Hoosier Prof in Peru

Writing in The New York Times this month, the science correspondent John Noble Wilford described the wonders that the Inca executed with simple fiber, including grasses and alpaca and llama wool.

He wrote: “Conquistadors from Spain came, they saw and they were astonished. They had never seen anything in Europe like the bridges of Peru. Chroniclers wrote that the Spanish soldiers stood in awe and fear before the spans of braided fiber cables suspended across deep gorges in the Andes, narrow walkways sagging and swaying and looking so frail.”

A course in “materials in human experience” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provided the news hook for the article. Working on flat, dry land, students there built a 60-foot-long fiber bridge along the lines of those the Inca made to cross unforgiving rivers. They wove 12 strands of twine (from a fiber called sisal) to create rope, and braided 12 lengths of rope to form cables, these to stretch across two campus buildings.

It’s hard to imagine turning wispy fiber into cables as the Inca did (“some as thick as a man’s torso,” Wilford wrote). For a visual tutorial in the mechanics, you might watch a 60-minute NOVA documentary called “Secrets of Lost Empires: Inca.” The documentary shows the making of a bridge in three days, beginning with harvesting blades of grass. Far down below runs a fast-moving river, and you can understand one NOVA researcher’s reluctance to walk across the bridge, full of openings and swaying in the wind. (The list price for the video is $19.95, but used copies are available on Amazon for about $11).

The documentary also shows a team of experts trying to replicate the near-perfect fit of Inca stone walls (able to withstand earthquakes and centuries of time), with handheld stones shaping massive blocks. We see these modern masons patiently chipping away to create a tight seam of interlocking block — no mortar allowed. But how to get the stone block to the wall in the first place? In one memorable scene, 250 men, women and children use thick ropes to demonstrate that it is possible to move a 15-ton monster block across the ground, as the Inca might have done in traveling from a quarry to a building site. (Call for backup: some Inca blocks weighed up to 100 tons.)

Anyone within reach of Chicago would do well to see a new exhibition at the Field Museum, “The Ancient Americas.” The Inca and the Aztec are featured cultures; both used military conquest and political alliances to become superpowers of their day, overseeing vast empires. In 1525, when the Anabaptists were reshaping the religious landscape in Europe, the Inca lorded over a 3,000-mile coastal empire, from Ecuador to Chile.

The Inca called their empire “the Land of the Four Quarters,” reflecting their four political regions. The capital was Cuzco, centrally located, if 11,000 feet high in the Andes, and known as “the navel” in the Quechua language. The Times article mentioned that the last existing Inca suspension bridge is near Cuzco, at Huinchiri; each year the bridge is refurbished during a three-day festival (the NOVA team got its footage here) . With luck, we might time a field trip to Machu Picchu to take in the bridge work.

“Pollito chicken, gallina hen, lapiz pencil, pluma pen.” Of all things I learned during my three years at Junior High School 143 in the Bronx, that little ditty stands out as clear as any. Senorita Jones would lead the whole Spanish class in a rousing chorus nearly every day. If you had to pick eight Spanish words to focus on, I can’t imagine these making it to the top of anyone’s list (and a college professor later told me to use boligrafo instead of pluma for pen). Still, for one 47-year-old there’s a reminder here of the merits of learning language relatively early in school, when words stick.

I wish that I would have had the immersion opportunity given to my nephew and nieces in Lancaster County, Pa. Beginning in about first grade, they took instruction in nearly all subjects — math, social studies, music — from a teacher speaking in Spanish. Though they never seemed to enjoy speaking in Spanish at family reunions, they were smart as a whip in knowing what was being said. In the school district that offered this immersion program, there were never enough places for children whose parents recognized the educational advantage to be had.

Here in Goshen, where language instruction begins in the seventh grade in public school, starting an immersion program for elementary school students would be a hard sell. The backlash against the inflow of immigrants, particularly from Mexico, has turned Spanish into enemy currency, in the minds of many. Letter writers in the local paper talk about all of the ills brought on the community because of the “illegals” (not the “immigrants” or the “newcomers” or even the “aliens” — just “illegals”). Besides demanding that these immigrants be returned to their home country, many letter writers also insist that they speak only English.

I do think all immigrants should strive to speak the language of their new country, if only for their economic self-interest, but I’m sympathetic to how hard it is. For the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to advance my grasp of Spanish, with pretty modest signs of growth. I audited Spanish 101 and then took 102 twice, just to be on the safe side (actually, it was the only Spanish section that fit in my schedule that semester); I made it most of the way through 201 before my own teaching load forced me to withdraw. Over the last two years, I’ve tried to be faithful in dipping into a Spanish textbook at least a few times a week. And recently, I started consulting Dictionary.com’s Spanish Word of the Day.

