The Kids are A'ight

I'm regressing. Social networks are killing me. Fewer words, please, and more pictures. Preferably of your cute, of-age sister...who I sure hope is too tech-dumb to elevate her security settings. The most consecutive letters I lay down these days are in the form of plays in Words With Friends. I recently completed a volcano hike so brutal there were times I hoped the ghetto-rigging of my shoelace-repaired crampon would fail and hurtle me down the ice-swath to my death, or that a boulder dislodged in our reckless descent would cleanly decapitate me.  But I survived and had to settle for a(n admittedly delicious) smoothie, because microbrews don't exist in Perú. I wrote my parents a disjointed ramble about the experience, which I'll spare anyone reading this blog.  (Though it bears mentioning that Joe's at-the-time unfortunate-sounding quip in Bolivia, describing his level of comfortability with our group -- "Know why I love our group? Because I can shit in front of our girls." -- proved prophetic and uncannily precise.)  The masochist in me decided, the day after vowing to never again so much as mention the V-word, that I needed another climb. And next time something taller, maybe icier.

Despite the fact that writing inexplicably became for me, sometime in the last few years, an emotionless task, I can confirm I love my life in Arequipa, Perú, that I'm neither depressed nor emotionally-neutered, that only my fingers bleed banality. I smile almost constantly, a stream of drool ornamenting that gaping grin every time I traverse my favorite streets, gauntlets of chicharronerías where all passing life is bathed in the gloriously oppressive stench of chicharrones, those succulent hunks of mostly-dehaired cross-sections of pig, dangly, deep fried globs of skin and fat with occasional bites of muscle mixed in.

The students I work with are -- for lack of creativity and vocabulary we'll opt for some of the least descriptive and most overused adjectives, foregoing the anecdotes that would require sentences -- beautiful; intelligent; humble; generous; inspiring.  They've avoided kidnapper cabbies and pregnancies and arrest, even as they give me fits with untimely injuries and illnesses and a general disregard for the whereabouts of their cellphones and deadlines and the contents of their inboxes.  Minor quibbles, really.  Short of a Weird Science scenario playing out I, honestly, couldn't ask for a more delightful group of minions.  Nah, nix that.  These kids -- shit, adults, huh? -- are more impressively, wonderfully multidimensional and interesting than anything I'd dream up (especially since I'm pretty sure my dreams extend no further than a set of measurements and perfect skin-tone).  I'll make it a point to tell them so in less effusive terms, flashing a thumbs up or extending a fist for bump and muttering something like, "Y'all a'ight." (Quickly coughing afterward, for the added layer of confusion, protecting that carefully cultivated misanthropic facade.)

