The Wisdom of Solomon?

If...The Peruvian Litmus Test

2011-02-09T17:21:00.000-08:00

Did I mention that my son hates having his diapers changed? Particularly after his wiggy epiphany he fights furiously for his rights as a naturist. But I have stumbled upon the solution. Now all I have to do is fix him with a stern eye and intone portentously:

“In the criminal justice system, sexually based offences are considered especially heinous. In New York City the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories.”

He absolutely loves it. Grins his head off and lies quietly while I change him.

Yes, I am a closet addict of Law and Order SUV. That cheesy American cop and lawyer show about the investigation and prosecution of sex crimes, each episode based on some controversial current event. And yes, no doubt I am a terrible parent exposing my infant son to such influences. But think what it will do for his vocabulary. Particularly since he seems at the moment to be learning mostly Spanish.

Many child rearing gurus insist that the way to raise a perfectly bilingual child is to have one parent speak to him exclusively in one language and the other exclusively in the other. Congratulations to anybody who has managed to stick to that regime. First of all, it is pretty impossible to switch from cooing to the baby in English to snarling at the husband in Spanish without some long-term schizophrenic effect. And secondly, I just can’t be arsed.

And anyway, he will be far too busy becoming a Peruvian to worry about any bilingual nonsense.

He is already an enthusiastic eater of onions and, if I would allow him, raw fish and various other strange things. He has mastered the words “hola” and “vamonos” (“let’s go”) and displays his latino temperament in his unwillingness to go to bed at a reasonable hour. And he is of course a team-shirt-wearing supporter of the Alianza football team.

But he still has a lot to learn about La Patria.

He has to memorise all seven verses of the national anthem followed on all occasions by a haka-style shout of “¡Viva el Peru!” “¡Viva!”

Peruvians take their himno nacional very seriously. In 2005 a Constitutional Tribunal settled various litigious issues about it including the fact that while the 5th stanza was not written by its original creator “its insertion into the history of the anthem expressed the will of the people represented in Law N° 1801 passed by Congress which declares it an intangible subject.”

He has to learn to despise Chileans, regard Argentineans with indulgent amusement and Bolivians with patronizing but kindly superiority.

Peruvians don’t just know who they are, they have very fixed views on who their neighbours are as well and are very conscious of their own central role in world history. Ask any of Lima’s well educated taxi drivers.

As one recent unprovoked tirade went:

“Those Chileans, can’t stand them. Traitors! Do you know they stole Bolivia’s access to the sea? Made them landlocked, pobrecitos. Chileans, pah! Did you know that they actually lent their airstrips to Inglaterra so they could invade Argentina? Si, La Guerra de las Malvinas. It’s true! Traitors! ¡Sin verguenzas todos! But you know what? That Prime Minister woman, what’s her name? Thatcher? La Dama de Hierro. She went to her grave not knowing that it was Peruvians who were shooting down her precious planes and ships. That’s right, Peruvian pilots we sent to help our brothers in Argentina. ¡Ella nunca sabía eso!”

I mentioned that in fact Thatcher was still alive but, seeing the hopeful gleam in his eye, added that she would be unlikely at this stage to be able to appreciate the full horror of this revelation suffering as she is from ongoing memory loss.

But he had some of his facts right. Apparently Peru was the only Latin American country to send tangible military assistance to Argentina, including 10 – 14 Mirage fighter jets and pilots from their own squadron (though some say they arrived too late to join in the actual fighting). And, according to one historian,

“Ships of the Royal Navy shot down only 10% of the Argentine Air Force, but 75% of the British task force was damaged or sunk.”

Whatever the truth, the Falkland’s War is clearly a source of pride to Peruvians. According to my taxi driver “We had to save our hermanos! Somos hermanos here in Latin America. Except those Chileans, hijos de puta! But Argentineans, muy buena gente. Cheap as hell, but really good fellas. And well dressed...always in the latest fashion but do they have a centavo in their pockets? Never! If you pick one up, turn him over and shake him ni un sol would fall out. But classy! They meet you for a drink and they say ‘ay hermano, I forgot my wallet. Lend me 50 soles to take a taxi and go get it.’ You give them the 50 and do they come back? Jamas, not even to give you change. But really nice people! Buena gente, not like them chilenos...”

So you see, it’s a lot to keep straight. I was thinking that I should make up for my laissez-faire attitude to his linguistic development by providing Smuggitos with some sort of learning aid. So I have turned to and liberally paraphrased that archetypical imperialist and purveyor of platitudes Rudyard Kipling:

If

(with apologies for butchering the scansion and rhymes)

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are babbling about ceviche and asking your own view;
If you can eat onions and raw fish with gusto,
And understand the mania for choclo con queso too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Haciendo la cola without murmur of complaint,
Or, being cut off in traffic, don't give way,
And yet don't get stuck in one spot for all eternity;

If you can dream without resort to ayahuasca;
If you can breathe amid the dust of Lima and not choke on automobile fumes;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And still believe that Alianza will survive;

If you can use the verb joder in every second sentence spoken
Conjugating to meet every twist of fate,
Or remember every Chilean malfeasance
And forgive the Argentinian propensity to thrift;

If you can watch the things you gave your life to all destroyed by earthquake,
And, resilient, stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can hold your hand against your heart and sing “Somos libres” with lusty force
And be convinced beyond all doubt that volleyball is actually a sport.

If you can walk in crowds and yet keep a bird’s eye view,
Or take a combi and not lose your cell phone;
If taxi drivers’ commentaries don’t bore you;
If all men wonder where you come from but are not sure enough to ask;

If you can ignore the unforgiving minute
With sixty hours worth of errands run -
Yours is the capital and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Peruvian my son!

There’s a Llama on your DNI!

2011-02-09T16:28:00.000-08:00

I have been reading Jeremy Paxman’s “The English: A Portrait of a People”, his erudite and amusing attempt to define the English (as opposed to British) personality and discover whether they do indeed have a national identity. Well there’s no question of that in Peru. Here it’s impossible NOT to have one. Here your identity is minutely assigned and rigorously documented.

By the time he was two weeks old my son had both a passport and a national identity card – a most attractive document featuring his photo (twice), his diminutive thumbprint and a holographic llama.

This Documento National de Identidad (DNI) is not so much proof of identity as proof of existence. You can do absolutely nothing without it, pay or get paid, open a bank account, buy anything on credit, enter various national buildings, get health care, issue a receipt, get a driver’s licence, etc. etc. And if you want to live in Peru you too must submit to being sucked into the system.

For resident foreigners the equivalent of the DNI is the Carnet de Extranjeria (CE). And instead of a llama it features a picture of Machu Picchu – no doubt symbolic of the arduous trek you need to make in order to get it. I won’t exhaust you with the minute details of the process. Suffice it to say that it involved a lot of time, money, patience and fingerprints.

Of course, a lot of it is about employment creation. Peru has an extremely service-oriented economy. Labour is cheap and plentiful, and Lima is full of compromises between modern technology and the need to keep a large population in work. All the large supermarkets and shopping malls boast electronic ticket barriers in their parking areas. But each one is manned by at least two uniformed personnel. You drive up to the barrier and there, sitting on a stool right next to the automatic button conveniently located within easy arm’s length of the driver’s window, is an official who pushes the button for you and hands you your ticket. On exiting you drive up to the barrier and hand your ticket to another official, who inserts it into the machine and beckons you through the automatically rising barrier. Similarly, the increased automation of government systems is matched by the insertion of more layers of bureaucracy.

Peru is also a signatory to the Hague Convention which allows an apostille stamp to be put on documents in the issuing country in order for them to be recognised as official in all other signatory countries.

Bollocks. In Peru you get blank stares and shrugs – go get it notarized and then legalized again at the ministry, but pay the fees first. You know how much income is generated and jobs created by one stamp? And all legal processes are so complicated that anyone who can afford it employs a tramitador (runner) to help with the legwork and guide you through the labyrinth.

All documents must be legalized and notarized several times over. Notarios are big business here and their offices can be found littering the streets of Lima in varying degrees of poshness. The notario (always a lawyer with a flourishing practice elsewhere) only ever witnesses you or your signature in the Jehovah’s Witness kind of sense – relying on the testimony of his servants that you are indeed who you say you are. He employs numerous minions to carry your documents up and down stairs, fingerprint you, tell you to come back later, that you needs more copies of this-or-that (a veritable cottage industry of photocopiers located within easy reach of all official buildings), even to charge you one sol to find you a parking space outside his premises and not vandalize your car. And notarized documents are only valid for between 1 and 6 months. Even your official birth certificate must have been issued within the last 6 months in order to be valid for various purposes.

In Peru you must literally be born again...and again.

Having completed the document legalization obstacle course in just over a year I embarked on the hardcore waiting and fingerprinting stage. As a veteran of several election observation missions I can tell you that fingerprint records are notoriously dodgy. I remember in one remote constituency in Guyana an election registration agent had forgotten his inkpad in the capital so simply registered everybody and added his own fingerprint to all the forms when he got back to head office. This was only discovered several elections later during a complete overhaul of the system.

But Peruvians are wedded to their fingerprints. Of course the technology is much more advanced here but even so not foolproof. Upon being employed full-time I was required to electronically register my right index fingerprint to sign in and out at school. My finger was rejected by the system because it matched that of another staff member already in the system so now I have to sign in with the left. I suppose it is in order to avoid such problems that they took prints of all 10 of my fingers at every stage of the process.

After the State had finally deemed my marriage certificate in order and registered it in the system (pay s/15 at any Banco de la Nación and you can get a copy) I was sent to Interpol – yes, the international crime fighting organisation you hear about in police procedurals and the occasional James Bond film – where I was fingerprinted again and photos taken of my teeth and, it seemed, my tonsils. All in one room and in full view of the waiting public. Then a lady at a computer screen entered my personal details (“and what do you call a person from Trinidad and Tobago?”), gazed at me, clicked her mouse and, without consultation, assigned me the skin colour “white”.

Being in smug possession of two black grandfathers and what my columnist hero Kevin Baldeosingh would call naturally curly hair, this was a great blow to me. But I felt it best not to rock the boat after waiting so long to get to this point.

Two months after the Interpol interlude I was informed that I had an appointment at the Ministry of External Affairs at 9 am to collect my CE. It only remained to pay the US$150 fee to be put on the foreigners register and to issue the CE; s/28 for paperwork for the annual foreigners tax; US$200 for the convenience of not having to leave the country and then return in order to change my visa status; and s/40 for transportation.

My tramitador turned up at 10 past 9 to collect me for the 45 minute drive to the ministry. But the lateness did not matter, apparently the 9 am appointment time is given to everyone coming to collect CEs on that day. The word “collect” is also used very loosely. It really means standing in more lines and giving more fingerprints for 2-4 hours while the system ensures that it has squeezed every last sol and ounce of patience out of you.

Whenever I arrive at a Caribbean airport from, say, JFK or Gatwick, I always feel a vengeful twinge of pleasure at the sight of the rows of sweating tourists waiting to go through immigration next to the briskly moving line reserved for Caribbean nationals. I suppose that’s how Peruvian bureaucrats feel watching the sea of gringos at their mercy.

So it was with resigned good-nature that I sat there among the dog-collared priests and wimpled nuns of various denominations and nationalities trying to remain beatific despite their obvious frustration; the barely-post-adolescent Mormon missionaries with their pocket badges denoting them as “Elder” this-or-that, travelling as usual in groups of two or three to present a united front to temptation. I observed with interest Clare, the beak-nosed, Germanic earth mother with her diminutive Peruvian husband, breastfeeding her three year old on demand and being told off for sitting on the floor while doing it. I even shrugged philosophically when my tramitador explain that I would have to apply for a renewal stamp every year and repeat the entire application process every four years. And when a harassed lady official berated me publicly and loudly for not having an entirely pristine page in my passport on which the Director could put his stamp I managed an unimpressed head toss and a truly Peruvian “ni modo pues”.

Finally I was presented with my plastic prize. My identity is established. I am officially a Peruvian resident.

¡Vive La Patria!

No, You Can’t have It All

2011-01-02T19:15:00.000-08:00

One year later...

The other day my son discovered his wiggy. You should have seen his face. One minute he was flailing around yelling his head off while I tried to change his diaper (he is very possessive of his poo) and the next his hand connected with his penis and bingo! Silence.

