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A man waiting on Saturday morning in Canta

Robin Kirk is a human rights activist and Latin American scholar. She reported from Peru during the guerra interna during the 1980s. Later, in 1997, she published a personal narrative of her time in Peru, The Monkey’s Paw: New Chronicles from Peru. The following passage comes from that book.

* * *

It takes a stubbornness, perhaps arrogance, and a certain faith in the face of long odds to write about someone else’s country. Nothing binds me to Peru, no family or history. Yet that is not the same as saying that writing is impossible. Perhaps it takes an outsider to discover in details invisible to natives a window onto a national soul…

I have not aspired to be a Peru expert. In my mind, the fact that I have lived for a time there and seen certain things, talked to some people and traveled a fair amount qualifies me only as adventurous Peru is a place I’ve been, but not always. It has occupied my thoughts, but not without respite. The stories I heard, some told in these pages, conclude with no prescriptions for Peru’s many ills. In a decade, what will Peru be? Besides poor, I can’t say…

Peru is my lens, a country where the challenge to lead a moral life is perhaps greater or more present than in my own. It is not a country founded on morality, but rather the exploitation of natural wealth: gold, jewels, people, cotton, guano, rubber, coca. Yet is also a place where morality has been taken to a lethal extreme, most recently in the war between the government and the Shining Path… [Y]oung Peruvians set out to destroy the world they new in order to build something that was barely a waking dream…

To say I have no physical connection to Peru does not mean I lack an emotional or intellectual one … I have a history, albeit brief, in the scheme of things, and a place to stand.

Despite all, and in Peru facing stifling odds, I met people for whom moral questions were not simply to be considered, but forces that shaped their lives, their axis and molten center. They believed and acted on those beliefs. In part, my aim in writing this book is to recognize them and put them in a context, to explore what a hard and astonishing thing it is to carve this path out of that wilderness. And I measure myself there, and wonder: where do I stand?

It is one of the basic questions, to ask what, if circumstances were different, would become of me. What is my essential self and what, if my comforts vanished, would I become? What if my child died? What if my electricity stopped and my faucets ran dry? … What if I were taken into the glare of the headlights on the rocky road, with the fleeing hares and the prick of the puna wind, and made to kneel? What if I forced the kneeling?

Perhaps it is the conceit of a writer to believe that the questions I find absorbing are more poignant now than they ever were. But I also wonder whether what all the modern world has given me—my soft chair, my tight roof, my full belly, my peacefully sleeping daughter, my cash machine and my safety belt and my hope and my vacation time and my birth control pills and my assumption that I will never be completely without a choice—makes me and those like me almost a different species from most of the rest of humanity and certainly most Peruvians, whose lives revolve around finding a meal, a night’s sleep, a bit of money, a place to rest. To Peru, the centuries have brought not progress but a place on a precipice. Any of the winds that periodically blow can crack away a tenuous purchase, won at high cost and never, ever sure.

Can I bridge the gap? Is my quest doomed? Is there, in all of this, a place to stand? And then?

Here are some photos from my recent trip to Arequipa, which is a city in southern Peru about 15 hours in bus from Lima. Yes, 15 hours, but more on that later

I will also be posting a a bunch of new photos over the next few days. Stop by again to check them out!

Monasterio de Santa Catalina

Semana Santa in Arequipa

Daphne and hot chocolate melted from the bar

Jeremy the Explorer atop a cerro

A meadow outside of Chivay

A grainy meadow along the road to Coporaque

Beautiful terracing, or balcones in Spanish, along the Cañon del Colca

Nora hides in an old waterfall basin

Sun sets in Arequipa. One of my favorite shots of Peru

Descending into Chivay

Nora and I and an Inca ruin (we think it was Incan, at least)

I recently came across this poem in a class I’m taking on Peruvian politics and violence from 1980 to 1992. This poem was written in 1986 as civil war encroached on Lima. The author was 25 years old at the time. Below is my humble translation.

Men working at La Punta. My photo.

