Ukuku, Qolqepunku Glacier; photo by Jorge Vera 2009
Back in December, msnbc.com published a photo story on Qoyllur Rit’i and global warming, with photos by El Fotógrafo and captions by yours truly.
I neglected to provide the link to that slide show, which includes some of EF’s strongest images of the dangerous (and endangered) glacier pilgrimage, so here it is, belatedly: “Peru’s Disappearing Holy Glacier.”
This photo, above, of a veteran ukuku is one of my favorites. The guy must be about 40 years old, but exposure to the harsh Andean elements has made his face a craggy moraine field.
Most of the ukukus at QR are in their late teens and early 20s; you don’t see a lot of old-timers like this guy. He lived through the crises in the 1990s when the glacier started melting and breaking up, and ukukus began falling into crevasses and dying.
Back then, the religious group that organizes the pilgrimage didn’t know about global warming and its effects on glaciers. They didn’t realize that their seemingly sturdy glacier was becoming a major hazard and couldn’t support the weight of hundreds of ukukus at a time. So they would ascend to the glacier at midnight to perform their rituals, as they had always done, and then the accidents started happening.
One veteran ukuku we interviewed in 2008 told us that he saw nine of his fellow ukukus die on the glacier in 1995. He was about the same age as this ukuku. Both were survivors of and witnesses to the hazards of extreme climate change. [Read more →]
The devastating 8.8-magnitude earthquake that ravaged Chile on Saturday could easily have happened here in Lima or anywhere else along the Pacific coast. Sooner or later another big one will hit Peru, as one did in July 2007, and there are only a few ways to increase your odds that you won’t get killed when it happens.
Living in a well-constructed, “earthquake-proof” home is the best way to protect yourself. I put quotation marks around that phrase because no structure is guaranteed to withstand the most violent earthquakes. Still, as engineer Andy Johnson notes, a well engineered building should hold up long enough for the people inside to escape before it collapses. If you can live and work in an anti-seismic structure, you’ve increased your survival odds significantly.
But that strategy only works if you live in a developed country that enforces building codes and if you have money to buy or rent a well engineered house.
What about the millions of people who live in developing countries, like Haiti and Peru, where is a montón of substandard housing — structures made of unreinforced brick and concrete masonry?
Forget about waiting for the government to seismically retrofit every existing structure and to enforce antiseismic building codes for all neighborhoods. Your chance of survival depends on getting your patootie out of your home as fast as you can.
That means: Keeping a pair of shoes handy at all times.
This is our earthquake-preparedness strategy here in Miraflores. We have three pairs of shoes lined up at our front door, one each for me, El Fotógrafo and El Hijo. [Read more →]
I’ve been away from An American in Lima for a little while (understatement) but thanks to my friend Levi Novey, aka Mr Green HuffPost, I’m getting a bigtime nudge to return to blogging. Which I do love doing, by the way.
Levi let me hijack his column today to guest rant about bullfighting (The Twisted Temptations of Bullfighting in Peru). It’s not a particularly green or PC piece. It’s actually a confession about the thing I experienced at Acho that I never wrote about before.
Call it my testosterone moment in the bullring. The column includes nice photos by El Fotografo, by the way.
I only went to the bullfights twice in Lima but I still think about what I saw and felt on those hot, dusty afternoons. It’s one of the strange things about living in Lima, which has never shaken off its colonial past. The longer I live in Lima, the more deeply I feel the presence of all that Spanish colonial-era stuff – the importance of one’s family name, the rigid social/racial hierarchies, the passion for dancing horses/bleeding toros. You’d think that after two and a half years I would have gotten over the strangeness of Peru, but it’s the opposite. Lima is just getting odder and odder to me.
I was away in the United States for a month, which might be partly responsible for my state of mind. (Not that the U.S. felt any less odd while I was there). I enjoyed being in the States but was happy to fly back in January and start teaching. Even with the chaotic traffic, life is simpler here. People aren’t killing each other with handguns. There’s no such thing as a FICO score. Vegetables are cheap.
The racism, the bloody animal stuff — that still needs work. Time for Peru to get a move on.
A tower of Peruvian-made panettone entices shoppers at Wong supermarket, Miraflores (photo c. Barbara Drake 2008)
Peruvians and Brazilians love their locally-made panettone, an Italian-style Christmas cake that’s grown into a multimillion-dollar business for bakers in South America.
Now the Italian Cake Industry group wants nonItalian manufacturers to conform to strict baking standards or stop calling their cakes “panettone,” reports Reuters:
Keep Christmas cake Italian, panettone makers say
Dec 12, 2007 ROME (Reuters) – Italy already has strict rules governing the origin and quality of its wine, while Parmigiano parmesan cheese can only be made in Parma and regulations on “Italian” olive oil are being tightened.
Now Christmas cake has become the latest product that the government and manufacturers want to protect from foreign imitations.
Italian bakers produce some 117 million panettone and pandoro cakes every Christmas — worth 579 million euros ($849 million). By law they must be made according to strict rules, including using only butter and beer yeast.
But those rules do not apply abroad, meaning exported Italian cakes may not be up to scratch, and foreign-made versions may only bear a vague resemblance to the tall, puffy, golden desserts prized by Italians.
“Just think — seven out of 10 panettoni and pandori exported to the United States do not respect the production norms. Seven out of 10 Americans buying an ‘Italian-style’ panettone are getting a fake,” Alberto Bauli, head of the Italian Cake Industry, told a news conference.
Todinno, one of Peru’s major manufacturers, reported that sales had risen by mid-November, despite the international financial crisis. Sales of Peruvian panettone alone were expected to exceed $110 million, according to a Nov. 24 news item in Andino:
The Peruvian panettone market is still dynamic and would increase by 7% this year, with sales for about 110 millions dollars, Todinno Company stated today.
“The consumption of panettones in the country [Peru] have been growing in a good pace for the last years and despite the international financial crisis, we have seen this Christmas campaign come ahead of time,” said Carlos Bravo, general manager of Todinno.
“In previous years, sales only reached 40 per cent by this time of year, but now sales have accelerated and we have already achieved 60% in mid-November,” he told Andina news agency.
Not only are sales of Todinno and other Peruvian panettone rising in Peru, they’re also up in Venezuela, Chile, Panama, Brazil, United States and Japan, Bravo said.
Sounds like Italy is getting riled up about the authenticity of S.A. panettone because it resents losing out on worldwide sales. If this issuch a serious concern to Italian bakers, why didn’t they raise a fuss decades ago when Italian immigrant Nicolas D’Onofrio first started baking sweet cakes in Peru?
It’s all about the money.
Moreover, the logic doesn’t hold for this product. What’s next? Start suing foreign businesses for making Italian bread? Ciabatta? Pesto? Marinara sauce?
American Lara DeVries, executive director of the Light & Leadership Initiative, an NGO based in the Ate-Vitarte district of Lima, talks about the high cost of water for shantytown residents in this MSNBC video:
Lara helped me coordinate the NBC Nightly News team’s coverage of water scarcity in the shantytowns. The NBC crew followed an aguacero (water truck) driven by her neighbor as it traveled on its early-morning route through neighborhoods in Ate-Vitarte. The expensive water sold from the truck comes directly from the contaminated River Rimac and is supposed to be treated for heavy minerals, bacteria and contaminants but is not.
SEDAPAL, the agency charged with overseeing water quality for metropolitan Lima, turns a blind eye to the aguaceros.
Jorge Recharte, Andes program director for the Mountain Institute, eloquently explains the special bond between Peru’s people and her mountains. This relationship has shaped 5,000 years of culture in both the coast and the sierra and will determine Peru’s future, says Recharte in this video featured on msnbc.com:
Thank god for Wikipedia and the efforts of reporters on the religion beat. Because it turns out that December 8 is the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose birthday is celebrated September 8 and whose own conception is said to fall nine months earlier, on today’s date.
As one Wikipedia contributor ponderously points, the Virgin Mary’s “immaculate conception in the womb of her mother, through sexual intercourse, should not be confused with the doctrine of the virginal conception of her son Jesus, known as the Annunciation, and followed by the Virgin Birth.”
In other words, Immaculate Conception Day doesn’t have anything to do with the conception of the baby Jesus. I’m glad about that, actually. The idea of Mary conceiving on December 8 and giving birth 17 days later conjured images of Mary’s stomach swelling and bursting at breakneck speed, a frightening scenario for any woman who’s given birth to contemplate.
December 8 is supposed to have special significance in the United States, where it is the country’s patronal feast day. I don’t know any Americans who celebrate it as a national holiday. It’s strictly a Catholic affair. But here in Peru, it is a national holiday. Banks closed, schools closed, government offices closed.
Apart from going to church, what is there to do on Immaculate Conception Day in Lima? In our house, El Hijo woke up ecstatic that he didn’t have to go to school.
“It’s like a Saturday,” he explained and rolled for another hour of sleep.
EH’s thoughts echo those of this Marianist poem, by Raissa Maritain:
The Blessed Virgin is the spoiled child of the Blessed Trinity.
She knows no law. Everything yields to her in heaven and on earth.
The whole of heaven gazes on her with delight.
She plays before the ravished eyes of God himself.
In the spirit of the Virgin Mary, my nonCatholic son played like a spoiled child morning long and balked at finishing his homework.
Tonight NBC Nightly News airs a special report on Peru’s melting glaciers and their downstream effects. (Click here for times and stations across the United States.)
NBC Nightly News Chief Environmental News Correspondent Anne Thompson interviews glaciologist Marco Zapata at Pastoruri Glacier, Oct. 2009 (photo c. Barbara Drake)
Tune in to see footage of dying Pastoruri Glacier and to hear correspondent Anne Thompson talk with experts on how Peru is struggling to adapt to a world without glaciers, a scenario that may be realized within the next quarter century.
Kudos to the NBC environmental news team for bringing this important story to the attention of U.S. viewers during Copenhagen 15. What happening in Peru is dramatic evidence of the catastrophic effects of global warming and rapid climate change. And although people in North America may not be experiencing such drastic climate effects yet, experts point to dire consequences if no action is taken on climate shifts.
I was fortunate to work with the NBC team as a fixer while they did their investigations in Peru. Anne Thompson was fast-thinking and insightful in the field, as well as an excellent listener. She took in the stories of campesinos struggling to water their crops with the same degree of attention that she gave to Antonio Brack when the environmental minister told her that it was “very hard” to regulate environmental abuses in Peru.
“Yes, but that’s your job,” she pointed out to him several times. The reporter’s message was clear: Stop passing the buck.
That message applies equally to the United States, I’d add. It’s time for America to commit to reducing emissions. For those flat-earthers who still deny that global warming is bad for humanity, take a look at tonight’s broadcast and hear what the campesinos in Ancash have to say. Their struggles show that adaptation to climate change is part of our future as well.
A heads-up to viewers in the United States: My sources at NBC Nightly News tell me that an investigative report on Peru’s pending water crisis will air on the show next Tuesday, Dec. 8, at 6:30 p.m. EST in many states. (Click here for state-by-state air times.)
NBC Nightly News crew films Anne Thompson’s interview with community leaders near Huaraz who are fighting to retain water rights (Oct. 2009)
Environmental news correspondent Anne Thompson explores the accelerating retreat of tropical glaciers in Peru and the downstream effects of dwindling melt-water on agriculture, hydroelectricity and drinking water supplies for highlanders and coastal dwellers. Peru is among the three countries in the world most vulnerable to the effects of climate change (IPCC), and its dependence on glacier melt-water for most of its water needs could spell disaster for this Andean nation within 20 to 30 years.
Thompson and a team led by environmental news producer Mario Garcia traveled throughout Peru for ten days of investigations in early October. The team spent time at Pastoruri Glacier, Huascaran National Park, Lago Parón and Cañon del Pato, in the department of Ancash, where Thompson interviewed glaciologists, community leaders and environmentalists.
Back in Lima, the team explored the hardships suffered by inhabitants of Ate-Vitarte and other shantytowns without running water service. Minister of the Environment Antonio Brack spoke to Thompson about Peru’s environmental policy, mineral rights and proposed solutions to the country’s pending water crisis.