A look of pleasurable awe stole over his face and I thought – not without a tiny twinge of envy – here goes a lifetime of unconscious patting, surreptitious fixing, and comforting tugging. And he wasn’t yet one year old. Watching this grand discovery I was given, as Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective would say, “furiously to think”. What great discoveries have I made after one year in Peru?

I was dismayed to discover that I could come up with nothing earthshaking and was in fact unable to write a single line. I had Blogger’s Block. Drastic action was needed.

After a year of culture shock, the first half spent as a stay-at-home new mother and the second adjusting to becoming a school teacher, I felt I deserved to re-live the old days. While not wishing to belittle the Peruvian experience I suppose I felt it would be nice to get back into my comfort zone and reclaim my identity. In Peru I am, to my great shock, a gringa. It is a term I thought was used by Latinos to refer exclusively to non-Latino Americans but it appears that it means any English speaking non-Peruvian.

And the most that people here seem to be able to identify about me is that I am non-Peruvian.

It’s bad enough having spent years explaining to people in Europe that Trinidad is not a neighbourhood in Jamaica, but here they keep asking me what part of Central America it is or to whom it “belongs”.

Like the cheesy Cheers song goes, sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.

So, using air miles tickets accumulated during my former life as a hard-travelling diplomat, I set off in mid-October with my two offspring in tow. Ah, I thought, a civilized 10 days in the brisk autumnal air of London. I’ll take the children sightseeing; meet up with similarly accessorized friends. We’d sit around in their back gardens sipping (alright, guzzling) fizzy white wine and gossiping while the kids frolicked at our feet. I would pay a visit to my former office, show off the sprogs, have a productive meeting with my former boss and discuss the state of world affairs rather than the best way to serve ceviche. I might even squeeze in a naughty night out. Ah, the conveniences and culture of the first world!

I was of course, severely deluded. My heroic friend and her stoic husband had offered to accommodate us in their small north London house. Already in possession of three children between 6 years and 1 month and an aged and enigmatic cat, this was nothing short of insanity. But, we thought, between two intelligent, professional women we could handle the lot of them.

On average, what with diaper changes, bathroom rotation, breastfeeding and the Baby Inca’s obsession with trying to sample the cat’s food, it would take us about 4 hours just to get ready to leave the house each day. Packing all the kids, two strollers and diaper bags into my friend’s newly acquired people carrier left room for little more than a small slip of paper and, like a chinese puzzle, once unpacked it was almost impossible to reassemble. Rather than sitting around in the backyard in the late October air discussing the state of the Commonwealth and how the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition is making out, we were reduced to furtive sips of wine in the kitchen late at night while loading the dishwasher and discussing the difficulty of finding affordable childcare in the metropolis. First reality check.

Paying for my principles

The first time I went to Lima I was shocked at the spectacle of domestic employees in uniforms trailing after their employers in every restaurant, supermarket and shopping mall. My husband took us to the well-heeled suburb of Asia Beach one day. It is the closest thing to a beach that Lima has: traditional sandy expanses lapped by the waves of the freezing Humboldt Current. The well-to-do own beach houses and dedicated ice cream sellers who refuse to sell to non-residents. The families sat about under beach umbrellas while three or four servants in blue or white tunics waited on them hand and foot, scuttling endlessly in and out of the houses because there is a strict ban against “domestics” sitting on or swimming from the beach. In restaurants nannies are not allowed to sit at the same table as their employers.

Terrible, I though. I was particularly offended by the colour-coded tunics which I felt were unnecessary trapping of class division. No Peruvian understood why I was so bothered. “But Señora, they like it, it gives them status; and they don’t have to wear out their own clothes.” And the separate seating accommodations? “They prefer to sit apart, they’d be embarrassed to have to interact with their employer’s social circle”.

When I took Smuggies to a friend’s birthday party we were greeted at the door by a gardener/handyman, who called a maid, who in turn called the nanny, who ushered Smuggs into the house. On returning to pick her up I waited in the foyer watched by various other employees peeping at me from various doors. At no time did I actually meet a parent. They had hired a hotdog stand and all the entertainment. At Smuggies’ birthday party one girl informed me that it was quite all right if she decided to stay later because her chauffeur was waiting outside for her.

I was horrified and swore that I would take great care to ensure that my daughter would never believe that this was real life.

Upon relocating I did realise that I would have to get someone to help me with the baby and the apartment, particularly once I found a job. The gringa network issued dire warnings not to use employment agencies to find domestic help and stressed the importance of getting someone de confianza. I found a lovely lady who had worked for the last 10 years for extranjeros and came highly recommended.

As a Lima greenhorn I happily paid her a gringa salary from my gringa savings and considered myself lucky to have her. With the high-minded idiocy of the morally righteous, I based all my decisions on what my employee told me her former boss had done. Señora Ann always paid all the medical expenses, both for her employee and her three children. Señora Ann paid for the private school which her employee’s daughter attended. Señora Ann paid a day's wages worth of overtime for an evening's babysitting. Señora Ann had several employees: gardener, handyman, cook, housekeeper and nanny. Señora Ann, it turns out, was the stay-at-home wife of a Canadian mining executive whose company paid all the expenses. I, it turns out, am now the working wife of a Peruvian employee and both of us earn Peruvian wages.

Now there is a lot of abuse of domestic employees in Peru despite the fact that the government had introduced legislation to deal with this, including mandatory registration of employees and a co-payment system for social security and medical coverage – very similar to that in more developed countries. But, after registering my employee – at her direction – she balked at paying the social security contribution of 3% of her salary (to my 9% above what I was already paying), saying that Señora Ann had in fact never bothered with all that, merely paid all the medical expenses as they arose. Having paid for several x-rays for a toe on which a frozen bit of meat had fallen and doctor visits for various vague conditions involving a feeling of depression or a panic attack, I began to feel a bit panic-stricken myself. My savings were dwindling rapidly and her family’s needs were increasing. It was when she seemed to expect me to pay for her teenage son to see a psychologist because he wasn’t getting good marks at school that I realised that the situation was unsustainable.

The expiration of my gringa savings coincided with my finding a job. As a part-time teacher I found that I was making just enough to pay my employee’s salary which, it turned out, was three times the going rate. In addition, my new working hours did not coincide with my employee’s schedule since she needed to collect her daughter after school. So I found myself pelting out of my school every afternoon, catching the bus (to save money) and running several blocks to arrive home panting 5 minutes late and therefore having to pay her taxi home in order for her to collect her daughter on time.

So we parted ways and I went to the dreaded agency and stated my price and requirements. I now have an equally lovely young lady who comes from Apurimac in the Sierra, a 14 hour bus ride from Lima. At first we had a problem understanding each other because of our accents but we make do. She insists on starting and ending each sentence with “Señora” and refers to my husband as “El Señor”. For the first two weeks she refused to put my son on the ground, carrying him in her arms at all times and I had trouble breaking her of her insistence on carrying Smuggies’ schoolbag up and down the stairs.

The first time we went out together – a trip to the supermarket – she refused to let me push the Baby Inca’s stroller. In fact, she would not even let me walk alongside. Or behind. As we walked along I kept unconsciously adjusting my normally impatiently long stride since she seemed incapable of keeping up. Gradually I realized that the slower I walked the slower she walked until we were all but going backwards. I tried starting a conversation, casually dropping back to catch her responses, no good. She maintained a stubborn few yards between us. Finally, in the interest of getting to the damned supermarket before it closed, I gave up and headed our little domestic procession along the broad avenidas of Lima. Had I been Lady Godiva with a crew cut I could not have been more embarrassed.

Imagine me arriving in Tesco's like that?

But now I pay a fair wage and have reliable childcare and two nights free a week. So let’s call that Great Discovery Number One: Paying for your principles can be both expensive and misguided.

To be continued...

Who Says the Commonwealth isn't Relevant Anymore?

2010-11-07T20:53:00.000-08:00

Well, the day of reckoning has arrived.

After a year of touting my cricketing credentials, thereby managing to get myself a job as official scorer (see previous blog) and elected at Women’s Cricket Officer for Peru Cricket, I was told that I had to pull together a team for an historic Peruvian event: the first ever women’s cricket match between MY(??!) team and a far better practiced team of teachers from Markham School.

As anyone who knows me can tell you, I talk a good game. But I haven’t hefted a bat since university days and can’t bowl worth a toss. I could as much set the hounds to the foxes as set a field.

After a mad scramble involving begging on bended knee and blackmailing a couple of my students I now have the required quantity for a six-a-side and, as soon as I finish writing this, I am off to the Lima Cricket Club.

This morning it suddenly occurred to me that we have no uniforms. I thought I’d have a rummage through my extensive T-shirt collection and take along a few white tops. I discovered that I have loads of white T-shirts left over from the various Commonwealth Election Observer Missions I had done in those countries where the colours of the main political parties clashed with those of the Commonwealth. In those cases we used to hurriedly commission white T-shirts with the Commonwealth logo on the pocket surrounded by the words “Commonwealth Expert Team” plus the place and date of the election.

Ooooh, I thought, we’ll be the Commonwealth Expert Team! On my team I have a half-Aruban-half-Peruvian, a half-Kiwi-half-Peruvian, an Auzzie, two full Peruvians, an American and, I think, a Pakistani.

We, of course, suck. The Peruvians (an art teacher and a veterinary student) have never played cricket and have watched a grand total of one game. The Aruban is sporty as hell, as keen as mustard and reminds me of myself at that age (15). The Auzzie attempted to take an interest in cricket when married to her first husband but had since moved on. I have never met the Pakistani but have great hopes. I have been suffering for a few months with tendonitis of the wrist and am secretly hoping that I can use this as an excuse to get out of the whole thing.

Markham ladies look out!

I am a bit nervous about posting this blog for fear of getting into post-employment trouble from the Commonwealth Secretary-General for misuse of the logo, though I think that any non-criminal promotion of the Commonwealth is A Good Thing. However, even if I get sued, I would like to dedicate this rout – I mean match –to Amitav, my fellow COMSEC cricket enthusiast and a great all-rounder.

So Amitav, morituri te salutant!

Update: We won! Several of my players didn’t turn up so the Markham captain unwisely lent me three Peruvians who had never played cricket before but were members of the national women’s rugby squad. A five minute coaching session later we were off.

The Pakistani turned out to be an Indian with great line and length and a thorough knowledge of the rules. She promptly stumped any opposition player who stepped outside her crease, gaining us several crucial wickets. She and I took turns keeping wicket and the rest of the match consisted of a contest between which side bowled the least amount of wides. We won by two runs.

Does Criticizing People In Positions Of Authority Excite You Sexually?

2010-06-17T06:46:00.000-07:00

I have suddenly realised why people looked at me aghast and reached for the straightjacket when I told them that after nine years I was going to have another child.

It’s not the midnight feeds or the diaper changing or the fact that I can no longer wear dangly jewellery; it’s the children’s TV programmes. I now have to re-live Playhouse Disney and the Teletubbies.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure, the Teletubbies are all the rage among the infant and pre-school set: a group of plush, amorphous creatures of assorted bright colours; asexual yet thoroughly camp. The big purple one, Tinky Winky, is fond of carrying around a red handbag. They speak in incredibly annoying baby language and are much given to group hugs. Like a recurring nightmare I am now having to watch the Teletubbies not only AGAIN but in Spanish, which I assure you does not improve their adult appeal. And don’t get me started on that purple paedophile Barney...

And speaking of paedophiles, I am officially not one. Or so I assume having just been through a most rigorous psychological testing process while applying to teach at a school here in Lima.

In my other life, I have been through and sat on interview panels, observed a variety of group exercises and participated in assessment centres for jobs involving postings to Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. I’ve had interviewees reveal the most amazing personality traits (particularly when asked to illustrate their understanding and appreciation of cultural diversity). I’ve been asked to draw a tree and a picture of a man in the rain by a forensic psychologist. I’ve even been required to play a complicated version of Cluedo with a bunch of Foreign Office types – If we could conclude that it was Miss Scarlet in the study with the candlestick we would presumably be good at figuring out where the roadside bombs were if we happened to be posted to Basra.

But I’ve never experienced such a thorough mental grilling as this one.

It started off innocuously enough. Could I please, asked the pleasant lady school psychologist, draw a picture of a house? Piece of piss. I drew a box with curtained windows, a triangular roof, a door and a welcome mat. I then gratuitously added such peripherals as a swimming pool, a bike lying on the grass, a barbeque grill and some frolicking children. Lady Psych then quizzed me gently about the house. Is it inhabited? Whose is it? Is it in the country or the city? What does it have inside? (A large kitchen and lots of space for books.) I signed my name on the back and we moved on.

