What’s especially remarkable about this area is that it lies only a few hours from the dry, sandy desert of the Lima coast, yet Canta is extremely verdant. The various hues of green in Canta remind me that photosynthesis indeed is a natural process, that in most parts of the world, when you have a patch of earth, stuff tends to grow. Not in Lima.

There are a few primary reasons for the difference in climate between Lima and Canta. First, lying at nearly at over 9000 feet, Canta is much higher in the mountains than Lima and thus receives much more rainfall than areas on the coastal desert. Second, the Chillón River runs strong in Canta as much of the water has yet to be diverted for small farms, allowing for extensive farming in the river valley. Finally, much of the outskirts of Lima were constructed in areas far from coastal river valleys; essentially, these parts of Lima — deserts with dunes, really — were largely inhospitable before modern technology allowed water and food to be transported more easily.

Please check out some photos:

A man waits in Canta

Canta panorama

South of Canta. Look how green it is!

Pretty flowers along the river

The greenness and water-ness was very different from Lima

Nora by the catarata

The river weaves its way through the valley

I had fun sliding down this pole with niños in San Miguel.

“The house is special,” said the Chief. “Part of its being special is its affiliation with the BMS [Best Medical School]. I want to tell you a story about the BMS, that showed me how special the BMS and the House are. It’s a story about a BMS doctor and a BMS nurse named Peg. It showed me what it is like to be affiliated with the …”

My mind wandered. The Leggo was a less chubby version of the Fish, as if, given the fact that the Leggo had published rather than perished to become Chief, all the human juice had been sucked out of him, and he had been left drained, dehydrated, even uremic. So this was the top of the cone, when finally, and with all men, as Chief, one was perpetually more slurped against than slurping.

“… and so Peg came up to me with a surprised look on her face and said ‘Doctor Leggo, how could you wonder whether that order had been done? When a BMS doctor tells a BMS nurse to do something, you can be sure it will be done, and it will be done right.’”

He paused, as if expecting applause. He was met with silence. I yawned, and realized that my mind had gone straight to f***ing.

And this one is my favorite in the whole book:

I sat in the E.W. nursing station thinking about how the Leggo and the Fish had blessed our ward with “the toughies,” the dying young, like Jimmy, like my friend Dr. Sanders, out there on his last fishing trip before his last autumn-

“That’s tough to do, to face the dying and the dead.”

I looked up. It was one of the policemen, the fat one, Gilheeny.

“Strength of character,” said the other one, Quick, “it doesn’t grow on trees.”

“Nor can one buy it in any store,” said the redhead. “It’s the toilet training that does it, I do believe. So said Freud and Cohen.”

“Where did an Irish cop learn about Freud?” I asked.

“Where? Why, here, man, here, from spending the last twenty years here, five nights a week; in trialogues of discussion with fine young overeducated men like you. Better than night school, more broad and useful. And we get paid to attend.”

“Not only that,” said Quick, “but all the different viewpoints contribute. Over twenty years one learns a good deal. Currently a surgeon named Gath brings the news from the Southern Rim, and with Cohen we are in the middle of a gold mine of psychoanalytical thought.”

“Who is Cohen?”

“A sophisticated, jocular, and unrestrained resident in psychiatry,” said Quick. “A textbook in himself.”

“You must make his acquaintance,” said Gilheeng. Twitching his red eyebrows so that they coerced the rest of his fat face into a gap-toothed smile, he went on, “We can hardly wait to hear from a Rhodes Scholar like yourself, a man with high qualities of body and mind, with experience gleaned from corners of the round globe, like England, France, and the Emerald Isle, which I have visited only twice.”

“A textbook in yourself,” said Quick.

The history of the ruins and the story of their discovery are both remarkable. Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady only popularized the site in the mid-1990s when she revealed the magnitude of the ruins: A city of pyramids in the Peruvian desert, with an elaborate complex of temples, an amphitheater and ordinary houses. Before the mid-1990s, even local Peruvians were unaware of the site’s existence; they thought the pyramids — covered in millennia of sand — were merely sand dunes.

What was surprising was not only the size of the archaeological site at Caral but also its age. It turned out that Caral was inhabited between roughly 2600 B.C. and 2000 B.C., making it the most ancient city in the Americas and possibly even the entire world. Amazingly, it was essentially unknown until twenty years ago and continues to be low on the radar of Peruvian and foreign tourists alike. I suspect that in ten or twenty years, after more archaeological excavation has been completed, Caral will be one of Peru’s most famous destinations.

