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.