The Week

I know this is a lot of blogging for a short period of time, but last week was such an interesting week that I couldn’t just skip it. So here you go: enough Meredith blog to keep you satisfied for at least another 7 days.

The Week

Day 1: Stephanie and I got back from the jungle at 9pm on Sunday night. At 8:30 on Monday morning, we were in a car with several other translators heading out to a small town called Concepción. A church from Florence, SC had brought a dentist, a gynecologist, an opthamologist, two pediatricians, several nurses and a few pharmacy people. A local Huancayo doctor joined the group to help with general medicine, and the plan was to offer a 1 day clinic in 5 different locations.

I was assigned to work with pediatrics, and I think I got pretty much the best deal of all the translators. Stephanie was working with the gynecologist and learned a whole range of new vocabulary she never dreamed she’d need. (The title of her blog this week was something like “Yes, my ovaries hurt too.”) Jimmy was working with the dentist and had to physically restrain children who were terrified of the dental instruments and screaming so loudly you could hear them three rooms away. I, on the other hand, got to sit and play with kids all day.

This is my first time working with a project like this, I quickly learned about the benefits and limitations of having a one-day clinic. On the upside we saw far more people in one day that a normal practice could have, and we weren't constrained by people's insurance or money. On the downside, it's a one-time visit, and there's a lot you can't do in a one-time visit.

I discovered that there are three kinds of kids that are brought into a one-day clinic. The first kind, which was most of the kids we saw, had absolutely nothing wrong with them. Their parents would bring them in and say “she won’t eat” or “he’s small for his age,” when really the kid was perfectly fine. For the ones who did have a slight cold, we handed out lots of Tylenol and Dimetapp. And of course, everyone got vitamins. Vitamins were the magic cure for “He’s not as big as his brother.”

The second kind were the children that really had something wrong with them that was easily curable. One girl came in with slight pneumonia, another had a fungus growing on his head. A few children had parasites. These are the kinds of things that are easily taken care of with a little medication, but of course the families had little resources for medication. In these cases the families were always extremely grateful that they could go to our pharmacy and pick up the medicines for free. The limitation is, of course, that if any sort of complication occurred, the family would have to go to a local doctor to follow up.

The third kind of kid we saw were the kids that had serious problems that the clinic could do nothing about. We saw several children with cerebral palsy, whose mothers knew there was probably nothing to do but brought the children out of desperation. There was at least one child who needed a surgery to be able to talk. Several children couldn’t walk, and were carried around (even until age 7 and 8) by their mothers who couldn’t afford wheelchairs. I explained to one mother that if she continued to work with her son’s legs everyday, maybe by the time he was six he would be able to take steps by himself.

It’s this third kind that really accentuates the difference between “developed” and “underdeveloped” places—as inadequate as those terms admittedly are—highlighted solely in the fact that parents in the U.S. have more options and education about their children’s conditions. Not that U.S. parents know how to care for their children any better, but they have the option—for example—of getting a wheelchair and physical therapy.

With the third type of kid, the doctors would just try to be as gentle as possible. We would give painkillers for minor aches, and sometimes tums for stomach aches. And of course we would give everyone vitamins. But you could see in the mothers’ eyes that they knew there was nothing we could really do.

Day 2: San Jeronimo, a little town known for silver work about 15 minutes from Huancayo. We saw 84 children in 5 hours. Yes, 84. They moved both pediatricians into the same room, so I translated for two doctors all day. I learned words I never thought I’d need to know, like “constipation,” “bloated,” “cyst,” and “diarrhea.” Apparently word got out that we gave out candy when we finished a consultation, so we had whole streams of kids saying things like “My head has hurt for the past 20 minutes” or “I get out of breath when I run.” That night I dreamt about translating for an endless line of children and complaining parents.

When we finally got home, Stephanie had to go teach so I went home to relax and stop thinking about children’ cold symptoms. We had soaked some beans, so I bought vegetables to cut up and make into a soup with the beans. I bought carrots, tomatoes, onions, and some seasoning, but was hovering near the section that had hot peppers. I knew the peppers were really hot (they make a sauce with them, but you can only use a few drops at a time), but the vegetable lady convinced me that if you take all the seeds out of them, they’re not hot at all. I decided a little bite in the bean soup couldn’t hurt, and so decided to buy just one small one.

