El traducir con la iglesia presbiteriana

Here I am looking all glamorous doing some hard labor and translation for a Christian missionary group who came from NYC. Check me out with my schnazzy bucket hat and ¨I Love Cajabamba¨ T-shirt! We´re going to help build the third floor of a church...Fun!
Here we go in my first heavy lifting!
Okay..maybe not!
Yay, success!

Bloque de Escritora

That loosely translates to writer´s block and I have it--horrible, HORRIBLE writer´s block. And it came at the worst time. You see, a little over a month ago, just for the fun of it, I decided to submit to a few literary agents a book idea. (Although that ¨fun¨ cost me a day´s worth of work.) Well, lo and behold, a few weeks later, a literary agent in NY actually contacted me for the the first chapter of my book. (Mind you, this is just for review, so don´t get too excited.)

But I was really flattered, because I heard somewhere that the chances of a literary agent even contacting you for a manuscript are, like, 2 out of 1000. So then, I began writing my first chapter to become the 1st class bestselling author that I always knew I was meant to be. But wouldn´t you know it that for the first time in my life, words escape me. I am choking! So far, my ¨chapter¨ consists of two pages and, trust me, it ain´t anything to write home about. So, thanks, stupid writer´s block for disallowing me to string even 2 good sentences together.

I´m all ears if anyone can provide me with any ideas/motivation. I choke under pressure! If we were in battle together (hypothetically, of course, because we would be screwed if the fate of our country depended on me), I would be the last person you would want to stand next to. Case in point, the other day, I was hiking with another volunteer when a dog started barking at us. Barking dogs freak me out. I´ve even stopped walking alone in the campo. (See all blog entries regarding idiotic accident April 2010.) Anyways, when the dog started coming toward us, teeth baring and all, I did the most natural thing without thinking—I pushed my friend towards the dog while I scurried away. Oops.

I mean, crap, even I´m ashamed of myself. I always thought I was a generous and good-hearted person who put other´s needs first. Nope, apparently not. In times of danger, it´s every woman for herself, darn it! Anyways, fortunately, we both made it out alive and bite-free. But, afterwards, came the most awkward apology (ie, awkward silence followed by, ¨Sorry, for pushing you towards the dog while I walked away. He he.¨). Well, my friend is a better person than me and said, ¨I understand.¨ If the book thing does pan out, he´s being written in as a superhero with a really cool hairdo.

Buena Noticia y Mala Noticia

It´s rainy season here again and I thought I had bed bugs again since my body is covered in red-hive looking bumps everywhere. Attractive, right? So then I once again fumigated my bed, washed all the sheets, and pajamas. It turns out that it´s not bed bugs, after all, but I have become allergic to the bugs here. One bites me and that part of my body swells up with a bunch of other red bumps. It´s horrible! I itch all over and I look like I have some type of serious disease!! Add salt to injury, it´s Carnival here again in Peru, which means water balloon and water guns everywhere. Gees, I wonder who will be an easy target. I drugged myself with Benadryl yesterday hoping that it would reduce the bumps, but no go. All it did was put me in a drugged-up stupor. I walked around like the red bumpy zombie that I was.

PS Spanish mistake of the day: ¨Preservativo¨ does not mean preservatives found in food. Oye. I´ve been walking around the last year and a half saying the wrong word and, finally, someone corrected me this week!

Feliz Año Nuevo!

Happy New Year, everyone! I am happy to report that I survived another Christmas in Peru! You all know that I love my Peru and I will always be the first to gush about it, but December is a hard month for me. It´s generally when I´m the most homesick and longing for peking duck, steamed dumplings, and Coldstone ice-cream. (We are Chinese, y´ know!) Anyways, homesickness is the thing that I still struggle with the most. On those dreaded days, everything just feels so heavy. I always try to get out of it as quickly as I can by going to the Peruvian market or reading up on celebrity gossip, but sometimes, it´s really hard.

Anyways, I´m happy to report that a rebound is coming on again! I´m not going to lie, I had help. There is this amazing bread here called Pannetone that Peruvians eat every Christmas. It´s huge, sweet, fluffy, and fruity. I imagine that it´s probably a lot like fruit cake in the states, but I wouldn´t know as I have never tried it. (Please see previous paragraph about being Chinese.) Anyways, it´s hard to feel sad when you have a fat piece of Pannetone in one hand and a glass of Peruvian champagne in the other. (Pannetone should be branded as the next Prozac…I was cured after Christmas night!) We also killed two turkeys to eat and I made a cucumber mango salad to share.

Anyways, I´ve attached some pics so that you could see Christmas in Peru, part deux.

PS If you think that the fruit trimming around the turkey looks weirdly inappropriate, it´s not just you. I think so, too! In my champagne daze, I might have mentioned it over dinner and everyone just looked at me funny.

