2007 October « Hoosier Prof in Peru

Where Were You During the Census of 2007?

October 23, 2007 at 11:17 pm (Dateline: Huancayo)

For 10 hours on Sunday, much of the nation simply shut down. Most people stayed home, and those with permission to travel, the volunteer census takers, went door to door, gathering data for federal number crunchers.

There’s a great photo in the newspaper El Commercio of a young man roller-blading down the middle of the Via Expresa at 12:40 p.m. on Sunday, with all three lanes to himself on an expressway that is usually not even safe for cars. The paper declared the census a logistical success: about 98 percent of residents participated.

We did our civic duty seated around the kitchen table in our apartment in Lima (two days early, on Friday, because we were to be out of town on Sunday). Before the census, more than a few people expressed misgivings about the survey. How intrusive would the questions be? Would the government look to profit from this information? We had an added layer of anxiety — would we understand the questions?

As it turned out, we had a very patient pollster who also let us look at a blank questionnaire as he went down the page (reading along made it much easier). Are the floors in your home made of earth, cement, rough wood, or finished wood? (A: finished wood). Did you work at least one hour in the past week? (A: yes). Do you know how to speak quechua, aymara, ashaninka, castellano or another native language? (A: working on castellano). Do you have Internet? (A: yes). Do you have cable TV? (A: no).

If one suspends cynicism about Peruvian politics, it may well be that the census will lead to improved social services. Certainly many of the questions pointed to efforts to shore up the safety net, which the government has said is its intent. How many hours a day do you have electricity? Do you have water every day of the week?

We had the good fortune of being invited to a wedding in Huancayo over the weekend, so we spent Sunday on the grounds of a hotel where the reception was held the night before. We hiked up an Andean slope behind the hotel in the afternoon, once the rainstorm had passed, and climbed up to an empty stone hut at the top, surrounded by little white flowers that looked like edelweiss. The rest of the time we stayed put, waiting until the buses and taxis began moving again at 6 p.m.

P.S. On the ride home to Lima by bus, I had one of my most memorable embarrassing moments as a newcomer in Peru. We were playing Bingo, with the winner to receive a free bus ride at a future date. Quite a few numbers had been called before I finished a horizontal row. I called out “Bingo” and pushed the overhead red button to alert the bus steward, who was doubling as the bingo caller. As I made my way down the aisle to have my card checked, several passengers yelled out, “You have to have all the numbers in the card punched out.” I had only about 10 of 24 checked off, including all 4 across one row. As I returned to my seat, feeling a little foolish, I heard the bingo caller announce through the intercom: “Alarma falsa.” She might have added: we have a gringo here playing by U.S. rules.

Easing the Border Crossing for Books and Chocolates

October 18, 2007 at 10:44 pm (Dateline: Lima)

The other day we walked to the Ricardo Palma Museum House to learn more about one of the most distinguished writers and folklorists in Latin America (one of his stories, “”Friar Martin’s Mice,” appears in our anchor textbook, The Peru Reader, and tells about a mouse who ends up eating a meal “in fellowship and love” with a dog and cat, thanks to a saint with a special affection for mice). The house where Palma spent his twilight years is filled with letters, books, family photos and portraits, favorite chairs and a death mask that captured his features at the end in 1919.

His portraits suggest a pretty serious, formal man, programmed for study but also eager for conversation. If Palma were to return, though, he might be wearing a frown over the cost of books in this town. Friends here tell us that people would buy more books if they were not so expensive.

Before we left the museum, we bought a booklet of Palma’s selected writings, in Spanish, for about 5 soles, or $1.66; that’s not bad, but, as noted, it was a very slim volume. Let’s say that we wanted to read Palma more deeply, and that to do so we wanted to read his translated works, in English. A quick search on Amazon.com turns up Peruvian Traditions: Ricardo Palma’s Latin American Historic and Folkloric Tales, for $14.95. Though Amazon does not ship to Latin America, we could order the book and then have a friend in the States mail the book to us here.

But the cost of the shipping could be more than double the cost of the book, at least based on a recent experience with another package. A friend of the family mailed a package to our address in Lima. UPS made initial inquiries; we had to verify our names and address and so forth. Then, at the insistence of UPS, we had to call the person who had sent the package to find out what was inside (chocolates) and what it was worth ($3 to $5). We arranged a date for delivery. On the morning of the delivery, UPS called to let us know that we would need to pay a storage fee before the book could be delivered (apparently, most incoming packages are inventoried in Callao, near the airport, just outside Lima). How much would that be? More than $30, we were told. We told UPS to enjoy the chocolates.

Just out of curiosity, I priced another book with roots in Peru. Ines of My Soul, a historical fiction work by Isabel Allende, is available at a bookstore a few blocks from our apartment for 64 soles, or about $21. While the comparison may not be exactly fair, an Amazon shopper in the U.S. would pay as little as $10.17 for a new book, and $5.95 for a used one (add a few dollars for shipping). Soon after we arrived, we paid about $40 for Harry Potter And the Deathly Hallows, well above what we would have paid at the Goshen College bookstore, in part because of an import tax.

Personally shipping books from the States may be prohibitive but there is good news for readers of these imported books. Peru’s Ministry of Economy and Finance is eliminating a 12 percent tax on such books. As it now stands, some 80 percent of the books sold in the country are imported, according to the president of Peru’s Chamber of Books, Gladys Díaz. Many are imports from Spain, Mexico and Argentina.