Stephanie will tell you that what happens next is apparently “quintessential Meredith.” I don’t know what she’s talking about.

So I get home and start cutting up vegetables. I get to the pepper and carefully start to slice it and take out all the seeds. Somehow—and I still don’t know exactly how this happened—I wiped my face and got a seed in my eye. That’s right—pepper seed in the eye.

I ran screaming from room to room until I finally found a bucket of water. (Remember they turn the water off in Huancayo in the evenings.) I pried my eye open and started scooping water into it. Unfortunately, my hands were still covered in pepper-juice, so the more I rubbed, the more the burning spread all over my face. I’ve never actually sprayed myself in the face with pepper spray before, but I’m pretty sure I now have a good idea how it feels.

I eventually got the seed out of my eye, but was then left with a burning face. Remember, this is all being done in a bucket, so at some point I’m just splashing the same juice back onto my face. I finally manage to get up enough to grab the soap and switch buckets. I washed my face over and over for about 20 minutes until I could finally stand to take my head out of the water.

When Stephanie came home, she saw me standing in the kitchen with a bright red face and puffy eyes. There were two buckets out, and water splashed all over the floor and up the sides of the walls. “Um, Meredith, did somebody die?”

Day 3: My eyes are actually a normal color the next day, which is apparently a good sign according to the doctors I’m working with. Yay, I’m not going to go blind.

We’re working in the Methodist Church at El Tambor in Huancayo, which is luckily only a few blocks from our house. It’s a pretty nice venue for the clinic. Pediatrics has the entire upstairs room, plus a waiting area. Even better, we have our own working bathroom. I can’t even tell you how upscale that is.

There are quite a few kids, and again I’m translating for both doctors. We have so many that we end up working through most of lunch. This is not altogether tragic, as most of the lunches they gave us were terrible. Someone somewhere got the idea the Americans wouldn’t want to eat a Peruvian lunch, so they gave us boxes with terrible sandwiches (we’re talking 3 slices of white bread), a piece of cheap cake, and a juice box.

Luckily, the church staff had decided to cook their own lunch. A few of us lucky ones got invited back to eat our choice of spaghetti, potatoes, and anticuchos. (Anticuchos are strips of cow heart skewered and roasted. I have yet to try one.) I accepted a plate of spaghetti, thankful that I didn’t get the boxed lunch that day.

All was fine until about four that afternoon. We were especially busy with several serious patients, and I was talking fast to try to translate everything the doctors were saying. With little warning, I walked next door to the bathroom and puked my guts out. That damn spaghetti. Not the first time it’s happened since I’ve been here, but it’s never exactly pleasant.

The doctors were, to say the least, a bit surprised. They send me home, where my festivities continued for another three hours. I was supposed to teach a class at 6:30, but around 5:50 I realized I wasn’t going to be able to leave the house for quite some time. I called and canceled my class, telling the secretary that I was pretty sick. Unfortunately, the term I used (“Estoy enferma hoy”) is the same term women apparently use to describe their menstrual cycles in Peru. To this day I am not sure if the secretary thought I was canceling classes because I had started my period.

Day 4: By this time, people had begun to notice that my Facebook status was “Meredith is wondering why the universe apparently hates her.” I have to admit, I wasn’t too pleased with the universe either. I rolled out of bed Thursday morning, grabbed 3 things of Gatorade and crackers, and dragged myself to another day of translating muttering something like, “I hate my stomach.”

Luckily, the day was quite light. Very few kids, and we even had two translators for pediatrics. I finished the Gatorade, and was even glad to see the white bread at lunch.

By this time, we had discovered that we could buy movies for about a dollar. I went home that night, slept 3 hours in the afternoon and woke up to watch “The Holiday” with Stephanie when she got home.

Day 5: It’s amazing how much better life looks when you can eat. I woke up Friday morning actually pretty darn excited to be alive and in Peru. Our clinic that day was in Cullpa, in a beautiful little retreat center in the country. We had a lovely room, and a wonderful view of the mountains.

We finished up fairly early, and hung around so the pharmacy could sort medications to donate. I taught class that night (not my best class ever, but whatever), went home, and drank boxed sangria we’d bought at the grocery store. Thank God it’s Friday.

