to women in the community on how to deal with domestic violence you include in the budget a 1,000-sole item for “gestiones” (management) or “elaboración del proyecto” (project development) and guess who gets that money?  I won’t mention who stole what and when and how because as I mention above I’ve learned to speak in “indirectos.”

Another really stupid thing that I kept trying to do, but which ended up working out for me, was attempting to work with women. In Callanca if you talk to a woman everyone just assumes that you’re sleeping with her or that you want to sleep with her. Why else would anyone talk to a woman? So for my first six months in Callanca, because I was working with artisans (all of them women), teachers (most of them women), restaurant workers (everyone who works in the kitchen is a woman), people thought that I had five hundred girlfriends. However, since in Callanca everyone knows exactly what everyone else is doing—people live seven or ten or fifteen to a household and there’s no privacy to be had anywhere—it soon became clear that I had no girlfriends. If I’d had a girlfriend everyone would have known about it. So by the end of my service people were saying to me, “Chár-les, you need to find yourself a good Callancana. You need to leave behind some blue-eyed children in Callanca!” Instead of resenting me for supposedly having girlfriends they were now trying to set me up with their sisters and aunts. Neither reaction was really appropriate but at least the latter was more flattering.

In spite of my many blunders they liked me in Callanca. When I left the Teniente Gobernador published this magazine about the work Char-les and his socios had done in Callanca between 2010 and 2013.

No one has called me Charles since the first grade when my teacher, Miss Berry, read off the names on the class roster and I was too shy to tell her that friends and family called me Chuck. For an entire year everyone in first grade called me Charles. In Callanca they also call me Charles, or actually CHARlez, with two syllables, accent on the first. It’s a fact of life in my experience that when you come as a stranger to a new society, be it a new school, a new job, a softball team, whatever, the members of that society frequently give you a new name. It might be a nickname like “Blondie” (the chicanos called me that when I moved from Texas to Arizona in 1968 to go to high school) or “Shuck” (the anglos called me that because that was how some of the chicanos mispronounced my name) or “Smiley” (the waitresses at The Gopher Sports Club in Phoenix called me that when I worked there as a cook in the mid-70s); or instead of a nickname it could be one of your real names but not the one you’re used to. It’s a way of claiming you and putting the stamp of approval of that society on you and accepting you. Or maybe I’m putting too positive a spin on the name-change thing; more likely what I should have understood was that as a gringo in Callanca I was back to being in the first grade.

Highlights of my three years in Callanca:

• Worked with Verónica Eneque to secure a S/.150,000 electric project that provided electricity to 120 families and resulted in the functioning of a well that provided water to 40 families.

• Sold over 1,000 ducks to local restaurants and earned over 40,000 soles working with Erick Eneque and Jesús Gonzales in a youth entrepreneurship project.

• Working with Dr. Jenny and Gisela the obstetrician, arranged the donation of land for the expansion of the local health post; taught diabetes-education classes at the health post and teen-pregnancy prevention workshops at the local high school; arranged the donation of a computer, sterilizing oven and glucometer for the posta.

• Worked with María Custodio to expand the market for her Marinera dresses; Mari was able to build a workshop/studio where she sews the dresses and now employs nine sisters, cousins and nieces whom she’s taught the art of embroidery in her new shop.

• With Gregorio Mechán started four community banks where participants save money and use that money to provide small, short-term loans to one another; the banks operate for eight months to a year and at the end of that time everyone gets their savings back plus their share of the interest earned by the loans. Participants have saved over S/.40,000 and provided over S/.120,000 in loans.

• Leveled and rebuilt a kindergarten with Aldo Rodríguez; previously the school had dirt floors, a roof made out of sticks and mud, no water, no bathroom, no electricity and now has a cement floor, a roof that doesn’t leak, light, running water and a bathroom. The number of children attending the school doubled the year after the renovation.

• Constructed 18 “cocinas mejoradas” (“improved cookstoves”) with Aldo Rodríguez; many women in Callanca still cook with firewood and as a result they and their families suffer from respiratory diseases, cataracts and other vision problems caused by exposure to smoke from open fires. Cocinas mejoradas eliminate these problems since they feature a combustion chamber that encloses the heat source and a chimney that directs smoke away from the house and its inhabitants.

• Formed a Community Leadership Council with representatives of other organizations in Callanca and gained from the Regional and District governments recognition of Callanca as a Municipality, meaning that in 2014 for the first time in its history Callanca will be eligible to elect its own independent mayor and city council and manage its own budget.

• Endured innumerable power outages, water shortages, sewer back-ups, interesting fungi, parasites, intestinal and skin disorders, floods, earthquakes, a house break-in and assault; came to see these as fairly ordinary occurrences and nothing that should prevent one from getting on with one’s work today because something worse was bound to happen tomorrow or the next day.

In Callanca I found that I could work hard 60 hours a week at jobs from which I did not benefit personally in any way, jobs which in fact often were prejudicial to my own interests—financially, healthwise or in any number of other ways—and still be deliriously happy.

Living in Callanca for three years truly changed me as a person. I’ve always been someone whom people respected because I’m responsible, work hard, use my imagination to solve problems in interesting ways and for the most part can be depended upon. However, most of the work I did in the U.S. I did alone. I was the kind of guy who, if you went on a camping trip with him, said, “Give me the tent and leave me alone; I can put it up faster by myself than with you helping me.” In Callanca I learned to work with other people and even developed a reputation for being cheerful, outgoing and “charismatic.” That’s a word in which I do not recognize my former self.

Whether I’ll be able to continue to make use of the elements of my personality that I discovered in Callanca remains to be seen. I like to think that in previously unknown, highly stressful and extremely challenging situations one’s true personality emerges and one finds out who one really is. In the U.S. very rarely did anything happen to me that I hadn’t seen coming. That being the case it was easy to prepare and have several good alternatives at hand at all times. In places like Callanca almost everything that happens to one is something that one hasn’t seen coming and in such moments one has to react as best one can; I believe that those reactions, for being unpremeditated and unrehearsed, inevitably reflect one’s character. If that’s the case then I’m very satisfied—although somewhat surprised—to find out who I really am.

I’m proud of virtually every moment I spent in Callanca. There, I was the person I’d wanted to be all of my life.

After an experience like Peace Corps one is tempted to resort to Kafka’s wry observation that “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” However, I’d turn that observation around and insist that “That which does not make me stronger kills me.” That is to say, if we don’t push ourselves somewhere close to our limits every day and ask of ourselves more than what we believed we could achieve, we die a little bit every day to the extent that we have not done so.

On that note I’ll sign off and go about the business just described in other venues and wish for all of you a taste of the sweetness I’ve known in Callanca as I and my entrañables amigos have been about that same business to the very best of our abilities for the greater part of the past three years.