I took this photo a few days ago when I was walking Lola. It was 8:30 a.m., and I figured that the dry cleaners would be open at that hour but it wasn’t.  One of the women who works at the front counter was sitting outside the locked metal doors, waiting for the manager to open.

Come back at 9, she said.

I use the Lavanderia San Antonio because they do a good job and they’re cheap and the workers are nice. Sometimes dry cleaning people can be unhelpful or sullen, even ornery. I noticed this in the United States, and it’s true in Peru too. Maybe it’s all those toxic chemicals they use. They use the same chemicals in this lavanderia but the people smile at you.

I like Lavanderia San Antonio for another reason, purely aesthetic. The sign has the same colors as Krispy Kreme, back in the U.S. The red and greenish-blue make me think of greasy glazed donuts, hot from the assembly line.

–Barbara Drake, An American in Lima

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A few days ago, I received a pleasant surprise:  two of my blog posts have been nominated for the Best of 2009 Just Posts. 

Just Posts for a Just World is a highly readable monthly roundtable of blog posts on social-justice issues from around the world.  It’s curated by Holly at Cold Spaghetti and Alejna at Collecting Tokens, who wade through the blogosphere each month to find personal posts that “speak to the same thing — the lifting up of our planet and all that inhabit it.”  The typical Just Post is candid and compassionate and outspoken, and reads like a real person speaking his/her own mind.

 I like that.

I’m honored to have a blog post (“250 Children Dead of Cold in Andes: Death Toll Keeps Climbing“) entered in the Child Welfare/health-wellness category and another (“Archbishop of Cusco to Evict More Local Restaurants“) in the Information & Advocacy category.  I didn’t write these posts to win awards.   I didn’t even “write” them in the normal sense of composing and editing. They were word-things born of outrage and frustration, at the senseless deaths of children in Puno due to Peru’s lack of a functioning Red Cross and at the greed of the Church’s highest ranking clergy in Cuzco. I wrote them to vent and to spur other people to act.

If you like what I have to say and want to raise awareness about problems in Peru, you can go to the Just Posts poll and vote for me in the Health & Wellness and Advocacy/Service categories, and best overall post category. You have until March 22 to register your vote.

And please read the other bloggers’ entries. There is some fantastic stuff there, and it feels good to know that there are many of us who want the world to become a better place. 

Spread the word!

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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.

BTW: I swiped the title of this blog post from an entry in the Cabinet of Wonders. COW’s entry provides an excellent introduction to the rituals of Qoyllur Rit’i and to the surreal atmosphere that surrounds this ancient event rooted in pre-Hispanic traditions.

 The title reminds me of these lines about glacier worship from “The Threshold,” by Rudyard Kipling. The speaker starts by recalling the days of early cave-dwelling humans, who lived in the shadow of receding glaciers and were starting to make sense of their place in the world:

The close years packed behind them,

As the glaciers bite and grind,

Filling the new-gouged valleys

With Gods of every kind.

Gods of all-reaching power–

Gods of all-searching eyes–

But each to be wooed by worship

And won by sacrifice.

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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. EH knows that when a quake hits, he’s supposed to go to the door, put on his shoes and leave the house with us.

Forget the Wii, forget the GameCube.

Shoes.

Without shoes, you’re funked. There’s usually glass falling all over and metal things flying around in an earthquake. You can’t run to an open area like a park if your feet are getting cut up by glass.

I know that the United States FEMA website says to stay inside during an earthquake. But that strategy only works in countries where the buildings are built to protect people. As we saw with the Haiti earthquake last month, in poor countries with substandard housing, staying inside means being buried alive.

Why did a collosal 8.8 earthquake kill only several hundred people in Chile, while the Haiti quake (which measured 7.0 Mw) killed about a quarter of a million? Chile, a richer country, has strict building codes and enforces them.

For those who want to change the world for the better, the lesson couldn’t be clearer.

Invest in infrastructure to disaster-proof countries in Central and South America. And include vulnerable areas in North America, while you’re at it.

Well, I seem to have all the answers today. I’d pat myself on the back only that won’t help me or my family when the next quake hits here in Peru. It will take years for Peru to get its housing act together. I can’t wait until then. Neither can the rest of Peru.

We’ve got our shoes lined up by the door. ‘Cause, as Nancy says, these boots are made for walking.

Nancy Sinatra These boots are made for walking
Cargado por igrecman. – Ver más clips de música, videos en HD!

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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.

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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.

Click here for the full article.

The bru-ha-ha goes all the way up to Italian Agriculture Minister Paolo De Castro, who wants to take action with the World Trade Organisation.

All I can say to Castro and the Italian cake jefe is: Have fun trying to stop the so-called bomba panettones. You’re too late.

Panettone manufacturing has been around for decades in Latin America, and the business is booming.

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.

(Full article here.)

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?

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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.

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Here’s the video of the report that aired on NBC Nightly News on December 8.

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I did. I even tweeted about it, erroneously.

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.

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