Here are a few photos:

The road from the ruins of Caral to the village of Caral.

The Super River Valley transforms a desert into a swath of green.

The road to the ruins.

Roger posing at the entrance.

The ruins are in a sandy desert next to the fertile region of the valley.

Me posing next to one of the 11 pyramids. Many are incompletely excavated.

A perfectly circular amphitheater built 4,000 years ago.

One of the larger pyramids at the site.

I hope the next six months in Peru are as wonderful as the my first three months in the country. I invite you to continue following my adventures at this humble web-log.

While I start taking photographs again in Peru, I’ve posted below two of my favorite images from my time back in Michigan:

Our cabin on Lake Louise during a snowstorm.

The sun sets at Lake Louise on December 30, 2010.

Do you Twitter and pay attention to all of that?

No I don’t. I don’t Tweet because I can’t think of anything I’d want to discuss with somebody that I could explain in 25 words or less, 140 characters or whatever it is, nor would I be particularly interested in their answer. And I think it’s forcing people to think in these kinds of sound-bytes, and you can’t think in sound-bytes. But on the other hand it will all level out. [Zoologist] Desmond Morris could explain it easily: it’s just primate grouping—people just need to group. They just need to pick each other’s fur, and that’s what it is, all day long, all this Facebook, Twittering, and texting is all just primate social grooming, you know? And if it brings us closer together as a kind of a mobile consciousness and lets people think of each other that way, then it’s fine. Problem is I had this kind of idealistic view of what the Internet could be: that you could have friends in Spain and in China, and that you could be connected to people and their strife. I had friends working at orphanages in Burma and things like that and I’m sending them money. I thought, ‘Wow, the Internet can really combat tyranny. It can bring us together, it can give us an appreciation of other cultures.’ And unfortunately, that’s not how it works. The Internet is used so that people can find somebody out of the other six billion people in the planet that are just like them, and so it’s this self-organizing principle that puts you always with a reinforcing group, not a group that challenges you.

Here are some highlights:

Peruvian superstar and boxer Kina Malpartida's had a fight televised during our bus trip. She won.

Baby potatoes in La Merced.

An ant near the Vela de la Novia waterfall in Yurinaki

A flower near the same waterfall

La Vela de la Novia. The water is rust colored due to recent rains that wash mud into the streams.

The selva, or jungle, in Yurinaki

A nun wades into the Río Perené at dusk in Pichanaqui

Cacti in Acobamba, Peru (near Tarma)

Chancras, or small farms, near Muruhuay

Sunset while eating Pachamanca, or meat and pototoes cooked underground

Dr. Seuss-esque trees outside of Tarmatambo

The view of Quito from San Martin

Armando snapped this spectular photo of a humbpack whale we spotted near La Isla de la Plata

Reading, as always, in Puerto Cayo

The stunning Las Lajas Catedral in Colombia

In Colombia, just across the northern Ecuadorian border

I have finally posted my photos from my time in Ecuador in July and August 2008 and invite you to check them out on Flickr either in slideshow form (which I recommend) or via the Flickr set page. A few of my favorites are above.

I’ve removed all pictures of friends from the Flickr album because it’s public and the internet is sometimes creepy. However, I have the same album up on Facebook too with more people pictures. If you care.

Thanks for stopping by.

On the Lima coast with my roommate's charango

Hi everyone, I’m writing this post from Lima, Peru, where I’ll be living over the next year as a volunteer/intern with Socios En Salud, which is part of the medical organization Partners In Health. I’ve been an enormous fan of the organization for quite some time now, so you can imagine how excited I am to join their team. But, I’m getting ahead of myself; let me first give some life context for those of you with whom I haven’t spoken in awhile.

I spent the last year — from September 2008 to August 2009 — taking all the pre-med classes at Bryn Mawr College, which is a small liberal arts school in the Philadelphia suburbs. This August, I finished my final pre-med requirements (curse you organic chemistry!), took the MCAT, and completed my medical school applications. Over the course of the next year, I will be going through the long medical school application process. After the MCAT adventure, I hauled my stuff home to Michigan with Mom and Dad. I then stayed at home with the fam for most of the month of September.

