Pictures of my first week

Here is a link to pictures of my first week!  Enjoy.  This is way less convenient than Facebook, so thank you for your cooperation.

https://picasaweb.google.com/114379609394765551921/FirstWeekInPeru03?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCP-Y0dTKio3VAw&feat=directlink

A little romance

May 2, 2013

Today was my first day holding hands here and I felt pretty queasy about it.  Margarita was in the kitchen before dinner, preparing something with Aleja (an older woman who doesn’t live with us but who cooks, eats, and hangs out at the house all day), and I asked if I could help.  What are you making, I wondered aloud.  Feet soup, they responded.  It’s good for the stomach.  Ok, how can I help you?  I asked, intrepidly.  Margarita had the raw chicken foot in her hand and was scraping it.  Aleja was dicing vegetables.  I thought that’s what my job would be.  Margarita grabbed another knife and told me to take the yellow parts off the chicken foot with it.  What are the yellow parts?  I asked.  Skin, she replied.  Oh.  I skinned the chicken leg, mindful to dissociate as much as possible. I saw how Margarita was doing it, very aggressively, so I copied her.  The best way to assimilate into a host family, I think, is to copy what they do.  The chicken leg still had its nails. It felt like holding a miniature old persons’ hands with only three fingers and a thumb.  Or was it two fingers a thumb?  How good I am at dissociation!  I hold its hand and rip at the skin, peeling it off slowly, trying to make it more fun for myself by remembering that I love peeling off people’s sunburned skin only that doesn’t feel like I’m holding a severed 97 year old baby’s hand while I’m doing it.  I made conversation.  Is this the same chicken we had for lunch, I asked.  It sure is, says Margarita.  Aleja nods accordingly, dicing her G-rated vegetables.  Keeping her hands clean of all this.  What a delicious chicken that was!  I remarked.  They murmured in agreement.  I can’t wait to eat its feet.  I kept that one to myself.  We sat down for dinner - me, Mama Ana Maria (just home from backbreaking labor making stone streets in our neighborhood), Aleja, and Cesar, Ana Maria’s goddaughter’s older brother from a town a few hours’ walk up the hill.  I tried eating a foot.  Ana Maria was very nice about it.  I had to ask her to put one in my soup for me.  I tried it, and for the first time in my traveling years, I felt vomit immediately in my mouth. I put it aside and laughed.  I couldn’t help myself!  Ana Maria ate it for me – it’s nothing, she said, your stomach still has to get accustomed.   

Work is great too.  There is so much to learn, but I love all of it.  This organization has clearly made an impact in the community - everyone I speak with knows not only the name of the organization, but can name one or more people that work here (there’s only about 6 of us).  There isn’t a lot to say about work yet because I’m feeling very overwhelmed by it.   My host family, their lives, and the comfort I feel here are very reachable for me. 

My life has changed immensely in the past week and it is an incredible shift.

At last!

5/1/13

At last!  So many things have happened at last.  Inside the mountains I have found a certain peace, mouth agape, family smiling, joy abound.  I unpack my things in this new home, my temporary placement.  A guinea pig farm, for eating only!  A houseful of mostly women, only one man to speak of, a very timid and adorable man who is in love with his wife and child.  It is here at last!  A walk through dirt roads and cables lining the street, sisters Cati and Ana Margarita dutifully carrying my bags, I see ice-capped mountains in the distance. I have a comfort zone in this incredibly foreign place.  It has not enlightened, nor thrilled, nor exhausted me yet because I have been thrown in and because it is so different.  I just might feel comfortable here soon though, with bugs biting me, walking across a dirt path from my room, adjacent to the room shared by mom, dad, and baby, to get to the dimly lit kitchen where we chat and drink coca leaf tea.  Dogs bark and fight in the distance.  I warily turn lights on, expecting the scurry of creatures.  The kitchen is full of jars and jars of spices and dried leaves, the oven built into a wall, black with soot.  Grandmother Ana Maria tells me she likes to cook everything.  Based on the massive amount of guinea pigs (cuy) she has in the back (piles of them) I’m guessing that’s one of her favorite things to cook.

In the backyard, the cuy murmur in unison.  Under each piece of cardboard box in their pen is another lump of fur!  A “mother with her babies” she would say.  I laugh and laugh (quietly so as not to offend them).  She maybe has 100 of them. By tomorrow it might jump to 150.  I am not yet grossed out by it, but I might be because they are cute, and when Ana Margarita holds one up to me I can’t help but pet it.  Is that how you treat your food?  I don’t know yet.  It is pretty precious, and terrified. Apparently they taste delicious.  The other girls I have met so far tell me they only have it on rare occasion, and in Cuzco it costs about $25 a plate. But not at Ana Maria’s!  I tell them it is my birthday on Friday, and they say they will make something for me, hopefully with a side of cuy.

