Cuzco(topia)

Any one awesome enough to know that the title of this entry is a play on the movie "The Emporers New Grove" gets bonus points. The rest of you who didn't know, consider yourselves educated!

Ever since I arrived in Peru, people have been asking me if I have been to Cuzco. The fact that I had been here a year and not been to Cuzco gave me a lot of street-cred with Peruvians. It was surprising to them to meet a gringo who was here, not turning a blind eye to the woes of their country and making a bee-line tour to Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca. I have now lost my edge on other white people visiting Peru. A week ago, I went to Cuzco and Machu Picchu. Not only that, I did it in style.
I was so stressed out when my parents arrived and spent a few days in Lima and at my site. I felt 100% responsible for their itinerary and their happiness. Lima is my stomping ground. Therefore, I knew all the ins and outs and would serve as their travel agent and tour guide. My parents had done next to no research on Lima and didn’t even bring an opinion as to what they might like to do. Cuzco was fantastic cause I was as clueless as they were about what to see and how to spend out time. So I got to sit back, relax, and be tourist just like everyone else.

The last time I had been on an airplane was the one I took to come to Peru a year ago. Since then, all my traveling has been by land, usually on overnight busses that have lasted as long as 16 hours. My parents paid $150 for me to fly with them to Cuzco, an unfathomable amount of money to me for transportation these days. I have flown a lot, especially in recent years. But this plane ride really blew me away. My whole perspective has changed and I felt as if I was flying for the first time in my life. It is such an amazing concept to travel such a long distance in such a short amount of time. A bus ride to Cuzco would have been 24 hours, but I stepped on a plane in Lima and hour later I was 12,000 feet in the Andes mountains in Cuzco. Crazy!

I have traveled to a handful of Andean “cities” in Peru. Cuzco was unlike them all. For starters, it was surrounded by mountains, but unlike the rest of the cities, the mountains around Cuzco seemed dry. They were not green (perhaps they are during the rainy season), and there were not snow capped mountains in sight. The city itself was more spectacular than any other Andean City I’ve seen. I was expecting that though. Cuzco was the capital city of the Incan Empire and therefore home to more beautiful architecture and ruins. The Spanish likewise made the city it’s base for the area, so there is an interesting mix of native and colonial influence.

Most noticeably, the difference between Cuzco and other Andean cities, is the amount of money it has flowing in. Cuzco is the main tourist destination in Peru and the local economy milks it for all it is worth. It seems as though modern day Cuzco was built for tourism. I couldn’t believe how many people spoke English. It was weird to be in a town where the Spanish architecture still looked well maintained. In Lima, the colonial heart of the city is very run down to the point that it feels dirty and dangerous. The main square in Cuzco felt like it was plucked from any city in Spain.

Our Hotel was once the home of a well to do Spanish man. It was a far cry from the high rise, steal and glass Marriott we stayed in Lima. Our hotel in Cuzco was made out of stone with a traditional Spanish plaza and fountain in the middle. It was rustic enough to transport you back to a different time, but modern enough that my dad could watch the US Open on the TV in our bedroom. As always, my favorite thing to do was curl up next to the fire at night time. Cuzco was pretty cold. It sits about 12,000 feet in the mountains and it’s winter time here. But because we’re so close to the equator, the coldest is gets is the 40s.

During the days, we went on tours of the churches in the cities and ruins in the country side. My parents were in heaven with the food, the shopping and the massages. All of which they found incredibly cheap. I on the other hand, was still having a hard time shaking my peace corps frugality and flinched with every swipe of the credit card.

I have been really reluctant to buy much since I arrived in Peru. One, because I don’t make the kind of money to buy much. Two, I know whatever I buy has to fit in two suitcases at the end of my service. But mostly because as some one who is spending 2 years in Peru, I feel the souvenirs I buy shouldn’t be the typical touristy crap. I want to bring back to the states some really awesome stuff that I will use and will last for a while. I have wanted to buy a baby alpaca blanket as one of the few investments I make towards my “worthy Peru memorabilia”. I resisted many of things my parents offered to buy for me, but I couldn’t say no to a blanket. By the end of our Cuzco trip, my parents had purchased five $100 baby alpaca blankets as gifts because I had given my blessing that it wasn’t just touristy crap.

