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Bus from the jungle

Let’s add a little rationality.  I’m underemployed.  That’s great.  That’s what I want – enough job to feed myself, and enough time – much more time – to feed my mind well.  I have autonomy in a job that’s not difficult.  It ties me to one place, a remote place, but it’s eminently manageable, it doesn’t consume me.  I’m in Perú – as I write this, I’m travelling through jungle in the Amazonian Basin – I can travel, and easily, to places most of my friends only dream about.  The climate is temperate, the people here are temperate.  I’m not dying of frighteningly grey cold for nine months of the year, and nor am I subject to the more corrosive parts of English culture (the need to complain constantly, nor the need to absolutely define myself by stupid lifestyle details – to fit in by ostentatiously not quite fitting in).  I’m learning a new language.  How wonderful to learn a whole new language, a whole new way of being - and this is me, someone utterly shit at languages, too.  I’m learning patience, and to rid myself of arrogance, which is something extremely difficult for either a European or a South American to do.  I’m learning how to have a little pride.
I’m learning compromise – many relationships I’ve had have been with people very different in character to me, but from a similar culture.  Now, I can’t rely on any shared assumption of justice, or of Being in the Right, or of other’s opinions.  I’m alone with my own beliefs and customs, and have to pick and choose which ones are worth the battle of maintaining.  I have a family, a husband: someone who is impossible, great-hearted, selfish, loving, bad tempered, loyal, difficult, who wakes up every morning and tells me that he loves me, who is the bloody bane of my existence, and whom I love to pieces right back.  He can be obstinate, egotistic, pig-headed and stubborn, and he can also show me one of the warmest hearts I ever encountered in life.
I live in the Andes, a five hour hop from the Amazon, amidst ancient tribal ruins without number.  Whenever I remember to lift my face from the grindstone of daily living, it stuns me with its complexity and beauty.  I live in the Andes.  The fucking Andes, for god’s sakes.  Life is life, and I forget that, too much.  People come here once in a lifetime.
I live far away from magazines and TV adverts, and trying to look fashionable.  Nobody’s ever going to tell me, with the weight of cultural rejection, that I’m not good enough, here, because I’m too skinny, too old, too young, too fat.  Of course what I am is too white, too foreign, too other for them to accept, but you don’t grab at the sweeter honey without getting stung a little. 
Yo me siento la falta de mis patas, de mis libros, de los platos típicos, de mi familia.  Falta algo.  Pero no es una cosa en lo que me falto todo.  Es el Perú.  En muchas formas, vivo una vida mas rica que antes. Eso me recordaría.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 5:13 pm ~ Love Letters Straight from One Heart [ View ~ Add ]

Avoidance

Written in April 08

The owl on the cover of my diary winks at me, in frozen, old, Singaporean merriment. My back's to the café, the staff avoid my eye. I try to believe that the stunted, bloated, younger child of the owner, shuffling and screaming in the shop, aged somewhere between 12 and 32, is a good person.

It’s a thing I practise. It’s not fun to be ugly, you have to allow the ugly certain character defects – it was society, not instinct that put them there. But she disappoints so often – truculent sighs in place of responses, slamming goods onto the glass, eye-rolling and loud no-one-in-particular style complaints about bloody foreigners; that I have to admit defeat, the girl is ugly on the inside.

She has a crush on my partner, and, man, she could lose weight, she could dress better, but it’s going to be harder to grow two feet, convert from black hair to blonde, hazel to blue eyes, and change the colour of skin. She has a lot of stuff to be angry about. Don’t we all.

But it’s depressing, you know – why the nastiness, why the aggression, why all born of self-hate? Is that my problem, too, am I not happy here because I’m too full of self loathing to be happy, geography be damned? I don’t think so. I ask if they’ll switch the TV on. The kid ignores me and walks away. I ask another worker. Same response. Scatter.

I victimise the new girl; she knits her brow as she doesn’t listen, as she hears only skin colour and not the formation of words. As she decides before I’ve really spoken that she won’t understand me.

God, I’m tired of this mountain ignorance. I’m tired of no words, no glances, no gestures reflected, no smiles. No social connections whatsoever, when you disregard the lamers who hope two words per month could one day convert into a fuck.

And – surprise. The new girl answered me, the usual, abrupt, Peruvian “no,” but this time she gave an explanation. A stupid explanation, yes, but that it exists acknowledges that I am human. Not just invisible. Not just Despised.

It won’t last. She’ll learn.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:14 pm ~ There are shitloads - 5 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Grillo

I found a three or four inch cricket on my bedsheets on Monday.  A grillo. It ran just like a spider with cat DNA might do, when I flicked it into the sunshine.  It ran up a drainpipe.  (isn't that a drainpipe just behind you?)

Drainpipe to another world.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:51 pm ~ There are shitloads - 5 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

On thoughts of suicide

Written in April 2008

I spent half of my first wedding anniversary crying uncontrollably.  Only the hours where I was alone.  It wasn't related to the date, only mere all pervading isolation and sadness.

I'm sure that's not an alien concept for you.

When my husband came home and held me, asked me later what I was thinking, I was even surprised at myself, noting that my passing thoughts had been of which pillar would hold firmest if I hanged myself from it.

It's not my way to think suicidal thoughts.  And I don't feel sympathy for the suicidal thinker.  I'm sorry if it offends you, but the long distant suicide of a friend left me with the conviction that this is a dark, perverse, selfish desire, founded on a well hidden need to cause deep and lasting pain.  I am the type who would bury a suicide at the crossroads, and refuse to mourn them.  And when someone you care about has hanged themselves in an empty garage, knowing that a child will find them, knowing that they have coruscated and abandoned four children under the age of seven, knowing that their life is far from unrecognised, unappreciated, or lost in the noise of humanity, then you may stand and point a finger at me for that.

It's not in my character to be this person.  But to be so inexplicably unequal to the world as to want to lash out and hurt it, to be so beneath what is needed as to fold, defeated, into myself - that very much is in my character.  This is chemical imbalance rearing its ugly head.  This is not response, this is depression.

And I spent last week trying to tell someone that she's depressed, that she needs help, that to cut off and hide at this point only feels the best response, but would actually bury her.  Even I couldn't be so stupid as to assume the symptoms I described weren't equally symptoms of my own black dolorousness.

So, I lie there, crying, thinking about oblivion, and it occurs to me that this is the Big D again.  Hello, black dogs, my old friends.  I'd hoped them to be isolated responses in my life, to difficult circumstances, but life shows me the lie.  By repetition life shows me the lie.  Even this way of speaking, this repetitive, ruthless (not ruthless enough) self-analysis is a symptom.  The fault lies not in the stars.  The fault lies in me.

Three times I could explain it away. The knocks.  The blows of rough fate: a logical response.  Four times, now, that the black dogs have greeted me.  Four times is not reaction.  Four times is tendency, syndrome, instigation.  This is chemical depression.  This is what darkens my skies, makes me unerringly the painted victim of my own moody refusal to lift my eyes.  This is depression.  This, then, is what I am, what I probably have always tended to be.

And I cry myself to sleep, thinking about how the writing and writing and writing doesn't help.  It both magnifies and hides, and then you reread and see what a false hypocritical bitch you can be, and of course, that realisation is always helpful, isn't it.

My husband holds me, and whispers "it's okay, it's just two months till you see your family again, all your friends, they'll be so pleased to see you."  It's not even an eye-blink space of thought that dismisses him - more a supposition of assumed negative force in the world, as memory registers that it ain't that way, that, usually, they're not pleased to see me at all, and disallows the possibility of light in the world.  And I spider my mind out, above the sadness - reflecting that this ability, too, is manic - to present itself to the problem of what to do about it.  This is Perú, I can buy prozac from a pharmacist without any enquiry - but wouldn't I rather see a pysch?  Do I really want to mask my problems with a drug that will just make me go away?  The only other time I took it, it brought order to my life, by eliminating the manic energy, the hyperreal super processes, reducing my days to automaton eat-drink-sleep.  A blessed release.  The most blessed being my prompt escape from this jelly-humanity, from life as a lower-evolved being, six months later.  If I do it again, if I take the blood pills and their promises, could I escape so fast the next time?  Is it possible they aggravate this tendency?  That I'm underwater and treading here because my response is to hide behind drugs?