The Selva

(Those who wish to view my photos of the jungle and are not on facebook should go to this link. Not all are actually my photos--my camera ran out of space pretty quick so I included some of Stephanie's photos also.)

http://duke.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2061893&l=bf9dd&id=1313457

My apologies to all that it has been two weeks since I have visited my beloved blog. These have been perhaps two of the busiest, craziest, weirdest weeks in my life. I have visited the Amazon, bathed in a river, eaten more rice in one sitting than perhaps in an entire month of life back in home, given myself semi-serious burns to the face with a hot pepper, gotten food poisoning, gotten over it, and translated for two doctors seeing 84 children in one day. This is why I haven’t blogged.

As this is far too much for my already-long blogs, I’m going to try to take it in bite-sized chunks. First bite: the Selva.

First some background: Stephanie and I are here as Duke Divinity students for our summer internship. The school has a relationship with a Peruvian Methodist pastor named César Llanco, so they send students down to help him. César is brilliant (which the District knows), and therefore highly overworked: he’s the chaplain of the very large Methodist high school, the head of the ecumenical seminary, and the pastor of a local church. He also coordinates most of the work groups that come in from the U.S.

Stephanie and I teach classes at San Pablo (the ecumenical seminary that César heads) and also at Probitem (the local Methodist seminary). Both seminaries charge very low tuition, and hold their classes at night since most people have to work during the day. In an attempt to offer a seminary education to rural churches, both seminaries also have extensions into various towns in the jungle. Teachers travel from Huancayo and give a week-long or weekend-long workshop to the extension churches in the jungle.

This past weekend, Stephanie and I went to a town called Pucharini as part of the extension program of Probitem (the Methodist seminary). The plan was to give two courses over the weekend: I taught intro to the Old Testament and Steph taught pastoral leadership. Most of the students in these classes have little to no education. They can read, but many have not finished high school. Thus we were encouraged to keep the level very simple, and not to lecture for too long at a time. (Which is, by the way, the only reason in the world I’m qualified to teach an introduction to the Old Testament. Keepin’ it simple.)

So here begins the real story. Friday morning, Stephanie and I packed ourselves into a fairly large bus and headed out on the five hour bus ride to La Merced, a main town in the Upper Amazon. If you ever find yourself on a busride in Peru, try not to go during the night. In the first place, I’m never really sure that those drivers (who are already taking the turns several hairs faster than I would) can actually see the road. But in the second place, you miss possibly the most incredibly view in the world. The trip from Huancayo to La Merced begins in the sierra, passing hundreds of dry, rocky mountain towns spotted with cacti and eucalyptus. The people raise cows and potatoes, and their faces are damaged from living far too close to the sun, making a 30-year-old woman sometimes look 50.

As the road goes lower, the mountains start to be covered in vegetation. We started passing entire mountains that were terraced, crop fields cut into the sides of incredibly steep earth. Many times, there would be a house built into the side of a mountain, alongside the terracing. We could see people going up and down the mountains to work in their fields, people who apparently lived their entire lives on a sharp incline.

We were surprised that the mountains never actually stopped, they just started to be covered more and more by thick vegetation. As you move into the jungle, the temperature changes and the mountains green, but the landscape doesn’t flatten in the slightest.

We arrived at LaMerced, ate lunch, and wrote another hour to Pucharini. Because the area is so mountainous, the road follows the river. Towns, then, spring up alongside the road and spread up the mountainside. Pucharini is one of these towns, with about a mile of houses between the river and road.

As soon as we stepped out of the car in Pucharini, I started having flashbacks of the 3 months I spent in rural Nicaragua. Same houses, same food, same weather, same beautiful scenery, same endless stream of curious children. I remembered suddenly what it’s like to not have any sort of distractions (or even communication with the outside world!) all day long. Everything moves a little bit slower. We would spend the hot afternoons just sitting in the shade and watching the river because there was really nothing else we needed to be doing at that time. It’s an entirely different—and not altogether unenviable—style of life.


Stephanie and I stayed with a family of 5 in Pucharini—Moises and Ruth, and their children Sadith, Dan, and Brion—who let us have one of the 2 bedrooms of their thatched house. Like all houses in this area, one side of the house was built open to the river, to get the breezes during the day. The rest of the house was simple wood with a dirt floor and a few windows. It’s actually a very practical design and it works wonderfully to keep cool during the day.

