Day Twenty Four

December 4th, the christmas decorations are up. The blackboard is dotted with snow flakes, and a little plastic christmas tree, reminiscent of the one from Charlie Brown, is in the common room. It's kind of odd to look at them, and to hear the occasional american christmas carols being played on radios in the market, because it really doesn't fell like the christmas season. The days and nights get longer and warmer; besides that, Pisco is the same grungy desert town by the sea as always. Earlier today I looked at a few articles that ran in the Daily Hampshire Gazette yesterday, one was about a 'Hot Chocolate Run,' and there was a photo of a parade in downtown Florence. The trees are all bare, the sky is overcast, everyone's wearing fleeces; it looks like December there. Here it doesn't seem like any particular season, and I don't get the impression it changes all that much during the course of the year. I have been here twenty four days, and every day the weather is the same: overcast and a little cool in the mornings, clearing up by 10 am, and the rest of the day is dry and hot with a cloudless blue sky. In the evening there is always the smell of decaying fish, but apparently that's only started in the last few weeks.

I spent most of the past week helping to build a wall of sandbags around a cement soccer pitch in a neighborhood across town. It is just across the road from Freddy's house, the guy I helped to get wood for two weeks ago. The neighborhood looks like somewhat more rural version of the first part of Slumdog Millionaire. The pitch is on the edge of the neighborhood. Beyond it there is a flat plane of sand, strewn with garbage, that stretches for the better part of a mile before it reaches a line of trees and what looks like a road. All day long while we work it shimmers in the heat. Sometimes locals ride out across the plain on motorbikes, sometimes in cars, sometimes they burn piles of stuff out on the plain, throwing up clouds of thick, black smoke. From the smell of it, they're burning trash.

Building the wall consists of sifting sand through screens into wheelbarrows to get out anything that could cut the sandbags from the inside, and then filling the bags and stacking them into a wall. It can get monotonous, but it's a good crew of people, and we always have interesting conversations, or if we don't we sing Disney songs. You have to be careful about sand blowing into your open mouth, however, it tastes, and smells if you get close enough, rather a lot like feces.

There is a short tree, about three feet high, near the pitch, and all day every day we've been there, there is a dog tethered to it who lies in the little puddle of shade underneath it. It sleeps, watches us, or drinks from the little bowl left out next to it. I'm guessing (I hope) that it's owners let it inside at night.

The children in the neighborhood, one group in particular, comes by every day and hangs around, sometimes they help us shovel. Some other kids will just walk by and call out "gringo, gringo." They don't do it in an insulting way, they just yell it out, still it's weird. In the U.S. if a white kid saw hispanic person and called out "latino, latino," I don't think that would go over well. But white people are more of an oddity here than any ethnicity in the States. Pisco is many things, but ethnically diverse is not one of them. I heard this week that one of the rumors among some of the locals is that we at PSF are criminals, not guilty of serious crimes, but misdemeanors, and working here in Pisco is our punishment, a community service we have to fulfill.

The After getting unpleasantly drunk four nights ago, I have been detoxing, so this has been a slow, easy weekend for me, without headaches. Last night there was a hot pepper eating competition between Shane, Gilky, Evan, Brian, and Kane. I began filming after it elevated from 'eating' to 'ingesting through the nostrils.' I'd thought about entering, and am glad I did not. After that we had a tuk-tuk party, we actually brought one into the yard and it blasted music. I checked out early, after a point, it is awkward to be sober at a Tuk-Tuk party.

Today I think I've been the only not-hungover person in all of PSF. I read more Hemingway, watched a few bad movies with people in recovery, got a burger from the gas station with Even. It was edible.

Being here, I thought earlier today about where I'd want to go next time I go adventuring. I think I'd like to explore some part of the U.S. I've never been before. I thought of something my brother-in-law, Casey said to me a few years back, that you could spend years just exploring and getting to know the U.S. It is weird to think that I know Pisco Peru better than I know San Francisco or Seattle, or Austin Texas. Living here, I try to understand this place, and it makes me wonder how well I understand my own country, how well I really know the USA. I know a part of it, we're not strangers, but I'd like to know it better.