In addition to the news report airing next week, MSNBC will feature extended video coverage about Peru on its online site. The report coincides with the Copenhagen 15 summit.
Apart from being deeply concerned about what will happen when Peru’s glaciers disappear, I have an additional interest in seeing the report: I worked as a ‘fixer’ for the NBC Nightly News team while they were in Peru, obtaining permits, arranging transportation and lining up interviews with experts. It was hard work and a lot of fun to help these news professionals get up to the glacier and back. Along the way, we managed to survive a freak electrical storm on Pastoruri that could have fried the team’s expensive cameras but thankfully just left a few people with very static-y hair. As Peruvians know, it’s always a risk when you climb to the realm of the apus.
Ten-year-old Michelito waves a bloody sword to crowd after his drawn-out debacle in the Acho bullring last November; photo c. Jorge Vera 2008
November 29’s corrida marked the penultimate bullfight of the Señor de los Milagros festival, held in Lima’s historic Plaza de Acho bullring.
The last day to see bullfighting in Peru’s capital is December 6, next Sunday. (Ticket information here.)
My husband El Fotografo and I haven’t gone to any of the corridas this year, and we don’t plan to. EF is grossed out by bullfighting, even though he admits the sport makes for great picture-taking, especially when you have permission to stand inside the callejón, as we did last November. (The callejón is the low-walled alley surrounding the bullring where the toreros enter and exit the sand circle or ruedo. Occasionally a bull will leap or knock over the wooden wall, injuring or even killing onlookers.)
My response to bullfighting is more complicated than EF’s, but the end result is the same: I’m staying away from Acho.
EF and I were allowed in the Plaza de Acho callejón as reporters covering the event for the Miami Herald last year. (See ”Battle of the Bulls,” MH, Nov. 21, 2008.) A native Limeño, EF had been dragged as a child to the bullfights by his father, a gregarious, cigar-smoking businessman who thought his two sons should experience “true” Peruvian culture by watching the ceremonial carnage in the sombra (shaded) section of the stadium. The exercise in claiming one’s cultural patrimony was lost on EF, who hated seeing the bloodbath and didn’t like the heady smell of anticuchos that permeated the pink-walled arena.
When EF and I covered the bullfights at Acho last year, it had been more than thirty years since he had stepped foot in the world’s second-oldest bullring, built in 1766.
As an American, I was a complete newcomer to the pomp and carnage of a bullfight. Like many first-timers, I was nervous that I might become nauseated or even faint once the killings got underway. However, nobody else had forced me to go; it was my idea. I pitched the story to the Herald, I convinced El Fotógrafo to take pictures, I coerced him to help interview Spanish toreroJosé Uceda Leal one afternoon at a café inside the stadium.
We saw two bullfights last season: a novillada featuring the 10-year-old bullfighting prodigy “Michelito, “ a 19-year-old female bullfighter Milagros Sánchez and a hapless Mexican girl who got tossed by the bull and booed; and a full-fledged corrida with Uceda Leal and two other top professional toreros who went up against six bulls. Those two days of fighting showed me the best and the worst of the sport. [Read more →]
Last month a Weimaraner named La Bruja gave birth to six puppies including Arena (”sand”), above.
La Bruja belongs to one of El Fotógrafo’s cousins who lives in Jesus María. We had heard that La Bruja was embarazada but we weren’t keeping track of the due date or even thinking ‘puppies on the way.’
This past Sunday we went to a family almuerzo, and one of the kids brought this little velvet-furred creature in a cardboard box. I was kind of floored. The puppy has a wrinkled old-man face and a fat panza and a tail like that of a chubby rat.
Who knew Weimaraner puppies were so tragically cute?
Vizcacha en escabeche (pickled vizcacha), a traditional dish of the Argentinean countryside where cute vizcachas run wild and free, as they should; photo courtesy La Cocina de Ile.com
The same might be said about the vizcacha, a reclusive member of the South American bunny family that some food experts have recommended as a economical protein source. (See my Feb. ‘09 post.) Seems that the experts didn’t realize that improperly prepared vizcacha is an ideal breeding ground for botulism, as one victim in Argentina recently found out.