And my visit home: would that be easier or harder if I floated through the whole thing without feeling anything?  Would I maybe be nicer, less disappointed, easier for the folks over there?  Would the absence of the catalyst alcohol, the absence of the catalyst character, the absence of the catalyst fear, be a factor in that?

My mind, even racing, can't find a solution.  If I find a psych, I can't talk.  Sleep is a healer.  I close wet lashes, dream that I take my own five year old self on my knee, tell her that I love her.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:25 pm ~ There are shitloads - 10 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Rosy

I don't want good publicity.  I don't need this place to render my life here in rosier detail.  Some bits of my life are good, a fair bit is bad, and I'm not interested in hiding it.  When something is solid, I don't need to talk it up.  This is not paradise, it's real life.  Real, messy, tormented, unpredictable, bitter, and arcane.

Fact.  Solid.  Perú is beautiful.

Fact. Solid.  My husband loves me.

Fact.  Solid.  My career is fulfilling, here.

I don't need to make out it's better than it is, I dont even need to say the good bits.  That's not my particular fight.  That's not what this place is for.

This place is to articulate the struggle to contain and control my traitor, negating soul.  If it sounds a little too much of the black paint for you, then there's a million happier places you could read.  A million happier people.

But don't pressure me to keep quiet about the dark bits.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:20 pm ~ There are shitloads - 3 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Revival

Written in April 08

I'm watching an evangelical meeting.  Live band, nuns doing the conga around a fountain, stacks of locals shuffling, headwagging, mouthing the words.  Latin americans are reputed to be warm, open, music loving, impetuous types, never more so than when being described by themselves.  "Europeans die of overwork of the heasde, you know," Alicia once confided, in a dark room in Cuenca, "and south americans die of overwork of the heart."

However, on the pacific coast, it doesn't ring true.  Ecuadorean and Peruvian society are repressed and conservative to the point of teeth gritting, and social control achieved through exhausting degrees of formalities, to be submitted to on every occasion.

Self consciously, the local citizens clap hands, stare nervously at each other, and try to secure good opinion from nuns.  People are snubbed, courted or approved of, through a limited, limiting code of gestures.  No one wants to bring censure on home and family by appearing, acting, or dressing out of place.

And then.  A fat woman, short haired, breaks from the conga line.  She's dressed in an alpaca sweater and grey slacks, not the conventional black leather jacket, black shirt, indigo jeans, black stilettos of peruvian women (of a certain age and status).  She wears the sweater because it's cold, and because its made of llama fur, and because she loves Perú.  On her feet are flip flops, dusty ones.  She congas alone across the patio, dancing with arms wide, like a fat scout-mistress demonstrating a good time.  She dances to the low wall opposite, pulls a rigid skinny nun from her perch, drags her protesting to the conga line.  Nervous titters from the nuns, who are girls, kind hearted girls dressed in old women's bodies.  Short dumpy nuns from Japan, goofy, stick-limbed nuns from Africa, moustachioed, illiterate and curvy, small nuns from Perú.  With a push and a shove and a wild ducking of the head, fat woman forces grey nun into the line, and she's dancing.  Knees swooping upwards in a barnyard gait, shes back off to the crowd and sequestering yet another pallid, nervous nun.

And, of all the world she has to be European, I realise.  That lack of self-consciousness, the desire to express squashing and killing the desire to conform.  Not giving a flying fuck what people with a stick up their arse think of her.  It's so unperuvian.  I've seen it so often (in the US, in Asia) that it shocks me how I'd forgotten.  The disjunct of witnessing physical liberty.  It's so European.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:04 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

nevernevernever

Written in April 08

"But you can never go back," he says, sipping coffee in pyjamas, in the doorway of my kitchen, this man I've never met before.  Last night I'd wept my way to sleep, resolving not to spend another Christmas in Perú, resolving to move out to an apartment with a bed, with a table, with a hanger and a space with a door I can shut on the world as soon as I awoke.