I came to Pisco twenty four days ago. I am much browner, much scruffier, and a little thinner than when I arrived. I will leave two weeks from today. Even though I know I'll only be in the airport, I'm excited to see Toronto.

This week, I think we will finish the sand bag wall. The week after, I think we will finish work at the French Hospital. I'd like to be there for that.

Day Eighteen

It was a slow weekend for me, addled by some very powerful antibiotics. They give you the feeling of being perpetually off-balance whenever you stand up. However, trips to the bathroom over the past several days indicate that the pills are doing their job.

On Sunday I woke up early, probably the only person at PSF to wake without a hangover. Breakfast consisted of me unhappily eating an entire papaya. The fruit and seeds of papaya are a natural antidote for intestinal parasites, unfortunately the taste is somewhere between bland and acidic. After that, and very thoroughly brushing my teeth, I joined a few others for a walk to the beach. Last weekend's trip to Huacachina, where I unwisely skimped on the sunscreen while in the middle of the burning desert, has led to me spending my spare minutes peeling skin off my shoulders, and to me being very fastidious with my sunblock habits. So this time I was adequately lathered.

I spent most of the time either talking with Evan and Lindsay or reading Hemingway. An unfortunate side effect of my intestinal ailment and use of antibiotics is that my stomach is not up to handling much alcohol. I notice this most while reading. Hemingway should be taken with wine or strong drink, although coffee will also do. While reading, reclining on my towel, I had an unsettling shuddering feeling, like my body was trembling, only it wasn't, the shudder was in the ground. I looked at the others and they nodded: it was a tremor. My first. Their a pretty common occurrence here, and I might not have noticed this one if I hadn't been lying down. I wasn't scared, I was out on the beach in the open, nothing was going to fall on me. But it was unsettling; I felt, very literally, not sure of my footing. It's a strange feeling when you can't completely trust the ground you're standing on.

Dinner last night was a barbecue, bring your own meat. I had steak, and many people here seem to be unfamiliar with the cooking technique of pouring beer over your meat as it cooks.

Today I felt better, but still not up for heavy physical work, so I opted to go on an offered tour, led by Joe, the other, more established Joe. My newly acquired nickname, through a series of misunderstandings, is 'Jop.' I can live with it. Everyone who went on the tour has been here at least as long as I have, but, like me, felt they had only a partial view of the city. This was a tour to acquaint us with what happened to Pisco; how the Pisco of noon on August 15, 2007, compares with the city we now live in.

The quake, I now know, hit at around 6pm. It measured between 7.9 and 8.0 on the Richter scale and lasted three minutes. By comparison, the San Francisco quake in 1989 lasted fifteen seconds. Four years ago, shortly before the big quake hit, their was a noticeable tremor. The people, as they usually did, went outside and waited a few minutes to make sure it was safe, then went back inside. When the ground started shaking late, many dismissed it as an aftershock. Hundreds of people in on of the main cathedrals attending a memorial service of a well-known public figure where killed when the roof, which had stood for over a hundred years, fell on top of them. The only survivor was the priest, who was in one of the rear alcoves at the time. Hundreds of people, seeking safety in a wide-open area where nothing could fall on them, ran to the beach, and most did not read anything ominous into the fact that the sea level had retreated drastically. Shortly afterwards, a tsunami generated by the earthquake slammed into the shore, killing over a hundred and pushing a wall of water nearly a quarter mile inland. Eighty percent of the city was leveled. Among those killed were the family of the mayor, and in the immediate aftermath he, in a state of combined shock and denial, was unable to govern effectively, but refused to step down.

We walked along the shore, passing a lagoon PSF helped to clean up. Many rare migratory birds use the lagoons on the shore of Pisco as a stop on their migrations, which was unfortunate when, for years after the earthquake, the municipal government decided to dump hundreds of tons of dirt, debris, and garbage on the beach. It was cheaper to dump in there than take it inland. We passed the foundation of a four or five star hotel which stood on the beach for most of the twentieth century. We passed derelict remains of beautiful colonial architecture. One of these old buildings that survived is now a hostel, still in development, but the front is a sort of museum, the walls covered with photograph of the city before it fell.

