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Do It Yourself

This, this is brilliant.  And true.  Ever wondered what it's like to be here?  To live third world stylee?  Your very own cut out and keep guide to third world travel, from Elizabeth Ames.

It is the very people who are led to escape America who may in fact be exporting the best of it. Those who are discontent and yet hopeful are always the immigrants, the adventurers, and the colonists. Those with no hope just lie down on the couch and flip the remote.

[...]

Do you simply want to drop out of the system, and find a place among some happy natives, who might just save your soul? Are you tired of having to make an appointment with your best friends or family for dinner - perhaps in two or three weeks? Do you long for a sense of being useful and welcome in your retirement years, instead of just superfluous? Well, welcome aboard. The Third World needs your energy.

’ll be your coach here for a bit to help you along the path. There is a lot you can do at home to get ready. We’ll take it in simple steps. Try this for at least a month and see if you have the makings of a true adventurous expat.

Step One – Language

If you have a foreign language station on your TV, start tuning it in and keep it on all the time. No fair going back to English, for you will most likely be going where English is not the dominant language. Australia, New Zealand, Bermuda, the Bahamas, are all very picky about their immigration and visa requirements, although Jamaica and Trinidad are probably still open. If you can live in another language, you have far more options. So try living with only the sound of Spanish or Portuguese for a while.

This experience alone may discourage some of you.

If you don’t have a TV, you are already way ahead of the game and may move to the advanced class.

Buy yourself a short-wave radio and plug in to some completely incomprehensible station for at least an hour a day.

Courage, this is just how two-year olds all over the world feel and they learn. Well, most of them, anyway.

If you are thinking of moving to India, you may substitute a deep reading in the Hindu and Moslem religions for this section.

Buy three CDs from the top countries on your list, if you can find them. Try dancing to them around your living room floor. Now try it in front of a full-length mirror. White people are notoriously bad dancers. Overcome it.

People will like you if you can dance, even if you can’t speak their language. If you are going to Latin America, play the music at twice your accustomed volume.

Latins love their music and always want to share it with their neighbors. Get used to the volume. If you are thinking of Greece and are a man, practice dancing in a line with other men. Rent Zorba and dance along.

Step Two – Comfort Addiction

Life in America is extremely easy on many levels compared to most of the countries I know. We are used to going into a store and finding exactly what we want, at a fair price, without any haggling. And we are used to doing it fast, fast, fast. We have very little patience and are easily frustrated. The thought that you may have to go to three stores to find a can opener is appalling.

Then consider that the first two can openers that you buy and try out will not work. Frustration, exasperation, anger, incomprehension, all certainly described my feelings about this most recent episode with the can openers.

To increase your tolerance for inconvenience, I suggest a multi-part program to wean you a bit from the comforts of home and prepare you for life outside your current comfort zone.

Go to your stove and disable two of the burners. Take off the covering plates. Then take the knob off the oven so you will not be tempted to use it. Oh, please, forget the microwave. No way will there be power lines strong enough to carry it.

Pack it into a closet. Do not, under any circumstances, use the freezer. Neither take anything out of the freezer or put anything in. Put duct tape on the door. Use just the body of the fridge.
You will notice a dramatic drop in your electric bill. Put the money into your savings account.
Now prepare your food this way for at least one week. Then you can have the other two burners back. You will wonder why you ever needed them. Really, who needs four burners? Just mix those vegetables together in the steamer.

Do not use the oven or freezer for at least a month. This will no doubt require that you simplify your cooking pattern and complicate your shopping. Your food will be fresher. You will buy smaller portions and cook more often. You will waste less food. You will appreciate your freezer and long for ice cubes and cream.

Do all your laundry by hand and hang it on the line. (Oh, I forgot, you are American. Well, put up a clothesline, even across the back porch if necessary). When you first start doing this you will wear everything that you own until you have no clean clothes. This is normal. You are allowed on this program, one trip to the laundromat during the first month. Then you can start again.

You will quickly learn that life is better with fewer clothes and that you really only like about a third of the things that you own. You will also find that you can easily wash every day the few clothes that really need washing. Your clothes will last longer without the agitation of the machine. You will learn not to use bleach, as it will sting your hands: it also destroys the fabric and the ozone layer. You don’t need to be that white. If your white clothes get too dingy, dye them blue.

If you hang your pajamas or nightgown outside every morning, they will be remarkably fresh.
Your standards for cleanliness will drop radically. This is an essential for life on the road.

Of course, if you are currently living in an apartment, you will be crowded in the bathroom with the clothesline across the tub. You will be complaining about the sheets and towels. Stop it. Be grateful that you do not have to go down to the river and pound the clothes on the stones on your hands and knees. Appreciate what your great grandmother’s life was like. Know that when you get where you are going, there will be someone who will wash them for you for a pittance.

After you have done it yourself, you will pay her more.

You will notice an impressive decline in your electric bill without the washer and dryer. Put the money into your savings account.

Now, go through your closets and give your extra clothes away. The aim here is to get down to two suitcases, no more than you can carry. And, if you are anything like me, half of one suitcase will have to be reserved for books, CDs, and your portable stereo system. You cannot travel effectively on the quest for paradise if you cannot carry your own bags. You’ll never get off the gringo highway. You will be condemned to staying at Hilton Hotels. Not what you are looking for, I am certain.