San Borja

I flew to Peru almost exactly a week ago. Here, I’m living in an apartment in the San Borja neighborhood of Lima. It’s actually a really nice neighborhood — probably one of the nicest in all of Lima. So, although there is considerable poverty throughout Lima and Peru in general, San Borja looks a little like some of the nicer beach neighborhoods of Los Angeles. As you can see from the photo, our street has a pretty boulevard down the middle.

As far as living arrangements, I’ve really been taken care of. My two roommates and I live in an apartment in a six-story apartment complex on the same block as the organization’s offices in San Borja. My depo (short for departamento, or apartment) is very nice. We have a beautiful dining area, a large lounge space with comfy couches, wireless internet, our own bedrooms, and probably more cable channels than I have at home. We also have help keeping the place clean from the organization’s wonderful cleaning service. In short, I must say these are by far the best digs I’ve had since leaving home to go to college. I’m very lucky.

Socios En Salud, the organization I’m working for, is a subsidiary of Partners In Health, which is an international medical NGO that works in many countries around the world — most prominently Haiti, Rwanda, and, of course, Peru. (Socios En Salud is just “Partners In Health” in Spanish). The organization is affiliated with a hospital in Boston (Brigham And Women’s Hospital) and Harvard Medical School. The history of Partners In Health and also Socios En Salud was described in Tracy Kidder’s book Mountains Beyond Mountains. It’s a great read, and I highly recommend it. Socios is very well known worldwide for its spectacular success treating drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis with community-health workers, but the organization has a number of other projects in areas such as infant health, microfinance, education, and home-building. My particular role is to serve as kind of a research assistant for two doctors here, as well as support the organization’s work with publications, presentations, Socio’s website, and other projects I can help with.

Lima, Peru.

Socios does much of their work in the outskirts of Lima, areas which are generally less well off than the central areas of Lima. A previous intern with Socios En Salud has explained this feature well:

If you made a topographical map of Lima by using household income instead of meters to measure altitude, that map would be almost a direct inverse of the actual topographical layout of Lima. That is to say the poorest people seem to live in the hills, and the higher up you go in the hills, the poorer people are. As it was explained to me, during Lima’s population explosion in the last generation, droves of people moved from the country into the city (again, often a trip downhill from the Andes but seeking higher socio-economic ground) and began these squatter settlements or “pueblos jovenes” in the unclaimed, unaccommodating hillsides. As new families move in, they simply build higher and higher up the hills. The cruel irony of this arrangement is that the people with the best views of the grandeur of the city have the least access to its resources.

Lima's historic center: Plaza de Armas

I don’t feel comfortable making many generalizations about Lima as I’ve only been in the city for one week. However, from what I’ve gleaned, it’s a unique city for a number of reasons. Here are a few things about Lima I didn’t know three months ago:

• Lima was founded in 1535 by Pizarro after his conquest of the Incas. However, present day Lima was not the original capital city of the Incas; that was Cuzco, which is located off the coast. Pizarro wanted a port city to be capital to take advantage of the seafaring nature of the Spanish.
• It is said the name “Lima” derives from the Quechua word limaq, which means “talker.”
• Lima has a fascinating microclimate that I don’t quite fully understand yet. It’s considered a coastal tropical desert and gets only about a few inches of rain each year. The sun rarely comes out during the winter.
• Greater Lima has a population of 8 million; one-third of all Peruvians live in the Lima metropolitan area.

I would be remiss if I also didn’t mention the food here. Peruvians take great pride in their national cuisine, which has been considered the best in all of Latin America. Peruvian food is an eclectic mix stemming from its diverse background:

Thanks to its pre-Incas and Inca heritage and to Spanish, Basque, African, Sino-Cantonese, Japanese and finally Italian, French and British immigration (mainly throughout the 19th century), Peruvian cuisine combines the flavors of four continents.

Some typical Peruvian dishes include ceviche (raw fish marinated in lemon juice and onions), lomo saltado (beef tenderloin with tomatoes and other spices), ají de gallina (chicken stew made with cream and cheese), and many more. (I’ve had the second two — delicious.) I have the privilege of trying a different Peruvian dish almost every lunch, so I will make sure to report back with my findings in a few months. I also must mention that Peru is home of the famous Pisco Sour, which is a cocktail made with pisco, lime, and egg-white. Pisco is a liquor distilled from grapes, and there is a long and complicated dispute between Peru and Chile over the rightful owner of the pisco denomination. I have been told in Lima, however, to always remember that El PISCO ES PERUANO.

Well, that’s about it for now. I welcome you to follow along in my further updates! Thank you for stopping by.