The city in the pictures is unrecognizable to me. Block after block of buildings older than most you would find in the U.S. It looks like the sort of place Hemingway would have been at home, rich in history and architecture, with plenty of cafes and bars. Pisco, I learned, is where Pizarro and his men landed when they came searching for a fabled city of gold. It was Peru's first port, and for a long time, it's biggest. This is a very old city, but most of the buildings in it are younger than I am. I'm reminded of Kurosawa's movie Stray Dog. It was made in, and takes place in, Tokyo in 1949, four years after the firebombing destroyed over 50% of the city. I remember that a critic said that "Tokyo in this film is like an open wound, festering in the sun." I haven't thought of Pisco, like that, I didn't have much context, I didn't have the city of five years ago to compare it to. Looking out the window of the tuk-tuk on the way back to PSF, Pisco, for the first time, looked like a disaster area still in recovery, like a shattered ruin still trying to put itself back together.

This is a strange place. Many people live in one story rectangles of concrete and wood panels, as many live in tents on yards of dirt. Cab ride across town costs the equivalent of 63 cents. Rats and dogs occupy the same niche. The women who work here can't walk down the street without being cat-called. Parts of the beach are lined with mountains of debris. Sometimes the ground shakes under your feet. This is a city in recovery, and tonight as I sit here writing this I appreciate that as I haven't before. It seems like every day here brings some new insight into this city, into what happened here and what is happening here. As I think I said before, gaining this kind of insight is not always comfortable, but it is always worth having.

Day Fifteen

I am now a part of a club within PSF, which all the most established folks are members of: the club of those who have contracted a disease while here in Pisco. For me it is the most common: parasites, giardia in my case. The gassy bellies and unpleasant times in the bathroom finally led yesterday to me waking up with a splitting headache and all the other symptoms of a really nasty hangover, the only difference being that I hadn't been drinking at all the night before. After stumbling to the gas station to get a bottle of water, I accepted that, two weeks into my stay here, I would have to take a sick day, and that it would be on Thanksgiving. As a result I spent Thanksgiving of 2011 being acutely thankful for antibiotics, as it turned out that the cipro my travel doc gave me in case I got traveler's diarrhea, works pretty well against early stage giardia, although at the time I didn't know exactly what disease I had contracted.

Besides the headaches, fatigue, and gastrointestinal unhappiness on my part, Thanksgiving in Pisco was rather nice. A lavish dinner, complete with two turkeys, was prepared by an extra-large dinner crew, that I would have been a member of if I wasn't lying on the couch all day. At dinner we all said, whenever we felt so moved, something we were thankful for. Afterwards was karaoke night, but I was asleep before it kicked off, though I woke up around eleven to the familiar, if very drunken, strains of 'Wagon Wheel' drifting up to the window of the Wacky Shack.

This morning, while feeling much better than I had twenty-four hours before, I was still not up for a day at the construction site, but went to the French Hospital anyway, for the first time not as a volunteer laborer, but as a patient. Whether or not a person has intestinal parasites, I learned, is determined not by a blood test, but by a poop test. A blood test thankfully determined that I did not have typhoid, and the crap test enlightened me to my giardia, and a quick trip to a pharmacist got me the pills I'll need. Altogether, the two tests plus the medication cost the equivalent of about $9.50. This is one aspect of life in Pisco I will never get tired of. I felt like it was a bit of a leap of faith though, to let a peruvian nurse stick a needle in my vein to draw some blood. The needle was pre-packaged and clearly sterilized, but still, it was a more intimate experience with the French hospital than I've had in the two weeks working there. I've walked by that bench many times, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with chunks of concrete; now I was one of the people on that bench, a wad of sterilized gauze covering the needle mark in the crook of my elbow, waiting to be told exactly how sick I was.