Buy anything that you need only at thrift or second hand stores. Start offering half of what is on the ticket to see the reaction. It takes courage to do this but, in many countries, the art of pricing an item is a dance you are expected to dance for hours. Otherwise, you are considered rude.
You may not go to Wal-Mart’s, Walgreen’s, Target’s, K-Mart, Home Depot, Circuit City, Bed Bath & Beyond or Barnes and Noble. Convenience is not one of the perquisites of the Southern Hemisphere. You will buy half as much and spend twice as much time doing it. Your shopping addiction will end. You are learning how little you really need.

Pick your favorite country and study the exchange rate. When you are shopping, multiply the dollar price by the appropriate number. (Yes, bring your calculator, who can multiply by 28 in their heads?) This will give you practice in learning your new monetary system.

You will notice a dramatic increase in your checking account. Transfer the money to your savings account.


Step Three – Foreign Adjustment, NeoColonialism And Racism

If you live in a larger city, this part will be much easier. But even in small towns now in America you will be able to do this.

Eat in foreign restaurants, preferably genuine ones that have actual foreigners among the clientele. Never, ever, never eat at a fast food restaurant.

Eliminate red meat from your diet. This will save you the shock of having to buy it at an open air market where it has been sitting in the sun all day, covered in flies.

Buy vegetables that you do not recognize. Buy packaged boxes of unfamiliar grains from other countries. These will have names like cous-cous and polenta. Download some recipes and cook (on your two burners). Add lots of salt and butter. Try maybe adding hot sauce. Or honey. Look up the nutritional information on the web and feel superior.

Try, if you can, not to eat any bread. In most developing countries the art of bread making has not evolved and will disappoint you. And you cannot make your own because you have no oven, remember? So learn to live without. Flour is not indigenous to the developing world. Substitute corn tortillas.

Put a map of the world on the wall. Learn the names of all the nations in South America, then Africa, then Asia. If you are extremely brave and very gifted and have a modern map, you may also try for the names of the countries in the former Soviet Union, although personally, I would find them too cold. But this is an exercise in globalizing your mind.

Read at least three books on the following subjects: Globalization, The World Bank, The IMF, the Cuban Revolution, the Sandanistas, the Zapatista rebels, the School of the Americas or the bombing of Vieques. If you are not an avid reader, you may substitute one history book by Howard Zinn.

This is to prepare you to hear the absolute worst about your country. It is better to learn these things in the privacy and security of your own home than to go out in the world unprepared and have some foreigner have to educate you. If you skip this step, your new neighbors may give you the information on little pieces of paper wrapped around rocks and thrown through your window.

Practice saying “ I am sorry that my government is so stupid. Please don’t hold it against the American people, who are really quite generous at heart.”

Most of the people in the rest of the world are not pink-mottled-skinned palefaces. You will most likely be in the minority. Learn how this feels by taking a weekend trip to either a Black or Hispanic section of any large city. Stay in a hotel, eat at the restaurants, walk around in the streets and feel conspicuous. Get used to it.

While you are in that neighborhood, visit the emergency room in the local public hospital. This last step will prepare you to not feel superior should you land in a third world hospital. If you are planning to go to Thailand or Cuba, which have reputed excellent health care systems, you may skip this step.

When you arrive back home, look again at the map on your wall. Imagine how rich the former colonial nations would be if the industrialized world had paid them a fair price for their labor and raw materials.

Repent. Drink a cup of strong, fair-traded coffee. Write out checks to the United Negro College Fund and Doctors Without Borders. Mail them. Feel better.

Step Five – Ready?

Are you still with me? Do you still want to leave? Even if you are discouraged, look at all the changes you have made in your life patterns without leaving home. Look at all that money in your savings account. Look at all the time you are spending taking good care of yourself. Think of all the oil that you are saving.

Maybe a few adjustments to your life were all that was needed. Or maybe you might want to take just a short trip.

But for those of you who are really enjoying this, bravo, you are almost ready for a life outside America.

Ok, now for the advanced class: disconnect your hot water for a week. Then go to your circuit breaker and shut off all the electricity and see if you can live without that for even 24 hours. Maybe you will have to wait for summer for these last two steps, but do them; really, it will help you more than fifteen guidebooks.

Now unplug your phone. Feel how it will be to not talk to your family and friends on a regular basis. Unless, of course, you are coming here to the Dominican Republic where it will be just a few pesos a minute or if you manage hi-speed internet in your new home and can use the internet phone system.

Do not flush the toilet paper down the toilet. Use instead a wastebasket on the floor. This will be difficult but most places are simply not equipped to handle toilet paper. Best you should know this beforehand and adapt. After all, I am not asking you to remove the toilet seat although that would also be good practice.

Stop taking all prescription medicine unless you are a diabetic. Cure yourself. You cannot be sickly and manage this life. Nor will you find a clinic on every corner.

If after all this, you still want to head out to the wilds, BRAVO – you have made it.

Take out your money from the savings account. Sublet your apartment or house at a profit for at least three months. You will need more money than you thought as the dollar is plummeting. Then buy a ticket or better yet trade in some frequent flyer miles for a ticket with a changeable return date with no penalty.

Make sure you have a good tenant so that you can stay for a year, at least. At the very least.
Select and break in three pairs of shoes. Make sure that you can walk at least two miles in each pair. Never start a trip with new shoes.

Then carefully pack two bags. Unpack them. Remove half the clothes. Replace them with rechargeable batteries and charger, a pocket flashlight, six books that you have always been meaning to read, CDs, and portable speakers for your Walkman. Pick up your bags and see if you can actually carry them. Adjust accordingly.