Babble-on

What impels you to become a taxista or combi driver in a city where the streets are so clogged by traffic that a two-mile trip, at peak hours, can be accomplished as quickly on foot as in carro? When typical cab fare is little more than $1, and a combi ride comes out to $0.30, but you have to pay gas prices easily as high as those back in the US? If you're the snatch-a-gringo-and-leave-'em-naked-on-the-outskirts type of unregistered cabbie, I gotcha; I mean, that's what I'm considering doing, too, once this job's up. Otherwise, isn't this a losing proposition?
And that's saying nothing of the actual driving conditions. Roads with potholes big enough to hide hibernating bears/potato-plumped Peruvian señoras? One-car-wide two-way streets? Cars turning from the middle lane as the norm? Combis slamming on brakes and veering across four lanes to pick up the S/.8 fare? If not for traffic's snail's pace the roads would be littered with twisted metal and blood-slicks, the dancing shadows of the vultures circling overhead.
Traffic cops seem to exist, though, for all they do, they could just as easily be crazies celebrating Halloween yearlong.
To avoid the frustration of being trapped in traffic while a legless man propped on a skateboard pulls himself down the sidewalk, I walk when I can. Which, combined with the fact that fresh food and controlled portions obviously don't provide the calories I need to maintain what was already a low weight, has led to my skeletalization. I'm down something like 13 pounds in the two months I've been in Perú. To be honest, this is not a new phenomenon; every time I've travelled Latin America I've hemorrhaged weight, in the process becoming something of a celebrity/mythical figure for those who witness the binging I have to undertake in order to slow my disappearing act. I'm back to eating at least 1,500 calories daily of supplemental junk -- chifles, heavily-salted and lightly spiced fried plantain chips; hunks of layer cakes; ice cream; cookies, two to four packs at a time; chicharrónes, baring my teeth at any waiter who dares try to clear my plate before I've forced down every gelatinous, inch-thick cube of (sometimes still hair-adorned) deep-fried fat and pig-skin.
Tangential food insertion: there are few things as fun as peeling back the skin from a fried guinea pig's face and tearing little pockets of meat from its cheeks to torture anyone who can't quite believe that their favorite childhood pet is a delicacy on the far side of the equator.
The Davidson group is good. Busy doesn't begin to describe our lives, from el jefe to me to the kids -- oh, the kids, with their classes and homework and weekly meetings and internships and clubs and, wait, that's right, social lives too! -- but they keep smiling, we keep smiling, even if sometimes those smiles are halfway-hijacked by diarrheaic grimaces. It's so cute, all these grotesque contortions of happiness, kids learning the importance of always, always stuffing a fistful of wadded toilet paper into their back pockets before heading out.
And what's a bit of foreign travel without love? I was recently informed by a girl, then reminded through a daily barrage of uncontested phone calls and text messages, that she needed to see me because she had a message she could only deliver in person. She said it wasn't love or pregnancy (had the latter been the case I'd probably have converted to religion, seeing as how that'd imply my having magical powers and other such biblical awesomeness). At that point I realized the message is to be buried deep into my heart -- delivered on the obsessively-sharpened tip of a switchblade. Taking a lesson from Omar (I'm re-watching The Wire), I've taken to stuffing my shirt with phonebooks every time I venture outside of my barred-and-locked domicile. (As a friend pointed out, Kevlar could likely be procured at the local black market, but I need to save my nuevos soles! See, I've already put in an "order" for an iPhone 4S, detailing to my "procurer" the daily routines of several locals spotted flaunting the device I so desire.)
Ah, but love. Sane love. When it invariably arises in daily encounters with random people or moms-eager-to-be-grandmas that I'm 28 and unmarried, and that yes, I'm unmarried by choice, not because I offed my wife, I have to offer a tension-and-confusion diffusing "Pues, ando buscando el amor/mi Peruanita." And their sweet reactions make me cackle inside as I go back to drooling over the endless parade of raven-haired señoritas teetering down the sidewalk on heels.
With all the barking dogs and earthquakes, early-risers and whistle-happy neighborhood watchmen, I wouldn't call myself desperate to add another sleep-disrupting variable to my life. A live in food-preparer might be favorable, but it's not quite an unbearable inconvenience to cross the street to receive meals from the sweet señora who cooks my food. And, while it'd be nice to have my clothes hand-washed on command, I packed enough to survive with just two hand-washings weekly. Geez, I've just gotten used to living hard, you know what I mean?
I need to die in these streets, because I don't know how I'm going to go back to living any other way.

This is all you get for a while.

I shouldn't be writing here.  I know, for the sake of my professional self, I shouldn't heed the nagging requests of those who've earned the right to nag -- friends, ex-coworkers, the like; my family, concerned that I maintain employment so I won't be crashing on their couches the rest of my life, have remained dutifully silent.  

Closet-Ids, lusting, hedonistic creatures who masquerade as upstanding citizens, shouldn't blog.  They should hit the bar with those closest friends and evacuate their perverted recesses.  Binge and purge.  A blog, to those swelling, pulsing with inappropriateness, who fancy themselves mildly clever, is the hot pinprick to the throbbing thumbnail recently hammered.  What screams forth will stain.

Eh, but what's protecting my reputation?  I'll be smeared across the pavement sometime soon anyway, some hairs or teeth or fingernails fender-snared souvenirs for the taxi-driving author of my hit-and-run.  The pretty blond girl kneeling beside the crumpled me won't realize for years that she's the reason the speeding driver never even noticed the dark-haired, moderately-tanned giant trying to dodge traffic.  And nobody will ever know if  it was a rush of testosterone that propelled me onto the highway, or if the sun-warmed-since-dawn head cheese sandwich I purchased from the lady with the salmonella-crusted fingernails was the impetus.  (But, hey, eating street food lends a certain credibility, an inalienable authenticity, to traveling, because nothing's realer than dysentery, nothing's cooler than cholera.)

So, we'll back it up a few months.  Last August I returned to Nicaragua for three weeks, visiting friends, reacquainting myself with vos, and ogling every nica I judged to be eighteen or older, so mostly the already pregnant and/or married.

