Barbara
I am an American writer who lived in Lima for seven years (2007-2014), where I covered Andean traditions, melting glaciers and daily life in the capital for Miami Herald, MSNBC and Huffington Post. I now live and work in northern Florida where I champion climate change advocacy and compassionate, affordable eldercare.
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Pres. Obama, Where Is Your Commitment to Climate Change Adaptation?
“There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we act now and act internationally” –Lord Stern Spent a few hours this morning at a group meeting with Mr. Robin Gwynn, the U.K’s newly appointed special envoy on climate change for vulnerable countries. He came to Lima with spokesperson Kirsty Lewis of the Hadley Center to talk about Peru, climate change and the U.K.’s commitment to helping threatened countries adapt to the environmental crisis. (The image above shows children in Puno being treated for respiratory illnesses in 2008 when record colds induced by climate change led to a rash of mortalities.) FYI: Peru is one of three…
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Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Peru!
Peru celebrates many days devoted to saints from the Catholic pantheon, but not much fuss is made here over St. Patrick, one of Ireland’s three santos patronales. He is credited with converting the Irish populace to Christianity, a struggle that is symbolized visually as St. Patrick casting down a mass of wriggling snakes (the Irish “heathen” — see above). You won’t find green beer flowing from the taps in Lima pubs as you do in U.S. cities with large Irish-American populations, such as Boston, Albany and Philadelphia. And you certainly won’t find Limeños parading around the downtown Plaza de Armas dressed in green and sporting buttons that read, “Besame. Soy Irelandesa.” What you will find in Lima are a few…
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Cleaning up Col. Leoncio Prado
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 him sits in the middle of Leoncio Prado park, across from my house in Miraflores. The Peruvian military owns the park as I found out last July 15 when it was occupied by battalions of soldiers and Masonic dignitaries celebrating Leoncio Prado’s birthday. If you weren’t wearing a uniform or a Masonic apron, you weren’t…
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New Map Shows Readers of An American in Lima
I’ve just added a nifty map widget to this blog that shows in real time where readers of An American in Lima are located. The widget is located on the right sidebar, below “10 Most Popular Posts” and above the Twitter feed. The orange stars indicate visitors’ city, state and country. A pulsing circle around a star indicates that the person is visiting the blog now (that means you). As you can tell by the clusters of stars, the majority of the blog’s visitors come from the United States (hi, Saint Louis! hi, Pompano Beach!), Peru (hola, San Pedro de Lloc y Huancayo!) and Europe (bonjour, Gent! hola, Madrid!). I more or less…
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El Corazón Es Un Músculo (The Heart Is a Muscle)
I used to think that France was the most food-obsessed nation on earth. Then I moved to Peru. Life halts twice a day in France for the gastronomic liturgies of le déjeuner and le dîner. Then the French people refold their napkins and return to the all-consuming business of being French: ie., being frighteningly exact about money, arguing about philosophy and literature, and dressing better than everyone else except the Italians. Here in Peru, however, food consciousness–preparing, eating, talking, thinking about food–goes on 24/7. Peruvians discuss food with a singular intensity and concentration — and I mean all Peruvians, all the time. I sometimes believe that you could wake a Peruvian from a dead sleep, and in less than two minutes…
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Lord of the Vinifan
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 as Vinifan. This could take all night. “I know,” EH gloated. I shot EF a pleading look. “You know I’m no good at it. You’re the expert.”
