Belleza Por Todos Lados: Tiled Floor (Lima)

From the Casa de la Literatura

...and the water is off again.

Apparently, not "'nuff said."

This is Peru, where things are rarely clear and never timely. They turned the water to our house back off and as far as we can tell it won't be turned on again until the weekend. We're hoping that our tank at the house has filled up with the water we got this morning. If that's the case we can funtion pretty normally. We'll just have to shorten our showers and ration our toilet flushes. I haven't been back to the house since the water was turned off so I don't know the full situation there.

Keep us and our water needs in your prayers.

The Water's back!

'Nuff said.

Belleza Por Todos Lados: Lights and Flag (Lima)

Waterless World

UPDATE 4:45PM - The parish doesn't have running water either. Who knows what we do now.

We don't have running water.

We haven't had water since Sunday night, when a pipe in town exploded. Yesterday, most of our neighbors got water back, but our sector of Andahuaylillas is still waterless. How do the JVs in the Mountain House deal with such a situation - we depend on the parish.

The parish has massive water tanks which means that even when there is no water from the municipality, the parish still has running water. Since most of the volunteers in our house work at the parish, we are allowed to bring buckets over and fill them up. The walk back is no picnic. It helps to consider it an exercise instead of a chore.

As a result of this change in water sources, we...

• Wash dishes like we're camping. We soap everything up and then double rinse it. Once in a bucket of just water, and the second time in a bucket of bleach water.
• Flush the toilets when the smell of eight people's urine mixing together gets to be too much. (We've been pooping at the parish. Pooping in Peru is always more interesting than it is in the States). We have 4 toilets that we use, so the smell isn't as bad as it could be. But we aren't flushing every time because one flush uses up 1.6 gallons of water (check your toilet at home, that's a pretty standard thing). That's a lot of water, probably more than you need for anything except the most impressive of poops. Flushing our 4 toilets once each uses about 6 and a half gallons of water. No one wants to carry that much water back and forth more than once a day. 
• Use iodine tablets to purify the water for drinking. We do this anyways, but it's more of a process when you are poring from a bucket into a jug than when the water is coming in a small stream from a faucet.
• Shower at the parish's retreat house. Like I said, they have water, and also have a hot water heater, so showers can be hot. I actually bucket showered just before we learned that the parish would let us use their showers. 

We have no sense of how long it could be before the water is flowing in our pipes again. So it's bucket carrying for the immediate future. 

Actually, it's almost time for Jacq to Skype someone, so I should leave the computer room and give her privacy. I think I'll use the bathroom here at the parish and then fill up some buckets to take home with me. Wish me luck!

Personal Request

Dear all,

One of my goals for the year is to read the entirety of the Bible. I have been using the plan for daily readings outlined in the back of my Good News Translation Bible by the American Bible Society. But I've hit a snag. I lost my Bible on the bus back from Lima.

So, if you have a copy of the Good News Translation, I would be very greatful if you could scan me the daily reading guide from the back of the book (email is benjamin.moses27@gmail.com). We have a community Bible that I can read from, but I can't find the same plan for readings online.

Second, I would like to replace my personal Bible. I like to mark pages sometimes but it would be disrespectful to do that to the JV community's Bible. I really liked the clarity of the language in the Good News Translation, so if anyone has an extra copy of it that they aren't using, I would be ever so greatful if you mailed it to

Benjamin Hill
c/o P. Carlos Silva SJ
Triunfo 339, Apartado 276
Cusco, Perú

Sincerely,
Benjamin

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To the International Olympic Comittee...

Please don't pick Boston to host the 2024 Olympics. We'd be honored, really, it's just that we have more imporant things to do than throw the world a 6 week party. Instead, why not pick the Colegio de la Imaculada in Lima? They seem to have enough outdoor space.

Belleza Por Todos Lados: A Panorama of Cusco

The home base blog celebrates the beautiful things of Boston with the series Beauty All Around Me. Belleza por Todos Lados, which translates to "beauty on all sides," is a series of my photos to celebrate the beautiful things in Peru.  

A Day in Central Lima

 As you know Erin and I were in Lima last week. I brought my camera, but not my camera cord. 8 days later, here is a glimpse of our trip to Central Lima on January 18 (which was Lima's birthday).

Belleza Por Todos Lados: Eagle in Flight

Belleza Por Todos Lados: Let us go to the Mountaintop

Belleza Por Todos Lados: Volcanic Rocks

Peru Timeline

Part of my intent in keeping this blog is to educate. Despite being a Latin American Studies major with 4 semesters of college happily behind me, I knew only 2 things about Peru when I first arrived in Lima on March 4, 2013.

1. Machu Picchu, a city built by the Incas, is located in Peru.
2. For a long time, Peru's major export was guano (bird dung used as fertilizer).

Thankfully, I know a bit more now. But I want to know more, and I think you should too. History is a big part of any culture. If you and I want to understand my JV life inside Peruvian culture, you and I are going to have to understand a bit of Peruvian history. 