"It's not that it's changed," he sipped at the imported beans, pink slippers on his feet, "it's you.  You know different things, now, and you'll never be able to go back to how it was."

Like a lone funereal toll, pealing out across a lake, somewhere.  My jaw drops, at the presumption, and at the accuracy, of him.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 3:56 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

Sierra

My friends and family have visited Perú, you know.  But what they saw was the coast.  The coast is different.  On the coast, women are now permitted to go to university, to begin (if not yet fully execute) a career.  They can smoke in public, delay marriage and children, travel independently (even though they don't, they can), see something different on the street and tolerate it.  The banks used to only employ beautiful girls, but nowadays quite a few banks will employ ugly women, too, if they are good at their jobs.
The coast is much more advanced than where I live.

Sure, maybe in comparison to back home, it seems shabby, dirty and limited.  Bit like Hull thirty years ago.  Women are not yet emancipated enough to have short hair, or to want to sacrifice family for the sake of their new careers.  And if they see a facial piercing, a boy in eyeliner, their jaws drop in shock.  But in the contest of Peru, of costa, sierra, selva (coast, mountain, jungle, the three separate cultures of any Andean country), they're worldly, liberal, cosmopolitan.  Tolerant.
My partner's from the coast.  But that's not My Perú. 

I live in the high sierra.  Coastal people use serrano (someone from the sierra is a serrano) as an insult.  It means backward, insular, unevolved. (believe me, you don't want to know what they think of selva culture...)

... and they have a bit of a point, there, see.

In the sierra, women still walk three paces behind their husband.  (who, incidentally, has never boiled water, but expects a three course meal for lunch, waiting on the table as he steps in the door.)  Women can run a family business, but nothing else - a woman is for the cleaning, the cooking, the breeding, the carrying.  Women don't even pay for things here.  Many's the night I've watched three knockout girls in a bar yawning around a man so inebriated that his face is in his navel, because if they don't dance attendance , who would pay for the drinks and the food?
[Explaining the concept of 'going dutch' to C----, coastal chica, she says, "yes, but on a date it'd be different, no?"  then gapes as I explain, no, that is a date.]

It's not unusual to see a halfcut fat rolling feller slouching down the street at one pm while his wife and his mother carry two stones of potatoes and three kids on their backs, behind him.  Women are treated as donkeys, here.

For that matter, so's everybody.  Treated like a donkey, I mean.
If you call an electrician he'll like as not arrive three days late and pissed for the first month of appointments.  There's a national ban on sale of alcohol two days before any election, to ensure people use the time off correctly.  In a restaurant, maybe you'll get served, and maybe you won't.    Maybe half of what you ordered will do.  Taxis are Toyota estates, and they carry between 12 and 18 people, a goat on the roof and a bag of chickens in the boot with the children, and yes, they do offroad.  What road?
An average taxi ride is four hours.  The handbrake is space for another passenger, there's a horn for that purpose.  If you enter a clothes shop in the sierra, they're quite likely to throw you out again.  Certainly you have little chance of trying on any clothes.  Workers in the sierra often work for three months, then disappear, having tired of it.  And yes, it's true, the manual workers outside of the cities will chew coca all day.

It's a bit like living in cave somewhere.  And slowly, slowly, the cave walls creep closer, and you begin to find it normal, to think that everywhere is always like this.  'Perú is advancing,' goes the national slogan, and yes, it is.  There's little terrorism now, educational standards are improving, even if alfabetismo doesn't yet hit every community, we have KFC, Starbucks, and a corrupt premier league just like you.
But that's one thousand kilometres south west of here, on the coast. 

Yesterday I saw a young calf walking through the regional capital city, with 'I'm yours for $11' tacked onto its belly.  (even in the godfearing sierra, a woman is cheaper.) 
Here, where I live, is the sierra.  And we're different.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 9:08 pm ~ There are shitloads - 4 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Snippets from real conversations

In the street, in the city square, in the market ...

• "I love you because your skin is white."
• "Is your country perfect?  Have peruvians ever existed in your country?"
• "Little white girl!  Little white girl!  Buy from me!"
• "Oh my god, look how fat you are.  Are you pregnent?  No?  You're just very, very fat, then.  It's because you're in love!"
• "When you people enter a room, somehow, we peruvians, we feel less."
• "You're too tall, but your eyes are nice."
• "White girl!"  [multiply this one by a million, and repeat it ad nauseum]
• "That food is poisonous.  You people can eat it only because your stomachs are different, because you are from Mars."
• "Oh my god, you're white.  You're so white.  How pretty.  How, how pretyyou are."
• "What's your problem, why are you buying vegetables so late?  It's one o'clock, did you get up late?" [other woman interjects] "Don't be stupid, she'ws the white girl rom the institute.  She works all the night, so she sleeps all day.  That's why she cooks at stupid times*.   How come you don't know this?"           [*30 minutes past the national lunchtime, fact fans]
• "I know about you.  You're the exploited white girl that guy keeps, no?"
• "I wish I was slim and beautiful like you, but I am black*."   [* from latin women who'd certainly be considered white in my country]
• "You have beautiful eyes but you like to hide them."
• "White giant.  You people eat only old food, many years old, isn't that true.  That's why peruvians will always be healthier than you."
• "Britain?  What part of the US is that, then?"
• "You are getting fatter, aren't you?"
• "Look, look! Look at that white girl!  Oh, she's pretty."
• "You tourists, you all behave like you are God.  You're nothing in your country."
• "Give me your eyes.  I like your eyes."
• "Can you see that?! It's a white girl!  Incredible."
• "White whore, go home.  American whore."
• "I would eat your eyes.  And then I want my daughter to have the same eyes."
• "I cannot go to your country.  I am not spoilt like you.  They would kill me because I am black*."       [* olive skin, inca cheekbones, or chinese features are considered 'black' in Perú]
• "Look, it's a prostitute!"
• "White girl, I have an uncle in the United States.  Do you know him?"
• "White bitch, what can he give you that I can't?"

For the record, I am not fat, beautiful, pretty, or possessed of unusually tempting eyes.  Listening to this all the time fucks with your sense of self.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:49 pm ~ There are shitloads - 8 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Blind to it

I was having a hard time with the silence, the lack of friends, the machismo, the racism, thepoverty, the language barrier, and got pretty depressed a couple of times (in the 'I give up, gimme drugs and get me through this' kind of sense - dicey in a country where access to powerful anti-depressants is utterly unregulated), but A--- pointed out to me that seeing things as black and white is itself a symptom of depression, and that gave me enough patience to ride it out a little longer.

"A person who is depressed doesn't see things as they are.  They see things in black and white.  And all the black is my fault."

Isolation doesn't compete well when set against rosy memories.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 11:40 pm ~ There are shitloads - 3 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

No matter how many times you take the road to Pittsburgh

No matter how many times you take the road to Pittsburgh, it's not going to get you to Philadelphia

Drunken posts we have known.  And man, it's harder to be pissed in an internet cafe.

Desperation.

The internet tells me this: "tell your friends and family.  But you may have to be specific about what you want them to do".

I want you to do this:

• don't imagine that I don't exist until I'm in Europe.  Speak to me, communicate with me.  If you have some vague, comforting idea that I have friends here, that I have anyone who will even reply to an enquiry, I don't.  If you communicate with me, it will be one of the few human voices I hear this month;
• telephone me.  I know most people send your their numbers in case you lose your mobile. Actually I sent you my number, because in three years, only looby (internet friend), eroica (internet friend), my mum, russell, caroline, my best friend and my sister ever sent a call.  And that was one each.
• or, say yes when I ask if it's okay that I stay with you on my first lentgthy UK visit since July2005.  Even if it's for two hours, just don't blank the email.
• send me a letter.  It takes a month, more while we still have avalanches but no gas or food, but it will get there.
• remember I'm alive. Sincerely, that's my biggest fear.
• try really hard to stop saying 'no' to me.  Really.  If you say 'yes', I'll make hardly any demands at all, and the bounty to my immortal soul will be considerable just not to live in a world where everyone in a first world country says 'no'.  Or, 'what have you done for me lately?'