Could I please draw a picture of a person in the rain? Now I have come across this before. My theory is that if you leave the poor person in the rain without either raincoat or umbrella you are revealing an unpleasant tendency to be unfeeling or cruel. I therefore gave my person an umbrella and one hand extended to check if the rain was about to let up – meant to demonstrate an optimistic outlook – driving the point home by plastering a large grin on the face. I was also very careful to include ears. I had read somewhere that psychiatrists leap upon the absence of ears as evidence of some subconscious statement or the other.

My efforts got a noncommittal smile from the Psych and a request that I arrange six or seven coloured cards into the order which I found most appealing. Having started with orange and ended with a kind of boring beige (with black and white somewhere spaced out in the middle), I moved on to a computer test which required me to rate myself on a scale of one (rarely/never) to five (frequently/always) in reply to statements like: “I often see and hear things that other people do not” or “I sometimes feel that I am outside of my own body”.

Bear in mind that all these test are administered in Spanish so one has to beware of subtle linguistic pitfalls. For example, were they asking if I had had experiences of being out of my own body or in someone else's? Or maybe experiences with someone else´s body – which would be an entirely different kettle of fish. One can´t be too careful.

These difficulties were compounded when we moved on to the final part of the test.

I was presented with 250 A or B statements. I had to choose whichever statement I agreed with most. If I agreed with neither I had to choose the one I disagreed with least. But I HAD to choose one. No question could be skipped.

At first they were pretty straightforward:

A. I like to have my desk and workspace neat and tidy or B. I enjoy laughing publicly at the mistakes of others. Duh.

A. I like to plan a trip well in advance or B. I enjoy asking questions that I know no one can answer.

But questions kept recurring in less palatable combinations:

A. I like to criticize people in authority or B. I enjoy laughing publicly at the mistakes of others.

I spent a particularly long time on: A. I enjoy reading books with a large sexual content or B. I like to tell other people how to do their jobs.

Well, I thought, obviously you don’t inform your would-be employers in advance that you plan to be a pain in the ass to your colleagues. But do I want to give the impression that I have a bedside collection of naughty novels? On balance I figured that many great works of literature could be considered to have a large sexual content and I’d rather argue the toss than come across as a coy, hypocritical, busybody.

But forget the risqué books, the sexual content of the test started to increase alarmingly.

Did I, it inquired, A. Prefer to plan a trip well in advance or B. Enjoy listening to or telling jokes with high sexual content?

Do I A. Enjoy laughing publicly at the mistakes of others or B. Like watching movies with high sexual content?

The test was obviously designed to weed out paedophiles, other sexual deviants and anyone with an irreverent sense of humour. Eventually being faced with the choice of: A. I enjoy criticizing people in positions of authority. Or: B. I enjoy exciting myself sexually, I had to exert all my self control not to reply “Criticizing people in positions of authority excites me sexually”.

I figure that the computer rating test I had done before was a general intelligence test since you´d have to be pretty dumb to admit in a job interview that you have out-of-body experiences or regularly hear voices and see ghosts. The final test was obviously personality based, possibly of the popular Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) variety which, Wikipedia tells us,

“...is a highly validated psychopathology test generally used in a clinical psychology setting that may reveal potential mental health disorders...Notable situations in which the MMPI may be used, and is sometimes mandated, are in final selection for police officers, fire fighters, and other security and emergency personnel, especially when required to carry weapons. In that context, an assessment of mental stability and fitness can be argued as "reasonably related" and necessary in the performance of the job.”

I don’t know whether a marking book and a memory stick can be considered weapons but I suppose teachers are reasonable candidates for “assessment of mental stability and fitness”. But what kind of personality were they looking for? I have no doubt they have some fancy grid that they lay over your answer sheet and hey presto, your true colours emerge. I had in fact heard that several promising candidates had failed the test so it wasn’t just a box-ticking exercise on the part of management. But, staggering out exhausted after two hours, it seemed to me that one could only emerge as either A. a dangerous sex maniac or B. an anal retentive bully.

I got the job so I’ll leave it to my readers to decide which category I should be filed under.

Well, my regression is complete. Not only am I re-living The Baby Years but I am also awash with adolescents on a daily basis. I am teaching English to grade eights; being addresses as Meeees; singing along to the Wiggles; and my knowledge of current affairs is once again limited to the latest episode of SpongeBob SquarePants.

To mitigate the shock of this transformation and to escape the Peruvian ‘winter’ I’ve decided to take the family to Trinidad in July for a sun and sea vacation. I have therefore embarked on a strict diet and exercise regime to get in shape for the necessary swimwear. I call it Road to Bikini Bottom.

And I plan to take along a lot of naughty books to read by the pool.

Y ¿Qué Tal la Comida?

2010-06-08T21:34:00.000-07:00

Far be it for me to be judgemental about other people’s self-delusion. I have enough of my own. I defend fiercely anyone’s right to their beliefs, no matter how absurd. And I would go to great lengths to avoid embarrassing people by revealing their harmless mistakes, particularly when I am a guest in their country.

For example, one day I told my helper – who speaks no English – that I had bought but misplaced some furniture polish. I described what it was for and said it was in a spray bottle. A few days later she informed me that she had found it, no worries. It was only several weeks later that I discovered that she has been assiduously anointing my furniture with SPF 4 Banana Boat Dark Tanning Oil. I have not had the heart to point out the misunderstanding so my bookshelves are benefitting from being moisturised with aloe vera and carrot extract.

While this may indeed be skin off my nose, to me it wasn’t worth making her feel silly. But there are limits.

As any regular reader of this blog can testify, I have endured with great stoicism the national obsession with food. If I had a sol for every time a taxi driver has asked me “Y ¿qué tal la comida?” I would have a chauffeur and several personal slaves and not have to take taxis at all. I have answered politely millions of questions about the relative merits of Caribbean over Peruvian food. I have endured uncomplaining endless rants about the charms of raw fish, lime and onions; bravely sampled and enjoyed alpaca and guinea pig; and even ingested purple corn in various liquid and gelatinous forms despite rumours that the key ingredient is spit.

But there is such a thing as mass delusion which, as history has shown, is often best nipped in the bud. So if no one else will speak up, I will. At the risk of causing permanent trauma to the Peruvian national psyche I am compelled to call a spade a spade. Or rather, a roast chicken a roast chicken.

Sorry for my grumpiness but you don’t have to smile and exclaim hypocritically every time someone in Lima promises you with an arch expression the equivalent of an edible orgasm and then presents you triumphantly with yet another pollo a la brasa.

“Pollo a la Brasa,...is a common dish of Peruvian cuisine and one of the most consumed in Peru, along with ceviche, and Chifa. The dish originated in the city of Lima in the 1950s...The origins of the recipe are attributed to Roger Schuler, who devised the specific method of cooking the chicken, observing his cook's technique in preparation, and gradually, along with his business partners, perfected the recipe, creating the Granja Azul restaurant in Santa Clara, district of Ate, in Lima....Originally its consumption was specific to the high socioeconomic classes (during the 1950's until the 1970's); however its consumption later became(sic) to include the medium and low socioeconomic classes as well. The original version consisted of a chicken (cooked in charcoal and marinated only with salt) served with large french fries and traditionally eaten with the fingers, without cutlery. Its popularity became massive in the 1970's.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollo_a_la_Brasa)

With all due respect to Mr Schuler, pollo a la brasa (at least in its modern form) that reverentially named staple of Peruvian cuisine is...chicken and chips. It is not, as all Peruvians believe, uniquely Peruvian and – though I have utterly failed to convince my in-laws or any other Limeño of this – can be found worldwide.

Rotisserie chicken: the healthier alternative to KFC.

Yes, yes, I say (raising my voice to be heard over the clamour of Peruvian protest) no doubt there are differences in seasoning, but nothing so startling as to base an entire expatriate culture on, I assure you. And yet, check out this You Tube clip. When we lived in London my husband would play it over and over again late at night, salivating and sighing with frustrated desire. Watching New Yorkers sing the praises of this ethnic culinary phenomenon you would be forgiven for thinking this is a new cult founded on the Upper West Side by the Peruvian diaspora. The gringos lick their fingers and exclaim at the flavour, the juiciness. “Mah gaaad, it’s awesome!” they gush.”It’s better than sex!”

For god’s sake, it’s fucking rotisserie chicken and chips, not the long lost recipe for manna from heaven!

Now if you tell me about parihuela, the seafood soup to end all seafood soups, you have my full respect, and anyone who says that French bouillabaisse is better will have me to deal with. Revel in the fact that Peru has more varieties of potato, corn and peppers than anywhere else in the world. Boast about the artistic layering of potatoes and various other ingredients to produce the delicious causa; continue – if you must – to bore me to death about ceviche in all its manifestations; stuff me with choclo con queso and drown me in chicha but trust me, pollo a la brasa is not the best example of a national dish. Hang your sense of national identity on that and you’re in for a nasty shock if you ever visit Hi Lo Supermarket in Port of Spain or Tesco’s in London.

I’m just saying.

Oh, and while we’re setting the record straight, Chinese food is NOT indigenous to Peru even if you’ve changed the name so stop giving me that blank look of disbelief when I say we have lots of it in Trinidad too.

Here endeth the rant. Time for a pisco sour...now there’s a well-deserved Peruvian bragging right.

Hubris is a Hell of a Thing

2010-05-26T20:03:00.000-07:00

When my daughter, now happily ensconced in a new school, announced that it was Sports Week and that one evening would be devoted to a parents swimming competition, I jumped at the chance to impress her.

After all, I’ve been swimming my whole life. My father, the Colossus of our childhood, had deemed me the most aquatically streamlined of his children and insisted that I swim endless lengths on all water-related occasions. At the age of twelve I swam lengths of the university pool, closely followed by our enthusiastic, long-clawed dog. I swam against fierce currents off the coast of the island we grew up on. I swam lengths of every hotel pool on every holiday we ever had.

Being crap at athletics, pathetic at maths and completely useless at attending PTA Mothers Day luncheons I thought that this was an opportunity to make a contribution to her school life. I pictured myself turning up at the pool and wowing the assembled crowds with stylish freestyle and Olympic-class breaststroke. “Goodness” they would exclaim, “now we know where she gets her talent from.” (My daughter had won all her swimming events the day before.)

In addition, I would be honouring a long family tradition. My father is an excellent and stylish swimmer and I well remember how in my childhood, when our school announced the introduction of a father's race in its annual swimming gala he went into training and we boasted for weeks. On the day, due to some misunderstanding between himself and the starter as to whether the starter should have said “Ready, set, go” or “Ready, go”, he false-started twice and ended up giving an exhibition performance of his immaculate freestyle.

So I dug out my one-piece from the back of the cupboard, shaved my legs and bikini line with the crappy razors they sell in Lima and borrowed Smuggies’ swimming cap. The swimsuit was stretched, the cap too small.

“Mum” said Smuggies in a doubtful tone. “Are you sure you want to compete? You really think you can win?”

“Of course!” I scoffed. “Don’t you have any faith in me? You think I can’t swim?”

“Well whenever we’re at a pool you spend all your time sun-tanning. And you never want to get your hair wet.”

It’s not my fault that I am pigmentally challenged. My older sister took all the brown genes and left none for me. It’s not my fault that water makes my hair expand like a huge fuzzy sponge.

I should have realised that something was amiss when we arrived at 6.35 for a 6.30 event and the pool was already full. Peruvians are NEVER on time. There is an official term for it: Hora Peruana, where one expects all events to start at least an hour late. But these folks were keen. In Smuggies’ last school in England the parents swimming race was cancelled for lack of interest (I was travelling at the time). But here were parents decked out in Speedos, swimming expert-looking warm-up lengths, their latex caps and ergonomic goggles bearing no sign of having been recently bought.

Peruvians, as I may have mentioned before, are generally rather diminutive. The women are well-turned out and apparently physically expert at nothing more strenuous than a twenty-meter dash for a taxi in painfully high heels. Gym attendance consists of mirror gazing and some gentle heel-raises to try to develop shapely calves to match unrealistic-looking boobs. In fact, my sister-in-law claims that exercise stops completely after university.

In addition to being taller and presumably stronger, I figured that I’d have the inherent advantage of the Caribbean island dweller over the denizens of a country which boasts beaches washed by the blood-freezing Humboldt Current. There are penguins and sea lions living off the coast of El Callao for god’s sake!

The parents were to swim for their respective children’s Houses. The British International School of Lima prides itself on Houses named Shakespeare, Dickens, Churchill and, mysteriously, Eckford. I would be swimming for (and hopefully like the) Dickens.

The pool was a classy 25 metre job complete with racing lines, starting blocks and lane dividers. A balcony above housed the spectators – on this occasion presumably proud sons and daughters. Having no babysitter I had brought along the Baby Inca, who was summarily banished to the upper balcony in the care of his sister. Rather nerve-wracking since the balcony railing was a bit low.

I jumped into the mercifully heated pool, paddled across to the Dickens group of parent and introduced myself with the usual cheek kisses. As we were all sporting swim caps and exposing rarely-seen body parts, it was unlikely that we’d recognise each other the next time we met.

Everyone seemed to know what the format was and I was pleased to see that Dickens had more competitors than the other Houses. Almost all were women; short, deceptively mild mannered, with well-muscled limbs and broad backs. I was delighted to note that one had a pronounced pot belly which even her designer Speedo could not subdue. I felt a bit more at home. I recognised a mother-and-father team whose son was in Smuggies’ class. In his miniscule trunks he looked like a Japanese version of Mark Spitz. His wife, on the other hand, looked like the female Michael Phelps complete with knee-length lycra speed suit and a Peru National Swim Team cap. My heart sank.

In the first race – freestyle – the Dickens mother in the heat ahead of me rocketed off the starting block in a long shallow dive, covered three-quarters of the length of the pool with a Man From Atlantis type underwater undulation, and, finally surfacing, touched the wall in two efficient strokes. Fuck.

“Dickens! Dickens!” the chant went up, echoing around the enclosed pavilion. Startled, the Baby Inca began to wail hysterically above.

I adjusted Sumggies’ undersized cap on my head and stepped up on the starting block, trying to suck in my stomach and stop my decidedly squishy post-natal legs from trembling as the whistle blew.

I came second.

But then, there were only two people in my heat.

After that it got worse. I backstroked so valiantly that I still have a black and blue on my forearm where it collided with the wall and my breaststroke, quite adequate for a leisurely swim to the nearest hotel pool bar, proved insufficient to garner more than last place. Emerging red-eyed (I had not deigned to wear goggles) I approached the crowd of mums at the scorers’ table, thinking I had to give my name and House. But no, the women were merely comparing their times to those before them. "¡Gané! (I won!)” cried the potbellied lady exultantly.

I limped back to the Sports Coordinator and explained that the baby was crying; that butterfly was not my best event; and that anyway, there were more than enough parents to make up the relay team.

“Never mind Mum,” said the valiant Smuggies, balancing her traumatised brother on one hip and firmly discarding inconvenient details, “you got a second place.”

As we made our premature exit I reflected on the innocence of childhood. Could it be possible that all those years ago my father had forfeited the possible thrill of victory in order to evade the potential agony of defeat?

Nah. But I will certainly keep the false-start technique in mind for next year. For now I take comfort from the guaranteed future anonymity provided by the swim gear. But should I soon forget this valuable lesson, the razor bumps in my crotch region will serve as an itchy reminder.

By the way, Dickens won.

Do You Know Who I Am? I Am The Official Scorer for the Peruvian Cricket Federation! Oops, no I’m not, the babysitter can’t make it.

2010-04-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

“There is a widely held and quite erroneous belief that cricket is just another game”
Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

“I don’t ask my wife to face Michael Holding, so there’s no reason why I should be changing nappies.”
Ian Botham

It’s a glorious day for cricket. The groundsmen are refreshing the somewhat meandering boundary line; Vishal is overseeing net practice for the newcomers; Harry is busy on the cell phone routing hungover players out of bed; and Peter, the Chilean cricket convert, is attempting to explain the game in Spanish to some of the Peruvian WAGs. “Well, you see there are two bateadors and the bowleador has to try to knock over those palitos...”

I have in my West Indies 2007 World Cup souvenir knapsack my sharpened pencils, my scoresheets, my ‘First Steps to Cricket Scoring’ manual downloaded off the internet, my thermos flask of lime juice and my open-toed sandals for when the score moves into double figures. I really must buy a calculator.

I have persuaded my husband to look after his son for the day. The sense of liberation is exhilarating.

When Julian, my fellow thespian from the Christmas pantomime, informed me via Google Chat that the cricket season was starting and that I was welcome to come watch any time at the Lima Cricket Club I agreed enthusiastically. So enthusiastically in fact that he ventured tentatively; “You wouldn’t like to be the scorer would you? We’ve been looking for one for ages.” I agreed even more enthusiastically. So enthusiastically in fact that he added – even more tentatively – “you do know how to score don’t you?”

“Of course!” I lied breezily, frantically entering “how to score a cricket match” into the search box at the top of the webpage.

As every cricket fan like me knows, watching the West Indies get their asses kicked or keeping score for a university pick-up-side match is one thing. Deciphering an official ICC scoresheet and converting results into statistics is entirely another. One might think that cricket in Peru would fall firmly into the “pick-up-side” category but one would be sorely mistaken.

The Lima Cricket (and Football) Club* is the oldest sports club in Peru and one of the oldest in Latin America, having celebrated its 150th anniversary last year. The LCFC was founded in 1859 at the height of the “guano and railway” era, which brought to Lima a great influx of English immigrants. English residents in Lima and Callao in that year rose to 1,397 as opposed to 442 at the start of the 20th century. Over time the LCFC became a multi-sport club and the cricket element waxed and waned, presumably depending on the number of dedicated ex-pats living in Lima at any given time. The first match against a foreign team was against Sir Pelham Warner’s MCC side on its way back from Australia via Chile and Peru in 1927. The former England captain, Freddie Brown, was born in Lima and his father took five wickets against the MCC.

Today, Peru Cricket - the national cricket association - has a national team plus four registered teams in Lima and one in Tacna that compete in domestic tournaments. After their 2006 season, the association applied for and got affiliate membership of the International Cricket Council (ICC). Peru is now in the ICC Americas Division III and ranked 75th in the world.

But they’ve never had an official scorer before. And believe me, it’s a tough job. Last week I scored for the first ever regional youth tournament held in Peru. “Awwww” you say? “All those Argentinean, Chilean and Peruvian under-13s looking so cute in their oversized sports shorts trotting around with their cricket bats and helmets”.

First Ever Under-13 Youth Tournament (Argentina, Chile, Peru)

Ha! You try figuring out who's who between two completely identical batsmidgets wearing identical gear. And the scoring box thronged with eager munchkins impatiently wanting to know their own personal score and fighting to change the scoreboard before the over is finished. Compounded by clueless Peruvian parents – eager to support their sons but having absolutely no idea of the rules of the game – poking their heads in through the window, blocking my view of the pitch and asking hopefully “Is it true the other team beat Peru by only one point?” “Is 16 for 5 off 11 overs a good score?”(Of course, when Peru won their first ever match in a truly nail-biting finish the jubilation was enormous and even the scorer may have shed a few proud tears.)

It’s slightly easier to tell the grown-ups apart. You can generally memorise whose tummy is bigger or who is wearing the Man. U. T-shirt, the wraparound shades or the non-regulation Auzzie beach shorts.

Indian Sub-Continent vs Rest of the World (guess who won?)

But you still have to concentrate hard and have a certain mental toughness. A typical day at the office goes something like this:

Tony comes in to bowl, it’s a wide and the batsmen steal a run. Small cross with dot in upper left hand corner. Bowling a bit tighter now, two dot balls and an appeal for LBW. Oh, square cut to the boundary, 4 runs. But wait, umpire signals a no-ball so (tongue sticking out of the side of my mouth) circle with a 4 in it on the cumulative total and in the bowler’s figures, 4 to the batsman, one in the extras and 5 against the bowler – I think.

Brrringg.

That’s over, change of bowler, Miles. We’re into double figures now so my shoes are off and my feet up on the table to assist in calculation.

Brrringg.

Was that a signal for bye or leg bye?

Brrringg.

“Si mi amor?”

“The baby’s crying”

“Did you give him milk?”

Click

An antipodean voice yells “my ball!” Dropped catch. Two singles, a dot ball and what was that last signal? No ball? Leg bye? Short run? Oh, the umpire is just answering his phone.

Brringg.

“Si mi amor?”

“He won’t stop crying. When are you coming home?”

“Walk him around a bit”

“I AM walking him around! He’s still crying”

“Perhaps if you stopped yelling “callate enano!” at him at the same time?”

Click.

“This is it Lima Cricket!” roars Julian, captain of LCFC and the Napoleon of the pitch, coming in to bowl his speciality: a ball so cunningly mediocre that the batsman invariably loses his wicket through sheer puzzlement. Record time of wicket, cumulative score at fall, how out, bowler’s name, batsman’s total score, time of entry of following batsman, small w in bowler’s box, check how many balls left in over...

Bbbbrrringg.

“When are you coming home? I gave him medicine and everything but he won’t stop crying.”

“Don’t give him medicine just to make him sleep! He’s not sick.”

“But he won’t stop crying. He must be sick!”

“He’s bored. Why don’t you take him to the park? It’s just across the road.”

Dot ball, a leg bye and, fuck who took that catch?

“I’m not taking him to the park! I’m watching football! When are you coming home?”

“So you want me to stop watching cricket, leave here now, take a taxi, come home and take him to the park across the road because you’re watching football?”

Click.

Change of bowler. Who’s that? “Bowler’s name!” I yell across the field. “Dinesh” floats back the reply. I have no Dinesh on my team list. “Who??” I yell. “Lakmal!” they shriek “everybody calls him Dinesh.” Except on the team list obviously.

Bbbbrrringgg.

“Juliet! When are you coming home? What’s more important to you? Cricket or your son?”

Dot ball, wide, single and over, “Hmmm? Sorry, I didn’t hear you just now.”

Click.

Brrrrringgg

Brrringggg

Fortunately, Peru Cricket is paying me just enough to cover babysitting fees.

*‘Football’ was added to the name in 1900 or 1906.

Peruvian Parricide, or “Come to the Dark Side Luke, We Have Pisco Sour”

2010-03-27T07:55:00.000-07:00

Part Two
The story so far...

Having mastered the art of pisco souring, our heroes have flown to Cuzco where they have contracted soroche and embarked on a whirlwind tour of the ancient Inca capital.

After a day of ruin-scrambling, earnest listening and heavy breathing, we returned to the hotel and agreed to give the second day’s planned tour of the Sacred Valley a miss. Instead we decided to sleep a lot and stagger casually around Cuzco to acclimatize ourselves for the assault on Machu Picchu the following day. In the interest of efficiency, we split the duties and my father slept a lot while I staggered around Cuzco.

Having skipped the sacred I thought I would embrace some of the profane and hooked up with a Caribbean friend of mine who had been living in Cuzco for the past six months. She in turn introduced me to a representative cross-section of local gringos. Cuzco has a small, vibrant and variously transient foreign population ranging from long-term enterprising coffee shop and Irish pub owners through guidebook-clutching four-day tourists like ourselves to medium-term backpackers and alternative-lifestyle/mind-altering-substances-seekers. In fact, there is quite a bit of overlap among the groups.

My friend had spent the first few months in Cuzco designing a business plan for a shaman in return for room and board. When her market research indicated that, due to the glut of shamans on the Cuzco market, his business was not viable, she had to move on to other accommodation. Apparently shamans are a dime a dozen in Cuzco, far more than the number of rich Americans seeking enlightenment so, unless you are really good at calling the condor, you have no value added.

The Inca believed in the interconnectedness of sky, earth and underworld, the spirit gods of which were the condor, puma and snake respectively. A vulture, the Andean Condor is the largest flying land bird in the Western Hemisphere. It is considered a symbol of power and health and features heavily in Peruvian tourism. Now I’m a little hazy on the details but apparently some well-heeled travellers pay a lot of money to be taken up some remote Peruvian peak by a shaman to “call the condor”. This, I understand, involves the shaman rubbing his forehead and navel against those of the hopeful tourist, thereby transferring his condor-calling powers. If, after this exchange of sweat and bellybutton fluff, a condor soars into view, the tourist descends empowered and ready to play the stock market with renewed vigor. I can’t imagine a better business model. All you need is a gullible tourist – already addled by altitude sickness – and a crafty Cusquenian accomplice lurking over the next ridge with a Monty Pythonesque condor-on-a-stick.

For those who can’t afford the condor-calling fees, there’s always the mind-altering alternatives. On arrival in Cuzco you are greeted with a cup of mate de coca, a tea made of coca leaves which is good for staving off the effects of soroche. For the average visitor it also provides a pleasurable frisson of naughtiness since 297 grams of dry coca leaf can theoretically be converted into 1 gram of cocaine. In Cuzco you can buy coca flavoured ice cream and drink coca sours without fear of arrest or the slightest enhancement of euphoria. For those in search of more authentic spiritual experiences I was told that the ubiquitous shamans also dispense various psychotropic substances. Ayahuasca is particularly popular in Peru. According to the font of all knowledge, Wikipedia:

"Ayahuasca tourist" refers to a tourist wanting a taste of an exotic ritual or who partakes in modified services geared specifically towards non-indigenous persons. Some seek to clear emotional blocks and gain a sense of peace.

Which is all very well if, in order to gain a sense of peace, you are happy to enjoy Ayahuasca’s ‘purgative properties’ in which “the intense vomiting and occasional diarrhea it induces can clear the body of worms and other tropical parasites”. Nice. Still, I hear Isabel Allende once used it to get rid of writer’s block so I’ll keep it in mind.

Having been thoroughly briefed on the local drug culture, and having marginally enjoyed a meal of grilled alpaca (edible llama), I was taken on a tour of Cuzco by night by a group of medium-term frustrated volunteers. This is a growing demographic in Peru: educated and qualified individuals wanting to see the world while doing volunteer work along the way. Unfortunately, volunteering has become so fashionable that you now have to pay to do it. I kid you not. It has been described as the “gap-year effect” because many middle-class parents with a child wanting to take a year off before going to university are willing to pay for them to do “something useful”. So if you offer your services to an NGO or community group you are likely to be asked to pay US$6000 for the privilege. Many of the group I met had been working in coffee shops and bars to make ends meet and were therefore presumably well placed to reveal to me Cuzco’s reputedly very vibrant night life.

It turned out to be the shortest pub crawl in history.

It wasn’t for lack of nightspots. The numerous discos, bars and restaurants are mainly clustered around the central Plaza de Armas or perched along the steep, narrow stone stairways leading up from Cuzco to San Blas above it. This makes getting from one to another either very quick or discouragingly vertical.

Secondly, I discovered that dancing at 3,600-plus metres above sea level is not a sustainable activity. Two steps and you’re panting for breath. It also doesn’t help that the places are so crowded that what little air your belaboured lungs are able to take in, has already been appropriated by someone else.

Thirdly, the expatriate Cuzco community is relatively small and highly incestuous so every time we approached a likely-looking nightspot one or other person in the group would say “oh no, we can’t go in there. I had/have a thing/fling/affair with/crush on the bartender/manager/performer/bouncer and I don’t want them to think I’m stalking them”.

We ended up on a bench in the Plaza de Armas sharing pisco sour from a plastic water bottle provided by an understanding bartender while the local police patrol strolled by asking “¿Aguita? ¿Augita?” in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink sort of way.

So I was well-rested for the 7.00 am start the next morning. A three and a half hour train journey took us down to Aguas Calientes (Machu Picchu is actually 1,000m lower than Cuzco) where we then took a 20 minute bus ride up the extremely winding mountain road to the entrance of Machu Picchu.

Of course, this is the lazy option. For the more adventurous there’s always the four-day trek on the Inca Trail, but the 10 minute climb from the ticket office to the lookout above the lost city nearly killed both of us.

My father almost died of lung collapse and had to sit down frequently and inhale oxygen from his handy tin and I came close to stumbling off the cliff several times while walking backwards taking photos of his travails. At one rest stop he encountered another tall, bearded, winded individual. “Age or altitude?” the man wheezed. “Both” puffed my father. This obviously Masonic greeting out of the way, they sat together on the narrow Incan step catching their breath in companionable silence while younger, eager tourists flowed past them like ants around a picnic treat too heavy to carry.

Despite the overexposure of Machu Picchu in photographs and publicity posters, it is still truly spectacular when seen live and direct for the first time. One’s appreciation is of course enhanced by the relief of actually reaching the damned place at last. However, just to ensure you don’t get too smug about your achievement, the guide quickly points out Waina Picchu, a yet higher peak, where some 400 people a day line up from the crack of dawn for the privilege of being allowed to climb it. I had no idea the global mental health problem was so acute.

If there was a contest to decide the exact geographical location of the middle of nowhere, my vote would go to Machu Picchu. Surrounded on three sides by cliffs which drop vertically for 450m to the Urubamba River below and with a near impassable mountain at its back, it is a natural fortress and if Hiram Bingham had not been shown the site by a 15-year-old local boy in 1911, he would never have discovered it on his own.

After some confusion involving varying interpretations of the phrase “a guide will be waiting for you with an orange flag”, we were taken under the wing of a stocky weatherbeaten guide by the name of Willy who had an Incan rainbow flag (more recently co-opted by the Gay and Lesbian Movement) and a habit of balancing nonchalantly on the very edge of every available precipice while lecturing to his audience.

Willy was another staunch patriot. Open-minded about the various theories of what Machu Picchu was actually used for (Country estate? Sanctuary of the sacred virgins? Prison? Administrative centre? Agricultural field station?), he had fixed views on Hiram Bingham transporting all the artefacts he found there to the United States and little faith in Yale University agreeing to return them. He kept up a cheerful discussion with the spirit gods as we went along, introducing us all as “Willy’s group” and assuring them that we had the best intentions and would leave them lovely presents in the various sacrificial spots.

My father was a bit disappointed to learn that there is no evidence of human sacrifice ever having been performed in Machu Picchu but, faced with a particularly treacherous descent down the side of the ancient observatory, strenuously declared that he had no intention of being the first. Having made it safely down to the lower level he plonked himself sternly on a large flat stone structure to rest.

This was the ritual Intihuatana stone. The Quechua name translates as “the hitching post of the sun” because it was believed to hold the sun in place as it moved through its annual celestial journey. On midday on the equinoxes the sun stands directly above the Intihuatana stone, casting no shadow. I have no idea what effect my father’s bottom had on this ancient artefact but if he had damaged it, it would not have been the first time. In 2002, during the filming of a beer commercial, a 1,000lb crane fell on it, chipping off a piece.

I don't know what UNESCO had to say about this defacement of one of their World Heritage Sites, but I'll bet Willy's god buddies sent the beer company into receivership, because I am convinced that the severe flooding which took place two weeks after my father sat on the Intihuatana was divine retribution for this piece of posterial lèse majesté.

But it is understandably hard work conquering one of the New Seven Wonders of the World so we were glad to wrap up the tour and leave Machu Picchu to the four official llamas (not naturally found at Machu Picchu but apparently transported there to provide authentic photo ops and lawnmowing services) and the gaggle of dreamy-eyed backpackers still sprawled on the terraces thinking deeply about life, the universe and everything.

Personally, I was thinking deeply about a cold pisco sour and the dusty but breathable atmosphere of Lima.

Peruvian Parricide or “Come to the Dark Side Luke, We Have Pisco Sour”

2010-02-08T13:26:00.000-08:00

Part One

It was easy to spot the departure gate for the flight to Cuzco. Two saffron-robed monks; a Caucasian Rasta in parachute pants and a well-worn The North Face backpack; and several middle-aged individuals with Lonely Planet Peru guidebooks, sturdy walking shoes and a see-Machu-Picchu-and-die expression.

My father and I had just finished doing the Lima tourist round. A retired linguist, he had enjoyed himself thoroughly grumbling about the terrible English translations on the exhibits in the museums and experimenting with Pisco Sour, the trademark Peruvian cocktail. Something of a perfectionist, he spent every evening poring over recipe books, squeezing limes, separating egg whites and concocting syrup on the stove, all ingredients carefully measured in a baby bottle borrowed from his grandson.

Pisco is a liquor distilled from grapes and takes its name from one of the Peruvian towns where it has been produced since the 16th Century. The right to produce and promote pisco has been the subject of prolonged international legal disputes between Chile and Peru. Until recently, Chile had successful promoted pisco as its very own and many a promising intercultural relationship has been ruined by the announcement on the part of the non-Peruvian that they had imbibed a delicious pisco sour while visiting Santiago. Trust me, I speak from experience.

Peruvians get very emotional on the subject and some years back the government even made the importation and sale of pisco from Chile illegal. These days the Chileans are making conciliatory noises about “why don’t we market the stuff together?” – a sure sign that they are at the losing end of this particular battle.*

However, this piscotorial petulance is only one aspect of the ongoing bad blood between the two nations which dates back to the 19th Century when Chile won the War of the Pacific (1879 – 1883) against Peru and Bolivia, taking away Bolivia's access to the sea and a lot of land from Peru. Things have never been the same since, with the most recent manifestation being in November 2009 when a Peruvian air force officer was arrested on charges of spying for Chile. Peruvian public opinion was most regretful that execution for treason is no longer an option.

Having paid due homage to pisco, my father indicated his willingness to cast a critical eye on Peru’s other national treasures.

If you are thinking about bumping off an elderly relative in a non-suspicious way I can recommend a trip to Cuzco and Machu Picchu. If altitude sickness in Cuzco doesn’t polish them off the vertiginous climbing around Machu Picchu should do the trick.

Along with long division and degrees centigrade, I have always viewed altitude measurements as fairly useless information. After all, I come from a Caribbean nation where the normal temperature range is between 28° and 32°C and the highest point is 940 metres (and who the hell lives there?). The practical implications of being told that Cuzco is located 3395 metres above sea level escaped me entirely.

My husband however, was clearly nervous about the trip. He minutely inquired about the state of his father-in-law’s health.

“Is his heart OK? Does he suffer from high blood pressure? Don’t forget your insurance card. Walk very slowly and remember to buy oxygen at the airport.”

Yes, they actually sell tinned oxygen at Cuzco airport. I heard one American tourist thinking aloud that she’d like to buy one but was afraid it might be too heavy to carry around. It was, of course, lighter than air.

Having very nearly been put off the entire trip by these solicitous utterings, I was less than happy when, sitting in the plane waiting to take off, my father remarked idly “they’ll have to land at a hell of a speed in Cuzco. At that altitude the air is so thin a plane has to fly extremely fast or else it’ll drop out of the sky.” On the approach to Cuzco the plane did indeed hang a sharp left turn and descend with a stomach-fluttering acceleration. “See what I mean?” said my father smugly as we taxied to the terminal.

Sometimes it is hard to tell which sensations are real and which are brought on by a stimulated imagination. On disembarking I had the impression that I was doing a bit of a moonwalk (the astronaut kind, not the Michael Jackson variety) but I put it down to imagination. Then there comes a moment when you lean down to drag your luggage off the conveyor belt and realise that you can’t catch your breath. Scary. Within an hour my father sounded like Darth Vader and we were both feeling queasy.

Do NOT look up the symptoms of Soroche (altitude sickness) on Wikipedia. You will never visit Cuzco and possibly never climb as much as a sand dune again.

But it’s not that bad. Walk slowly and carry a can of oxygen and you’ll be fine.

Oh, and take Soroche tablets.

And, according to the taxi driver, don’t eat red meat or noodles for the first day.

Oh, and lie down a lot. Not too much vigorous activity.

We had purchased a four-day, three-night tour package consisting of much vigorous scrambling around ruins: a city tour of Cuzco, a trip to the Sacred Valley and – the pièce de résistance – a visit to Machu Picchu.

Archaeologists will tell you testily that the Inca were not the most ancient Peruvian civilization or even the most talented. But they were certainly the most bossy. Like the Romans they subjugated several other communities and moulded them into a vast administrative network with Cuzco as its capital.

I am not going to add to the existing glut of information and contesting theories of Incan culture already available on the internet – look it up yourself. But I did reach a few anthropological conclusions of my own which I am happy to share with you as we go along.

For example, the Inca’s communication and administrative network was so efficient that it is said that despite the lack of wheeled vehicles, fresh fish was regularly brought to Cuzco from the coast 200 miles away by chaski runners. Each chaski would sprint for about 2.5 km before handing over to another. By my calculation that is roughly 129 chaski runners per fish delivery. The fish can’t have been that fresh when it reach Cuzco and would certainly have been well-marinated in chaski sweat – hence the invention of ceviche.