Transfer all your addresses from your email account onto a disk. Forward your mail and your bills to your sister along with a photocopy of your passport and driver’s license. Leave her as well a rough itinerary, the names and phones of any contacts that you might have, and a schedule for your check in calls so that she will know if she has to start a search.

Accidents can happen all over the world.

Buy a good offshore major medical policy.

Throw a really big goodbye party with all your friends so that you will be too embarrassed to come home in a month.

Leave.

And – most importantly – don’t look back. Only right in front of you. That will be exciting enough.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:06 pm ~ There are shitloads - 2 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

What Does Your Passport Say?

I was thinking about a particularly uncompromising friend of mine, who's lived in a trendy subdistrict of an artsy EU capital for around ten years longer than I've been a permanent foreigner.  I was wondering if we had anything in common; I, the peruvian immigrant newbie, and he, the social gadfly with about a billion languages under his belt.

Immigrant.  It would be as if I'm slinging mud to call him that.  In any of his languages, I'd be somehow equating him with arabs, with pakistanis, with nigerians, with irish, with chinese.  With all those subgroups who don't sound kinda cool in a wine bar.  Not Done.  Not him, not at all.  (this is my thought-trip, though. Not his - perhaps I'm wrong.  My instinctive assumption is he'd react as if attacked.  But maybe I'm just racist by proxy.)

And then I wonder if he's changed his passport, yet.  Immediately I see my friend in a livid visual, shrugging.  It's the EU.  Why should he?

He's an Ex Pat, I realise.  Not an immigrant.   I'm getting my citizenship   He - well, why should he?

And the cogs grind on, not letting me sleep and forget all this nonsense: what is the difference between an immigrant and an ex pat anyway?

Is it ... cash?  Someone who's got the best of both worlds, the money to go home, and the career not to have to.  Lack of commitment?  Someone who's relocated for better, not for worse.   Is the point not being to exist in this new country, but rather to refuse to exist in that old one?

That's another arrogance, right there, in the thought grind: ex pats bring something to their host cultures, and they often stick with it through difficulty and deprivation - they're not all hollywood style arms dealers with a colonial mansion and a maid.

When I read ex pat blogs, when I chat to ex pat people - they're bright, interesting people, fully aware of themselves in a way that people back home might never be.  The shit ones, they complain all the time.  The great ones, their interest is lively.  Energised, in that magpie way.  Their sense of humour fully deployed in the task of deflecting all that cultural shit that just bogs and depresses me.  They're engaging.  Only sometimes bitter.

But they're not lifers.  Not immigrants.  ('Not like me,' I say, and then wonder)

Where does that come from, that certainty that for all the crap, me and Peru will never be over?  Not love, that's for sure.  From connection?

And I wonder what it says in their passports, the culture hoppers whose lives I read avariciously and yet half heartedly, hoping to find convergence: will, rachel, emily, edvard, barbara, fned, vanesita.  What about them?  Are they ex pats? or immigrants?

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:48 pm ~ There are shitloads - 4 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Noche Buena - The Good Night

It's the 24th December and, in the hispanic world, today is Christmas.

(the 25th counts only as some anonymously municipal day off work, for going to the beach or the river, cool off a little.)

The city seems empty - January and February are vacation months, so the usual population have traveled, and won't be back till March.  In their place are scattered families, come to visit grandma but faltering slightly, left strangers in the city they grew up in.  The shopping frenzy - such as it was - happened yesterday when the markets were still trading.  In a country where only children get presents (even then no more than three), the Big Shop takes four minutes and consists of turkey, two potatoes, a few tins of milk, a slab of chocolate and cinnamon, plus a panetón.

Panetón is a Milanese fruit cake, but far more popular in Peru than anywhere in Italy, or indeed, the world.  Families have prepared their houses by buying up a single branch of silver fir and black carrier bags of moist mosses - not for a Christmas tree, but for a nativity scene.  The infant Jesús has been taken to a priest for his blessing, by now, and is surrounded by lions, llamas, elephants, tiny giraffes, giant rabbits; the menagerie circle el infante, José and María rather menacingly.  Nativity scenes are serious - people kneel to them, pray at them, and touch the feet of the plastic baby reverently.

It's hot and sun-bleached, here, with light clouds scudding across the sky as if humans never yet happened.  Andean breezes are always frosty, a promise of night chills, because if the sun shines by day, the mercury always plummets at sunset.  For now, though, when the clouds clear and the wind drops, the sun's heat presses heavily against you; a physical weight, your thighs suddenly burned by hot denim.

The municipalidad didn't decorate city hall or the plaza de armas till the 20th - trying to cut down on electric costs, though Peru's economy is only just now starting to emerge from a relative boomtime.  All christmas decs - indoors or out - emit a whining, tinny, discordant jingle - each fairy light set on a different tune.  The mix and fade give you an eerie sense that you're some minor actor in 'Bride of Chucky,' about to be stabbed in the calf by an infantile toy turned demon.  The decs look good; the town council have finally started to adopt the Peruvian custom of hanging large parcels in palm trees, of wrapping the trunk in silver foil.  Even so, some joker has wired up a five foot neon candle shape to resemble an ejaculating penis, complete with bulbous balls and red veins on the shaft.  So old world pagan fertility festivals live on, as a drunken joke.