Dr. Francisco Diez, a 45-year-old orthopedic surgeon, was rushed to a hospital in San Rafael in the Cuyo region of Argentina, on October 25, after contracting a local form of botulism, reported Diario Los Andes and other South American news sources.
Diez became violently ill after eating vizcacha en escabeche, a traditional Argentinean dish of rodent cooked in oil, onions and vinegar and stored in its pickled juices. Vizcacha are found in the Andes mountains of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru.
A vizcacha suns himself on a rock in southern Peru, far away from home-canning enthusiasts in Argentina; photo c. Rodrigo Verdugo
The doctor was admitted to Hospital Español del Sur Mendocino, where doctors put him on a respirator and attempted to stablize him, reported Los Andes. After twelve hours of testing, hospital staff identified the botulism as a type endemic to the region of Cuyo and Neuguen, where Diez had been visiting. A frantic search for the antidote ensued over several days, with three vials ultimately being transported from Plata, Mendoza, to the hospital in San Rafael.
Despite receiving the antidote, Diez’s condition worsened. By October 30, he remained in critical condition. Toxins had paralyzed his respiratory functions and he could breathe only with mechanical intervention. His face and the muscles in his body were paralyzed.
One week after being admitted to Hospital Español del Sur Mendocino, Diez was transferred by helicopter to Hospital Lagomaggiore, [Read more →]
It’s been more than a year since I had pizza at El Italiano, a classic pizzeria/trattoria in Lima’s rough-and-tumble La Victoria neighborhood.
In that time I had forgotten that El Italiano makes better pizza than almost any other place in Lima, a city that should have lots of excellent pizza joints but for some reason doesn’t.
What might have induced my temporary amnesia is that I always seem to crave El Italiano when it’s closed. Several times El Fotografo and I have driven to El Italiano on a Monday night, only to arrive at a darkened restaurant. It took three abortive outings for the restaurant’s schedule (open Tuesdays-Sundays) to sink into my brain and, in the process, I stopped drooling whenever I thought of El Italiano, something that used to happen automatically.
I’m happy to report that, after last Friday’s visit, my salivary glands have regained their former El Italiano groove.
El Italiano makes pasta dishes but I’ve never ordered any, so I can’t comment. What I do know is that they make a rustic thin-crust pizza that is crisp, flavorful and satisfying. They have a round pizza oven in the back and a baker standing guard who does nothing but slide the pies in and out on a flat shovel and time them. The photo below shows one of the pizza chefs and owner Giuseppe Natalini raising a toast:
Eat our food! Drink our wine! Okay, drink your own wine! (photo courtesy Peru.com)
The pizza crust is homemade and firm, crisp underneath but not brittle. It can stand up to plenty of toppings, unlike the pizza crust at Antica which, although tasty, sags under the weight of chorizos and seafood.
I lived from ages 3 to 13 in central Jersey, so I know thin-crust pizza. El Italiano’s crust isn’t great — I reserve that superlative for John’s, in New York City and for a little pizza place in a strip mall where I used to eat as a kid– but it’s very good. ‘Very good’ is way better than the pizza served at Papa Johns, Dominos, Little Caesar’s, D’Innos or any of the chains that have spread throughout Lima like creeping vines. And those chains, in turn, are better than the awful, undercooked pizzas served in La Calle de los Pizzas, in Miraflores. Given the ubiquitousness of inferior pizza in Lima, places like El Italiano are a godsend.
El Italiano serves two sizes of pizza: Personal (S/.23.50 – .25.00 each) and Grande (S/.28.50 — S/.43.00 each). There isn’t a great difference between them. If I were the owner of El Italiano, I’d call them “Small” and “Medium” and add an additional “Large” size. But who’s asking the gringa?
Check out El Italiano’s pizza menu here and the entire menu here. I’m sorry I don’t have photos. I don’t photograph the food I eat (unless someone is paying me), and El Italiano’s website has miniscule photos at like 10 dpi, so it wasn’t any use trying to use those. [Read more →]
