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.