We taught all night Friday and most of the day Saturday. The classes actually went quite well, attended by a few students and a horde of local children. We discovered quickly that lectures could not hold attention very long, and we soon learned to intersperse them with group work and storytelling. Stephanie and I both learned a method of storytelling at Duke called Godly Play, which proved extraordinarily useful with the group.



I remember when I was a little girl that I would sometimes watch Disney jungle movies and then pretend for the next week that my bathtub was an Amazon river and my bed was a hammock in a treehouse somewhere. As we were bathing in the river Saturday morning (and by bathe, I mean rinse off face, legs, hands, and hair), I was a bit shocked to realize how close I’d gotten. This place really was a paradise of sorts. Children make rafts from palms and spend the afternoon playing in the river, people pick their breakfast off the tree every morning, and children pick flowers to put in their hair Sunday morning. Despite the fact that I was absolutely filthy—the natives know how to keep clean in rivers, but Stephanie and I were a constant mess of sunscreen, repellant, sweat, bugbites, and body odor—it was a little exciting.

Of course, I don’t mean to over-romanticize things. Stephanie and I were bitten by every kind of insect in the book, and slept on beds that were probably alternately used as torture devices. On a more serious level, the community is struggling with poverty, lack of education, sanitation issues, domestic violence, and devastating environmental change. It’s just interesting to me that those things are paired with so idyllic a location.

Saturday evening we lost a game of volleyball to some Peruvian girls. Apparently a requirement of being Peruvian is being freaking incredible at sports. We were on a team of four, and at first our teammates were excited about our height, thinking it would surely make us win. Little did they know…

Sunday morning we rode a little cart attached to a motorcycle up the side of the mountain to the church. The church is a simple concrete building, perched to overlook the mountains sloping down into the river. The kids put flowers in our hair, gave us fruit off the trees, and played Stephanie’s camera until the service started. Because the church is almost half children, we spent probably the first 45 minutes of the service singing songs that involve lots of clapping, jumping, and sometimes turning around.

As we were waiting for a car to come take us to the bus station, Brion—the youngest of Moises’ children—set to work trying to amuse us by throwing a chick in the air and watching it flap its wings as it fell to the ground. Sadith brought more flowers for our hair, and asked if we would ever come back. We said we would like to, but in all likelihood—probably not. As we drove away, I found myself wishing we were wrong. Maybe someday…

Being Extranjera

Stephanie and I have realized that extranjeras (foreign women) are allowed to do whatever they want and commit all sorts of social errors that Peruvians just couldn’t get away with—like buying just one piece of bread or ordering yogurt at the wrong time of day. And it’s days like today that make me extraordinarily glad for that.

We woke up this morning to the sounds of the evangelical Catholic church on the corner. It seems that anyone in Peru who can afford a megaphone has the right to use it, so they project their services starting at about 6:30 in the morning and ending around 7 at night. It woke us up the first morning, but there are so many megaphones around that we’ve kind of gotten used to it by now. Not kidding: the palta (avocado) guy starts at 6:15: “palta! palta! palta! palta para el desayuno!”

As luck would have it, I actually had a great shower this morning. I took my shower first, and experienced what some might call hot water. It was awesome. Stephanie, unfortunately, was not so lucky. I knew things were bad when I heard here trying to coax the hot water out of the shower with a kind of whiny, sing-song voice. (FYI, we definitely talk to the inanimate objects in our apartment. Whoever said talking to water doesn’t make it boil faster has never lived in Peru.)

Things did not improve. Electricity was sketchy, and hot water was completely on strike. Worse, we had just gotten back from a retreat the night before, so we were both sunburned and disgusting. I decided to go buy veggies for lentil soup (we learned how to make lentil soup!). As I left, Stephanie was standing next to the shower in her underwear and a T-shirt, verbally pleading for warm water and wondering if a cold shower was really all that bad.

The market outside our house on Sundays is especially busy. We’ve discovered the avocado guy, and we also discovered that avocado goes with everything we cook. So we regularly buy enormous avocados (seriously, about the size of a small child) for 30 cents a piece. I visited this man first, then went down the street to get tomatoes, onion, and a carrot.

On my way back, I stopped by the store beneath our apartment (the one owned by our duena’s daughter-in-law) to get bottled water and pasta. I briefly considered buying beer, but then realized we didn’t have a bottle-opener yet.