Cuzco I think was the trip of a life time. I don’t think my parents ever would have come to South America and visited one of the new seven wonders of the world if I hadn’t been placed here. Machu Picchu was definitely the apex of our trip but that will be left for the next installment of my trip.

Living La Lima Loca

It was too hard to blog while I was with my parents. Not because of a busy itinerary or lack or internet. It would have been much easier for me to post while on vacation than it normally is at site. I just couldn't find the motivation to sit in front of a computer and talk about the experience while it was happening. Maybe this means that I'm not a very good writer, or at least blogger, but I needed a little perspective. Having my parents here and taking a break from Peace Corps life was way different than I expected. I didn't think I had changed much and I was really surprised at the culture shock I experienced just being around people who hadn't been living my reality for the past year.

Having my parents here was so wonderful for so many reasons. I am so fortunate to have parents willing to make such a huge and expensive trip down to an unknown land just to see me. I am so lucky that after a year apart, I got to spend a whole week with my parents. Regardless of where we were or what we did, just being able to hang out with them was vacation enough for me. At times it didn't feel like a vacation. I am so obsessed with making people happy, and nobodies happiness means more to me than my mom and dads. So at first, I had a hard time relaxing cause I was so worried about everything and if everyone was having a good time.

Lima isn't the greatest city in the world. Normally, it would never be a place my parents would ever voluntarily choose to travel to. But because it is where I live and it is such a big part of my life, they arranged to spend a few days here. My moms ideal vacation involves beaches, shopping, gardens or theaters. My dads ideal vacation has biking, skiing, golfing or any combination of sports. Lima offered non of my parents comforts. For them, I think this trip was a really unique experience. It was unlike anything they had ever done or any place they had ever been.

For the past year, I had been making a list in my head of things I could do with my parents while they were here in Lima. Out of the list of a hundred or so things, we probably did about 5. My mom didn't like riding in taxis becausethe way people drive around here scared her and my dad didn't like to walk too much cause his knees where bugging him. So we pretty much stayed within a stones through from our hotel. We never made it to the colonial, historic town center. We stayed in the Marriott overy looking the ocean, with a touristy shopping center built into the cliff right in front of us. We ate most of our meals there cause of it's convience. We never walked the streets of bohemian Barranco and we didn't see any of the Inca ruins just a five minute drive from where we were staying.

Instead, we spent our time in Lima the way I spend my time in Lima. To me, being in Lima means being with family. Whether it's spending time with my friends that live in Lima or visiting other Peace Corps volunteers, who are my family here in Peru. Being in Lima usually means going to the Peace Corps office, going to the doctor, shopping, getting a break from the food at site and eating at nicer restaurants. That is exactly how we spent out time in Lima. There happened to be a handful of volunteers in Lima so my parents took them out for drinks and dinner. We spent a lot of time just hanging out together and eating a lot of food at restaurants I can't normally afford.

I realized just how cheap I am since becoming a Peace Corps volunteer. I am even more aware of my frugality now that my mom and dad are gone and I am back on my own dime. While having them pay for expensive food was great, the coolest thing about having my parents and their money here was being able to take taxis. To me, taking taxis has become the ultimate luxury. I thought I would impress my parents by haggling with the taxi drivers and bargaining down a good price. But every time we got in a cab, my dad would ask how much we were paying and insist on giving the drivers more. I think the poverty in Peru really made an impression on my dad and seeing the joy on the drivers face when they got double the amount they were expecting, made my dad feel like he was doing his part to help out.

Lima seemed like a different place when they were here. Now it seems completely different without them again. Of course, Lima was just a small stop over on their trip. The real vacation was Cuzco and Machu Picchu. I will be writing and posting pictures all week from the fabulous adventure we got to share together, up in the Andes mountains. It somehow didn't seem right to me to write about the trip while it was happening. I knew I was gonna need some hindsight to share our vacation. Now I get to relive it all this week as I immortalize it in the blogosphere.