We spent the first day visiting various ruins in the company of an eloquent and sardonic guide with scathing views on the Spanish conquest. Taking us around Qorikancha, the Incan temple of the sun which had been largely dismantled by the Spanish to build the Santo Domingo Church with which it now shares space, he succinctly explained the difference in architectural and construction techniques as the first having been built by the Inca and the second by the incapaz (incapable). The walls of the temple, built 600 years ago with no mortar or cement between the blocks but so well fitted that a piece of paper can’t pass between them, have survived many earthquakes. The church, built in part from slabs stolen from the dismantled temple but stuck together with mortar, has collapsed 4 times since its construction by the Spanish around 1633.

He also pooh poohed conventional notions of the Inca worshipping various deities in a kind of mindless, the sky-will-fall-on-our-heads, fear-of-the-wrath-of-the-gods kind of way. No, everything these canny fellows constructed was geared towards predicting the seasons and weather for agricultural purposes.

They were also expert brain surgeons – or at least skull surgeons.

Enthusiastic practitioners of trepanning, scientists say that their success rate was around 80%, as opposed to surgeons in Europe and America in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, only about 25% of whose patients survived. With a pleasing symmetry, at the same time as drilling a hole in your head, the Inca could fill the holes in your teeth. Stone or cement fillings for the masses and gold or silver fillings for the upper classes. There is as yet no evidence that the Inca also went in for breast augmentation, but a glance around my gym leads me to believe that this practice is ancient and ingrained in Peruvian culture.

Certainly the current enthusiasm of Peruvian women for postponing the ageing process appears to date back to Inca times. Our first day’s ruin inspection tour ended at Tambomachay, an excellent example of an Inca system of aqueducts and site of what we were informed was the Fountain of Eternal Youth.

Unfortunately I am not in a position to comment on the veracity of this claim. Being of a highly suspicious and distrustful nature, I noted carefully that the guide had actually said “If you put the water on your face you will stay as you are for a very long time.” I was suffering from a disfiguring eye infection that day and figured that on a strict interpretation, the fountain of youth might actually be a fountain of the “if-you-put-your-face-like-that-and-the-wind-changes-it-will-stick” variety, known to all parents of grimacing adolescents. At any rate, I declined to take the chance.

*According to legal documents recently found in the U.S. National Archives of San Francisco, California in 2007, it has been proven that at least until 1864, Pisco was considered a liquor native only to the Republic of Peru. (Wikipedia)

Next: Darth Vader shuns the Sacred Valley and I investigate Cuzco by night...

When In Lima...

2010-01-25T07:52:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons one goes in for foreign travel is so that one can have authentic cultural experiences. You will therefore be unsurprised to learn that three weeks after arriving in Peru I auditioned for a Christmas pantomime.

This thoroughly English tradition of musical-comedy theatrical performance has been kept alive here for many years by the Good Companions, Lima’s amateur English-speaking theatre group, founded in 1947. Surfing a website for expatriates in Peru I stumbled across an appeal for actors for their 2009 offering, Little Red Riding Hood. I waddled along with my heavily pregnant self and secured the role of Dizzy, the Spirit of the Woods and Smuggies became my Sprite. They obligingly designed me a voluminous costume and only blinked slightly when, halfway through October, I announced that I would be giving birth the following Monday and would therefore be unable to make rehearsals that night.

Two missed rehearsals later we were back, two-week-old Smuggitos in hand. He soon got used to sleeping in his portable bassinet behind the backdrops and, when awake, being handed off to whichever actor was not currently on stage. On an average night he would work his way from Wolf to Prince to Huntsman to Little Red Riding Hood herself. On one occasion I entered stage right for a curtain call and met my son approaching from the other wings in the arms of the Sprite. He became known as the Prop Baby and no amount of bathing could eradicate the traces of greasepaint and glitter from his face.

Of course, pantomimes are as Peruvian as Buckingham Palace but you’d be surprised at the number of local references that can be worked into a script and the joy of yelling “Boooooo!!!” at the baddies is universal.

My next cultural experience occurred exactly three months after giving birth. My husband excitedly announced that for our first romantic post-partum outing he had secured tickets to Metallica’s World Metallic Tour 2010 concert.

Oh joy.

But what to wear? My husband, having invited me only the night before, had denied me the luxury of sartorial cogitation. Post-pregnancy chic is hard to come by and, though I toyed with the idea of a caftan sporting the logo “I Just Had a Baby, Give Me a Break”, I eventually settled for the universal rock uniform of black T-shirt and jeans.

I was delighted to find that I could once more wiggle into my button-front Levis until I discovered that they made my midsection look like a well-executed soufflé. I wiggled back out, wiggled into a girdle (yes, Dear Reader, let there be no secrets between us), donned the Levis once again and kept my fingers crossed that my caesarean scar wouldn’t split at the seams.

I had been instructed to leave home at 3.45 pm in order to take a taxi and meet Bigboy at his office at 5.00. The concert was due to start at 9.00 pm but we would obviously be competing for a good view with all those Heavy Metal fans who had reportedly come to Lima from various surrounding countries especially for this event.

Lima is the graveyard of rock. Any used-to-be-famous bunch of geriatrics can turn up in the City of Kings and expect a rapturous welcome, but this was apparently going to be the biggest concert in Peru’s history. The only venue large enough was the 50,000-seat stadium of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. The first officially established university in the Americas, San Marcos was founded in 1551 by a decree of King Charles V. Originally named the ‘Royal and Pontifical University of the City of the Kings of Lima’ it is one of the oldest universities in the world.

It sits near the border of Lima with the Constitutional Province of Callao, where the port, the airport and Bigboy’s office are located. El Callao has the reputation of being a fairly dodgy place. Its local football team, the SportBoys, play in pink uniforms and their mascot is the Pink Panther and yet they do not get beaten up on a regular basis. This says a great deal about the type of hard men produced in El Callao.

A taxi ride there will cost you in both soles and serenity. Social historians will tell you that the era of anarchy in Peru ended in 1992 with the defeat of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrilla group and the capture of its leader Abimael Guzman. This is incorrect. Anarchy is alive and well on Lima’s roads and asking to be taken to El Callao is obviously tantamount to indicating that you have no objection to living dangerously.

A working horn and good brakes are essential; indicators, shock absorbers, and following the rules of the road optional. Traffic police (of which there are many) hold animated personal conversations on their hands-free Bluetooth devices while conducting traffic, others demand the right of way when transporting their girlfriends on the back of their official motorbikes, overloaded shopping baskets held at arm’s length at each side. Drivers weave through traffic at high speeds, holding a cell phone clamped to one ear and taking the other hand off the wheel to point out to you the infractions of others: “¡Mire este loco! ¡No sabe manejar!”

Your best option is to close your eyes and hope that the pious name inevitably painted on the side of the taxi serves some protective purpose. However, I once saw a taxi called Divine Baby Jesus the Third. Whether the driver thought the Holy Trinity was made up exclusively of the Son, or he just liked the name and had written off two previous vehicles, it did not inspire confidence.

Having careened safely to a halt in front of my husband’s office, we walked the 10-15 blocks to the stadium. The route was littered with hardcore fans who had travelled up to 30 hours by bus and camped out for days outside the venue. The usual collection of hawkers darted about flogging Metallica T-shirts and cheap binoculars. While the age of the majority of fans ranged from toothless to shopworn – about the same vintage as the band itself – there was a significant percentage of younger fans who had obviously been introduced to Metallica via the Guitar Hero video game and were keen to see the real thing.

Inside the stadium we found the essential ingredients of every Peruvian public event: cerveza and choripan. Wisely only on sale between 4.30 and 8.30 pm, the beer was served in large plastic pint cups at a shudderingly lukewarm temperature. Choripan – the Peruvian equivalent of CMOT Dibbler’s sausage-inna-bun, immortalised in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld – consist of fat, bright pink sausages, lightly grilled and shoved unceremoniously into a hunk of bread. They are extremely delicious.

While they waited the crowd entertained itself trying to get a Mexican wave going around the stadium accompanied by shouts of “¡Con ganas carajo!” (Politely translated: “Like you mean it dammit!”) Interim entertainment consisted of a local rock band with an inferior sound system and a name like Necropsia or Necrophilia or some such death-related theme. They got a polite hearing from the crowd but once they retired the chant went up, football terrace style: “¡Olé, olé, olé, olé, Meh-taaa-leee-ca!”

When Metallica began to play, the stadium instantly lit up with the glow of 49,999 tiny lights. Cigarette lighters waved in appreciation of the music in the time-honoured fashion? No. Mobile phone cameras recording.

So ironically, those who spent up to US$400 on a ticket watched the entire concert via a screen smaller that their TV at home. Others ran up their phone bills by dialling friends and holding the phones up in the air to transmit the music and the roar of the crowd.

Now I couldn’t name a Metallica song if you put lighted matches between my toes, far less sing along to one. This turned out to be no problem. All that was required was a good deal of epileptic head bobbing and the occasional fist pump. (Surprisingly few air guitars made it through security.) Down near the stage we could see enthusiastic arms waving and, for those unable to contain their delirium, a small oasis of people skipping and leaping about in an uncoordinated way.

Up in the top tiers of the stadium where we were, the crowd was surprisingly sedate. Standing and mouthing the words with an intent look on their faces, they appeared to be considering the band’s place in music history for the doctoral thesis they planned to write later.

Two hours later, after the usual pre-arranged curtain calls where the band was ‘persuaded’ to return to the stage and play their most popular hits, we all filed meekly out and the crowd dispersed in an orderly fashion pursued by last-ditch T-shirt sellers.

My eardrums didn’t bleed and no guitars were smashed on stage so I suppose the Metal wasn’t as Heavy as I had expected, but beyond a few strangled cries of “Suicide!”, “Kill them all!” and “Seek and Destroy!” I still couldn’t sing you a Metallica song. However, it will take weeks to stop chanting “¡Olé, olé, olé, olé, Meh-taaa-leee-ca!”

I Can See Russia From Here

2009-12-13T06:25:00.000-08:00

Back in the 80s Gary Trudeau’s Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoon Doonesbury ran a strip about longtime characters Rick Redfern and Joanie Caucus, two professionals who get married and have a baby. Rick comes home one day to find Joanie bathing their son in the bathtub.

“Hi” he says, “can I help?”

“No” she replies, “ 'help' implies that the responsibility of caring for our child is solely mine and that you are doing me a favour by offering. Go out and try again.”

Rick goes out and re-enters the bathroom.

“Hi. Can I co-parent?”

“No” says Joanie, “you always get the floor wet”.

And this is the problem you see. While one wants to insist on one’s hard-won right to equal help from the male half of the parenting equation, at the same time one is utterly convinced that he is in need of serious training before being let loose on a real live baby. And who has the time? Or the training materials?

My husband, aka Señor I’m Too Practical To Worry About Minor Details So Just Tell Me What To Do In Two Words Or Less Before I Lose Patience, is not going to stand still long enough for me to explain to him why it is not a good idea to doze off in front of the TV while balancing the baby on his paunch or instruct him in the fine art of diaper changing (“Yes, you got the location for the Pamper right but now there’s poo all over the bed. You have to clean him a bit before removing the dirty diaper from underneath his bottom! No, just holding him upside down under the shower is not a better idea”). So, unless I can borrow someone else’s baby, I have the choice of letting him practice on my own child or doing it all myself. Neither option provides any relaxation or time off for me because who can sleep with the anxiety of wondering whether one’s husband is accidentally boiling the baby in the bath?

In addition to forfeiting my conjugal rights to assistance, and possibly due to the trauma of being described as ‘housewife’ on Smuggitos’ birth certificate, I very nearly slipped into the Sarah Palin approach to motherhood.

Having been a working mother and sole breadwinner for many years, it is somewhat difficult to let go of the notion that I am free to make financial decisions at will. The novelty of being followed around a supermarket and cross-questioned as to the necessity of purchasing face cream or a particular brand of soap palls very quickly.

The day I was due to be booked into the maternity clinic there was an ad in one of the daily papers for a Peru Country Manager with an international NGO which specialises in organising working vacations for people (mostly from the US) who want to volunteer with various charitable projects aimed at assisting the less fortunate. It looked interesting so I sent off an application letter and CV and hastened off to give birth. A couple of days after Smuggitos was born I received an enthusiastic email saying that the Vice President for Operations would be in Lima within the next few days and could I meet with her?