Peru is not a place that forgets its history. This is a massive mural located on Avenida El Sol in Central Cusco. It depicts the history of Cusco from the beginning of time until the end. Click here to see it in larger size (Image credit).

To start us off, I'm posting this timeline. I don't expect anyone to read it straight through. I know I wouldn't. Personally, I would skim it and only read the things that seemed most interesting to me. Whether you read any of it or not, it will be here for us to refer to in future discussions of Peruvian history. 

The following timeline is taken from discover-peru.org. 

On Home

Just because you live somewhere doesn't mean it's home. Home isn't a place or a group of people. As the song says, it's not just where you lay your head; it's not just where you make your bed. Home is a feeling. It's the sense that this is mine and I am its. When you are home, you can say "I belong here."

A place takes time to become home. A new house, a college dorm room - they take time to grow into. While I was walking up the street from the bus stop to the volunteer house after a week in Lima, I realized something important. I realized that I wasn't walking to "the house." I realized I was walking home. The Mountain House is home now. It won't be home forever. But it is home for now.


Speaking of home. Shout out to to Nora Hill, young poet. Her poem Almost Home was recently published in the online magazine.

Music "Lejos de Ti"

Places have sights. Places have smells. Places have textures. Places have tastes. Places have sounds.

I can only share the 1st two with you. Everthing else will have to be described by words. Having had some success uploading photographs, it is time to introduce sound into our discussion of Peru.

"Lejos de Ti" (Far from You) is a very popular song in the Andes. I heard it a lot in 2013 and I still hear it a lot riding on buses and in taxis across the mountain roads. It seemed a good choice for the first song to share with you. This version is a jazzed up version compared to the one that I know. My quick youtube search yielded several different versions of the song.

PS-Here is the version I am much more used to hearing on the radio. I chose not to post it because the video spends far too much time focused on the singer rolling around in bed with his girlfriend.

"Kareem Abdul Jabar: Why I Have Mixed Feelings About MLK Day"

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar may not be at the forefront of your mind on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but he's got some important insights into the King Legacy, US racism in the 21st century, and the work that people of good conscience need to do.

For some, the fact that we have Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a confirmation that the war has been won, that racism has been eliminated. That we have overcome. But we have to look at the civil rights movement like antibiotics: Just because some of the symptoms of racism are clearing up, you don’t stop taking the medicine or the malady returns even stronger than before. Recent events make clear that the disease of racism is still infecting our culture and that Martin Luther King Jr. Day needs to be a rallying cry to continue fighting the disease rather than just a pat on the back for what’s been accomplished. 

History has a tendency to commemorate the very thing it wishes to obfuscate. When you convince people that they’ve won, they lose some of their fire over injustice, their passion to challenge the status quo. 

You can read the whole thing here

Housekeeping

Hi All,

I'm taking advantage of the fast internet here at the Jesuit residence in Lima to play around with the design of the blog. I've added a picture of the town of Andahuaylillas (taken from the side of one of the mountains) to the background. Unfortunately, Blogger won't let me upload any file beyond a certain size so I can't set the picture to take up the whole background, thus the slightly tacky mosaic style you see. Even though I don't love the look, I'm going to leave it as is. The whole point of this blog is to offer windows into my life and world here in the mountains of Peru. Now whenever you check the blog you'll have a glance down on my world.

Below, you'll find a clear version of the photograph. That's it. That's the entire town of Andahuaylillas. You can see the chacras (plots of farming land) all around. On the left you can see the pista (highway) leading away from Cusco on towards Urcos, the capital of Quispicanchi Valley. The church is right near the middle of the picture to the right of the trees in the center of town. Those trees are growing along the sides of the plaza. Although you can't make it out in the photograph, our house is one block "up" from the parish.

They say Boston is a small town. But I'm not so sure anymore. Andahuaylillas is actually a small town.

To see a closer view, click here

Arrived in Lima

UPDATE: We are in Lima after our 20 hour bus-ride. While bus isn't the best way to travel, this was the comfiest bus I've ever ridden. Of course it had its wackiness-five on board movies and the 6:30AM wake-up playlist of salsa, cumbia, and house music. But we've arrived, and we have a place to stay and food to eat. So we are grateful.

Speaking of food, I've been wondering about this one ever since the first time I had the beans Peruvians call "habas" back on my Study Abroad experience in 2013. Do we call Phaseolus lunatus Lima Beans in English because they originally came from Peru and were exported through Lima?

Cusco Day (with Pictures!)

First things first. We had to delay our trip to Lima. They are fumigating the house where we will stay and can't accmodate visitors until Saturday. So I'll have to contain my travel excitement for two more days. We have bus tickets to leave Cusco on Friday at 11AM and are scheduled to arrive in Lima at 7AM. So given the usual Peruvian time conversions, we'll probably be in Lima by 9. 