Musing!

4/15/13

This feels different to me than leaving for Asia.  Then, there was heartbreak, extreme emotions, heat, and a ripping apart of my life in Santa Barbara to create something entirely unique in a foreign place.  This feels complacent.  I am not forcing anything to a stop; things have eased themselves into a natural termination.  This is the beginning that I want, not one I need, or one that I have to construct out of a void.  There is nothing left for me to accomplish here in this moment, the light of this place is flickering to a close. 

My muse - my muse is trouble, she is delinquency and a torturous past, failed relationships and broken hearts and I get the sense that she is not able to fully function right now because I am doing pretty well.  Beauty used to be created for me out of a certain suffering and it will take me a while to re-assess that suffering, tap into it, and re-write it from this stance - to enter into a place in my life where I can engage a transformed muse and where beauty can emerge from a point of positivity and empowerment.  Not all the time though – she does come back uninvited and unexpected to scratch her long nails down the chalkboards of my inactivity.  But for now, her light and airy counterpart will have to find her way into my phonemes, spreading like inkblots and blurring and slurring the darkened syntax.  

Looking back (in preparation)

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August 4, 2005…(taken from one of my recently found journals)

I am overwhelmed by all I want to do, but I can’t stand still.  I need to do something out of the ordinary, need to take a risk, break away from this level of functionality and add a spark to it’s grayness.  Maybe I’m slowly getting ready.  

Presently….

It’s hard to believe – well it’s hard to believe a lot about that last statement, that I wrote it almost 8 years ago, that since then I have done some fairly out of the ordinary things, that I felt this way before leaving for college and that I still feel this way a little bit.  I love these pieces of me that I see over time, I love how they melt together and roughly form the portrait of who I am, and how that portrait will help build the one 8 years from now.  In looking back, there are times when I wish I could hold myself, tell myself that the storm will clear, tell myself to stay or go, tell myself that soon the pain will pass and the beauty will begin.  Tell myself to breathe, breathe through the hard times and gulp the air down when times are good.  I know I will want to tell myself these things as I look back on this phase of my life years from now, so I hope that through this retrospective looking glass I can invert the image and hold steady on me now, continue breathing through the hard times and the good, and love myself throughout this new adventure.

For those of you who are interested, here is a link to the organization I will be working for in Peru:

http://www.sacredvalleyhealth.org/about.html

Leaving Bangkok Behind

October 24

Sitting in the Bangkok Airport on the way to Burma - in a tiny, stifling gate miles away from food or a toilet, I can’t help but feel a bit nostalgic.  Not toward my traveling, my volunteering, the feeling of freedom and liberation that I found in transience, but rather toward the beginning.  Nostalgia; that bittersweet bubble that I let grow unknowingly in my belly during those times when I thought hatred was the only option.  But now when I think back I know that if given the same circumstance, I would do it again.  Bangkok, Thailand, all of it, it meant a lot for me, more than I would have let myself know at the time…I feel like more than ever now that I am leaving it for the last time, that this place is truly my South East Asia home.  Mae Sot, yes, that part of Thailand meant the world to me as well, but mostly this part - the rude and obtrusive, the meddling and the beautiful, the sprawling disgust of Pattaya, the children looking expectantly at me and me giving them the same look back, those days…the summer of my journey, that was the real beginning.  Malaysia, yes you opened my eyes, serving the function of  the Siren’s call to this part of the world, you gave me the gumption I needed to perhaps make the best decision I could have made in leaving Pattaya but now, as I sit here amongst the Sikh men and their turbans, the airlines employees wearing headscarves and the monks boarding planes, I think back to my time, my miserable, laughable, unforgettable time in Pattaya with my South East Asia soul mate, Jenna, and I think that yes, I would do it again.  I would do it again…maybe this is what nostalgia does.  I remember the bad, yes I do, but being here somehow makes me remember the good, remember the growth and ultimately remember the decision I made that impacted me greatly, the decision to leave.  How strange is this? I can’t quite put my finger on it, my missing Pattaya, the place I formerly called Hell on Earth and rightfully so.  The place that makes me shudder when I see Russian script anywhere, the place that made my heart crumble away in tiny pieces. But right now as I leave Bangkok, and this morning when I left my familiar hostel, the one I used to feel so homey in, and traversed my usual route to my favorite breakfast place and got my favorite breakfast (2 of them, I over-indulged…hadn’t had bagel sandwiches in a while), I thought that what I had done rather than traveled aimlessly for seven months was arrive, place a perimeter around South East Asia, then make it my home.  And this, Bangkok, Pattaya, whatever this feeling is, is the living room…the place I will always see when I open the front door. 