Bearing in mind that I had recently been sliced open like a side of beef and could not yet walk unaided, it wasn’t the most enticing prospect but I thought of the price of face cream and said yes. I had to get my husband to drive me to a mall, borrow a wheelchair and prop me up in a beauty salon because after three days in the clinic I looked like Don King on a bad hair day. He also agreed to drive me to the hotel where the interview was to take place, steer me through the door and wait for me outside.

So – like ex-Governor Palin dribbling amniotic fluid while giving a speech – with a double dose of painkillers for breakfast and a post-operative velcro girdle I turned up at the appointed hour and called the VP from the reception desk only to be told that she’d mistaken the day and could I please come back tomorrow.

In the car on the way back home I swore profusely and threatened to tell them where to shove their prospective job. “It’s entirely your decision mi amor” said my husband and, in an apparent change of subject, inquired how many diapers per day on average I thought Smuggitos would be using.

I went back the next day.

I had at first omitted to fill in the part of the application form which asked for my last salary. The fact that it was to be quoted as an hourly rate indicated that this was hardly going to be a job which would keep me in the style to which I would like to become accustomed. When the VP insisted on knowing my previous remuneration package I first smiled modestly and said it wasn’t relevant as I would not be expecting a commensurate salary. The VP then named a salary range which would no doubt dazzle the inhabitants of one of Lima’s poorer slums and asked whether I was still interested in hearing more about the job. Keeping the cost of lamb chops firmly in mind, I said yes.

Basically on alternate fortnights I would be expected to act as sherpa to a group of do-gooding tourists paying to spend their holidays painting orphanages and teaching English. The other fortnights would be administrative work done via email from any location I felt like. Nothing too intellectually challenging but flexible enough to be attractive. “Right” I thought, “I can carry the baby around in one of those slings they use in the Peruvian highlands and breastfeed him while I’m waiting for flights to arrive.” The gringos would love it, a real live Baby Inca to add a touch of authenticity to their trip. Maybe I could carry a tin cup and collect tips, charge extra for photos.

A couple of days later I got a call from the States. Apparently they thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread and was by far the best candidate but, given my previous salary, they doubted very much I would stay long in the job so had decided to give it to someone else. My dreams of financial independence evaporated.

Of course, having now rediscovered the realities of taking care of a new baby, getting rejected was a Good Thing.

My husband keeps muttering darkly about the exorbitant price of diapers and powdered milk and I have noticed that on purchasing the Sunday papers he invariably hands me the classifieds section first. Well he can sod right off. The only reason he gets to read the Sunday papers at all is because I’m taking care of the baby.

So I am temporarily acclimatising myself to reminding my husband to pay the light bill as he rushes off to work every morning. Once I’ve got Smuggies off to school; fed, bathed and changed Smuggitos; arranged by telephone in tortured Spanish the installation of internet and telephone; lugged a large bag of dirty clothes to the lavanderia on the corner; walked to the supermercado and back with the shopping; and made daily progress on unpacking my books, I can settle down in front of the TV and watch some international news. And when I see Sarah Palin on her book tour or burbling some fresh incoherency on climate change, cradling her baby all the while, I don’t despair. Very soon I’m going to get tired of playing house and will need a real job before I lose touch with the international arena. But until then, if I sit on the steps of the balcony and really crane my neck, I’m sure I can see Russia from here.

Suffer the Little Children

2009-12-02T07:12:00.000-08:00

Despite advertising itself as following the international curriculum, my daughter’s very expensive school is international only in the sense that it charges in US dollars. In her last school, in a class of 23 students on average there were 18 different nationalities. Here, the students are predominantly Peruvian and Catholic. They have Religious Instruction classes where they learn hymns and compose acrostics on JESUS CHRIST. Other religions are superficially examined under the rubric of ‘Traditions’ in their Unit of Inquiry class.

There is a House system, meant to promote teamwork and camaraderie but in reality increasing the pressure to conform – all perceived infractions are not just punished on an individual basis but also attract demerit points for your House. So if you fuck up you have to deal with your own sense of failure as well as the opprobrium of your schoolmates. And, just to ensure that gender roles are well inculcated from the get-go, the Houses are headed by House Masters assisted by House Mothers.

Poor Smuggies has therefore been struggling to cope with the shock of moving from an environment where diversity was the norm to one where conformity is essential. After a joyous first day where she was the toast of the girls in her class, things went rapidly downhill. The teacher told me that she was repeatedly pestered with questions as to why she had not done First Communion. She replied politely at first but after continuously being badgered she said “my Mum doesn’t believe in God, so I didn’t do it”. I understand from the teacher that this caused great consternation among the students including the conclusion that “your Mum must be a very bad person”. Smuggies defended me valiantly and insisted that I had even been voted the coolest mum in the school by her former schoolmates but it seems she has been marked for all eternity from that day.

To this initial setting apart was added the inevitable challenge of finding a niche in an already established social order. Girls are in a minority in her class and there is a strong clique led by Florencia, an Alpha female with the much-admired talent of being able to hold her breath and turn bright red at will. She apparently rules the assorted Alejandras, Andreas and Antonellas with an iron fist. Initially welcomed as a new recruit, Smuggies fell afoul of her when, having refused an order to be the counter in a game of hide and seek when it wasn’t her turn, she was told that she was to count “because I say so. And if you don’t I will make sure that no one plays with you ever again.”

Smuggies resisted and the sentence of ostracism was carried out with all the girls of her class swearing a solemn oath never to play with her again. She has been spotted by the teacher hiding behind walls on the playground. When asked why she is not mixing she pretends that she’s playing hide and seek with someone who is at the present moment hiding.

She understood much faster than I did that while it is all right to make fancy PowerPoint presentations on Hanukkah as a class project, diversity just don’t cut it on the playground. She is both desperate to fit in and subconsciously indignant at the need to do so. In her quest for acceptance she is vigorously suppressing all that makes her unique. In the hope of achieving straight hair she has managed to shave off a patch at the front and, when she was singled out as having a beautiful voice and selected to sing a solo in the Christmas show, she was at first delighted and then flatly refused to do it.

“I don’t want them to like me for my voice Mum.”

She falls over herself to be obliging and suffers agonies of anxiety in her desire to please. When the girls in her class liked the chocolate spread sandwich she brought for a snack, she swiped the entire bottle to take to school for them. One girl enjoyed the mango she had for dessert so now I have to send several each day. When she was selected to represent her House in basketball and running on sports day she threw up from the sheer terror of failing because she saw it as a last chance to gain glory and acceptance.

This desire to please combined with the daily frustration of being the outsider is explosive and inevitable leads to trouble. The other day I got a call from the school. They were very sorry to tell me that my daughter had been involved in an ‘incident’. A boy had been teasing her relentlessly in the playground so she aimed a kick at him, missed and kicked another boy. She was very sorry indeed, apologised profusely and, in order to make it up to him, offered to take revenge on his behalf on anyone he cared to identify. He accepted this offer and pointed out a third boy, an innocent bystander, whom Jade then obligingly kneed in the nuts.

When hauled up before authority she admitted that she knew what she had done was wrong and that violence is unacceptable but kept asking in a hopeful voice, “are you going to expel me?” She now has a permanent black mark on her school record and I’ve been called in for a meeting with the school psychologist.

She has since made up with Florencia the Red but still hides behind walls in the playground. Why? “I know the other girls want to play with me Mum but they swore an oath to God” so she doesn’t want to be responsible for consigning their souls to eternal damnation if they break it. I told her if she got me God’s cell phone number I’d call and have a chat with him about it but she was indignant at my frivolity.

“Cell phones weren’t invented back then Mum!”

So now I’m contemplating writing a letter to the Pope asking for special dispensation to let the other girls play with my daughter at school.

Ever wonder how religious wars get started?

This Season’s Must-Have Accessory

2009-11-22T02:17:00.001-08:00

While mothers-in-law can be intensely irritating and are a legitimate target for blogging abuse, grandmothers are absolutely indispensable and must be celebrated.

Like certain exotic breeds of marsupial, they are at their best at night when they are especially good at tapping on the door of the pumpkin at 2.00 a.m. and asking to “borrow” the baby – as if they just happened to be passing by and were seized by a sudden urge to hang out with their screaming grandson.

And despite their often out-dated theories on infant development (don’t let them keep their knees bent or else they’ll turn out bow-legged) they have street cred. One certainly cannot navigate the labyrinthine childcare bureaucracy of this country without an abuela.

In Peru, while most vaccinations are available in private clinics and can be easily obtained at a price, the very first one – which has to be given before the child is 20 days old – is only administered in the public hospitals. It is probably the State’s way of keeping tabs on births. In order to obtain this vaccination, which is only dispensed at 8.15 a.m., three days a week, one has to travel to the centre of Lima at the crack of dawn to “hacer la cola”.

Queuing is a way of life in Lima and there are individuals that make their living at it. They get up early and stand in whatever line they think will be most profitable and then sell their place to desperate latecomers. Others arrive early, convince the person in line in front of them to hold their place and then go and have a leisurely breakfast. Thus, you can arrive at a reasonable hour and join a reasonable length line only to have 5 or 10 people suddenly appear in front of you just as the doors are opening. This is seen as perfectly legitimate and draws not a murmur of protest from either the people in the queue or the police keeping order.

It is advisable to arrive in el centro well before 8.15 a.m. because vaccinations are dispensed until they run out and those remaining in the queue have to start all over again on the next available day. Of course no one but an abuela knows these things. I arrived with mine just after 7.00 a.m. and joined a line of what appeared to be three mamas but which we discovered upon canny inquires by my mother-in-law, was actually a line of seven.

All the mamas were equipped with the essentials: 1) a large bundle of blankets; and 2) an abuela carrying a bottomless Mary Poppins-like handbag out of which they produce at intervals thermos flasks of hot water, tins of formula, baby wipes, diapers, hats and more blankets. Those few mamas not fortunate enough to be in possession of an abeula bring along nervous husbands who busy themselves fiddling with their cell phones or pretending to look for parking spaces for their non-existent cars.

Having established your place on the pavement the baby-comparison ritual begins. As the morning chill gives way to the standard light fog of dust that settles over Lima daily, layers of blankets are cautiously peeled back, a smorgasbord of baby heads emerge and the chorus begins. “¡Ay que preciosa!” “¡Pero que bonito!” “¡Cuanto tiempo tiene?” “¡Que muñequito!” The mamas try to look modest while the abuelas proudly compare statistics.

My mother-in-law is delighted that Smuggitos is the smallest baby in the queue.

“He was born even tinier” she says with perverse pride, “2.750 kilos and only 47 cm!”

His nearest rival – also newborn – is swathed in a dense cloud of pink blankets, the first layer of which when removed reveals a large round face the colour of brick topped by an impossibly thick thatch of black hair which starts at the bridge of the perspiring nose. This kid is several weight divisions above Smuggitos.

Once the doors are opened the tyranny of the enfermeras begins. The vaccination department is run by a team of diminutive nurses who swiftly separate the mamas and the abuelas. The mamas are packed in an orderly manner onto a row of benches while the abuelas are banished back to the pavement. The mamas are given a brief lecture: “wait your turn, it will take about 10 minutes each, be sure to have your vaccination cards with you. Can’t tell you if there are vaccines available, you’ll only find out once you get into the inside room.”

The abuelas stand outside on the pavement and fret.

“But I have to give the leche.”

“The baby needs another blanket, ¡mucho aire!”

“I have to carry the baby. My daughter had a C-section. They cut her from hip to hip and look at the size of the child. She weighs a ton!” says the grandmother of the pink cumulus nimbus, with some justification.

Inside, the mamas, bereft of their shepherds, are being bullied by the enfermeras.

“Señora, how old is that child? Six months? And you are only now bringing him for his shot?”

“Where is his vaccination card? What do you mean you have to ask your mother? You don’t know? It’s your baby!”

“What do you mean the clinic told you to bring him for la vacuna now? Forget what the clinic says, you must take the child to the centro de servicios medical in your district.”

The enfermeras reserve a special degree of contempt for mamas who turn up with prescriptions or ordenes from a private clinic.

“What is your baby suffering from? Nothing? She must have something wrong with her if the clinic gave you this piece of paper just to get a vacuna. Typhoid? Polio? Does she have a fever? I don’t care if your doctor says she’s healthy. There must be something wrong if you have a prescription for a vaccination. No, your mother can’t come inside and explain to me. Wait over there.”

