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El loco y el mar
El Fotógrafo took this photo in 1989. He was walking along the Malecon, in Miraflores, when he saw a man standing on the cliffs, waving a stick back and forth in front of the ocean, like a conductor. There were no violins or flutes or kettle drums — just the crashing of the waves on the rocks below. The stick rose in the air, sliced down, swept to the right, then rose again. He swayed back and forth, then lifted his finger to his lips: Shush. El Fotógrafo calls this diptych “Creador.” Creator.
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My Own Brush with a Violent Protest in Lima
After writing yesterday’s tongue-in-cheek post about the U.S. Embassy warning about foreigners getting swept up in political demonstrations in Peru, I realized that I had nearly been caught in a violent protest myself. (To my credit, I had no illusion that it was a folkloric event.) It was in May 2000, when Fujimori was storming his way to a third presidential term, and protesters all throughout Lima, as well as the rest of the country, were clashing with police. El Híjo, El Fotógrafo and I were at a leather store in downtown Lima, three blocks from the presidential palace, when people started yelling in the street. One minute it was a quiet, gray…
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Conversations in the Gym
Bicep curls, by Ron Burgundy. Yesterday I was chatted up by the manager of the gym where I (sometimes) work out. Cinco Pirouettas is a stout man in his forties who claims to have been a ballerino when he was young. He spends most of his time talking to girls at the machines. He also bosses around skinny young men who appear to have never lifted weights before. He sometimes talks to mothers. “Did you do ballet?” he asked me point blank one afternoon, about a month ago. I was stretching on the floor. Yes, I told him, a long, long time ago. He puffed up his chest. “I did ballet. How many pirouettes in a…
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Photo of the Day: Lavanderia San Antonio
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…
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Deadly Negligence: Peru’s Red Cross & Cold Deaths in Andes
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, noting the low temperatures, the rise in pneumonia cases and the deaths of “113” children (a number much lower than that cited by other news sources in early August). After low-balling the number of deaths, the bulletin explained that the PRC “has been assisting the affected people with medicines, blankets and food items. Additionally, the…
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Supermarket Cowboys
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 men who bag your groceries wear these white ponchos with red scarves and big straw hats – the traditional costume of el chalán, the horse trainer or cowboy from northern Peru. Peru is such a service-oriented country that the Wong bagmen will walk you home with your groceries, free of charge…
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Happy Father’s Day, Peru-style
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 to Peru in ’07, Father’s Day has grown into an Event. This change is partially due to the hoopla made by EH’s British-Peruvian school over Dia del Papá (and over Mother’s Day as well). From what I understand, this is common practice at schools in Lima. I’d always thought of Father’s Day as a family…
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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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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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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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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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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…
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High-tech Super Tree Combats Air Pollution in Surquillo
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 them through the national health ministry. (Sierra later claimed that he was misquoted and that he does not want to legalize drugs, but, rather, he wants the Peruvian government to fund programs to treat drug addicts. Read his refutation in Spanish here.) Now Surquillo is tackling the less-controversial problem of air pollution by installing a state-of-the-art air purifier nicknamed…
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Maids Still Banned from Swimming at Peru Beaches? Sadly, Yes
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 and black women) from swimming on the beach during daylight hours. As Juan Arellano described in Global Voices Online in 2007, the beaches where this discrimination is practiced are located south of Lima, among them the fashionable resort town of Asia. Wealthy Limeños flock to beach houses in Asia during the brief summer months,…