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Yellow-tailed Woolly Monkey Ready for Its Close-up
A young yellow-tailed woolly monkey plays in the rubbish behind a family’s house in Alto Mayo Valley, Peru / photos c. Shanee-NPC Noga Shanee of the Neotropical Primate Conservation group and Univ. San Marco researcher Fanny Cornejo visited this blog a few days ago to share some facts about the yellow-tailed woolly monkey (Oreonax flavicauda), an extremely rare primate found only in the cloud forests of Peru. As Noga and Fanny have so helpfully pointed out, I ran the wrong photo with my original post about this endangered monkey. Those images were of the common woolly tailed monkey, not the rarer yellow-tailed woolly. Mea culpa. A true yellow-tailed woolly has a white muzzle, as…
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Photo of the Day: Girl with pigeons, Arequipa
Girl feeding pigeons in Plaza de Armas, Arequipa / photo c. Jorge Vera 2008 Arequipa, the White City rimmed by volcanic mountains home to cloistered nuns, virgin sacrifices & this sombre girl in the Plaza de Armas feeding pigeons from her fingertips. — Barbara R. Drake
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Recommended: A How-to Guide to Living and Working in Peru
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 a Peruvian bank, you can get a resident visa? (Not!) Do I think it’s a good idea for a retiree to go in on a scheme with his guru to buy land in Tarapoto and build a vegetarian co-op/ashram on it? (Well, I met two U.S. citizens who lost $60,000 that way in 2007 because…
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Nightmares and Blighted Dreams in Little Boxes: Retablos of Nicario Jimenez Quispe
The other day in a post about art about the Shining Path years, I included an unidentified photograph of a Peruvian retablo created by, it turns out, master artisan Nicario Jiménez Quispe. Jiménez was born in Ayacucho, the historic center of indigenous struggle in Peru and the locus of Shining Path conflict, and now lives in the decidedly peaceful town of Naples, Florida. His work is notable for its application of the traditional Andean retablo form — essentially, a portable prayer box with handmade figurines depicting a narrative — to contemporary socio-political themes in Peruvian, U.S. and Mexican societies. Among the stories that Jimenez illustrates are the April 1997 rescue of hostages from the Japanese embassy…
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The Milk of Sorrow Joins Growing List of Works about Peru’s Shining Path Years
A scene from the Spanish-Peruvian movie “The Milk Of Sorrow” by director Claudia Llosa in this photo released by the Berlinale film festival. (Berlinale via Associated Press) Congratulations to Peruvian-born director Claudia Llosa, whose drama The Milk of Sorrow (La Teta Asustada) captured the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlin film festival last week. I am eager to see the film, which to my knowledge is not presently showing in Lima. If you’re curious about it, here’s a recent review from Variety: With her sophomore effort “The Milk of Sorrow,” Peruvian director Claudia Llosa (“Madeinusa”) bolsters her reputation as one of the most interesting femme helmers working in the Americas…
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Encounters on the Miraflores Malecon
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 Lola’s mother is she looks exactly like Lola — a slim, low-slung black European Lab with a delicately shaped head. EF has spotted Pepa several times by the Malecón lighthouse in the last year, but this was my first time meeting maman since we adopted Lola in late 2007. Pepa was carrying a tennis ball…
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Vegan Antitaurino Activist, Plaza San Martin, Lima, Peru
Animal-rights protestor Jessica Santilla, demonstration at Plaza San Martin, Lima, Peru, Nov. 2008 / photo c. Jorge Vera El Fotografo and I met this protestor at an antitaurino (anti-bullfighting) rally held on the opening day of the Plaza de Acho bullfights, last November. Jessica Santillan is 20 years old, a student and an ardent vegan. Unlike many of the antitaurinos I met in Lima that day, Santillan believes that slaughtering animals for food is as morally reprehensible as killing bulls in the bullring. She and her boyfriend were holding up a sign that said “Neither bulls in the Plaza nor cattle in the slaughterhouse.” They were wearing matching toro outfits and chained together. Some of the demonstrators…
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Bicycle-powered Washing Machine Debuts at Lima Orphanage
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 the newest prototype of the “bicilavadora” machine to an orphanage in the slums of Ventanilla, Lima, where volunteers put it through its paces, announced MIT News: In many developing countries, electricity is unreliable or unavailable and water must be carried by hand, so conventional modern washing machines are not an option. Washing clothes can take…