The bus companies are shuttered up; nobody can enter or leave the mountains without them.  It's well known how dangerous it is to travel in the next three days as men who work menial jobs go on a borgogna bender, chugging pilsener in litre bottles, or splashing out on sweet green portuguese tinto.

Tonight, NocheBuena, Christmas dinners will start preparation around 8pm, guests (of whom - alone in the city - I'm one) will arrive about ten.  The tradition is to visit seven churches before midnight, though the cathedral's been in a state of disrepair so long it's practically impossible without transport to distant campo chapels.  At midnight, we'll eat.  A thick slice of boiled yellow potato, a drizzle of chili salsa, a leg of turkey and a slice of panetón - the fruit cake bigger than your head - all sharing the same plate. 

Turkey's something of an inferior meat in Europe - dry, white.  Tasteless.  In Peru it's a different species.  Drumsticks are massive, length of a small child's arm, the meat so dark it appears black, with a strong, smoky taste.  (If you tasted it once, you'd be off European turkey for life.  [Cook a goose.  A duck.  A monkey, even.  Cook something that has flavour, for the hell of it.]) 

The drumstick tastes meaty enough to compete with, and dwarf the red chili.  Easily.  To the right, a teacup full of hot evaporated milk, solid chocolate, cinnamon and molasses.  If it's been a good year, a glass containing half a tinned peach: twice the price of alcohol.  To the left, a thimble of red sweet dessert wine - for toasting, not drinking.

I used to hate Christmas here.  One year, wanting something - anything - more festive than the beach with a hangover on the 25th, I tantrummed for a multi-cultural Christmas.  I had that expat irritability (that longing for home, dressed up as variance), the first two years - my culture's biggest fiesta, I'd think, and you're ruining it.  I wanted a Christmas where my world also existed, where I could open a present, without having to hide to do so.  Well, if it's really that important to you, the family here conceded, doubtfully, we can go to the store and buy a tin of tuna.

I began to describe British Christmases differently, hoping to sell them to Peru.  It's like the US movies, I'd say.  Trees and jumpers and a lot of presents.  It's one of the best bits, giving people presents. Everybody gets presents, for everybody else.  And it's three days, not just one night. (three days, mark you, you deutsch Christmas Grinches!  Not one!)  By day two everyone's sick of drinking and they want to kill each other, but there's no transport and they can't escape.  I tried, but I didn't make it sound too good.

A South American Christmas is like a South American fiesta.  It's not about presents, nobody has money for that amount of food, and not many businesses really shut for the season.  Christmas is, however, a house full of people: the laughing conversation, the jokes and ribbing, kids running wild until the small hours, all of us sitting around a plastic covered table in a bare concrete room with the same old faces who seem never to change from year to year.  It's not so different - like your Christmas, but with sunblasted outdoors, no games, no TV, no carpet to blob out on. 

This year, I begin to imagine myself UKside, trying to get the guys in from the pub unsloshed by midnight, for a chocolatada.  Imagine trying to persuade them to hang out at a table with just a thimble of plonk for five hours, shooting the breeze.  This year, it begins to seem like Christmas is Peru-style, and I imagine how one day I might miss it.

This. Is. Water.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 5:32 pm ~ Love Letters Straight from One Heart [ View ~ Add ]

Happy Monkey

Nuthin much goin on hereabouts, and shedload of catch up posts still need to be written from way back, back in November, back when it was raining and we still had teabags.  Anyway, I'm off to lie in a hammock in the jungle and think about posting. 

I just really wanted to pop in (pop on?) and wish both my loyal readers a Happy Monkey.  *

* You know you want to meme the hell out of that one, bwoy.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 5:52 pm ~ There are shitloads - 2 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

The Nebulous, Grey, Vague BAD

Now I get it.  Why in the 21st century, we still don't have a paved road to the major city of the region.  Why the cathedral never got rebuilt (despite a public telethon, and a government promise - '90 days' - posted up over two years ago).  Why the teachers in the schools and colleges don't have any qualifications.  Why the only good hospital is two regions away.  I thought it was maybe corruption - but I've seen the corruption and only the police are explicitly corrupt.  At any other level, it's just a manifestation of the same circles of social exclusion that exist in the west, also.

And then I attended the Asia Pacific Economic Community's annual investment conference.  Boo-yah.  What a total eye-opener.

It's like reading VS. Naipaul, lamenting on the state of Africa.  African states with generally wealthy ruling classes, educated at the best global institutions money can buy entry to.  With industrious, socially invested middle classes.  (No, mi niño pequeño , not everybody is holding a clay pot in a dusty refugee camp.)  But still Africa doesn't advance as fast as it should. 

Why don't the poorer countries advance?  What is it that's holding them back?  Corruption, you suppose, shaking your head.  That nebulous other, that grey, vague bad that can't be laid at the feet of anyone in particular.

They're not evil, the men who run this city.  They're not even particularly corrupt (although at lower echelons, corruption does abound.)  It's just that their only real talent is backslapping, is political tongue extension and slaver, is finding the Big Man in the room, and greasing his palm on the offchance.

Faced with people - powerful people, rich people - people who actually DO things, they're lost like orphan ducklings.  They feel keenly the lack of the empty ritual, the exclusive circular south american camaraderie.  They're lost.  And so, when the prime minister pops in for a chat and a photocall, I ring the directer of local industry, the president of the region (who usually flips burgers in a local greasy spoon).  Get your fat arse over here and do something, I say.  The Prime Minister is coming.

Mr Big Politician of the North of Peru is in the dinner queue for canapes. 