Posted by Sarsparilla at 12:17 am ~ There are shitloads - 6 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Delineation

August 27th, 2006. Written in the UK.

Delineation. It’s interesting what people consider public, or private. My sole rule of blogging is Finished Business Only. Dale comments that if anything, his writing is all unfinished business. Occasionally I get emails from people who’ve built up an entire cyber-personality for me, from the shreds they see on the web. I never quite know how to break it, how to let them down gently that the words here don’t represent who I am (that prime directive, in fact, means that, if anything, my online writing could only ever tell you Who I Have Once Been).

I’ve met plenty of people through various onscreen guises (and before you get snobby, as long as I can’t detect a clique forming, I like it; it’s just another way humans adapt cyberspace and personalise it. Stick that in your arsey up-yourself pipe and choke on it, all you ‘blogging is shit’-shouting, mediocre dead-media columnists – if you had any talent, you wouldn’t need to be scornful.) One of the most predictable responses I get from people I’ve met a time or two, who crack and start to be honest – is that they find me nothing like the person they’d imagined. So the writing isn’t feeding you the woman.

Whereas RL friends who read the blog (and there are plenty of posturing declaimers who like to greet me with ‘I don’t read your blog, you know!’ (if they’d had a few, they’ll follow it up with ‘it’s so self-indulgent!’) I’ve bitten my tongue on the fact that my site stats show they update weekly – if they think new media’s an excuse for poor manners, it’s their funeral) tend to see it as an extension of the person they know. Kind of a clue about what the quiet, sulky one is thinking. That seems more realistic an interpretation to me. I mean, just knowing someone isn’t any guarantee you actually know them.

Two of my exes read this blog (actually, lots do, but these two actually respond like puppets to scissors (so their reaction comes to gain meaning, simply via volume)). One read the blog before we dated. One knew me in RL, then, as part of some inexplicable pre-date stalking ritual, uncovered the blog.

• The former, who read the blog before ‘reading’ me regarded onscreen writing in much the same way as drunken musing. If I said something particularly ill-advised, I’d get a phone call to talk it out. The blog was seen as ‘surface’, and the person as what’s real.

• The latter, the one who knew me, then knew the blog regarded onscreen writing as some sort of lightning bolt truth blow delivered straight from my soul to the ether. If I gabbed my gob off ill-advisedly, I’d be ignored for weeks, then get some portentous admission. “I’ve read The Blog.” Real-life me was seen as ‘surface’, and the blog suddenly represented what was real.

In fact, when I spoke to Dutch about the ethics of dating and blogging, she did the Old Lady With The Second Sight act from any slasher B movie, complete with mad eyes, and clutching – “whatever you do, don’t tell her/him about the blog.”

I suppose I’ve never really had a strong delineation between public and private (isolated childhoods can fuck with your values). And I suppose an easy way out is to tell no one.

I dunno. I think they’ve all got it wrong. Sometimes, my blog is truer than my voice. Most times you’d not connect my RL calmness with the hysteric onscreen. We all have a mass of contradictory opinions that we hope nobody else will notice.

I am not the person you read here. As if that needed saying. This is not truth; this is not truth. No blog is ever truth.

The only way you know people? Really?

1. You have to do things with them. New things.

2. They have to want to let you in. That cuts out about 90% of the human race, then.

You don’t know me? Whaddaya talking about? You don’t even know you.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 1:54 pm ~ There are shitloads - 2 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Who's Ya Hero?