As I was checking out, someone came up and tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around to find my supervisor, César. As background, you should know that César is awesome. Seriously, maybe the best supervisor I’ve ever had. However, both Stephanie and I have something of a complex about the fact that we can never manage to get grammar quite right around him. He actually probably thinks we’re retarded by this point, but figures he’s got to put up with us for the rest of the summer so he might as well not mention anything.

So César is comes up to me while I’m checking out, and I am suddenly quite glad I decided not to buy beer. Not that I think he’s a teetotaler, but still: in a country where most religious folk prohibit drinking, it probably wouldn’t be great for a seminary teacher to be buying beer at 9am on Sunday morning.

We small talk for a few minutes, and I consider making a joke about how Stephanie didn’t have water, something like “Stephanie’s standing outside the shower in her underwear waiting for the hot water to start.” I decided not to because I figured I’d probably screw it up and say something like, “I’m wearing Stephanie’s underwear right now.”

Luckily, the small-talk chat ended harmlessly. He probably still doesn’t think much of my intelligence, but at least I didn’t accidentally lead him to believe Stephanie and I regularly exchange underwear.

Upon entering the apartment again, Stephanie was still arguing with the shower, and it looked like the shower was winning. I probably would have given up and just braided my hair that day, but Stephanie is much more persistent than I. And apparently perseverance pays off: as I was making tea in the kitchen I heard a scream midsentence from the bathroom that apparently signified the hot water was working.

Stephanie finished her (hot) shower just in time to get to church. We go to the smaller of the two Methodist churches in Huancayo: a congregation of about 50 that meets in a rented room about three blocks from our apartment. Services are usually about an hour and a half, and consist of several songs (which everyone else knows the words to, because there are no songbooks), a pretty long sermon, and at least 3 “greeting times.” During these greeting times, people walk around and greet everyone else in the sanctuary by kissing them on the cheek and saying something meaningful—usually “God bless you” or “Peace be with you” or, in my case, “Hi.”

There is an art to the cheek kiss that I seem not to have mastered. I learned in Spain that it’s more of a touching cheeks than actually kissing, but here it seems to be somewhat more complicated. After much observation, Stephanie and I have come to the conclusion that the men actually kiss cheeks, while women touch cheeks and make a kissing sound. Which means that when a woman greets someone in this manner, she aims with her cheek rather than her lips. This is the part I don’t seem to be able to get. For some reason, I am unable to control the velocity of my head, so that I either miss completely (leading to an embarrassing do-over) or accidentally inflict a head-butt with my cheek (leading to an embarrassing apology and—depending on how old the victim is—an offer to go get some ice).

This morning was communion Sunday, meaning that we all filed up front and had yet another “greeting time.” I managed not to injure anyone this time, but did startle an older woman when I accidentally hit her with my cheekbone. After greeting time, César and the other pastor (Jaime) walked around the circle to give communion. They served by intinction, so each person took a piece of bread and dipped it in the…whatever that was. (I think some sort of juice…definitely not grape juice or wine). Great, I finally know what’s going on. I took my bread dipped it in the cup, and put it in my mouth. It was at that moment that Stephanie elbowed me in the ribs and pointed out that everyone else was still holding theirs. Apparently, Peruvians wait for everyone to be served before eating the elements.

My first instinct was to spit out the bread that I hadn’t swallowed yet, until Stephanie pointed out in a loud English whisper that that would be disgusting. The second best option was to hold it un-chewed in my mouth, and then pretend to eat something when everyone else did.

Unfortunately, by this time Stephanie (who had not eaten her bread) was cracking up, which was making me crack up. This was not good, both because I had a piece of bread in my mouth and because the rest of the church was praying. I tried to stifle it, but—unlike Stephanie—I have not been gifted with the ability to laugh silently. My stifled laughter tends to sound somewhere between a horse snorting and a goose being chased by a wild hog, a hard sound to pass off as crying or some other pious activity. This made Stephanie laugh even more, which made me laugh even more, which made the congregation think that perhaps I was choking. I held my hands in front of my face, partly to mask the sound and partly to make it look like I still had my bread.

Luckily, communion ended soon and Stephanie and I were free to go to the back of the church and laugh to our hearts content. Nobody mentioned anything, although I did notice that one lady shook my hand instead of kissing me goodbye.