My Parents and My Site

So my parents arrived with no problems. As you can imagine I haven't really had the time to sit down and blog since then, and don't really feel like doing it now. But here are a few pictures from when they first arrived.

First, I took them to the ruins of Pachacamac which is an archeological site 5 minutes from Lurin. From my old house, I used to be able to look out my bedroom window and see the Temple of the Sun, the place we are standing in this picture. This will be the first of many many ruins we will visit in our trip. It helps get a feel for how long Peru has had modern civilization and lays the base work for the ever more impressive mountian ruins.

After our trip to Pachacamac we went to my site, Lurin. First we paid a visit to our local market. Here are my parents in front of several vegetable vendors. I showed them where I buy pirated DVDs and all the crazy fruits that we don't have in the USA. We also bought a huge bouquet of flowers that we gave to the nuns when we visited the orphanage later in the day.

I showed them all the things all the locals only know about and I took them to all my favorite places and walked them through a typical day at my life in site. This is the fruit stand that is across the street from my house. I go to these guys everyday and get fresh squeezed orange and pinapple juice. Nothings says Peru to me, like fresh fuits and juices.

And They're Off!

To my Doctor-to-be friends: I love you

I often think about how attractive working as a Doctor would be. I love the idea that no day is ever the same for a Doctor. They are not stuck behind desks but move around all day working up close and personal with a variety of people. Being a doctor is challenging, rewarding, and meaningful. Three things that are most important to me in a career. But there's a small problem with me wanting to be a doctor, I think blood and guts are icky. I can handle looking at flesh, but it doesn't excite me in the way my friends think looking at a fractured tibia sticking out of some one's leg is cool.

Doctors do such amazing work. After reading Mountains beyond Mountains, it makes me wish I could do work that makes such a difference as Dr. Paul Farmer did in the book. But I believe in working with the gifts god gives you. A person will make a bigger impact on the world if they are doing something that they truly love. I think I would have incredible bedside manner as a Doctor, but apart from that, I don't think my natural talents would make me very successful in the world of medicine. Why don't they employ people at hospitals and clinics that walk around talking to patients and making them feel happy? That would be the perfect job for me. Maybe the next president will fix medical care in the US to include this position. Obama 2008!

Thank you to Laura and Amanda for your expertise (or blossoming expertise) on the matter. I will always welcome your two cents on my well being. One can never have too many opinions when it comes medical advice.

Right now I am waiting for my parents to arrive. I just got off the phone with them as they were sitting in their first class seats drinking Pisco Sours in LA before take off. Nice, huh? I'm living the life of a Peace Corps volunteer and they mock me by flying first class. But they're happy and their vacation has already started while I pace around the room trying not to look at the clock too often.

I've been anticipating they're arrival for a while. Last week I told a Peruvian the exact number of days until they arrived. She asked how long it had been since I had seen them last and I told her a year. Then she told me that family wasn't as important in the US as it is in Peru. I was offended down to my soul and got a bit defensive in trying state my opinion on the contrary. I think I must have taken what she said very personally. As if she was telling me that my family wasn't very important to me because I was living so far away from them and didn't get to see them that often. I think I made my case to her and further fulfilled my peace corps obligations by teaching locals about my home and breaking stereotypes. But the idea that Americans value family less than other stuck with me and continued to bother me.

Then, I realized I was being a hypocrite. I didn't like the way in which this Peruvian was speaking about me and US culture as a whole. I regularly discus my general observations about Peruvians and Peruvian culture on my blog and make accusations along the lines of the one I had been offended by. People do this to me all the time though. They will say (never ask, but announce really) Americans are like this or like that. I have heard some crazy stuff like "Americans eat everything out of cans" or "black people are never sad". I usually take all this with a good sense of humor and use the opportunity as a learning experience. But I considered it a huge insult when this peruvian generalized about Americans and Family. It's like insulting someone's mother, which you just don't do in any culture.

I thought about this for a while. Yes, there are differences in the ways which families behave between cultures, but family is one of the few things that transcends borders. Families and our relationships to each other are what makes us fundamentally human. The family is the core of all culture and therefore different as its representative of the uniqueness of each culture. But to say that family is not as important in one culture versus another is just not fair. It's like saying these people are more capable of love than these other people. I think I'm obviously over reacting but this peruvian woman's statement was a learning lesson for me as well. It made me think of family as a more of a transnational concept than as a means to compare and contrast cultures, as I have been doing since the moment I arrived.

