Hoosier Prof in Peru

After more than half a year of living in Peru and wondering for just as long what it would be like to try to speak only in Spanish for an entire day, I finally found out.

I had thought of this as my own personal pursuit, but early on was reminded that other people who had no vote in the matter would be asked to go along with Spanish-only. As we were hurrying to pack lunches for school my daughters told me that this was a fine goal and that they would like to join me in this undertaking but that this particular day was not an especially good day for speaking only in Spanish and that they would like if I could wait for a better time, maybe in the next week. “No puedo,” I said.

After they left for school, I went out with Oswaldo, a Peruvian friend and one of our language profs, for a late breakfast at an outdoor cafe. Though he also speaks English, he was happy to keep the conversation in Spanish, all the way through a tamale (his) and a piece of lemon pie (mine). And Celia, the country coordinator of the SST program here, was ever so patient as we conducted business that day only in Spanish. People who listened in on our conversations might have thought that I was extremely thoughtful, prone to long pauses between sentences, and even words (Maybe . . . we . . . should . . . move . . . the . . . history . . . lecture . . . to . . . Monday . . . instead).

One of the more awkward moments of the day came when I visited our daughters’ school, the International Christian School of Lima, to return their report card folders. I arrived expecting to find the secretary who is bilingual, but she was not in the front office that day. Instead, the principal was minding the desk. As he approached, I remembered that he had told us during our first meeting earlier in the year that he had been so busy managing the affairs of the school that he had not learned much Spanish. Oh, no. “How are you?” he asked. “Muy bien,” I told him. I tried my best to explain to him — in Spanish — about the personal language contract in place for the day. “That’s just fine,” he said, not switching to Spanish but clearly understanding my predicament. So we talked about which of the papers I needed to sign and return, he in English, me in Spanish. I felt a little foolish but held fast to the pledge. As I was leaving, I saw the vice principal, and we exchanged greetings. “Hello.” “Hola. Que tal?”

Of the many elements that go into successfully learning a language, one that rises near the top is that elusive sense of confidence. When the waiter approaches, do you think you can find the right verb and manage the correct conjugation? Do you feel like a Spanish speaker when you are about to call a hostel to make a reservation? And this sense of being up to the challenge can rise and fall by the day, if not the hour.

Spanish texts, even the best of them, make the whole process sound too easy, at least in my experience. The authors of 501 Spanish Verbs, an excellent book to be sure, are overly hopeful: “You will master Spanish verb forms if you study this book for a few minutes every day.” And speaking of the indexes found in the book, they write, “If you refer to these back pages each time you look up verb tense forms for a particular verb, you will increase your knowledge of Spanish vocabulary and Spanish idioms by leaps and bounds.” That may be, but it’s one thing to know that haya hablado means “I may have spoken” and that hubiera hablado means “I might have spoken,” and another thing altogether to gracefully insert the correct phrase while you’re crossing the street with a friend.

Maybe the most beneficial part of the Spanish-only day was moving inside a zone where words were more within reach than usual. Even though my vocabulary and conjugational control hadn’t improved appreciably, I felt less tentative in conversations than I had only the day before. When a money transfer failed to go through, walking into the bank to make inquiries seemed a little less daunting.

I had a few slips during the day, but my closest colleagues (Karen, Kate and Emily) always reminded me when I started out a sentence in English. By evening, I was getting pretty tired. Karen said I kept falling back on the same phrases, like “Algo mas?” (Anything else?). She’d ask me a question, I’d answer with a yes or a no, and then “Algo mas?”

“Algo mas?” “Algo mas?” “Algo mas?” “No mas!”

We just got back from a trip to Arequipa, the second-largest city in the country of Peru, with a reputation for thinking of itself as the independent republic of Arequipa. Though we weren’t there long enough to be able to pick up on the nuances of the self-reliance and aloofness that people ascribe to Arequipa, we did enjoy a few of the jewels around town.

For one thing, the views are magnificent. In the Plaza de Armas, you can see where Arequipa got its nickname as “the White City,” with volcanic sillar coloring colonial buildings on all sides. Then, too, the city sits in a valley that looks out on the snow-capped volcano El Misti, at 5,822 meters (19,101 feet), in the company of the Chachani (6,057 meters) and Pichu-Pichu (5,669 meters) mountains. The air is cool at night, and warm during the day, reminding me of autumn back in Indiana.

While there, we visited the Santa Catalina Convent, which opened to the public only in 1970 after having been a walled miniature town within a town for four centuries. We wish we could have spent a whole day there, enjoying the cobblestone streets lined with red geraniums, the patios cooled by fountains, and the meditative bedrooms, each with little more than a single bed and the figurine of a saint.

We also visited the impressive Museo Santuarios Andinos, which holds the remains of several frozen mummies, all children who had been sacrificed on the nearby Ampato volcano, in a bid by the Incas to appease the mountain gods and ensure water and bountiful harvests. As it happened, the girl known as Juanita, representing perhaps the best preserved body from pre-Columbian times, was not on display during our visit, but we did get to see another intact mummy, that of Sarita.

From the city we took a four-hour or so van ride to the Colca Canyon, starting the trip on pavement and ending on rough dirt roads, to see the condors. That meant waking up around 5 in morning so that we could reach the canyon in time to see the Andean condors, said to be the largest flying land bird in the hemisphere, with a wingspan of about 9 feet, glide up from the canyon below. As we watched, one or two or three of these magnificent birds would silently appear, circle a few times at eye level, as if paid to make a stage appearance for all of the expectant tourists, and then glide away. The canyon here is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, and if we had more time, we could have walked down to the riverbed below.

I would put Arequipa pretty high up on the list of must-see destinations for visitors, definitely ahead of Nasca, which had little to recommend itself apart from the famous drawings on the desert floor. (When you figure in the high probability of someone in the plane getting sick, the Colca Canyon seems even more inviting. And Nasca’s appeal was set back further in the last week when a plane flying over the geoglyphs crashed, killing five French tourists.)

The main drawback to Arequipa is the long bus ride from Lima — about 14 hours each way. And then the Colca Canyon is a few hours beyond that, including a long bumpy stretch.

A headline in El Commercio this week was enough to make most readers take pause: Limeños pasan más de 4 años de su vida en combi (Lima residents spend more than 4 years of their life in combis, or commuter vans). Dios mio! (Holy cow!)

The estimate came from a study by a government agency devoted to land transportation, which figured that city residents have on average a 90-minute, round-trip commute each day. At five days a week, that’s 30 hours a month. The full formula must take more factors into account because I don’t come up with four-plus years no matter how I add up the numbers.

I don’t have that kind of a regular lengthy commute, but I have been putting on the miles, and the hours, especially with service visits. By a rough estimate, over the last month bus travel exceeded 100 hours, if rides around the city are included: Arequipa (28 hours); Chancay (5 hours); Chimbote (14 hours); Chincha (6 hours); Huancayo (14 hours); Huaraz (15 hours); La Merced (10 hours).

The romance of the open road is fading, I’m afraid. On the ride home from Arequipa the mobster movie was running past midnight, and the music started up around 7, an instrumental track that cycled round and round as everyone kept trying to sleep. And no matter how often we asked, we couldn’t get the steward to turn down the volume. But we got a lot of reading in and arrived back in Lima at 11:30 on Sunday morning, within a minute of our projected arrival, impeccable timing for a cross-country trip. Here are a couple of photos of a place that made the trip worth it.