Hoosier Prof in Peru

When friends and family members visited in recent weeks, they came bearing gifts: M&M’s, chocolate chips, Nutrageous bars, Suave Green Apple shampoo, Boston cleaning solution for gas permeable hard lenses, and some other things that we’ve found hard to buy here in Lima.

But they didn’t bring something else that we really crave: lettuce. Maybe a head or two of iceberg lettuce for taco salads, and some red loose-leaf lettuce for a side salad with walnuts. It’s not that we’re without options for lettuce here, but it’s so much work. We have a disinfectant bleach solution that requires adding one spoonful of solution to every liter of water, soaking the lettuce for 5 minutes, and then drying each leaf. It’s a lot of work, and we have to feel inspired to make a salad.

The local menú restaurants often offer up a mixed green salad for lunch; it’s tempting, especially at the restaurants that we know well and trust. And students, when they go out on service and have had more time in the country, tell us how hard it is to decline lettuce served up by host families or restaurants. But the lettuce policy for our own family and for the students is inflexible: don’t eat the lettuce unless you really truly know that it’s been carefully washed.

Risks in eating unwashed lettuce, whether in Peru or in the U.S., include E. coli and hepatitis A. One aggravating factor here is that tap water is generally regarded as unsafe for drinking, and washing foods. (Avid news readers may remember that in 2006 lettuce killed three camels given to Peru by the king of Morocco — the high nitrate levels apparently did them in. Camels definitely should not eat the lettuce.)

In moments of weakness, when I want more than anything to just eat that mixed salad underneath the palta, or avocado, slices, I remind myself of a couple of stories shared by friends.

The mother of a friend of Emily’s, born and raised in Bolivia, told us about the time that she returned to the country, as an adult. She and her husband, who is U.S. American, were living in a small town in the country. Sitting down for lunch one day, they were served sandwiches. He took out his lettuce. As a native feeling very much at home, she ate her sandwich as it was served. Almost immediately, she said, she became sick and took months to recover.

There’s another story that made an impression. Before we came to Lima a friend from Goshen told us about her son, who has business interests and plenty of experience in Peru. Once, while eating at restaurant he trusted in Lima, he ate the lettuce and, apparently as a result, became gravely ill.

During orientation sessions for SST, Ruth Stoltzfus, the college nurse, offers a memorable aphorism: boil it, cook it, peel it, or forget it. I think I’ll have another one of those Nutrageous bars and call it day.

P.S. By chance, I came across a poem entitled “Lettuce in Winter” by Risa Stephanie Bear.  I don’t know much about the author and her body of work, but the title, and the poem, spoke to me.

Peru continues to draw tourists from the United States and elsewhere in ever greater numbers. The National Statistics Institute reported that 182,806 foreigners arrived in November, an 8.9 percent increase compared with the same month a year ago.

According to the November immigration report, which is the most recent one available, the largest number of foreigners to arrive came from Chile (31.4%), followed by the United States (19.4 percent), Ecuador (9.9%), Spain (7.2%), Argentina (4.9%) and Bolivia (4.5%).

Goshen College will have an impact on the numbers in January. A week ago, we welcomed our new group of 23 students. The first week is incredibly intense, as they settle in with host families, visiting in Spanish every evening. They take language classes in the morning. In the afternoons, they have toured La Huaca Pucllana, an archeological site in Lima; the Congressional building; San Cristobal hill, which overlooks the city; the two main plazas; and more. On top of that, they had to read the first 175 pages of The Peru Reader and write three journal entries.

In some respects, theirs is a top-down approach to Peru. The tour of downtown Lima in the early going included a view of the changing of the guard at the Presidential Palace, full of brass and high-stepping pageantry, a tribute to President Alan Garcia, who lives there with his family. In the second half of the term, when students are placed in small towns and cities for service, they will certainly see another side of Peru, with many struggling workers eager to point out how they have been forgotten by the power brokers in Lima.

For some reason, more men are arriving in Peru than are women. Of all the foreigners that came to Peru in November, 56.2 percent were men while 43.2 percent were women. And in our group, men outnumber women, 15 to 8 (an unusual SST composition for Goshen College, where women hold the numerical edge on campus).

New arrivals will find that the dollar is not stretching as far as it once did. When we landed six months ago, we were getting 3.15 soles for every U.S. dollar from the money changers on the street. Now they give us 2.90 soles, with expectations of a further decline.

Peruvians are continuing to invest in their tourist attractions. Lima, which this year unveiled a fountain of parks that includes the highest vertical jet stream in the world, is planning to construct a tram that will take passengers from La Muralla Park, just off the main plaza, up to San Cristóbal Hill, from which you can look several miles across the city, all the way to the ocean on a clear day (there is one predicted for next year).