He politely declines to leave the free food and do something - anything! - for the folk who elected him. 

I yanked my 'I promise not to kill Mister Bush if you let me in' tag from my suit and went for a futile stomp round the pissant, pointless fountains, my ears steaming in frustration.  So now I know why we don't get paved roads. 

Posted by Sarsparilla at 9:09 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

Not Apt

written November 08

I'm supremely bad at immigration.  There are people who are good at it, that's how I know.  Will.  Rob, who's been here ten years, Ronald, who's been here fifteen, or Tomas, who's managed more than twenty, and is the president of the region (a deeply unpopular one, but still).

But for me, it's still a rare day that I don't find difficult - and those hard-fought for - products of years here, fighting, now.  I can see why in many ways it's better here than home, and most days I still want to go upside the head of the next slack-jawed fool who stares dumbfounded and loose mouthed in the street at the White Monstrosity that is me.  That beats into submission any of my life, my character, my history, my name, and assumes dominance over everything.  I want to shut their mouths with my fist four or five times a week, when they can't speak for laughing at my temerity in daring to be white in their line of vision.

As I said, I have many internationalist friends, many displaced friends, many respectable expat types, many crusty backpacker trash acquaintances, and I know full well that a Good Immigrant doesn't Want to Twat the Locals.

But, see.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 8:55 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

Lost to the Fight

written in October 08

"You need to be away from excuses to write. If there's any excuses about - anyone to talk to, anything - you won't write at all," says the Poet, and, two days after I'd wanted to write about change, four days after I'd wanted to write about mudslides and sticky mototaxis ... one brief, stupid (inevitable) argument has sucked every good thought out of my brain, and left me suffused with pointless rage.  And it is pointless, because I'm most angry at myself for being angry.

I know I like fighting too much, I know I need to develop the ability to walk away;  I know I run away too much, and I need to develop the ability to retrace my steps and come back to the world.

I was a bad fighter as a child, and responded to conflict by running.  And hating myself for it.  In my twenties I learnt to fight; to fight and to win; fortunately the knowledge that I could win makes it possible to recede, to leave it for the other party to smack their head pointlessly against.

I see now how many coupley spats birth not from an insult, but from a perception of a mortal insult, where perhaps only petulance really lay.  I don't want to be the gritana who responds to all situations by yelling.  Things work out better, usually, if I don't fight.  I hated it as a child, the receding, but away from the slap and the shove of the moment I see how it gives me distance, space.  Time not to have to respond.  Not to let someone else puppet me against my will.

But it's more than I can do to stay calm sometimes.  And the blood runs hot, the fire burns inside, and every thought, every reflection, every observation is torn.  Who I am is lost to the fight.  I really don't want to fight any more.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 8:27 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

On Shutting Up and Taking It

written in May 08

Why don't you try showing them a bit of British stiff upper lip? 

If they're nasty to you, just be nasty back?

When I'm warm and inviting, then still even the anglophiles continue to believe all Europeans are unfeeling, incapable of love.  That's when I'm taking it on the chin, when I'm doggedly continuing to enquire after the health of every racist, continuing to proffer my abject thanks for their time of the most ignorant jingoist who's told me to go back where I came from.  If I start ranting, I only confirm their long held suspicions, and every Euro everywhere is assumed to be what I show.

It won't be a second of angry outburst, it will be a revelation of what they always knew to be true.  Two minutes will be considered real, and two years of shiteating smiles be forgotten in an instant.  Remember, these are people who have half a mind to believe I'm less human than they are.  I would merely lose the loyalty of the two or three in the twenty four thousand who still reply when I ask a question.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 8:43 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

Upon Ageing

This time last year ... I didn't know (though I should have guessed) it was gonna get a lot worse before it got better. 

And as time goes on, as it begins to be decades that are passing, I see which bad points are waning and which are hardening into character flaws, in the mirrors are that my also ageing friends.  And it's a surprise, because, against all prior evidence, they're the utterly predictable ones. He's an arrogant cityboy, she's a pedant academic, they're doormats, he's a lush ... and I'm a bloody hippie.

I was not good value, in England.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 8:20 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

Achuar Huayna: The Jungle Come to Town

A-wa-hoo-na. In spanish, awajun.

They live in the jungle, north east of here.  They carry spears, their tribal chief wears a headdress of feathers and beads.  They own the land that the government sells off to US aid companies.  They've successfully protested against not having a say in these deals, twice now, and retain veto rights.  When they protest, they block the roads - the crucial thoroughfares from the lush food-producing Amazon jungle to the aridity of the Andean sierra: god-sized rock chasms that grow nothing; to the coastal desert: the blasted inhuman wasteland that grows nothing.  They can freeze commerical trade across the entire north of Peru just by standing in the road and shaking those spears.

They are a frightening spectacle in a roadblock.  They use rocks and lanzas (spears) to smash, they group and physically shake the vehicles until the terrified drivers exit.  They get what they want.

And they wanted to march here, to a regional capital, a governmental administrative centre in the high sierra,  walking here from the distant rainforest to the Amazonian rim, 2400 metres up above the basin.  They wanted to bring spears, lanzas, headdresses, rocks and blowdarts to the modern city.  And this is what coastal peruvians, Limeñan peruvians (capital city dwellers), think our city in the sierra is like.  Their eyes bug out when you mention where you live, they ask you how you cope with the grass skirts, and the bones through the nose.  In reality, we're an isolated, conservative, very classically colonial spanish city, all patios and haciendas, arched cloisters and carved wooden balconies.  Behaviour here is tightly regulated by the all powerful threat of social disapproval.    When the Achuar Huayna, the men of the jungle, threaten to walk to the city, shake their sticks, break things, the serranos laugh, incredulous.  The jungle come to town?

It becomes the hot insult of the moment.  "¡Oye!  ¡Achuar Huayna!"  You jungle bunny.  You native.  You savage.  If they actually come, the good citizens will lock up their valuables and their children, because, funny though these people might be, these savages have no respect, they will destroy everything, if they can.

The Achuar Huayna don't come.  The President strikes a deal about selling off oil rich rainforest to the yanqui invader, and bribes them into silence with a promise.  Children yelling, "achuar huayna" at each other over a street soccer match tail off.  The sierra is the sierra again, and the jungle can't encroach on us.  But, like the avalanches - like the earthquakes - little by little, they change us.  The university begins to offer Achuar Huayna as a second language.  Four people opt onto the course.  People who've done business with the chaps in the feathered headdresses slowly come forward and say they're cultured, they're respectful, actually.

It's not much.  But.

It gives me hope that one day, even this godforsaken corner of nowhere could change.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 1:24 pm ~ Love Letters Straight from One Heart [ View ~ Add ]

Cometh the Hour

"That pipedream of a fresh start, with funds, that most people have," mentions my oldest friend on earth, in an airmail letter, all red and blue stripes, flimsiness, and anticipation.  It has the odour of having been created slowly, that rarest quality in our world.

The word pipedream always makes me think of Eugene O'Neill, of an imagined, anonymously dusty US barroom, lived in philosophically whenever I revisited 'The Iceman Cometh', and fortuitously never seen.  A graveyard of hope and ambition, every man an angry drunk, angry at and reliant on the excuse that keeps them there, that they dare not disbelieve.  A pipedream.

If you haven't read O'Neill - he used to be an entire adjective, an epithet of his own creation, like the even lesserknown Odets - Odets - I urge you to.  He's one of those reasons that reading exists in our world.

The pipedream of a fresh start, though - with funds, the all-important with funds: it's a nail-meets-head line.  It is indeed, what we've all longed for.  A rebirth, a second chance.  And I want to tell you, if you ever have the opportunity (and they do present themselves, rarely, those moments where you find yourself untied, uncommitted, loosed from the world you worry may one day imprison you - and then the shutters close, and your path is chosen for you once again.)  ... well, I know I moan a lot here, I know I stress the difficulties*, I know I tell my older friends that immigration is the hardest thing I've ever done ... it is worth it, you know.  It is worth running after the last chink of untrammeled, lively, dancing light, and dropping everything you ever knew to leap blindly, flailing, into something New.  It is one of the finest opportunities you can ever give yourself, a statement of self-faith more marvelous and total than you can perhaps believe from where you're sitting now.

[*Most of which are attributable to the fact I earn twenty to forty pounds a month in an area more remote than anything I could previously imagine, and one where they Don't Like Outsiders.  Nine hours from a shop, man, fifteen hours from a book, twenty two hours from a newspaper.]

I groan, and I moan, and I flail, and I fuck up, but it is every minute worth the ticket.  I wake up in the Andes, when I could be in suburbia.  So, what I wanted to say, is, it's not a pipedream ..  Not from here, four degrees south of the Equator, at the rim of the Amazon Basin, it isn't.

"They realized, standing on the wharf, that the orderly, grey, past life was of no significance.  They had reached that point at which they would be offered up, in varying degrees, to chaos or to heroism.  So they were shaking with their discovery, beside the water, as the crude, presumptious town stretched out behind them, was reeling on its foundations in the sour earth.  Nothing was tried yet, or established, only promised.

Such glimpses are, of course, a matter of seconds."               

Voss, Patrick White.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 1:05 pm ~ There are shitloads - 2 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

A Beautiful Birkenau Sunset

If you'd never read Primo Levi, you wouldn't know what understatement truly means.  In a previous life, my British life, I had huge holidays - weeks and weeks and weeks of money-tight nothing to do and nobody freeness stretching out stark across endless summer skies.  So I would set myself homeworks - walk down every alley in East London, read all the early Black American Literature I can find (see every church Hawksmoor ever constructed, and rate it on a one to ten scale for diabolism).  And so on.

The most misguided was the year I read as much Holocaust literature as I could lay my hands on.  Living in what was once a Huguenot / Jewish emigre ghetto, I wasn't short of materials.  That's how I found Primo Levi.  A writer who isn't trying to entertain you, will not manipulate your response into the rise and fall or a story arc, a writer who doesn't want you to feel this, this and this about the world.  But simply wants to describe a part of it.  To bear witness.

I was on a crowded number eight trundling down Oxford Street, London.  A red double decker London bus, in the commuter hour, groaning and aching its way down one of the most overcrowded tourist shopping streets on earth.  A spot less conducive to moments of spiritual searching may no exist in the world.  I read about a cattle train packed with sick, frightened humans, traveling at night beneath Polish stars.  Its occupants dispossessed, aching, not yet fully aware they were travelling to Auschwitz, to the camps and the ovens, but aware of being packed so tightly that some couldn't breathe, that the elderly chap over there, five crushed bodies away, has succumbed, has died on his feet, with the air squeezed out of him by other, pressing flesh; the pressure still so great that his corpse cannot fall.  I read that the stars are bright, that the snow starts to fall softly on the crush of people made bodies by proximity, by fear; the train passes under a dark bridge (and I pass Selfridges). it judders, slows, begins to halt for a time.  Somewhere, someone on that train lets out the only sound they hear all night - a low, building wail.