The Rest of Cambodia

October 22

What a whirlwind ride this past month and a half has been.  I think I’ve only had one or two days to myself, including this one.  The other one was spent dealing with my lost wallet in Kratie, the town with fresh water dolphins and sick babies whose parents carried their IVs…I still can’t figure out why each baby had an IV, or how the tiny clinic across from my tiny hostel could be that filled with tiny little brown babies crawling around with their parents holding  their IV drip bags over them, chasing them around, sitting them on the ground outside and placing the bag on motorbike handlebars while they chatted with other parents.  Poverty here can strike at some pretty random times.  What a strange day to have to myself, I thought, calling credit card companies, thinking about endangered dolphins, and watching sick babies. 

Nonetheless, Cambodia and the craziness since has been filled; filled to the max with no time or space to breathe, only to have fun and look in the mirror and practice loving myself and others in an extraordinary way.  Here I am, at a hostel after two weeks of luxury with my father, and I see there are plenty of ways to practice my newfound happiness, refine it, watch it spill all over multi-colored lines, watch it run over cups and crawl into tiny spaces, watch it spend money and smile at frustrating situations, watch it be blunt and feminine, watch it play all sorts of games and laugh through pain with friends, watch it ask questions through answers.  I see that I have become more proactive in self-governance. 

Cambodia…hm.  After the killing fields, regulating my emotions became something I realized I could talk about at any time I saw fit, either with myself or companions.  That place, those memories not only for me but for the people who actually went through it, brought me through the rainbow of black and brown, of morose and remorse and into one of connection and conversation.  It opened me up.  So cliché, but think about it, really think about what it means to be opened up.  Almost surgically, for inspection, for introspection and outrospection and retrospection and futrospection.  I saw there that my time here was limited but that my options and opportunities out of here were exponentially quite the opposite.  All of those people I walked over, all of that injustice and quiet comprehension that this place faced during and after the genocide made me understand the very same thing inside of myself and helped me to begin the process of walking out of it.  Loudness and voices and laughter and making sure I understand and am understood, confusion and color and brightness and stress and pressure and acknowledgement, positive and negative, all of it – it all holds the energy that I am working to finesse.  If this doesn’t make sense, that’s fine.  I don’t think it should because processes tend not to.  They tend to write, edit, re-write, erase, and speak over things they use to whisper about.  This month and a half has been all of that, encased in the realization that going places and ending new beginnings are also beginnings in and of themselves as long as I maintain what I think has grown inside of me. 

That I can love what I see on the side of the road, that I can love this poverty and inequality, these smiles and those children and that group of women talking, and this conversation I have with a tuk-tuk driver, and at the same time I can love what I want to do when I come home, what I want to be in this new journey, I can love this translation however difficult it will be, no matter how much it might suck; that I can love the process of loving the search because it is all passion…this is my newest revelation.  Evolving passion, (let’s be real here) because who’s to say that I won’t break down when I arrive in LAX and realize that everyone speaks English?  That I don’t have to use sign language, that fried noodles with vegetables isn’t on every menu, that people won’t offer me to hold their child while they get on the over-crowded minibus?  Of course I will have those break downs, especially at night, when I go outside to take my mind off…of…that…silence…that never ever exists here, not even in the most remote places.  That silence that exists back home, almost like someone pressed a mute button.  Of course that will break me, and of course I will go on my MacBook (yikes!) and look up cheap tickets to Laos and jobs and living arrangements and then I will stop and think about my passion and my ability to not stop this forward motion.  I will think about the journey I am on, think about my own education, well, my need to get one I suppose, and think about me and my friends, and the new things I will see because I have had this realization that it isn’t the place (although this place is majestic, at least), but it is me and my ability to love myself and think I am not that bad, and it is the people  I meet and the experiences we have together, no matter where we are.  A little mushy, I suppose.

So.  After hanging out with friends, friends from home who came to Asia, friends of their friends, friends I met in other parts of Asia, friends I met while traveling with these friends, and feverishly running around with them all around Cambodia, I saw how possible it is for me to not take myself so freaking seriously.  It was great.  I got to be flitty, flirty, whimsical, badass, while also never losing sight of my intelligence and wit.  I let myself have fun, and while this whole trip has been fun, I have been avoiding the inevitable - the transition into “home”, and hanging out with people who came directly from there made me see that it is possible for me to maintain myself, the self that I found, treasure, love, that Asia helped me fill in while not separating completely from a culture I am not totally satisfied with (home).  Meaning, I see now that I don’t have to live like a hermit once I come back to the US.  I can successfully engage with civilians while not losing sight of the person I have become.  Good!

