Out with the old, in with the new

In case you haven’t noticed, the world didn’t end. Things looked rather grim for a while, and it seemed like as the days got closer and closer to December 21^st I saw more and more people huddled in corners, making plans for the End of It All. “We should all gather in a group,” one woman told me solemnly, “So that we can die together. How will we find one another once the eclipse comes and the sun goes out?” Well, that’s one hell of a way to start a conversation.

When December 21^st came and left, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. People walked with a lighter spring in their step. There was no earthquake! No eclipse! No cataclysmic event at all! Maybe because no one actually expected to be able to enjoy 2013, New Year’s turned out to be quite the event.

Just like Christmas, New Year’s was quite a family event for me. My siblings Rubven, Mayson, Maiker and Yessenea had stayed around after the holidays, and Erica and Robinson promised to return home soon to enjoy the festivities at home. Yessenea, ever the bubbly recruiter, soon enlisted me to deck out our general store. Since yellow is considered the color for happiness and usually plays a prominent role in New Year’s décor. People gift yellow underwear in order to wish someone luck, and yellow streamers, necklaces, and other brick-a-brack are hung from buildings. In order to usher in a prosperous year, Maiker, Yessenea and I spent a good amount of time blowing up yellow balloons and hanging them from the store ceiling and walls. We also had fun participating in the second traditional New Year’s activity: burning the muñeca. Muñeca means “doll” in Spanish, but in this case it’s more like a scarecrow. Families build life-size human dolls out of old cloth and straw and then dress it in old clothing. The doll is usually given a face and a name (some take a more tongue-in-cheek approach and have muñecas that look strikingly like the president or the local town mayor) and, at the stroke of midnight, burned in the street. The point of the burning is to rid the family of the old, and usher in the new. My brothers had a great time making our muñeca and made it especially life-like. It scared the crap out of me. Whenever I left the bathroom I’d scream because I thought some creepy man was watching me. My family found that endlessly amusing.

Before our New Year’s festivities could kick off, a friend of mine, Mr. Galo, stopped by our house. He asked me and my parents to come with him to a nearby house, for reasons not really specified. When we arrived, we were in for quite a surprise. Inside was a fairly large crowd of people and three bright, shiny machines with a champagne bottle attached to each one. The machines were milling machines, which would be used to grind cereals and grains. Local families could pay a fee to use the machines, and in turn sell the ground products or use them for themselves. The machines had just been completed, and it was time for them to have “godparents.” I swear, everything here has a godparent. In this case the “godparent” was the person to open the machines up for business and make them available to the public. So, that was how I found myself on New Year’s Eve, smashing champagne bottles against milling machines and having a great time. Afterwards we feasted on more champagne and pachamanca before returning home.

When we got back, the family was all united and it was time to celebrate. Robinson and Erica arrived and brought Marti Gras-style masks, yellow luau necklaces, silly string, confetti, and a piñata in the shape of a giant beer bottle. The piñata was filled with candy and sweets and promptly hung from the second story over our front door. At midnight, we began to party. We burned the muñeca in the street and began to launch fireworks. As my sisters pranced around with sparklers and Roman candles, we formed a conga line and began hitting the piñata. While Robinson and Mayson sprayed everyone with silly string and tossed confetti, the piñata finally broke and all the neighborhood kids dashed for the treats. We passed around champagne, ate grapes (the tradition is to eat 12 grapes and, after you eat each one, you make a wish), and lit more fireworks. We then had a chocolatada and passed around slices of pantetón and hot chocolate to everyone. But that was not the end of the food. My mom and older siblings had fried potatoes and chicken and prepared a plate for everyone. Of course, no party would be complete without some wino. We closed the doors of the shop, made a dance floor, and boogied until the early hours of the morning.

So cheers, everyone! Here’s to hoping that we all have another wonderful year together, and that everyone remembers that the Mayans really are only good for their chocolate.