It's when I close the book there, realising that this is too much, this is too painful (this is not what I can carry right now), that I realise how I've been crying.  In the commuter bus on Oxford Street, flooded with secondhand pain.  Levi didn't describe that sound, he didn't load it down with lead words, he simply stated it.  You don't need him to add to your horror.  You already know that the cry was bestial.

You know, I always believe (cling to belief, maybe) that the mind protects us; that we are incapable, literally incapable, of accurately remembering pain.  I can remember a walk on the beach, close my eyes and feel sun on my face, hear the crunch between my toes.  Remember a delicious meal, and half taste the fatty afterglow, the fat satedness, the last swilling drop.  But I can't remember pain.  Shock, yes, surprise.  Repulsion, even.  The label of it.  'This was PAIN: bad thing / do not repeat.'  The fact of the pain.  But the pain itself - the metallic tang of intense now - it's truly gone.  And isn't that just one more beautiful detail or our world?

Posted by Sarsparilla at 12:21 pm ~ There are shitloads - 7 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Nativity Scene

Written 10th November, 2008

I don't really know how or why they made me so angry, the hippies.  Eight and a half months pregnant girl, fresh from five weeks in a hammock on the Amazon, twenty four year old rainbow boy, arse hanging out of the holes in his jeans and dreads - blond dreads - to the small of his back.  Rainbow community hippies, desperate to impress, first they scowl at me, then they ask for a free bed for the night (then the next, then the next ...) Once in my house, they wander in and out of the rooms, inquisitively fingering things.  They're talented, interesting, too.  They want to buy some land in Peru.  They want their child to be born here, so he'll be Peruvian.  So they'll be Peruvian too.

I explain it doesn't work like that, that this is a rigidly controlled conservative culture where even the concept of individualism has to be explained (like a lecture on Marxism at Sunday School).  I ask how much they want to spend on the land, perhaps there's someone I know.  They want to find a shaman who will cleanse them for the pleasure of curing another human, not for cold cash transaction.  They want a world without money.  They want a place deep in the jungle where they can live off the land, not be noticed, and have Full Moon parties.

I say that I never met a shaman who works for free; this is a poor country, and shamans need to eat.  I contact a friend who can rent them a shack in a community in the cloud forest for $30 a month.  I say that they will have problems with the police if they illegally immigrate, squat the jungle, and host drug orgies.  I point out that hospitals in Peru cost a lot of money (you enter, pay the doctor, he tells you what medicine he needs to put in you, and you go back outside and and buy the meds, the scalpels, the syringes, then bring them back with you).  And that no one will help them without it.  They would step over corpses in the hospital entrance rather than take bread from their own mouths, mouths that have also known hunger.

They get angry when I tell them to offer a payment for their accommodation.  Scoff when I ask if they're not scared about when the baby comes.  She's no idea if she's seven, eight, nine months pregnant, but the contractions she's having don't scare her: she's read some books "and it could still be a week yet."

I know the people here, I know that every time they enter my premises, I get closer to a trumped up drug running charge (drug running and rape being the fave accusations du jour in el invidioso Perú.)  They set off, mid contractions, for the shack in the jungle, complaining it's not what they wanted, they wanted something further away from the world.  The old lady who's renting to them feels so bad for the unborn child that she refuses to ask them for money, rent, deposit, that she pays a midwife to pretend to be a civilian, so the baby doesn't die while its father is insisting it be born in a tree. 

I don't know why they make me so angry.  It's like Mary, Joseph, and a donkey, turned up on Christmas Eve, and I turned them away from my stable.  I beg them to tell me if they need help, if they truly need help, rather than just a free ride.  They don't want Peru, or Peruvians, they call the culture here 'impoverished' because the Amazonian tribes have access to TV.  I plead with them to stay in contact, while denying them a bed in the same breath.  Inside, unspoken, I'm saying, 'Don't die.  Don't die.  Don't kill your baby.  Don't do this.  Don't die.'

Posted by Sarsparilla at 5:09 pm ~ There are shitloads - 5 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Rise and Fall

Written in May 08, in Peru.

A sudden rush of blancita-bella gringa-ismo.  Rapidly followed by my souring mood.  Soy humana, I want to say.  I am human.

Rapidly followed by a backlash.  Allowing yourself to appear in any way different is not valued in conservative societies - is actively punished.  The glares and refusals to acknowledge take a temporarily malevolent turn.  Someone pours condensed milk in my soup.  Someone yells 'whore' as I pass.  Someone shoves me and calls me gaveota.  Seagull.  'You are not Peruvian,' he explains.  Existo, I want to say.  I am human.  I exist.

This is the worst part of rootlessness, of never having access to a moment in life where you are normal.  You begin to believe them, to accept this shit as if it's inevitable.  But how pathetic, unh?  To reduce people like that.  I am human.  I exist.

That it comes to this.  That I have to fight for that.  Me agota.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 2:05 pm ~ There are shitloads - 5 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Unmoved

Written 13th May, 2008

The road is clear, one month after the derrumbes.  As we travel by daylight I begin to see how euphemistic that expression 'clear' can be.  Peruvian roads, when they are good roads and not pitted blowsy dirt tracks occupied by miniature orange dust tornadoes, have a concrete V shaped ditch alongside.