I had a similar experience two days ago, the day before Thanksgiving. Work was wrapping up at the hospital when Sam, one of the long time members of PSF, stopped by with the truck and said he needed a hand lifting some wood. I was pretty much done anyway, and it sounded like a quick job. As it turned out, we were getting the wood for a guy named Freddy, a local man who has helped PSF more than once, and wants to reinforce the flimsy front wall of his modular home, since someone has tried to break in a number of times. After picking up Freddy and meeting his family, along with their dog, Blanco, we went to a school surrounded, as are many establishments around here, by a concrete wall. The school, still under construction, had a lot of scarp wood lying around, and while they wouldn't give it to Freddy, they would some to PSF. So Sam, Freddy, and I loaded up the truck, and as we were pulling out, Sam spotted two other local friends of his, a sixteen year old girl and her three year old brother, trying to catch a cab, so offered them a lift home, since they live less than a block from PSF.

After we dropped of Freddy and the wood, the brother and sister rode in front with Sam while I rode in the truck bed. The little boy has a brain tumor, and the entire family is working to earn enough money to pay for the operation, with occasional help from PSF. As we were riding back I thought about how inadequate it was that all I could offer them at the moment was my seat in the front of the truck. But it was a start, I thought. That hour or so working with Freddy changed my view on the work we're doing here. There was more of an immediately tangible benefit to it, than to all the work I've done so far at the hospital, but more importantly, I feel like I got my first real sense of the people here. Up until now the people of Pisco have, by and large, just been been faces to me, no real sense of the people themselves, of who they are. I got just a glimpse of it with Freddy, and with the brother and sister, but it reminded me that what we are here to do is actually important, that this place is more than a place for twenty-somethings from Europe or the U.S. to spend a few weeks while they're backpacking around South America. I'm glad I got that reminder, it made me that much happier to be here.

I'm sitting, as usual, at one of the picnic tables in the courtyard, writing. I finished Serpico earlier this evening. Having read it, I definitely don't want to be a New York City police officer, but I wish that all cops, everywhere, could be like him. After I finish writing this, I think I'll start A Farewell to Arms. I'll try to finish it by Christmas. Speaking of which I have a (temporary) return date set. I'll be flying back to the states, by an involved route, on December 18th. I hadn't planned it when I first came down here, but this year, as Kim Gannon wrote, I'll be home for Christmas, and I'm happy for that.

For now though, sitting in the warm night here in Pisco, complete with the unwelcome parasite in my intestines, I'm glad to be here. I think maybe tomorrow I'll feel better enough to actually go out and work again. Here's hoping.

Day Twelve

It was an eventful, very gritty, weekend. On Friday a large portion of PSF headed off to Lima for a Pearl Jam concert, and many of us who remained behind left on Saturday afternoon for Huacachina, a tiny tourist town just outside of Lima. Huacachina is sort of a bizarre place. An oasis in the middle of towering sand dunes that stretch for interminable miles, Huacahina is basically a very warm pond surrounded by palm trees. For a few hundred yards in any direction from the pond there are streets and buildings, mostly hostels and restaurants, and beyond that nothing but mountains of sand. Walking around Huacachina, I kept on getting the impression that the entire town was about to be buried.

After a party at the hostel Saturday night, Sunday morning was spent recuperating by the pool. It felt odd to relax under palm trees in a beach chair. My experiences in Peru thus far have been very far from that. Then in the afternoon we headed out to the dunes. We did this by riding, along with a few other tourists, all english speaking, in a dune buggy driven by a man who is paid to drive like a lunatic. Think a roller coaster, only substitute a coaster cart for a reinforced ATV, and instead of being in an amusement park, it's on Tatooine. Then we went sand-boarding, which consists of standing, kneeling, or lying on a fiberglass board as it zips down the side of a huge dune. A lot of fun, but I think it'll be a few weeks before I get all the sand out of my hair.

Speaking of which, at the moment we have no water here at PSF. Earlier this evening, unfortunately before I got to take a shower, the water pressure disappeared. This has apparently happened before, though not since I've been here. A few minutes ago I joined a group riding the truck down to the beach to get water in buckets and trash barrels so that we'll be able to flush the toilets. Evidently last time this wasn't done as promptly, there was some backup in the toilets, and a lot of people got typhoid. You get the idea.

Life in Pisco is many things, but, thus far at least, it is never boring.