Now if only the government would do something about chocolate imports . . . sitting down with a box of Esther Price or See’s chocolates and a book . . . that would be a nice taste of home in Lima.

What a Wonderful World (For Those Who Have Tickets)

October 14, 2007 at 11:35 pm (Dateline: Cusco)

From the high ground at Machu Picchu, by the Hut of the Caretaker of the Funerary Rock, the vantage point for many a calendar shot, it can be challenging to take a good photograph of the temples, sanctuaries, residential compounds and green spaces below, no matter how exquisite the stone handiwork: the tourists keep getting in the way.

On the day that we were there, we heard a lot of English (U.S. and British accents) and some German. We also heard plenty of Spanish, especially from the clusters of children who were there with classmates from elementary and high schools.

As one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, Machu Picchu has global cachet. Tens of thousands of tourists visit the Inca archaelogical site every month, crowding the “lost city.” In August, Peru’s National Statistics Institute said that the number of visitors in May, 47,192, represented an increase of 13.1 percent from the year earlier. Some organizations are predicting that tourism could rise by 20 percent each year.

It’s easy to see why. One can start out the morning soaking in the hot springs in Aguas Calientes, down in the valley. In the village, one finds fast Internet, craft vendors, bottled water, hiking sticks, hotels and hostels, massage services and restaurants (with lots of brick-oven pizza) — all appealing to foreign visitors. In the town square a statue of the ninth Inca, Pachacute, credited with turning a regional tribe into the powerbroker of South America, keeps watch over the commercial buzz. Buses provide a comfortable ride up the mountain, even with the hairpin turns, and vistas that keep getting better.

Machu Picchu itself is just amazing. Every turn, every step, provides something rich for the eye to see, up close or far away. At the end of the day, what I wished for more than anything else was time alone to sit in this place and just imagine what it would have been like to have lived in a stone hut here, in a world set apart, grateful to the sun and the mother earth for potatoes, corn and other necessities of life. But we had only a few hours, and kept moving on.

The day after having visited Machu Picchu, we were in a taxi, crawling through Lima traffic, the sun, as is so often the case, blocked by cloud cover. Lima never seemed so dreary. The driver, who had picked us up at the airport, asked where we had been. When I told him that we had been to see Machu Picchu, and said how impressed we were, I asked whether he too had seen this Inca kingdom 8,000 feet high in sky. I should have known better.

“No,” he said quietly, with a weary resignation, “it’s too expensive.” He went on to say that he had been born in Piura, north along the coast, another beautiful place where the sun shines, but that he had moved to Lima because there were few jobs to be found in Piura. It’s a sad reality that Peruvians continue to crowd the capital city in the hope of bettering their lives, and that even with two jobs (not unusual) most will still not make enough to afford a ticket to Machu Picchu. (The entrance fee was about $40; the bus, $12; the train, $57; and the plane from Lima to Cusco, $158).

Knowing this, it’s hard not to feel discomfort in the company of throngs of foreign tourists. But it was encouraging to see so many school children there on the day that we went. The government should take some portion of the ticket sales — perhaps it already has — and subsidize the visits of Peruvian children, in public and private schools. In time, then, visiting Machu Picchu would become a rite of passage for every Peruvian, a place of solidarity where the number of nationals would overwhelm the foreigners.

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Knowing Where Our SSTers Are

October 9, 2007 at 3:21 am (Dateline: Lima)

After spending five weeks together studying here in Lima, the 16 students in our fall group are about to leave us for service assignments in other parts of the country, including Piura way up north, Cusco in the Andes to the east and Chincha along the coast in the south. We’re going to miss them, and miss the chance to check in most every day to make sure that all is well.

On at least one day though, Sunday, Oct. 21, we will know where we can find them, at any minute or hour, if we need them: at home. All of Peru’s residents, and foreign visitors as well, are expected to be in their homes that Sunday, which is National Census Day, ready to answer questions about age, place of birth, occupation and so forth. Those who venture outside are said to risk arrest.

It’ll be like a national holiday, only not as much fun. Markets, supermarkets, restaurants and other businesses are to be closed from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Pets are to be kept quiet so as not to interfere with the work of the census volunteers.

In a Prohibitionary touch, the government will ban the sale of alcohol for the 12-hour period leading up to the census. Goshen College would readily lend its support to the action no doubt (and the college might say, while the government is at it, to shut down all of the gambling casinos that have sprung up around the capital, with glittery facades and temptress names like “Atlantic City”). But no doubt there are many organizations and households laying plans for how to get around the ban, looking on this as something of a lark.

The official rationale is serious enough: a census should provide a clearer sense of what regions need the most assistance, so that the government can act accordingly. If indeed the census leads to a redistribution of resources, many Peruvians, especially those who live outside of Lima, would surely be pleased. But before the government can tackle that enormous challenge, there is the matter of executing an accurate census. Peru’s president, Alan Garcia, called the most recent census, conducted in 2005, “a swindle” that offered an inaccurate sampling picture of the nation (he was not in office when the census was carried out).

We’ll be watching to see how things go this time around — at least whether people violate the stay-inside directive — from our balcony perch safely overlooking Avenido Larco.

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