20th August, 2006; written in south west England

Change? Change is easy. The unknown, the step into the new. Fuckin' easy. It's like being back in school, because there's an easy sense of progress built in. It doesn't take strength of character, initiative, or self awareness to change anything - to change everything in your life.
What's hard is sticking about to see something through. That's where the real, gutsy heroes are, you know.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 5:41 pm ~ There are shitloads - 4 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Derrumbe

The derrumbes continue. Earthquake season is not till August, but it's the rainy season in the sierra (while equatorial, flat, coastal Perú enjoys their sweltering summer), and along the Andes - being largely formed of cities on mountain peaks, accessed by roads along valley chasms, alongside the white water furies that formed them - sometimes when the rivers swell, they take things with them.
It started two weeks ago, when the river swoll and took a suspension bridge, two cars, a truck and fifteen people. But we laughed nervously, here on our safe mountainpeak, and listened to stories of the rope bridge built across the still roaring white water, of the extra two hour hike to get to the ropes.
No hay pase became a new phrase I learnt. There's no way through. Cars can ford so much river, but not a torrent.
Another week of rain, and showers, and buses to the nearest city started to take 24 hours to complete a 9 hour journey. The slowness necessitated by the awkward, perilous task of riding over a fresh derrumbe, a fresh avalanche fall, on precipice white water overhangs, at five different points in the journey. Once the soil has started to slide, there's not much to stop it doing so again, so often you see colectivo drivers winging it, deciding to drive through an active avalanche, in the hope that it's not too serious yet, but if they wait, it will block the road for two days.

There are two roads into Bumfuck, Perú. We are situated on the eastern side of the Andean range, closer to the Amazonian jungle than to the coast (and civilisation). One road leads north, to the jungle fork, to the source of the river Amazon, to the turn off for the coast. The government have spent two years trying to pave this road, and in doing so for half of the route, has cut three hours from the travel time. The other leads south, and up: to 3500 metre frozen peaks and a city in the clouds, on the western side of the range. This road is not yet, and will not ever be paved, so a journey this way is steambreath cold, bumpy like a bike on a pebble beach, and dangerous.

Soon the word comes in - a derrumbe has closed the north road. For all the time and money spent paving the thing, no government can control the sheer Andean peak on one side, and the white water rushing on the other. The mountain has moved, shifted, and destroyed, taking with it not only the road, but the entire winding chasm of a valley. Not just the road is gone. The route is gone. Under shifting, unstable roack, it will never be there again.
If we want a route to the coast, we will have to cut one from the mountain through a different valley.
The estimated time for reopening the route is 3 years, or perhaps 30 days. It continues to rain.

We hear news from our sister city, in the western sierra, at the foot of the road south. They too have been cut off from the rest of the country. Now there is only the road to the jungle to feed us.  In the sierra, we grow potatoes. No more. We do not grow vegetables, we do not farm cattle (excepting the odd llama on the forgotten creepered fortresses in the junglier valleys), we do not grow rice, or farm chickens, or tank up gas for anywhere. Everything we eat has to be brought here. Peru survives on twice daily chicken and rice. This is going to be bad.

We wait for the prices to rise. My house runs out of gas to cook on day two. We go to the market and buy an electric kettle, saving my western addiction to coffee from the torture. There's no warm water to be boiled to wash with, but I got me my morning coffee. Go me.

My mother in law lives in one of the smaller towns stranded on all sides by the derrumbes, in the fertile valleys that provide us with rice. The restaurants in her town have run out of food and fuel, and refuse to serve anyone. The houses with kitchens are the only ones with gas. But no food to cook on it. She has decided to make a dash for the jungle. The route is clear, if you can get colectivos from derrumbe to derrumbe, and are willing to hike an hour or so over the unstable silt top of each avalanche. She wants to risk it.

Realising that foreigners will be the last to secure sought after supplies, we end up sending a peruvian out to whisper in corners about where more gas can be bribed out of the woodwork.  We hear: the houses who sell gas canisters have been hiding their stock, pretending it's run out, so they can reserve it for the big customers, the restaurants, and hoik the price up sky high.
The police discover this fraud, and raid all the gas sellers, confiscate their stock on the charge of having hidden it. The police now have all the gas in town. They hide it, and sell it at ridiculous prices, only to their friends. The rain continues.

One of our staff is having an affair with a married frenchman. He works for Medecins Sans Frontiers, in the African Republic of Congo, saving lives. He says his marriage is dead, and she is the first person to make him feel alive again. He spends $4000 USD flying from Congo to Lima, via Rio de Janeiro. There is no way through from Lima to the sierra.
He flies again, north to the coastal cities. There is no way through. He has ten days before he has to go back to Africa and save lives again. She cries a lot, and buys tickets from Paola.

The government sends an army cargo plane, to ship people out of the city to the coast, and food and fuel in. They promise that food will be sold at no more than usual profit, market prices. Fuel, too.
Nobody in the city ever sees a whisper of this food and fuel, but we've all heard it exists. They begin to ship people to the coast. The flights are free (Paola is cross, and refuses to let the private plane leave until it's full). People flying cargo have no seats, they simply strap themselves to a bench, try to endure the roaring noise, and the memories of the plane crash, swearing that they will never fly again.
The swell of people wanting free shipment to the coast is too big, and the army need to find a way to identify the most deserving cases. They decide that people with hospital appointments on the coast are not the most deserving cases, but people with important jobs who are friends of the mayor are. It keeps raining.

The restaurants are beginning to run out of fuel. Royser has a secret store of kerosene to roast chicken from. Luis reckons he has the inside info on where the camioneta full of gas canisters everybody saw this morning ended up.  The taxis in the city move around by pushing. Tempers are beginning to fray, and all across the Andes, the internet, the cellphones flare with gossip about a route over the peaks here, a possibility of movement there.

According to the government, the siege will last 15 days, or 2 years, now. We look at the local cathedral, demolished 15 months ago, sporting a government sign bragging of its rebuilding program, 'in only 90 days!'  Peruvians are ingenious people, can make something from nothing, can always always fix things, somehow. We know that in government speak, this means 8 days, or 30 days.  Or maybe ten years.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:04 pm ~ There are shitloads - 3 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

The Pleasures of Poverty

Written in December 07, Perú

It's not a new thing to be poor.  Poverty's causes cycle through a range of reasons:  you're a student, you're saving, you're paying rent on two houses, your ex stole a shitload of moolah from you, your money's earmarked for a higher or more important cause than eating right now, your job is shit, your partner's sick, you're waiting on a payout, it's a bad month for the business, you spent like hell last month, or you're just grinding shiteating dirt poor.

Doesn't make a whole lot of difference, I find, the reason.  Not to your stomach.  Not when you find yourself mentally rehearsing ways to tell your family you can't afford a christmas present for them that year.  Not when you try to nice it up that you didn't ring for a year cos there was no money for the phone.  Or can you send me a t shirt, a book, a blanket, so I don't have to stop eating to buy one.
My reason this time is that if I stay here, in SA, forever - or at least for such a period that makes pensionability impossible in my country of origin - then I have no pension and no health insurance for when I'm getting old enough for the parts to go rotten.  So the wee pile of money I have left from selling a London flat in 05 is now earmarked for double bypasses in a country with no NHS, for prescription drugs in a place where you buy the surgical implements and the medicines at the store and take them with you to the hospital.  For that, and for emergency plane fares home if for some reason I need an out route.  Suddenly, the pile that made me feel comfy for two years is not so much when I see the back up plan (a job, in a first world country) disappearing.

So I'm poor.  But the kind of poor where there's money, there's just a fucking good reason not to put it in my stomach.

And, as ever, I find there's a lot more peace in having nothing in your stomach, than in having something, but knowing there'll be less tomorrow.  Somehow, the possession of my last ten soles (one pound twenty four, fact fans) is astronomically stressful, when the possession of zero centavos is simply something I have no option but to endure.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 12:43 pm ~ There are shitloads - 8 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]