Then came the test. I met with a tutor, a first-year student at Goshen College who is a native of Mexico and a very gracious teacher. The ground rule: we were only to speak in Spanish. I struggled for words. I found myself reaching for crutch words that can buy time (no estoy seguro pero . . . or creo que . . . ) and hoped-for cognates (nombre de user? Not even close. Who came up with el nick for username?). As the weeks have gone by, I’ve become a bit more comfortable, but am always aware of how much there is to learn. The real class starts in July: Peru 101.

One of the most pleasurable ways of getting the news is still, even in the age of iGoogle, to sit down at the breakfast table with a paper newspaper and to be surprised. Beyond elections and wars and accidents, international coverage is pretty thin in most U.S. papers. But there it was, on Page B6 of The Truth, a story about surfing, dateline Lima, Peru.

Surfing along the 1,500 miles of Peru’s desert coast knows no season, according to The Associated Press; the breaks are dependable month after month. Surfing havens like Hawaii and Australia are not so lucky, the article said.Surfing havens like Hawaii and Australia are not so lucky, the article said.

The gist of the story is the growing number of lower- and middle-class surfers, enabled by cheaper boards and inspired by a Peruvian, Sofia Mulanovich, the women’s world surfing champion in 2004. Mulanovich learned to surf at “the gritty Costa Verde beach,” along Lima’s coast. Said one student: “In the water we’re all equal.”

Surfing is definitely not on our itinerary. The college’s international education office reports that aside from the usual risks associated with riding a board without a seatbelt in heavy traffic with shifting lanes, there are health concerns as well. Apparently, Lima puts a lot of its sewage directly in the ocean. The official college advisory: do not be tempted by surfing lessons at $10 an hour.

The best literary bridge from the United States to Peru may well be American Chica, a memoir by Marie Arana, editor of The Washington Post’s Book World. As the daughter of a Peruvian father and U.S. American mother, Arana offers an engrossing account of the struggles and tensions in both worlds — she calls herself “a north-south collision” — as well as in her parents’ marriage. Through the first three semesters of SST in Peru, students consistently ranked this book, a finalist for the National Book Award, among their favorites. So once again, we’ll put it atop the list.

Arana, who maintains a home residence in Washington and in Peru, happened to be in Lima last summer and visited with Goshen students, whom she described as “a delightful crew.” In a recent e-mail note she suggested we consider adding a book by Daniel Alarcon, a young Peruvian writer, to the mix. Lost City Radio, a novel in which a broadcaster named Norma helps a country to reunite in the aftermath of war, wins out over a darker collection of his short stories, War by Candlelight. Like Arana, Alarcon has one foot in his native Peru and one in the States, where he now lives. (Arana also recommended short stories by Julio Ramon Ribeyro; this will be on the suggested readings list.)

What to do about Peru’s greatest novelist and former presidential candidate, Mario Vargas Llosa? A couple of summers ago, students read Death in the Andes during the second half of the term, when they were spread out across the country, living with Peruvian families. While they didn’t challenge the book’s literary merits, some did find themselves unnerved as, cut off from things familiar, they read about the Peruvian Army corporal Lituma and his deputy, Tomas, who had been sent to investigate the disappearance of three people in a remote Andean village and to guard the townspeople from the Shining Path guerrillas. It got too creepy, some students said. As Lituma observes: “Nobody’s nerves can take it. The air’s overheated. Don’t you feel it?” We’ll keep this book on the recommended list; reading it in Goshen, it’s a hard book to put down.

Three other books, assigned at different times in the earlier units, finish out the required list: The Peru Reader, a sampling of essays about the history, culture and politics of Peru; A Brief History of Peru, which puts the earlier essays in a clear historical context; and Fire From the Andes, an anthology of fiction by women from Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. We hope that this strikes the right balance between fiction and nonfiction, and between time for assigned reading and time to get to know the country in other ways.

In two months I’ll be leaving Goshen College, in Indiana, bound for Peru. Along with my wife and daughters, we’ll welcome three groups of Goshen College students over the course of the year, each group staying for about three months to study Spanish and the culture, history, politics and art of a country best known as the home of Machu Picchu, created by the Incas around 1450, perhaps as a royal retreat or a spiritual oasis.

When my daughter told her teacher that she was going to Peru for a year, the teacher thought she meant Peru, Indiana. A lot of people don’t put Peru and Indiana together but if you drive Route 31 between Goshen and Indianapolis then the association is not such a stretch, I guess. Peru, Indiana, best known as the home of the International Circus Hall of Fame, has about 13,000 residents. The other Peru has about 28,000,000 residents and counting, with about half of them living in the greater Lima area.

This stay in Peru is made possible by Goshen College’s international education program, known as Study-Service Term. Back in 1968 when the college launched SST, such study abroad, mandatory for students, was pretty rare. Goshen was the first to send students to study in China in the post-Mao years. The program in Peru, as with others, will be experience-based learning: home stays in Lima for six weeks and then in the country for six more weeks, lectures, discussions, field trips, journal writing, special projects, readings.

Speaking of readings, it’s time to draw up the required reading list. That comes next.