LIMA REVISITED

Por Eduardo Chirinos. Para Nilo Espinoza

“NO ME DIGAS QUE FUE UN SUEÑO”

Cuánta ausencia en las calles.
Los dioses han abandonado a Antonio
lo han dejado tirando cintura, bien plantado
en un cafetín de mala muerte.–”Una cerveza”, pide.
Qué espuma borrará su boca, qué amargo
inundará su sangre. Esto es Lima, Antonio.
Los dioses la han llenado de muertos.

NOCHE CADA CIEN AÑOS

Hemos acostumbrado nuestro dedo
a posarse en las llagas más horribles: la muerte
danza entre los desperdicios, muestra
su trise dentadura en los transportes públicos
alza su falda y nos enseña
un sexo abochornad, noticias de periódico,
cáscaras de plátano,
el sonido del viento agitando la noche.

HOMBRES, MUJERES, NIÑOS…

Hombres con el torso desnudo
descargan bolsas de arena o de cmento
las apilan junta a una construcción
y beben litros de cerveza
en cualquier calle de Lima.
Mujeres de rostro duro
pregonan tamales, emolientes, licores
y enormes senos que palpitan bajo el sol
en cualquier calle de Lima.
Niños en a edad de la inocencia
miran con codicia a las mujeres
sonríen entre ellos y nerviosos
corren detrás de una pelota
en cualquier calle de Lima.

LIMA REVISITED

By Eduardo Chirinos. To Nilo Espinoza

“DON’T TELL ME THAT IT WAS A DREAM”

How much emptiness in the streets.
The gods have abandoned Antonio
they’ve left him to dancing alone, stood him up
in a godforsaken bar–”A beer,” he asks.
What foam he wipes from his mouth, what bitterness
inundates his blood. This is Lima, Antonio.
The gods have filled it with the dead.

NIGHT EVERY HUNDRED YEARS

We’ve been accustomed to place
our fingers on the most horrible wounds: death
dances among the the wasted, showing
its sad smile on the public buses
it raises its skirt and shows us
its cowering sexiness, stories in the newspaper,
banana peels,
the sound of wind shaking the night.

MEN, WOMEN, CHILDREN…

Men with bare chests
unload bags of sand or concrete
they pile them next to a construction site
and drink liters of beer
on any street in Lima.
Women of hard faces
hawking tamales, emollients, spirits
enormous bosoms that bounce in the sun
on any street in Lima.
Children in the age of innocence
look with lust at the women
they smile between themselves, nervous
they chase behind a soccer ball
on any street in Lima.

I recently have written a short travel guide to Peru for my family’s visit here in mid-May. I plan on adopting some sections of what I wrote in that guide as blog posts here. This is the first adaptation.

Annotated map of Peru

Let me also make a quick note about the geography here. Peru is a fairly large country—about twice the size of the state of Texas. Peruvians think of their country as having three very distinct regions: the arid costa (coast) on the west; the mountainous sierra in the center; and the Amazonian selva (rainforest) on the east. You also sometimes hear about the eastern slopes of the Andes where the mountains turn to tropical rainforest; this is called ceja de selva, or “eyebrow of the jungle.”

These regions really stand out in the map above, which has been constructed using local satellite images and is thus representative of the true nature of the terrain. The coast is a desert—dry, sandy, and largely barren of plants except for the approximately 40 river valleys that cut through from the mountains. The mountains are habitable but rugged. The jungle is impressively green.

The Incas largely lived in the mountains, but after centuries of migration, most Peruvians now live along the coast. The jungle—although representing nearly 50% of the land area of the country—is home to a relatively few number of Peruvians, approximately a million, or less than 5%.

Lima is home to approximately one-third of all Peruvians. But remember that Lima is situated on the costa. As you can glean, it’s a desert. Nature never “intended” more than 10 million humans to call the relatively slender Rimac River Valley home. The Incas knew better, and they built their capital and largest cities in the mountains where rain is abundant and crops can be grown with relatively little coaxing. Conversely, almost nothing in Lima is naturally green. Who was the genius who chose to build a capital city in the middle of a desert? Francisco Pizarro, of course.

PBS Newshour recently visited Lima to film a short segment on Socios En Salud’s microfinance project. Unfortunately, I was busy with other tasks and was not able to accompany the filmmaker, Talea Miller, on her visit. However, I’m sure that my colleague, the wonderful Elna Osso, was a more-than-capable guide and liason.

Please check out the short film below: