An American in Lima

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:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Lara helped me coordinate the NBC Nightly News team’s coverage of water [...]

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At last count (mid August), 514 Peruvians had died of pneumonia brought on by extreme cold this year, most of them children under five. Most reasonable people would call that an emergency.
Not Peru’s Red Cross, however. 
In a bulletin issued August 4, 2009, the Peruvian Red Cross (PRC) issued a general statement about the cold deaths in Puno, [...]

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Peru’s biggest supermarket chain – Wong – plays up Fiestas Patrias in a big way, sponsoring patriotic events and featuring the “flavors of Peru” during the month-long season. The store’s colors are red and white, the colors of the Peruvian flag, but to celebrate the Independence Day spirit during July, some employees wear outfits distinctive to Peru. The young [...]

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A tension has been building up all week in our house as Father’s Day approaches. This was a low-key holiday for us back in the States — El Hijo would make El Fotografo a card at the last minute, or I’d haul him off to the mall to buy an electric razor — but since moving [...]

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photos c. Barbara Drake 2009

As I passed through Leoncio Prado park this morning, I caught sight of this municipal worker cleaning the general himself with a hose.
A hero/martyr in Peru’s disasterous four-year war with Chile (1879-1883), Col. Leoncio Prado opted to be gunned down by an enemy firing squad rather than surrender his arms. A big statue of [...]

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yo vinifano, tu vinifanas, él vinifana….

“Parents have homework tonight,” El Híjo announced smugly as he dumped the cuadernos on the diningroom table earlier this week.
He turned to me and El Fotógrafo: “You have to Vinifan them.”
EF and I counted up the stack and groaned. Nine school notebooks to cover in clear, toxic-smelling plastic sheets known [...]

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I get emails from time to time from people abroad who want to know about resettling in Peru.
Is the job market in Peru good, they want to know?  (Tough for a foreigner, unless you’re okay with teaching English at $5/hour.) Can an American buy property in Lima? (Yes.) Is it true that if you put $20,000 in [...]

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Lola had an eventful morning. El Fotografo and I took her for a long stroll along the Malecón in Miraflores, overlooking the ocean, and in the course of one and a half hours she met:

her longlost mother
her longlost father
author Mario Vargas Llosa.

We had been walking for an hour when we ran into Pepa. The eerie thing about [...]

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MIT students and residents of Ventanilla, Peru work on the bicilavadora, a novel, inexpensive bike/washing machine. Photo / Gwyndaf Jones

Forward-thinking inventors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a “green” washing machine that runs on pedal power, mountain-bike gears and no electricity, making it ideal for rural and impoverished communities.
Last month, MIT students took [...]

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The Urban Air Cleaner UAC-20, a.k.a. “Super Tree,” is busy sucking up fumes in lovely downtown Surquillo

What is it with Surquillo, lately?
The working-class Lima district is making headlines for advocating innovative, sometimes radical solutions to urban problems. 
First Surquillo’s mayor Gustavo Sierra raised eyebrows around the world when he suggested that Peru solve its drug problem by legalizing illicit drugs and handling [...]

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Artist’s depiction of discriminatory laws at some Peruvian beaches that prohibit maids from swimming during daylight hours (until 7 p.m. at Asia beach)

It sounds like a scene straight out of the Jim Crow era in the American South, but it’s happening today in coastal Peru: discriminatory laws in some exclusive seaside resorts prohibit maids (nearly all of whom are poor Andean [...]

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Bring on the inflatable breasts! It’s summertime in Lima

It’s summer in Lima. It’s hot, there’s no air-conditioning, all the pitucos are at the beach, and the city street-sweepers are roasting in their masks and full-body jumpsuits.
I haven’t mentioned the pitucos before. I was going to get around to it.
The word roughly means “snob,” but [...]

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Excuse the radio silence. I’ve been holed up writing grant applications to fund an expedition that El Fotografo and I want to do this year in the dept. of Cusco. Keep your fingers crossed.
Expeditions are not the only projects in Peru that are eligible for funding. Research projects undertaken by investigators in the “hard” and social sciences, as well [...]

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El Fotógrafo has an erratic relationship with his hair. He goes for weeks without doing much of anything to it, letting it sprout in extravagent clumps, and then one day, he will be struck by a severe urge to cut his hair Now.
This can be hazardous because EF has a cowlick. It’s not something a person can [...]

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