A few months back in the US was all I could handle, so after Thanksgiving I flew down to murder-capitals Guatemala and El Salvador.  In Antigua, Guatemala I spotted an appropriately disheveled homeless man slumped into a urine stained and scented corner, his shirt reading, "Más vale bolo famoso que alcohólico anónimo."  In San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, I realized that the smacking sound that emanates from every single Guatemalan household, every single day around lunchtime has nothing to do with an insatiable midday horniness -- this is no concert of balls slapping -- but rather with that ubiquitous mealtime staple, the tortilla (which is prepared fresh and in infinite quantities for lunch, and then recycled at dinner and the next morning's breakfast, after which the cycle begins anew).

In Playa el Tunco, El Salvador, while I gauged the time of day by the number of popsicles I'd yet eaten, volunteered at a local orphanage, and spent my free minutes devouring pupusas like any addict who knows he'll be divorced from his love for the foreseeable future, a Salvadoran friend of friends, an artist, was gunned down in San Salvador.

Back at Charlotte-Douglass International Airport, walking through the terminal toward baggage claim, I passed the line of posters commemorating all the classic cinema filmed in the area.  Shallow Hal, for example.  When it took me fifteen confused seconds to realize the racing movie wasn't pronounced [dah’-lay] (as in dale, pues) but rather Dale, as in Dale Earnhardt, I realized I already felt out of place.

Luckily, months prior, Davidson College had fulfilled a dream -- offering me the opportunity to work with its inquisitive, inspiring and unfailingly quirky students, under the supervision of a renowned professor/political scientist, while living in the beautiful, climatically-perfect city of Arequipa, Perú, all the while being paid in dólares!

So that's where you find me now.  A few months deep into working in Perú.  The rainy season has passed, which means that the stench of sewage no longer pervades the avenues in the late afternoons, the roads no longer converting daily to shin-deep conveyers of rain-diluted waste from higher-ground reservoirs; all river-spanning bridges are open again, and the road is no longer an unpredictably-cratered, vehicle-disabling landscape rived anew by each day's downpour.  And though the ceiling of my apartment now bears yellowed, dining table-sized splotches of water damage, paint flakes and particles have mostly ceased to snow down; you can no longer appreciate fine powder ever so gently detaching from the ceiling if so much as massaged by a breath; exposed surfaces are no longer obscured beneath dusty accumulations through which you could finger-trace messages to be slowly but surely buried.  (And even though non-experts assured me that the paint probably wasn't lead-based, it's nice no longer worrying that I might roll onto my back and breathe through a gaping mouth in my sleep.)

My apartment also features the world's first electric bucket shower.  I don't have real hot water, just the common-to-poorer-parts-of-Latin-America-standard electric shower head, that which sizzles as electricity heats the water that exits the wired attachment and sometimes gives you a little shock or, if you're tall and your head comes near the contraption, might trigger flashes of white behind your closed eyes.  My shower-head water heater trips the apartment's circuit if it's left running for more than a minute.  Which means I have to exit the shower, walk down the hall, and flip the switch if I want hot water.  And I want hot water.  Solution: shower in thirty second intervals, lathering or shampooing in between.  Somehow, probably due to the conditions to which I subjected myself during 18-months of backpacking, I find this more amusing than annoying.

That ability to find the humor in situations, to have patience, is something I developed, at least more fully developed, traveling.  There's a reason that my current boss' main concern, when contacting my professional references prior to my hiring, was that I would be able to laugh in and at any situation, no matter how stressful, how dire.

And so, instead of exasperation, I can only laugh when a Radio Shack employee, presumably someone semi-educated in things electronic, is adamant that 1080p is a higher definition than 1440p.  Or, later, when a group of Radio Shack employees try to explain to me that the "Grounded" light on my surge protector will only illuminate if the adaptor is placed atop (or, perhaps, buried in) dirt -- "Es que, pues, mira, gringo: 'ground' es tierra.  ¿No lo sabes?"

Everyday presents another opportunity to learn, to appreciate, to laugh.  Tomorrow I will begin the process of navigating legal channels to secure a falsified document.  I will have to pay legitimate doctors so they will record, officially, that a particular student suffers from allergies severe enough to prevent her from receiving a specific vaccine, proof of which is required for entry into an adjoining country we will visit.  Once it's been officially established that our student can't be vaccinated, I'll be able to request a falsified vaccination card, proof that our student received a vaccination never administered, so as to avoid the potential for any problems at the border crossing.

¡Viva el Perú! 


[I have no idea why the text color/background formatting is suddenly off.  Nor do I care to figure out why.]