I'm going to be redundant and say that I am really excited to see my parents. I would try to explain why having them come visit me and my life here is so important and meaningful but that would sound so sappy and would even venture off into the abstract. I try to keep my blog a bit more grounded than that and less emotional. My next few updates should be about what it's like having them here and their reactions of this fascination country.

Tuberculosis, Peru & Me

I was cuddled up in bed last night reading a great book, Mountains beyond Mountains. I was about half way through the book about an amazing doctor who was working to alleviate infectious diseases in Haiti. This man had a love affair with Haiti and didn´t have a big desire to spread his focus. That is until, and I quote, "MDR [multi-drug resistant TB] claimed a close friend who had been living in a shantytown on the outskirts of Lima, Peru". That was the last sentence in that chapter. I had to put down the book as I processed what I just read. The process consisted of my inner dialog letting out a big Whooooaaaaaa.

I totally live in shantytown on the outskirts of Lima. I picked up the book and read the next chapter of the Author describing his first experiences with Peru. Here are some exceprts of how Tracy Kidder recounts his first trip.

"I gazed out the car window at hillsides smothered in darkness but doted with twinkling lights, as if by Japanese lanterns, pretty in the night. "Lima doesn`t seem like the third world" I said.
"Oh, yes it is," said Farmer. "You`ll See"
Lima is a vast coastal city, vast and dry. In the daylight the northern neighborhoods seemed like an endlessly spreading slum, the roads chocked with traffic and with motorcycle rickshaws and minibuses that served as public transportation, and the banks of roads littered with broken-down vehicles and garbage, and garbage on fire, and with ramshackle-looking development, like American strip malls that had moldered before being completed...the sun filtering down through thin fog from the Pacific, then through the perpetual ground level strata of dust and hydrocarbons.....The Hovels were perched on the sides of steep, gray-brown hills---giant heaps of sand and rock and nothing growing on them, except for the shacks....The air carried a strengthening smell of urine."

I don´t know if I could have described such a desperate scene so elegantly. I feel like I have tried, but reading this gave my sentiments words. The reason the book turns from focusing on TB in Haiti to Peru is not because of an epidemic or improper health care. The World Health Organization actually claimed that Peru was the most successful of all developing countries at following the recommended proceedure by the WHO to eradicate the disease. The problem they found in Peru, is that strains of medicine resistant TB were more present than the current government would like to admit. This part of the book took place in the mid nineties. And I haven´t finished the book yet so I don´t know what type of treatment they have come up with for MDR TB.

Then I remembered my site visit back in August. My PCV predecessor told me that our doctors informed her she had some kind of TB. This isn´t that big a deal necessarily, she told me something along the lines of having TB antibodies in her, and it wasn´t the full on disease. The doctors were putting her on 9 months of medication to prevent it from turning into anything serious. I didn´t really understand what that mean, and to be honest, I still don´t fully understand it. I know now from reading this book that 2 billion, approximately one third of the worlds population, have some sort of TB in their system. But what I realized last night, is that MDR TB is common in Peru. Perhaps my predecessor had one of these strains that wouldn´t be cured by her 9 month treatment.

What`s even more scary, is that I took her place. During site visit I stayed in her bed and eventually moved into her home and into her life. I lived with the same family and worked with the same kids. TB is airborne and it is likely I have come into contact with whatever she had. I`m not saying I`m terrified, nor am I that worried, really. It`s just something I never thought about. Getting some crazy disease was my worst fear joining Peace Corps. TB is not something we think about much in the US and therefore never even crossed my mind as something I could get. I have my one year med checks in August and will find out then if I have contracted anything. Strangely enough, since I leave the day after my med checks, if they do find something, I will likely be in the states when they get the results. I`d hate to have some fiasco like that guy on vacation in Italy who sneaked into the states through Canada when he wasn`t permited in the country after he contracted TB. Again, highly unlikely, but you never can be sure.