Day Eight

An introspective day for me. I went to the French Hospital with the regular crew, plus Dave and Emily, who arrived yesterday. It's becoming a routine for me, jackhammering the floor and sanding the walls, the work I do is focused on cement, either breaking it into bits or wearing it smooth. I spent a lot of my tim thinking of abstract notions, like why I came here and where I'm going afterwards, in both the short and long term.

I was thinking today about how people travel so they can learn more about themselves, or at least I think I do. I read the idea in a book by Michael Crighton: you remove yourself from your regular surroundings, and all you're left with is you, the person having the experience; when you travel, you see how you behave when your surroundings are always changing, when the only constant is you, so you learn about yourself.

There are a lot of things around here with English writing on them, even though not many people in Pisco speak English. At lunch today the glasses they gave us had 'Made in China,' stamped on the bottom. It's comforting, in a way, to see labeling in my native language, because I know I understand it, I don't have to read it through two or three times to make sure I understand it.

It's been a week now, I arrived here one week ago today. I caught myself missing snow today for the first time in I don't know how long. I was reading A Wild Sheep Chase, I've only got 45 pages left, and the protagonist is in this remote house in a field in the mountains as it starts to snow, and I thought of our little house in Vermont. It's the first time I can ever remember sitting in the tropics and thinking longingly of New England. I usually think of myself as someone who tolerates winter until Spring comes along, but I know now, for the record, that while I love summer, I love winter too. I love snow. That's something about myself I learned through traveling today.

I saw a man near the hospital today wearing a Dead Kennedys T-shirt. It had a crossed out swastika on it, and said "Nazi punks, Fuck off!" I wonder if the guy wearing it understood what it said. I think probably yes, but many of the people who see him on the street do not.

I was reminded talking with Bryan and Killian tonight that not all of Peru is like this. We were talking about the folks in PSF who have gotten typhoid or parasites (there are a lot of them), and someone remarked that it wasn't surprising since we were living in "a festering bowl of disease." That's an uncharitable way of putting it, but he's got a point. When I said that, as this is my first time in Peru and I came straight to Pisco, this is my only impression of Peru, Evan said that there are many other Perus to see, in the forests and the mountains and all the other places that aren't here, between the desert and the sea.

Like I said, an introspective day on my part. On another note, my debit card has been lost/stolen and as a result I'm having the bank FedEx a new one down here. In the meantime, I'm being thrifty with the money I have, just under 100 soles. It should last until the card gets here (I hope).

Also, I actually bothered to read the shower instructions in the bathroom for the first time today, and so I had my first warm shower since arriving in Peru this evening. It was lovely.

I'm on the dinner cooking crew tomorrow, so I won't be going to the French Hospital, making dinner will be my job, along with a few other people, and I hear it really does take all day.

I'll tell you all about it tomorrow.

Day Six

It is 7:05 am and I can hear the strains of 'Eye of the Tiger' drifting out of the kitchen where breakfast is being cooked. Traffic is already a steady drone outside, occasionally rising in angry squawks of car horns, which are very high-pitched hereabouts. It has been less than a week, but I can safely say that Peruvian drivers are the most aggressive drivers I have ever seen, anywhere. The absence of traffic lights means that, on narrow city streets where one can't see around the corner, cars slow down when approaching interceptions and leans on the horn to alert any other car, invisible to him, that he is approaching the intersection. A few inches is more than enough space for vehicles, from the tiny 'tuk-tuk' cabs up to to buses, to pass each other. After my first two days of near constant traveling, I was honestly surprised I hadn't seen even one accident.

Yesterday I worked again at the French Hospital, and used a jackhammer for the first time ever. Everyone should use one at least once. Riding back to PSF, we remarked on how a lot of care is taken in making the front of buildings look very nice, or even fancy, while the sides are generally bare brick. Also: a useful, and frequently used loophole in Peruvian zoning law: if the top floor of a building is not completed, if it is still 'under construction,' then you don't have to pay taxes on it. As a result, nearly all buildings in Pisco have rebar sticking from the roofs and a few building materials scattered on top. The entire city looks vaguely like a construction sight, and a lot of it literally is.

Breakfast is being served now, and then we'll be off to work. Last night I felt the first rumblings of a possible traveler's bug. Everyone does sooner or later, mostly sooner. Sorry I shared that with you, but for posterity's sake, I'm recording it.