The Lima Tram will be 1.4 kilometers (4,593 feet) long and have cable cars that travel 18 kph (11 mph). Each of the 13 cable cars will have a capacity of eight passengers. A restaurant and other services will also be added on top of San Cristóbal Hill (where now there is a tiny museum, a kiosk to buy snacks, and a so-so bathroom for 50 centimos).

The idea is to make the visit to the hill more appealing and comfortable for tourists. And that it will. Just this past week as we made the trip with students we were reminded to close all windows in the hot bus when we drove through the rough neighborhood of Rimac and we had to wait for oncoming vehicles to get out of the way while we edged through narrow streets.

But some things will be lost with the tram as well. Right now everyone can go to the Plaza de Armas to find bus agents hawking tickets to the hill for 5 soles. Nationals and tourists sit side by side for the ride up the hill, reminded along the way that Lima includes many neighborhoods like Rimac. The tram will likely cost quite a bit more, angling for a higher-end clientele. And the small tourist buses may find themselves out of business. The biggest threat to the success of the tram may be the weather: when we took the first group up the hill it was so foggy that we couldn’t see but a few feet off the hill.

One of my two resolutions for the new year is to speak only in Spanish for an entire day — not perfect Spanish, and certainly not longwinded Spanish, but serviceable Spanish. And not one word of English.

Halfway through a yearlong assignment here in Peru, I’m reminded every day of how much of a struggle it is to try to become conversational in another language – at age 48, anyway. I can’t imagine feeling any more motivated.

And I take up the task with at least some background. Back in 1979, as an undergraduate at Goshen College, I went to Costa Rica for three months. The arrangement was similar to how it works now. I studied Spanish in a school for the first six weeks that we lived in the capital, San Jose, and then I lived in a small town in the country, Venecia, during the next six weeks of service.

Though I had Spanish classes in junior high school, I somehow managed to avoid taking classes in high school and in college (I tell my daughters that this is one of the biggest mistakes of my youth). After SST there followed a long gap in learning. And then in the two years before we came to Lima, I audited classes at the college as I could fit them in between classes I was teaching.

Once we arrived here I settled on a learning strategy that included reading a Spanish-language newspaper every day, reading street signs aloud and faithfully adding new words to a customized dictionary — just today I added “frenos” (brakes) after reading the very sad headline “microbus sin frenos arrolla taxi y mata a una familia” (minibus without brakes hits taxi and kills a family).

And there’s more. As time allowed, I met with a private tutor who is the best language instructor one could hope to find. He got me started listening to the radio for a least a little while every day. And so I’ve found myself toggling the dial between CPN Radio (“Le informa mejor,” where you can be the best informed) and RPP Radio (“Te informa primero,” where you can find things out before your neighbor does).

So how could it be that I’m walking along the shore of one of the most beautiful bodies of water in the world, the Laguna de Llanganuco, looking up at the highest mountain peak in Peru, the snow-capped Huascarán, and commit the silliest language blunder? I was with a host parent who also happens to be professional mountain guide, and I asked him whether, when he heads out on expeditions, he uses “ropas” — ropes, of course, is what I meant. But in that moment when my Spanish broke down, I was asking him whether he went hiking, in effect, with his clothes on. What was I thinking?

Often during these months here, I wonder: What would it be like to be back in Goshen, a 48-year-old immigrant from Mexico, trying to learn English? And to hear people say, with a noticeable emphasis on one word, “Why don’t they just learn English?”

Here in Peru, I’m learning Spanish in a position of advantage. By virtue of money or the light color of skin or the power of a passport, visitors from the United States are privileged in many ways. Go to Larcomar, the posh mall along the ocean, and you will hear English spoken by many people on the buffet line. I can’t imagine how much more difficult it would be as a foreigner living in a place where, by contrast, I was not welcomed, where to speak with an accent or to misuse a word would risk a slur or a look of scorn.

My second resolution is to remember, once I am back in the States, to be a generous conversational partner when I meet someone who is learning English. To speak clearly, and not too quickly; to find subtle ways of saying the same thing twice; to use my hands to illustrate points. And to smile, a universal seal of approval.

And when someone says “Why don’t they just learn English,” my answer will be: because it’s hard; very, very hard.

P.S. I came across an interesting blog posting and set of comments on a Sojourners and Beliefnet site. The second person to respond to the blog wrote: “Hispanics that refuse to speak English are 100% racist. ” A thoughtful conversation ensued, including a note on vocabulary size (a writer said Spanish tops out at 250,000 words, while English has more than 750,000) and another on learning curve (a contributor said it took four generations to eliminate the German language within her immigrant Mennonite family).