July 5, 2006: Harassment and embarrassment

¨I think young people ought to seek an experience that is going to knock them off center¨ --James A. Michener...Oh James, you would be so proud of me...

Regarding the title of this entry, it’s either one or the other for me here in Peru, I swear. In my particular case though, it’s thankfully more of the latter. From all of all the negative things I have heard about safety in Peru, though, I am gratefully surprised that my group has not encountered more issues. I have to remember to keep my optimism in check though, because after all, it’s only week two here. In terms of harassment, I have only had two encounters, both of which I can already laugh about. A few nights ago, a friend and I were attempting to do a good deed by returning our beer bottles to the vendor for recycling purposes. This vendor has a small store attached to her kiosk where people can sit to drink, and when we got there that day, we were greeted by a bunch of drunken men who in their inebriated states, thought that we were the most gorgeous creatures ever, and proceeded to yell some pretty vulgar things at us. Obviously, this is to be expected since we look so different, but it hadn’t happened so overtly up until that point, so it threw me off a bit. I didn’t really know what to do, so out of nervousness I yelled something at them like “Have some respect, don’t be gross” (wow, how sharp-tongued and elaborate, eh?). But I think the words may have gotten mixed up a bit (because I was still thinking about returning the bottles and how much money we would receive back), that I may have said “You can’t afford us”, which in retrospect, probably made us look like prostitutes. My friends weren’t too pleased with my approach, and we later decided that it might be best just to ignore such annoyances. It’s hard though, because it is a pretty major cultural adjustment to make. All comes with time though, I suppose. My next encounter with danger happened today when the same friend and I were in a nearby town and trying to take pictures of this river from a bridge. This guy came up to us while I had both cameras in my hand and essentially tried to knock us out or distract us with a fistful of coughdrops. Interesting…Luckily my friend is much more observant than I am, and was able to slyly save us from potentially losing our most valuable possessions here in Peru. Coughdrops smoughdrops, that’s all I have to say to that guy.

Onto embarrassing moments…Where oh where should I start? Coincidentally, most of these moments occurred in the kitchen. After a few friends and I cooked a delicious dinner for ourselves one night, we convinced each other that we were practically professional chefs, and with our leftover ingredients, that we should cook my friend’s host family dinner the next evening. We looked up a Thai recipe online to really knock their socks off, and went into town to get the ingredients for spicy eggplant and tofu. We improvised a bit because we couldn’t find everything we needed, but we knew that we at least had one ingredient that we needed, and that was red chili pepper. The woman that we bought it from kept saying something about it being too hot, and that we shouldn’t buy it (because it’s essentially inedible), but the recipe called for it, so we bought three. As we were cooking everything, some suspicion was arising about the peppers, because the mere scent of them coming from the pan was sending us into coughing and crying fits, but we figured that if we added sugar and every other vegetable we had in the house to the mix, that it would play down the spiciness. We were slightly panicked about what we were going to feed the family that was anxiously awaiting our concoction, but instead of coming up with a “Plan B,” we just got giggly and giddy and made lots of jokes like, “Do you wanna give Dominoes a call and let them know that we will be needing two pizzas pronto?” The more the ingredients cooked, and the more our eyes watered from the stench, the less funny the Dominoes jokes were. We were screwed. I didn’t think the family would mind the disaster too much until my friend’s host mom came home and shouted some common Peruvian hyperbole at us about how she was so hungry that she could eat all of Peru’s people, or something like that. Did that mean that she would also eat something that would instantaneously burn her tongue off? As I was wondering that, I noticed that my face and hands started burning in the worst of ways, and truly, you don’t notice how much you touch your face in the span of a half hour until you have chili pepper juice burning your skin off. After explaining to my friend’s host family the mistake we had made, they seemed very worried and not too perturbed with us, because evidently, there is a “true story” circulating in Peru about these peppers that we cooked with. The story goes…one time two friends ate that specific type of pepper and one swelled up like a balloon and turned bright red, and the other died of a heart attack. Very uplifting, don’t you think? The moral that we took from that story is that nobody in Peru eats those peppers, and that they are mainly decorative, or to be used in very small amounts (about 1/100th of the amount we used). After my host mom giving me a lemon bath to soothe my skin, I am happy to say that I am still alive.

As if my red chili-induced puffiness wasn’t enough for one week, the next day, as I was baking a cake for my host sister’s birthday, I told my host family that I am accustomed to mixing batters with my hands, and if it was alright with them, my hands were clean and I’d like to follow my trend. They gave me a bewildered look, but said sure, and off I went mixing eggs and sugar and butter by squishing it between my fingers. Considering I had not yet recovered from the burns the chili pepper juice had given me, this did not feel too good on my hands, but it was getting the job done so I didn’t complain. Twenty minutes later, when all was mixed, I went to wash my hands, but to my amazement, the butter would not, and I repeat WOULD NOT, wash off my hands. I soon noticed that my host family was staring a hole through the back of my head, so I decided to sneak upstairs to struggle with this in peace. Ten minutes later, after using everything in sight to scrape this sticky goo off my hands, my host mom knocked at the door and said something that taunted me, like, “Lindsay, how’s that butter coming?” “What butter, what are you talking about Yolanda? I haven’t thought about or touched butter in ages. What are you mentioning butter for?” At this she burst into hysterics. Oh yes, how funny that the gringa gave herself permanent butter fingers. She made me come out of my room so she could display my idiocy to the entire family, before she introduced me to something she called sandpaper soap which took the butter, along with my first layer of skin, right off. I am taking a wild guess that butter is different here, and of a higher concentration, and therefore, is not really great to wipe on your skin. Week 2, lesson #754 learned here in Peru.

While we are on the topic of food, let me mention that I am in a perpetual state of starvation, and that it is impossible to satiate my hunger here. While the food is beyond delicious here in Peru, it has little to no nutritional value, so it’s not really staying in my system for longer than, say, 15 minutes. We eat mostly starches, such as rice and papas (potatoes), and while I thought for a second that at least the vegetable sauces served over the rice and potatoes might fill me up, I soon discovered in watching my host mom cook, that the sauces are made predominantly of liquefied white bread. Lord have mercy, give me some roughage! I’m famished. One thing that is keeping my outlook shiny though is the avocadoes that my town produces. I think everyone in the world is in agreement that avocadoes are the best invention next to sliced bread or cheese or however that adage goes, but let me tell you, the world of avocadoes just got so much better. The avocadoes in my town are 5 times the size of the avocadoes in the states, and they are rounder and easier to peel and enjoy. This way I can eat five in the time in usually takes me to eat one, so I hope that my family here is not onto the fact that I am consuming enough avocadoes for our 8 person family. I wonder if my skin will turn green?