A Different Kind of Christmas

Christmas means a lot of things for me. It means freshly baked springerlies that make the whole house smell like anise. It means upside-down Christmas trees and ugly ornament contests, a ring of nutcrackers that guard the paper angel I colored when I was 2-years old. It means cuddling up on the couch to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “White Christmas,” then cuddling up with my mom in bed to read all of our favorite childhood Christmas stories. It means overflowing Christmas stockings, lounging around all day in pjs, and eating clam chowder and shrimp cocktails. It means candlelight Church services and listening to the Handel’s “Messiah” until my father can’t stand it any longer. This is how I define Christmas, and this year it all changed.

This year I had to spend Christmas in Peru.

I remember the moment when it dawned on my parents and me that I wouldn’t be able to spend the holidays at home. It was before I left, and we were all standing in the kitchen. I had just read the rule in my Peace Corps handbook that stated that no volunteer was allowed to travel or receive foreign guests during their first six months in country. We did the math – I was to arrive in mid-September, which meant I would only have phone and Skype-contact with my family until February.

“But…but what about Christmas?” my mom asked.

We were all stunned. “Well,” I said rather shell-shocked, “I guess Christmas is going to be a little different this year.” 

Although I tried to act excited and praised the idea of experiencing Christmas in a foreign country, deep down I was worried. What if Christmas turned out to be a total dud? What if my host family didn’t do anything for the holidays? What if my only Christmas celebration turned out to be nothing more than me sitting all alone on my bed, binging on packaged cookies and chocolate bars? It was a terrifying prospect.

As the days of December passed by, I started to get more and more anxious. I finally felt at home in Aurahua and felt close to my host family, but still the idea of celebrating Christmas away from my American family seemed rather troubling. I shrugged and smiled when I cheerfully told my neighbors that I’d be sticking around for the holidays. However, I’m sure my eyes revealed my inner panic. The responses I received were all pretty much the same: “You’re going to be here for Christmas? Oh you poor thing! They don’t do anything here for the holidays. You should have gone back to the States.” Thanks guys, thanks a lot. I kept probing my host family, subtly asking what, exactly, we’d be doing on the 24^th and the 25^th and crossing my fingers that it would be something more than watching soap operas on TV. The answers were vague and mysterious. Apparently all of my host siblings were coming back home for the holidays, but other than that I got nothing.

Well, at least I wouldn’t suffer alone.

One by one they arrived at the house. My 18-year old host brother, Maiker, arrived first, followed shortly by my older 25-year old brother, Robinson, and my younger host sister, Yessenea, who is 20-years old. Erica, who is 23, was the last to arrive. All together, we went from a quiet, peaceful household of five to a jam-packed house of nine. It couldn’t have been better.

I soon discovered that I loved – repeat LOVED – my host siblings. We did everything together. From the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed, I was with at least one of them. We spent hours laughing, talking, comparing childhoods and Christmas traditions, and everything in between. Robinson gave me a half-day tour of the neighboring countryside, pointing out all of our family-owned fields and the areas where he used to play and beat up on his brothers as a child. When we got home, he started giving me cooking lessons. Lacking a Christmas tree, Yessenea commandeered me into decorating the family store with red, green, and yellow balloons. Let me tell you, blowing up balloons is easier said than done in high altitude. There were also fierce volleyball matches and men vs. women soccer games between me, Yessenea, and my two younger brothers Mayson and Rubven. As I spent more and more time with them, I realized how irregular it was for them all to be home at once. Robinson had a full-time job in Lima, Yessenea was a university student, Maiker attended a college-preparatory academy, and Erica worked for the government in Chincha. They all had busy, hectic lives, making trips home hard to schedule. Robinson, for his part, hadn’t been home for Christmas in about ten years. The more and more I learned, the more I realized that they had all made a special effort to not only return home for the holidays, but also to meet and welcome me.

A lot of my best memories leading up to Christmas have to deal with food. Besides my regular cooking lessons, there was a lot of activity in the kitchen. Since the family had grown considerably, we had a lot more cooking to do. Right before Christmas Eve, one of our cows suffered from colic and had to be killed. As Robinson and I prepared food for our dogs (by the way, we have FOUR puppies) and made cheese, I watched as my dad, our farmhands, and my three other host brothers skinned and quartered the carcass. We carried everything back home, and every, and I mean every, available overhanging surface was used to hang the meat. We had ribs hanging off clotheslines, hearts and lungs draped over gutters, legs and cutlets dangling off of pipes, and, to top of it, a cow head staring rather morosely from an oil drum barrel. Our back yard looked like a murder scene from the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”  But boy did we eat well. Meat is rather expensive here, and most times an animal is more valuable alive than slaughtered. Typically dishes have only small pieces of meat, but for the holidays we had whole slabs of seasoned beef and rich, meaty stews. As all nine of us piled into our small earthen kitchen, we laughed and joked and ate heartily. “Isn’t it great that we’re all finally together as one big family?” asked my host sister, Yessenea, “And now we have another daughter in the family! What could be better for Christmas?”

When Christmas Eve arrived, I had two celebrations to prepare for: one with the health center and one with my family. Unfortunately for my health staff, medical emergencies don’t respect the holidays. Since anything could happen at any time, someone had to stay in the health center for Christmas. Unfortunately that rather unpleasant duty fell on our nurse intern, Miriam, and two of our technicians, Elizabeth and Carmen Luz. Knowing firsthand how much it truly sucked to be away from home during the holidays, I proposed that we have our own Christmas celebration together. The idea became very popular, and we commissioned Carmen to make us some sort of Christmas dinner. Elizabeth, Miriam and I bought all the groceries and, in lieu of my normal holiday baking, I made no-bake cookies. At 8:00 on Christmas Eve, we gathered around one of our tables in the health center, feasted on chicken boiled in dark beer with peas and carrots, fried potatoes, rice, boxed wine, sickeningly sweet champagne, and cookies and jammed out to Latin music videos. Before we left, we went over to the center’s nativity set and put baby Jesus in his manger.

My second Christmas Eve celebration was with my host family. After leaving the health center, I found all of my host siblings in the street throwing small fireworks and playing volleyball. I gladly joined them and was pleased to win the volleyball game (although this was mostly due to my younger host brother, Rubvin). We were then ushered inside to have a late-night feast of pachamanca.

Pachamanca is one of the best foods Peru has to offer. It’s a traditional dish usually consisting of seasoned meat, sweet potatoes, yellow potatoes, peas, and choclo, a type of large-kernelled corn, that are slowly roasted together. There are two ways you can cook pachamanca. You can either burry all the ingredients in the ground with some hot coals, or you can slowly cook everything together in a big pot over a fire. People normally are fanatic about their method of cooking. Those who prefer the earthen method state that the flavors are richer than anything you could get from an iron pot. On the other hand, those who use pots say that the meat is far more tender and not nearly as dry as cooking pachamanca in the ground. In either case, the result is delicious.

After having our fill of pachamanca, we waited until the stroke of midnight and had a chocolatada. Chocolatadadas are events that consist of only two things: hot chocolate spiced with cinnamon and clove and panetón. Once I felt like I was ready to explode, we had a dance party. Yessenea turned out to be quite the dancing dictator and demanded that everyone get up and party. She put in DVD after DVD of Andean music videos and we all celebrated. I danced wino, a type of Andean dance. It’s a little hard to describe, but it consists mostly of hopping, twirling, and stomping. Although I never say it out loud, I always refer to wino dancing in my head as “kill the herd of cockroaches” dance, or “trample out the forest fire” dance. My friend Karen affectionately refers to it as “stomp your right foot till you drop” dance. At 1:00 AM, I was about ready to drop. I thanked everyone, excused myself, and merrily passed out on my bed.

As I drifted off to sleep I couldn’t help but think how lucky I was. It was true that I was away from home and didn’t really get to do any of my traditional Christmas celebrations. I didn’t get to make my springerlies, or have my holiday movie marathon, or even decorate my tree, but that didn’t mean I didn’t get to have Christmas. I got to celebrate a warm, family-filled holiday and the birth of Christ with people I had truly come to love. So, it was a different kind of Christmas, but a wonderful Christmas all the same. 

Feliz Cumpleaños

“I lost my own boy, Treelore, right before I started waiting on Miss Leefolt. He was twenty-four years old. The best part of a person’s life.”

That was the first thing I read in an absolutely fantastic book, The Help, on December 12, 2012. It was the morning of my birthday, and I too was turning 24. Since the Peace Corps has a rule saying that you can’t travel or accept foreign guests during your first three months in site, I wondered how, exactly, I was going to enjoy my birthday in Aurahua, Peru. I was going to be away from my family and my friends in the States, and so far I had only formed loose friendships within my new community. So, what exactly was it going to be like to spend the first day of the best part of my life here in Aurahua, Peru?

As I was getting dressed in the morning, I tried to tell myself to not let my hopes get too high. Today would probably be just another day. As I bumbled around my room in my pajamas, I heard a knock on my door. In burst my 15-year old host brother, Rubven, who grasped me in a stifling bear hug shouting, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!” I was then told to get dressed quickly and come downstairs as soon as possible. When I wondered into the kitchen, there was my mother with a huge breakfast spread: potatoes with cream, boiled eggs, and a large fruit salad tossed in yogurt. I was stunned. Fruit is rather expensive for my family, and yet they had splurged to ensure that I got to celebrate first thing in the morning. As I stumbled for words, in walked Omar, the high school science teacher and one of my closest friends here. He came over specially to wish me a happy birthday and celebrate with me.

For the rest of the day, I was showered with birthday greetings. Everyone who I passed on the street beamed with smiles and wished me a happy birthday, and I also received phone calls and texts from my parents in the US, my host family in Lima, various Peace Corps volunteers, my site mates, my two health directors, my host sister in Chincha, and the director of the Aurahua health center. I was stunned by how many people remembered and went out of their way to wish me well. As I passed the local high school, the teachers came out to treat me to lunch. Before I could protest, they had whisked me off to a small restaurant and treated me to yet another meal.

Even though it was my birthday, I still felt like I needed to do something productive and work. So, I spent a majority of the afternoon in the health center, working on various projects and helping out as much as I could. When 6:30 rolled around, I told the technicians that I was going to head on home. Before I could get up, they asked me to stick around a bit longer. They wanted to buy some things from one of the nearby stores, so they asked me to watch over the health center while they stepped out. I agreed, assuming they were going to buy some late-night snacks. When they came back, I realized that they had secretly gone out to buy me a birthday dinner. They had plates of salchipollo, a street food that involves fried chicken, French fries, and salsa, a huge bottle of Pepsi, and a paletón, a basketball-sized sweetbread filled with candied fruit. We had a small feast and watched soap operas, laughing and celebrating together.

When I returned home that night, I was informed that the local elementary school was having a graduation party and that I should attend. So, at 10:00 I left the house to watch the kids parade and dance around in fairy princess-like dresses and suits. It was absolutely adorable. However, word soon spread that it was my birthday and before I knew it, I was being surrounded by people wishing me well. I was whisked off to eat even MORE food – carapulca, boiled potatoes in a spicy tomato sauce, and sopa seca, noodles tossed in a dry herb sauce. Suddenly it was announced that there was cake and that I should most definitely eat that too. At this point, it was close to midnight and I was about ready to burst. I thanked everyone profusely, but politely declined. I literally could not eat another bite.

After walking back home, I collapsed on top of my bed, extremely tired but overwhelmingly happy. My town doesn’t have a lot, yet everyone had gone out of their way to give what they could and celebrate with me. They all understood what an important day it was and, even though I was away from my own friends and family, they were determined to make me feel at home.

What a great way to start the best days of my life.