Next up, photos! The computers have been cleaned and are currently virus-free, which means I can transfer photographs to the computers without fear of infecting my laptop. Yesterday I went in to Cusco by myself to buy bus tickets for us, pick up some translated documents for the JVs in Tacna, and run an errand for the parish. Here is my day in pictures:

Return to Lima!

As you may know, Erin and I are in the middle of the Migrations process. Just today we got word from them that it is time to go to Lima to do the next step. I'm not excited for the 22 hours of sitting on a bus, but I can't wait to leave.

"I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and sky" -John Masefield

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Cardinal Burke, I'ma let you finish but...

Actually, no, I'm not. You're going off at the mouth with stuff that has no business being said.
Especially by leaders in the 21st century. When you say things like this...

I think that [the introduction of female altar servers] has contributed to a loss of priestly vocations. It requires a certain manly discipline to serve as an altar boy in service at the side of [a] priest, and most priests have their first deep experiences of the liturgy as altar boys. If we are not training young men as altar boys, giving them an experience of serving God in the liturgy, we should not be surprised that vocations have fallen dramatically.

...you make yourself look bad because you sound out of touch. You make me look bad by association because you are a leader of my chosen religious tradition. And you make the Church look at best unappealing - and out worst downright disgusting - to thousands of people that we should be welcoming with open arms.

You really should go and read Mollie Wilson O'Reilly's column on Commonweal (Cardinal Burke's vision of a manly church, and what it leaves out). It's intelligent and well written, and points out several flaws in your reasoning. It also explains why such a line of thinking is bad for the Catholic Church. She's above posting a picture of you in your lacy vestments to point at the contradiction between your words and your (literal) dress.

I'm not Molly Wilson O'Reilly. Just we're clear, here your image of manliness:

Housekeeping: Reading/Viewing List

I've added a new page. It's my recommended Reading/Viewing List. Anytime I read or watch something that resonates with me and is connected to my JV life I'll add it to the list. If you're curious about the JVC experience or want recommendations to learn more about Peru*, you'll find something there.

*I'm reading a very funny and informative book about Machu Picchu right now. When I've finished I'll add it.

Que Difícil es Hablar el Español (Oh How Hard it is to Speak Spanish)

English speakers generally know that language is slight different depending on where you go in the English speaking world. There's plenty of regionalism across the United States (water fountain v. bubbler). But Spanish across Latin America is way more confusing. Sometimes it may even seem like different languages. I know for a fact that some of our fellow JVs in Tacna are experiencing this difficulty. For us in Andahuaylillas, most of the non-standard Spanish words here are borrowed from Quechua. This video shows just how hard it can be to be "fluent" in Spanish in Latin America. 

Trash Day!

January is the time for swearing in public officials. We have a new congress, a new governor, and Andahuaylillas has a brand new mayor. The inauguration involved a day long celebration in the plaza that made so much noise Saturday night mass was canceled.

A new administration means some transitional difficulties. The most obvious one to the volunteers in the Mountain house is the trash. Usually in Andahuayillas, a truck comes around the town once a week ringing a triangle to let everyone know that they can empty their house of food scraps, empty packaging, and bags full of toilet paper into the truck. But because of the mix of holidays, the lame-duck period of the old mayor, and this being Peru, I hadn't heard the trash truck since I arrived (which was over a month ago).

Star of Wonder

Today is Three King's Day, also known as the Feast of Epiphany. (If you are unfamiliar with the story, it's at the end of this post.)

What catches my attention most about this story is the second verse: "Where is the baby born to be the king of the Jews? We saw his star when it came up in the east, and have come to worship him." 

Cholito Jesús

The Catholic Church is a universal church. But as universal as the Catholic mass may be, each mass is also unique. The experience of a mass if affected by the priest saying the mass, the community attending the mass, and of course, the music played at mass. Here, I want to focus on just one Peruvian Christmas song before the Christmas season is over (it ends tomorrow). The song is called Cholito Jesús.*

*The word "cholo" is something I hope to discuss at length at another time. It's a very complicated, often racially charged, word. For today, I will only say that cholo applies to people of Andean descent.*

Abandonment

Theresea (3rd year) is back in the States visiting her family. Victoria and Jacqueline have various travel plans with various visitors. So Erin and I are in the midst of our time of "Abandonment."

It's actually a good thing, because it pushes us to figure out things on our own. And it's been fun so far. Here's a few snippets of what we've been up to:

Thank You for 2014

Here's the word from home base about the past 365 days:

2014 is almost over and the emerging consensus is clear:  it was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad year.  Disappearing airplanes, Ebola outbreaks, the emergence of the Islamic State, the self-induced deaths of (among others) Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman, the police-induced deaths of (among others) Michael Brown and Eric Garner, real median incomes lower than they were 15 years ago…the only thing more depressing than that list is how quick and easy it was to make.

But I'd like to make it clear that I am not a part of the "emerging consensus." If I had one song to sing about 2014 it would be this one (I know my church family knows how this one goes):

I just want

To take a little time right now and thank you, Lord

For all you´ve done for me

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!