The men have been working for the one month steadily, and still they have only cleared the road, not the ditch.  The mountains have fallen into the ditches, have claimed them, have claimed a large part of the road beyond them, also.  For most of the twelve hour bus journey, the road becomes single lane, along precipitous mountain turns, with vehicles hurtling at speed in opposing directions.  To overtake on a blind hairpin bend overhanging an abyss is nothing unusual in Peru.  As our bus thunders past, we see that the mountains are still steadily collapsing.

Yet the danger is not the mountain, but the river.  Roads built along winding valleys parallel the outer turn of white water cascades powerful enough to cut through the solid rock that defeats human engineering.  The rains all last month added to that power.  As we enter the second of three dangerous, dizzyingly mountainous three hour passes, we descend through the level of clouds, to another world beneath, and reach one of many valley floors.  Three times the river has simply taken the road away.  Concrete, steel and tarmac, those staunch reliables of western culture have been bitten off like taffy treacle.  Diggers have tried to cut a new path, solid as the dust and rubble that still falls onto it, and not quite as wide as the wheels of our double decker mega coach which must navigate with terrifying precision.

The more fortunate can sleep through the perilous high wire driving - the rest of us peer blankly through tinted glass windows with hearts in mouths.

It's utterly impossible, but we lose footing only once.  The bus climbs again, into the next cordillera.  A forty minute climb, hugging peaks at every moment, brings us up to Olmos, on the next valley floor.  There, the road has been cleared, but the pueblo is not yet so lucky.  Alongside our dusty track lie massive boulders.  Two the size of a fully mature oak tree, and all at least half that size.  They lie where they have rolled and bounced.

Peruvian houses are the same anywhere, but in the cities they have a patina - the whitewash and plaster on the adobe, red tiles hammered onto corrugated zinc roofs, the iron rails of glassless airtrap windows replaced by worked mahogany rods.  In the campo, adobe walls are raw and half corroded, plastered with gigantic political slogans and symbols to persuade the illiterate; their battered and rusted zinc lids held to the walls by a series of big stones.  The eight foot rocks have bounced, smashed, entered and destroyed every house.  You can even see where trees have grown around them, humans have plumbed winding pipes around them, the rocks fallen in previous years.  And I can't avoid the thought: how deprived of opportunity do you have to be, to build a mud and zinc home in a place where rocks the size of God's teeth rain from dark skies with regularity?  What would pass through your mind as you kiss your kids goodnight in a place like that?

The road winds on, sometimes built a mere meter away from the outer rim of massive twists in white water river rush.  Why would you even put a road there?  Clearly the river is going to eat and cut and tear and destroy.  (I'm reminded of a British tourist who once remarked, 'if they were English they'd just build a bloody big suspension bridge'.)

The ride itself is not the terrifying detail, however.  I know that in two days' time, I'll take this route in reverse, and at night.  Buses to Bumfuck only travel at night, and so frequently somersault into rivers that the Foreign Office baldly states: your travel insurance is invalidated if you take even one of them.  Between twelve hour journeys, drivers often do not rest.  The trickiest part of the route is, in reverse, the final leg, when the driver's lids are falling at the sheer, twisting boredom of the unlit roads.  Frequently, I've seen colectivo drivers switch off their headlamps as they swerve wildly and crazily around potholes, superstitious about saving battery, and hoping that when the lamps are switched back on, it will jump-start tired eyes into life.  The buses are often illegal cut and shut constructions - a modern pluxury road liner built onto the base of a flatbed lorry - that explode into their original parts when impacted.  And they are often, often impacted.  This is La Día de la Madre, a busier weekend than Christmas, New Year, Independence Day or Easter Week.  Hordes in their thousands are desperate to see Mamá, and will accept any form of transportation to get home at an hour that won't cost them their job.  When we arrive at the coast, we immediately book pasaje back to the sierra, choosing the ricketiest, smallest, oldest bus, on the basis that narrower wheels might have more traction on the jerry built roadlets that scrape past the worst landfalls.

And, por suerte, nothing happens to us, thought I pass the first nine hours with my face glued to the curtains, eyes blearily seeking out the bluish shadow that indicates a clear road ditch, a part of the road less murderous than others.  I know from first hand experience that when a bus somersaults on a mountain road, the passengers with curtains closed don't lose half of their face.  Our seatbelts are already welded shut, unoperable, so I clutch the curtains close, hoping for flinch-time, should we fall.

But we don't fall.  Early in the road, the bus stops at the sound of females screaming in the night.  A camioneta is on its side in the ditch by the bridge, luggage and dead bodies littering the tarmac.  The bus coasts slowly past, intent on causing no further harm, and between the dark shadows of onlookers (from where? where do accident crowds come from?) I stare into the sightless eyes of my neighbour and her fourteen year old daughter, stretched out in the road as if stiffly asleep.  The bus pulls over, and ninety percent of the passengers get out to gaze further, families pulling their young children to watch, and excusing their vulture impulses with loud emotional bursts of pity.

We stay on the bus, two foreigners, La Princesa and me - immobile night buses attract stealth and thieves, often armed - terrified of the journey ahead, refusing to look out through fingers at our dead neighbours' unsmiling faces.  No doubt everyone in Peru thinks about how unfeeling we are, as we do so.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 6:19 pm ~ There are shitloads - 6 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]