Sunday December 20, 2009

It is 11:30 p.m. and Glenn isn’t back. He went to Chimbote with Orlando, about 2 hours south of Trujillo.  It is raining a little here.  We had another whirlwind weekend with Orlando.  Friday morning we left for Jaen.  We have stopped so many places I have lost count.  Orlando’s wife must be a saint to put up with him being gone all the time.  This is the second weekend he has been gone and he promised everywhere he went to come back in January.  I am glad we came on this trip.  It made the month go fast.  And it has been good to be out of Lima.  Hopefully, also, we are seeing a little bit of the fruits of the labor we put into the course for self-employment. I am tired of the food at restaurants.  It is good, but just always the same: soup, some kind of meat and white rice.  I would like some vegetables.  We have had a couple of very good meals.  Glenn has become a fan of cabrito, baby goat, which he had served with taca taca, which is a mixture of rice and beans fried.  I had ceviche, which is also very good and I think missionaries are not allowed to eat it—fish uncooked, or rather cooked with lime juice.

The land north of Trujillo is desert but there is some life; humps of sand with plants and when you finally head east, there must be some rain because there is a lot of vegetation, trees I don’t know the names of, even before you get into the mountains.

I have begun to take the juxtaposition of rich and poor, old and modern in Peru for granted.  Donkeys pulling carts, adobe homes beside highways with cars, trucks and buses, cell phones and people washing clothes in the river, people begging and sometimes sleeping on the streets, gorgeous catholic churches, modern Mormon churches, green rice fields and desert sand, tiny stores and huge modern ones.  Common sights:  buzzards, rice fields and the white birds that live near them, rubble along the side of the road, and plastic bags caught in the vegetation, small stands selling pop, fruit, snacks, toilet paper, etc.  adobe bricks drying, clothes hanging out, mototaxis, sugar cane fields, huge semi trucks, men peeing, statues in every plaza or park, giba or break springs (speedbumps), dirt streets, dirty walls, huge buses, taxis with the name of the owner’s mother on the back, huge gas stations called grifos.

We passed by several archeological sites, Chan Chan the largest adobe city in the world, pyramids, museums, my lord of sipan, a particularly famous burial of a rich guy which was found not looted.  But we saw only the signs as we drove by.  Apparently archaeology is not one of Orlando’s interests.

North of Chiclayo is a large farming community. And many rice mills with brown rice laying out to dry and bags full waiting to be milled.

The mountains to Jaen are not as high  or steep, which was fine with me—I didn’t want another white knuckle ride–but the vegetation was different, not much potato farming. Jaen what we saw of it, wasn’t very remarkable except for the number of motorcycles.  The hotel was brand new said to be built with laundered drug money.  The rice fields are really beautiful, terraced, wonderfully green, in various stages of production, with the white birds, and occasionally an ox plowing through the water. They have small combines for harvesting the rice.

We passed by a water project called Olmos.  They have built a dam and are working on a tunnel to divert water that now goes to the Amazon to send it to the west coast for irrigation.  The tunnel goes under a mountain, the continental divide and will be 20 km long.  It is really a great undertaking.  It is being built by a company from Brazil.  Orlando said this project has been planned for 50 years.  The government is finally uncorrupt enough that the money is being spent to help the country in place of lining the pockets of friends of the powerful.  My impression of Peru is that the government is doing good things here and trying to improve the country, and things are improving for the people.

On the way back from Jaen we visited the pueblo of Olmos which is famous for limes.  When we arrived the branch president and two full time missionaries were cleaning the building.  The branch president has two sons 16 and 18 who want to study with the fund.  They will have to live in Chiclayo because there are no schools in Olmos, which is farm country.

Sunday morning began as a typical day with Orlando.  He wanted to leave Chiclayo early, then spent 10 minutes driving around looking for a gasoline station that sold 95 octane.  We drive out to Barrio Las Delicias to meet the stake president who is out of work.  He wasn’t there so we waited half an hour for him and stayed at sacrament meeting just to take the sacrament.  This must be a ward where the people do not have bathrooms in their houses and use the church bathroom to wash up before meetings, it was unusually dirty.  Yet the people always come in clean clothes and look nice.  

We stopped by Pacasmayo again at the end of the meetings because people there want the self-employment class.  Ate lunch there.  I started feeling sick, like I needed to stay close to the bathroom so they dropped me off at the hotel on the way through Trujillo and Glenn and Orlando drove back to Chimbote where he had scheduled a first class for the Creating Family Prosperity Class.  Glenn said over 200 people showed up.  They got back to the hotel at 12:30pm, but no one was there to open the gate to let Glenn in (I had finally gone to sleep with a pillow over my ears because someone was having a loud party so I didn’t hear them).  After 20 minutes of knocking and honking the horn, Glenn went to sleep at a hostal down the block.  When I woke up in the middle of the night and he wasn’t back I was actually pretty calm, considering that I am always expecting that Orlando’s bad driving will someday catch up to him.  But I did realize how utterly helpless I am; I can’t speak Spanish very well, I didn’t know  phone number to Orlando’s house or anywhere else, and didn’t have a phone if I did know the number.  And I don’t know how to get to the bus station or the employment office.  I had little money.  Etc.  I wouldn’t know what to do if I were alone. 

Monday Dec. 29, 2009 back in Lima

We made it through Christmas and are now counting down the weeks until we leave: there are about 8 to go.  Christmas eve we had three other missionary couples over for supper and then went to a program at the Missionary Training Center.  Christmas morning we talked to some of the kids on Skype and watched some of them open presents, then spent the afternoon at the Zoo.  We got to talk to all the kids and so it was a nice Christmas.  Christmas eve Peruvians set off fireworks, bottle rockets, firecrackers, etc and so from about 11:30 pm until 12:30 am, later in other places we heard, there was too much noise to sleep so we watched fireworks out our apartment window.  Few people are in the office for this week which is good because Glenn is working on a vocational test that can be put on line for all five countries and when no one is around he can get more done.  I went with 5 other North American women to the Inca Market to buy souvenirs to take home and to just get out.  The sun shone today for the first time since we got back in town from our trip to Trujillo.  No applications have come in for a while, I guess because everyone is on vacation.  So I will go back to translating missionary applications.

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