Until next time.

Day Four

Apologies for the delay, it's taken a few days to get my bearings to the point where I can write anything intelligible. These first few days have, however, been eventful.

Lima Airport welcomed me three days ago by informing me that my duffel bag, containing things like my toothbrush, bug-spray, and all my clothes besides the on my back, was still in Ecuador, and would arrive at Lima the following day, if, in fact, it ever arrived at all. While getting a room at a hostel for the night might have been a wiser course of action, a combination of jet-lag, apprehension in a new city, and wanting both to know where I was going and to be in the company of other gringos, I instead proceeded to the bus station and hopped on a bus for Pisco, knowing I would have to repeat this trip, twice, the next day. During the four hour bus ride, during which the onboard TVs played Rise of the Planet of the Apes and two Jason Statham action flicks, all dubbed, naturally, in Spanish, we rode through a landscape out of Mad Max. The ocean in the distance on the right pounded against jagged cliffs, and on the left were bare mountains and deep canyons, all of the same gray-yellow dust and rock. It's a weird environment when you first encounter it, desert by the sea.

Arriving at last in Pisco, I caught a cab, and the very friendly driver dropped me off in front of a metal wall painted blue with a door in the middle, with the PSF logo painted on it in white. I knocked on the door, and was welcomed by a woman named Yulia with neon pink hair, a familiar sight which immediately put me at ease. Ducking through the door, I entered a cement courtyard. There were a few wooden and plastic picnic tables, and plastic chairs were stacked in a corner, in front of a shed which had a hand painted sign on the front which said 'No Smoking in Bio-Diesel Area.' Next to this shed was a Maine state flag hanging on the wall. I knew now for certain that this was an excellent place.

I was given a bunk in 'The Wacky Shack,' above the office. Unpacking at this stage consisted of putting my backpack down, but it felt satisfying anyway. Then I went down to the common room to start meeting people. I met Hector, from Lima, and Nick, from Missouri, while Hector was in the process of removing all the hair from the top of Nick's head. Dinner was excellent, and afterwards we had a 'new volunteer meeting' covering things like the rotating cleaning and cooking schedule, the use and maintenance of power tools, and earthquake safety.

The next morning I was off to return to Lima. When I dialed he phone number I was given at the airport to call and check if my bag was in, an automated voice informed me that it didn't exist, so I was going on hope, along with a desire to have more than one pair of underwear. They played Titanic on the bus on the way to Lima. The movies, while dubbed, are not edited for content, and while I've seen Titanic many times before, I've never been more uncomfortable watching it as this time, with many small children on board while Kate Winslet is naked on screen.

After the four hour bus ride to Lima and forty minute cab ride to the airport, it took less than ten minutes in the airport to get my bag. When I first saw it I was so excited that I accidentally punched the ceiling, which amused the ladies in the office.

Then back to Lima, watching Gran Torino on the bus, which I thought was an odd choice for a movie to show on public transport in Peru, given how much of the movie is devoted to Clint Eastwood being a grumpy racist. Arriving finally in Pisco, fully equipped, I noticed on the cab ride that all the lights in the neighborhood around PSF were out, another power outage. But as I walked into the courtyard, the lights came back on, a good omen. I got my first taste of Pisco night life later that night, when some of us went to a club called 'Mistica." The clubbing experience is very similar here as in the states: bar, strobe-lights, and music with a lot of bass.

Yesterday, my first real day here, I went with a crew to 'The French Hospital,' which isn't actually French, but the the people who supplied the money for it to be built are. I sanded concrete and chiseled a brick doorway, very gratifying and manly work. Saturdays are half days, so we wrapped up around 2 pm, and came back to PSF. We had two birthdays yesterday, Sam and Lucy, and it was Sam's 21st, so we roasted a pig on the beach. A good time was had by all.

Sunday is our off day, so I'm sitting at one of the tables in the courtyard at 10:30, eating a papaya. From now on I'll be more regular with the posts, and get in some photos. Hope all's well back home, and that the Occupy protests are still going strong. If you have a dog, give it a hug for me, I'm sure they deserve it.