Then came the ultimate challenge….my father.  Challenging in the sense that families are always challenging, and because with my friends I was at least able to take a breather when I needed to (being the only girl among them, they understood if I needed to have “woman time”/BeccaTime), but with my Dad this became a tad bit more difficult.  I saw that I needed to practice my happiness in the context that issues may arise when I move back in with the parentals.  I saw that communication about things, namely my newfound independence, may be tense when it comes to me being back, but manageable and even cool if done well.  I saw that I have been living by what Santa Barbarians might call homeless-person standards, and loving it.  I saw that air conditioning actually makes me physically sick, and, while my dad was sleeping, I would turn it up to roughly the same temperature it was outside.  I saw, above all, how awesome my dad is for journeying out into a crazy, rule-less place where he is a white Amazonian giant with strange facial hair and even stranger facial expressions.  I saw him talk to locals and develop his English-for-people-who-don’t-speak-English skills.  I saw him at first be very nervous at things not working out our way, like hotel bookings or flights, but by the end was fine when the ferry that took us and our motorbikes across the Mekong was actually slabs of wood draped haphazardly across two wooden dugout canoes.  At least, he looked fine.  He also looked fine when he made the ultimate decision to fly into a tropical storm, one that even I was wary about.  Bussing into one is fine, because I can use local people as a fear barometer.  But flying…first of all, this is a technology I had near forgotten about.  Secondly, not many locals fly.  Thirdly, Lao Airlines is notorious for crashing, even more than Lao boat-lines.  But we went for it, and I’m glad we did.  Planes are amazing!  And flying into Laos was a great experience, not to mention sitting in our resort watching a tropical storm pass us by while sipping on delicious beer and occasionally checking on the elephants that were also staying at the resort.  Way to go, Dad! 

So, now that Dad has left, and my friends have dispersed all over Asia, I am alone again.  Tomorrow I head for Bangkok if it’s not too flooded, and then on Monday I fly into Burma.  After that, I will stop in South Korea for about a week and then come home.  My trip is winding down, and I have plenty of mixed feelings about it.  As excited as I am to begin a new adventure, I am nervous as hell that reverse culture shock is going to be far more devastating than any other reverse culture shock has been for me before.  I am anxious that reconnecting with my friends and family in person will be hard and that the story of my trip will go unnoticed.  I am, however, ready to hear about the twists and turns your lives have taken these past few months and hope that the time we will share will be mutually engaging.  I am terrified about applying for jobs and scared that I won’t get a perfect one…there are so many things that I now want to do.  I am worried about following the rules that I have so neglected to follow in Asia, simple things like crossing the street at crosswalks and letting people know where I am have gone by the wayside as I tend to now plan as things come along.  I hope I can be patient with myself and people can be patient with me.  I am, actually, worried about using silverware.  I will need a purse or something big enough to accommodate the chopsticks I plan on carrying with me wherever I go, and will ask the wait staff at restaurants to cut my meat up for me before serving it.  Wearing shoes inside may also present a problem.  Taking showers inside the shower will be strange, as opposed to just using the showerhead inside the bathroom.  Cooking, driving, animals that aren’t meant for eating, tipping at restaurants, having a wardrobe, bike lanes, driving inside of things rather than outside of them, parking spaces, chains of stores and markets, white people…all of this will take getting used to.  What do I do if I need something right away?  Drive to the store?  Weird.  I should be able to walk outside and find the person selling it. What will it be like to not see water buffalo everywhere?  I know…I need to convince Mom and Dad to buy one and put it in the backyard.   I am also neglecting the wonderful things that I should like about coming home…seeing my family and friends, freedom to talk about governments, not seeing corpses on the road, fat children (not obese, just not with bones sticking out of them), Sebastian, carpeted floors, salad, sandwiches, other food in general, the ability to walk and maintain a conversation without having to look at the ground all the time, shade, jeans.  I guess this is all part of the return package.  

When I think about the funny shape this trip has become, it makes me smile, utterly grateful that it didn’t turn out any other way.  Back in July, I wrote in my journal, “in telling Tiana [my friend] a little more about how I got here, I realize it’s a bit of a messy story where nothing worked out and I’m still, still, still happy.  Like the sky today, unexpectedly exactly how it’s supposed to be.  Beautiful.”