Pollo a la Brasa

In the year that I´ve been here, I´ve learned one thing: We are really passionate about our chicken. Two anecdotes:

(1) I was dining at a polleria (roast chicken restaurant) when one of the patrons suddenly went into a convulsion. Suddenly, there was mad chaos. The guy was unconscious, shaking, and bleeding from the mouth (he bit his tongue), while his family was pushing back tables trying to lay him down on the ground. Peruvians are very open about their emotions so, the woman, whom I presumed was his wife, started wailing and praying to God. (I mean, what else are you going to do when there´s no ambulance service?) Meanwhile, a crowd was forming, because if there´s one other thing we love more than chicken, it´s to know what´s going on at all times. Anyways, after 10 minutes of wailing and everyone fanning him with napkins, the man eventually comes to. Whew! The family then ushers him out (to home, I presume) and everything goes back to normal. But then, 15 minutes later, the entire family (minus the convulsed man) comes back, resume their normal places at the table, and continue to eat the chicken that they had left behind as if nothing happened. Huh!

(2) The second story involves a hostage situation that happened in Lima a little while ago. Some bloke was robbing a bank and were holding people hostage. When the police came to ask him what his demands were, he told them the usual TV hostage requests—cash and a helicopter for escape. And then to cap off those two big things, the kidnapper then asked for pollo a la brasa—roast chicken—to eat. At first, I was really judgmental about this fellow, because, number one, we´re in Peru—I´ve yet to see a helicopter here except on TV. (Chuck Norris is a second God here.) Second, pollo a la brasa as your last meal!? (And I say ¨last¨ only because bank robberies never end well here.) Like I said, I was really critical of him at first, but then I started thinking about my ideal meal and you know what? I could not get out of my head the damn image of a Santa Fe Chicken Skillet from Village Inn. (In case you are not lucky enough to have visited a Village Inn, imagine a heavenly diner-establishment where each plate costs less than $10 and the place serves as a cavern for all senior citizens to unite after Sunday mass. No seriously, there is a mad line every Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.)

So the moral of the story is this: Chicken is part of our culture here. And, after a lot of deep soul searching, I realized that chicken has become an important part of my life as well. I mean, it made an appearance at every one of my important events last year—birthday, Christmas, New Year´s, my last meal before my accident, my go-to meal after I had just had my accident, my comfort meal after the nurses surprised me with a sponge bath (you get the point). And this year, I don´t see it being any different. Listen, I may have been a sucker for the sugary carbohydrates before (I defy you, Coldstone two layer chocolate chip cookie dough ice-cream cake!), but this year just know that I can only be bought with authentic, Peruvian pollo a la brasa!

Chirimoya

I swear I am not running for President of the I-Love-Peru fan club, but seeing that I will be home in 7 months, it´s hard not to reflect. US is like a big, scary world of adults…and, truth be told, I am TERRIFIED of it! I´m not going to name any names, but sometimes, when I talk to the peeps back home, they all sound so stressed, sighing and grunting over work and this and that. Meanwhile, my day sometimes just consist of doing project-related stuff in the morning, eating lunch, taking a siesta (It´s what everyone else does after lunch!), go to the gym, shower, eat again, read or watch a DVD or study my Spanish (or sometimes all 3), and then going to bed until the roosters wake me up at 7 a.m. Yay, happy as a clown!

(Really, the most exciting thing that happened today probably occurred over breakfast. I was eating a Peruvian fruit, chirimoya, and a little worm squirmed out. I said a silent prayer that I hadn´t ingested more of them and that none were growing in my stomach at that exact moment, flicked that sucker away, and just kept right on eating…I ain´t going to waste a perfectly good fruit! Money doesn´t grow on trees here, you know!)

And, then, I think about home again…work, make money, pay off my billions in student loans, rent or buy a place, track down car insurance prices, avoid getting all road-vengeful at rush hour, having barely 15 minutes to scarf down a lunch…and, yes, sighing and grunting (or in my case, snapping) my way through the day. One time, my dad said ¨hi¨ to me while I was studying and I chewed him out for having the audacity to interrupt me. (Bad daughter!)

Recently, when I expressed to one of my US counterparts how much I liked Peru´s lifestyle, I was told that I´m too young to live like this. I mean, when has a healthy balance between work and life equate to laziness? I´m sure that when I come back to the US, I´ll get a rush from working 60 hour weeks again. (It´s hard to believe that I used to like working so much!) But, in the meantime, have I mentioned how much I love living in Cajabamba, Peru? Seriously, if it wasn´t for the fam, friends, and food, I really think I could live here for a long time.

Clase de Ingles

In Peru, summer vacation begins in mid-December. So very soon, my classes will end. For one of my English classes, I had the kids dictate what they would like to do in their last two classes. One activity they chose was BINGO (easy enough), another they would like me to teach them a song or dance (Oh the horror! This was even after I explained to them that I have two left feet and can´t carry a tune to save my life.), and, for the last activity, they wanted to play the drinking game that I had taught them last year.

Um, let me explain so you know that I´m not getting a bunch of little kids drunk. I have realized that you can make an English lesson with just about any activity. You can even do that game where the kids form two lines and then they flip their cups over with one finger after they´ve finished chugging WATER. Yes, clean and drinkable water. For the kids who are watching in line, you can teach them useful English phrases like, ¨Hurry up!¨ ¨Good job!¨ or ¨Chug faster!¨ (Is the image going through your mind of little Peruvian children running around, yelling ¨Chug faster!¨?) But this is not the only lesson, you can also incorporate the importance of drinking clean water daily. Seriously, the other teachers thought it was the most brilliant activity ever… a win-win-win for all! Anyways, little did I know that the game was such a hit, that they still remember it after a year later. It´s times like this where I think I can stay in Cajabamba, Peru forever as its English teacher. :)