Occasionally, when the security guard at the door is distracted, an abuela will dart in and attempt to assist their bewildered offspring. They are quickly shooed away and return to the pavement where they compare notes. This is where all the essential information is obtained: which public hospital has the surest supply of vaccinations and what time you need to turn up there. Which clinics charge the most and what the new reglas are with regard to a variety of state services. “Did you know that the ID card office has moved to Av Javier Prado opposite el Banco Nacional? Sí, about 6 months ago, and now you have to go between 8.00 a.m. and noon to apply and it takes a week but you can give the official 10 soles and he’ll do it for you de una vez. Go on a Wednesday, the line is shorter.”

There is no number to call or webpage to visit to find out this stuff. It is only available on the abuelanet and if you don’t have one you are, as the Peruvians say, jodido. So the next time my suegra gives me one of her backhanded compliments (“How nice you look today, but hija, don’t ever wear that jumper again.” “Your hair looks great, now that’s how I like to see you!”) I will smile serenely and silently thank whichever deity sent her.

"It Takes a Village..." or The Open Source Approach to Childrearing

2009-11-06T18:48:00.000-08:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a mother in possession of a newborn baby must be in want of advice.

It matters not at all that my daughter is living proof that I have raised at least one child with no visible signs of trauma or abnormality. Completely irrelevant. I am a new mother and therefore by definition completely incompetent. The minute I even try to lift the baby the cry goes up “the spine! The spine! Be careful with his head!” as if I’m going to wring the child out like a piece of laundry. From clinic to home to the doctor’s waiting room, I am constantly observed and instructed. I took Smuggitos to get his passport and was thoroughly and intimately interrogated by an elderly woman in the immigration office waiting room.

“¡Ah que preciosura!” (they always start off like that). “Are you breastfeeding? And what else? Forget formula, you need to feed him lots of water! That will make him nice and fat. Eight glasses of water a day, that’s what he needs, believe me. And his skin? Odourless vaseline all over, its miraculous. You’re travelling? Remember to stuff lots of cotton wool in his ears when the plane takes off. Have you circumcised him? No?!! But you must! If you don’t, you’ll regret it later, his sex life will be terrible.”

I commented that I had consulted with the male members of my family, all of whom were intact and had no complaints about their sex lives. She peered at me incredulously, “¿y de donde eres señora?” obviously making a mental note to report the entire Caribbean region to the UN Human Rights Council.

And since when is breastfeeding a spectator sport? People peer over my shoulder and make observations: “Try the other one” “Sit up straighter” “Lean forward” “Are you sure you have any milk?” “The spine! The spine! Be careful with his head!” I had nurses – each with her own infallible technique to demonstrate – actually climb onto the bed to try and poke my nipple into the baby’s mouth from different angles.

Even my husband has ventured a “but my mother says...” He’s damned lucky marital relations have not yet been resumed because if they had, he wouldn’t be getting any.

I mentioned before that my mother-in-law is remarkable at burping the baby, but gas comes in many forms, and in return for this invaluable service I am subjected to endless and repetitive philosophical ay hija discourses and minute instructions as to how to hold, feed, bathe and generally care for my son. My interpretation of the Baby Inca’s cries, squeaks and grunts are all discarded in favour of her own – apparently he speaks the Chiclayan dialect of her region.

My stress levels are not assisted by the fact that, having spent 9 months growing a magnificent pair of boobs, the little ingrate now refuses to utilize them because he's been surreptitiously introduced to the joys of bottled formula. Despite insisting that I wanted to breastfeed exclusively the nurses in the clinic, instead of bringing him to me in the night when he cried for food (“you were sleeping so well señora”), kept “topping him up” like a damned phonecard. He is now wedded to fast flowing bottles and refuses to put in the graft required to source his meals from my chest so I’m struggling with breast pumps and “nipple confusion” and trying to limit his intake of formula and other fluids. Meanwhile, my mother-in-law keeps trying to feed him aniseed-flavoured water and manzanilla tea to help his digestion. Why is everyone trying to irrigate my child? What is this obsession with water?

In the face of this constant onslaught of goodwill I have developed Coping Strategies.

Have you ever wondered what the purpose of baby talk is? Why adults tend to start babbling like village idiots the moment a baby approaches? I used to think that it was one of those useless Darwinian leftovers like the appendix. However, I have discovered that it is nothing of the sort. In fact, it is an evolutionary necessity, as important a survival mechanism as opposable thumbs or the fight-or-flight response triggered by adrenalin.

For example, when my suegra announced that she was inviting herself to the first doctor visit, I instinctively picked up Smuggitos and cooed to him: “Of course your abuela is coming to the doctor with us! Yes she is! Yes she is! She wants to make sure that silly mummy is taking good care of her ickle wickle grandson doesn’t she? Yes she does! Yes she does! But don’t worry, your mummy is a grown woman who is perfectly capable of taking care of her Smuggitos. Yes she is! Yes she is!”

This automatic ‘talk to the baby’ response by the mother of the newborn in the face of territorial challenges sends a subtle message while avoiding direct confrontation with the challenger. It also eases tension along the jaw line and keeps me out of prison, where I hear the wifi connections are not great.

Secondly, I am invoking my constitutional right to Make Stuff Up and Have My Passionate Beliefs Respected No Matter How Illogical. I have noticed that quoting doctors’ orders has absolutely no effect in deflecting unwanted home remedies but anything ‘traditional’ or ‘customary’ is greeted with respectful nods and total compliance.

Before checking me out of the clinic the paediatrician gave me a brochure with childcare instructions, including the stricture that I not use any kind of girdle or umbligero (which I can only translate as a “bellybuttoner”) on the child. Turns out that it is customary to strap down babies’ midsections so their bellybuttons will be innies and not outies.

My suegra says that with each of her children she taped a coin to their navels to avoid this social disgrace. “I did it to you, and yours doesn’t stick out” she sniffed at my husband with impeccable logic. I pointed out that neither does mine and I was not subjected to such measures. “You were obviously too young to remember” she replied. (“But with Smuggies I never...” I began, but gave it up. I am saving my energy for the interception of enriched liquids.)

I was instructed to blow on the top of the baby’s head three times to stop the hiccups. My husband was sceptical at first but reported excitedly that he tried it and it worked like a charm. “You have to wait about 15 minutes before they stop of course, but it works!”

My suegro told Smuggies that we have to wrap red string around the baby’s hand to ward of the evil eye from bad adults. This is similar to the Trinidad and Tobago practice of giving babies bracelets of black beads to wear to ward off ‘maljo’ (mal yeux or ‘bad eye’).

As far as I am concerned they can adorn the Baby Inca like a Christmas tree as long as they let me decide what to feed him. I therefore plan to trot out traditions at every available opportunity. As a test, I announced that we have to bury his 'navelstring' (what we Trinis call the remnant of the umbilical cord which falls off after a week or so) under a plant in the backyard. Shovels are being sourced as we speak.

From now on, I shall invent traditions at my convenience. The next time anyone suggests I feed Smuggitos agua I will inform them that in the Caribbean it is considered very bad luck to give a baby water before 6 months of age because then the water jumbies will become restless and floods will inundate the neighbourhood. If the threat of tsunamis doesn't work, nothing will.

As I was saying to my son just the other day “we’re going to fill them up with a pack of lies aren’t we Smuggitos? Yes we are! Yes we are!”

Coming Soon...This Season’s Must-Have Accessory

The Return of Inca Rule

2009-10-24T16:19:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase the French, Le Baby Inca est arrivé!

Now hands up everyone who wants to hear all the gory details...

No, I though not. Neither do I wish to re-live them. However, should you ever have the opportunity of being interned in a maternity clinic in Peru you may find the following medical terminology useful:

“Un dolorcito” (a little hurt) is how they describe shoving a big epidural needle into your spine (no doubt also known in NHS circles as an “Optional Extra”).

“Un momentito” is what the anaesthesiologist says when he answers his cell phone in mid-operation.

“Un bañito” is when the nurses give you a perfunctory wash in your bed and then hose you down with your £40 Yves St Laurent Rive Gauche Eau de Toilette like its Limacol.

“fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck” is what you are allowed to mutter pleasantly under your breath while hobbling to the bathroom for the first time with a six-inch incision in your abdomen, because no one will understand what you are saying.

The most traumatic moment however, was being described as “housewife” on the birth certificate. Husband made all the right patronising noises about it being the “hardest and most important job in the world” blah blah blah. I resisted asking him whether he’d have accepted having his macho latino self described as “stay-at-home father”. Though at that point he might actually have said yes and meant it, such was his euphoria.

It won’t last of course. He’s still at the “ohmigod he’s so wonderful but why does he sleep all the time?” phase. I warned him in advance that he would be hovering over the crib poking the child awake to make sure he’s still alive and he scoffed at me. He did exactly that on day one and yesterday remarked in a disgusted kind of way that it is a good thing that breathing is required as a sign of life since, if it was optional, Smuggitos wouldn’t do that either. He will soon eat those words – no doubt raw with onions and a splash of lime juice.

Smuggies is also euphoric – though more cautiously so. In the run-up to the birth she was waxing philosophical about “the end of 100% of love” and “I’ll quite understand if you guys like him more that you like me. After all, babies are cuter than people”. I assured her that for most people babies are indeed cute but are, at best, fleetingly diverting, quickly becoming boring because they lack conversational skills so she and her brother would certainly not be appealing to the same audience.

I then had to get creative about the mathematics of love, explaining that it is not a finite resource and therefore not apportioned on a percentage basis. She was unconvinced. I tried to float the theory that there were different “love resources” and that there was therefore “Smuggie Love” which is specific to her and cannot be subtracted from in favour of “Smuggito Love”. She did not openly jeer at the suggestion but I suspect she only pretended to accept it to get me to shut up.

Having now returned to the pumpkin after the artificially regulated environment of the clinic, everybody is struggling to adjust to the Atahualpa in our midst.

Husband is caught between parental enthusiasm and extreme irritation at the minutiae of childcare. Having sweated over assembling the crib; accepted (with poor grace) that reading the instructions BEFORE installing the car seat might yield a more successful result than his first few efforts; and supported me in and out of bed to go to the bathroom; when then asked to find a specific white muslin cloth, carefully washed and sterilised for the purpose of wiping excess milk off the royal face, he snarled “why can’t you just use this?” and tossed me a sweaty T-shirt that had been draped for some days over the shoe rack.

Smuggies on the other hand has been vigorously playing both sides of the coin. She imperiously cites her previous childcare experience (a year-old cousin in the Dominican Republic) and insists on holding him, burping him, singing to him, walking him and generally hovering possessively over him. She then reports to everyone in an exhausted and long-suffering voice "I got no sleep whatsoever! I've been up since 4.00 am with the baby".

My father-in-law, having cleaned the house to within an inch of its life, seems to be at a bit of a loose end now. He comes in every morning before leaving for work and every evening on coming home to see whether the baby is awake. Asleep or awake, he peers proudly at him and then scuttles away.

My suegra is keeping me fed and watered (or rather chicken soupy wouped) and trying her best to resist teaching me how to breastfeed. She has also taken in good part our repeated rejection of her nutritional suggestions for Smuggitos. Breast milk only for 6 months is not a concept that she is familiar or comfortable with. She is however, a world champion burper and is now the official Gas Czar.

As for me, I’m suffering all the indignities of the barely ambulant. In addition, given the newly realigned family priorities and the sheer weight of responsibility he is now shouldering, I have been too terrified to ask my husband to retrieve my toothbrush from the bottom of whichever bag he shoved it into when we were leaving the clinic. However, I figure if I breathe ardently on him for a few days he may take the hint.

Peruvian Conversations Parts I & II

2009-10-14T06:01:00.000-07:00

Part I

I have been reading on the internet about the Nesting Instinct, “the name given to the distinctive urge to clean, tidy, and organize that occurs at the end of the pregnancy and is a sign that your baby is about to make its appearance”.

All true. My father-in-law’s got it. He’s been cleaning the house from top to bottom for the last two days. I get up at 5.00 am to use the toilet and he’s scrubbing the sink. I try to make breakfast and he says “don’t use the stove, I just sprayed oven cleaner all over it.” He’s been bustling around like a maniac with his trousers tucked into the top of his socks, crawling behind furniture with dust cloths and carrying buckets and mops up and down the stairs to clean up whenever anyone walks past.

This is a good thing because it looks like we’ll be living in the pumpkin until after Smuggitos is born. We’ve found an apartment and our shipment has arrived from London but a few problems have cropped up.

First, it is not easy to cram a three-story-townhouse-with-back-garden’s worth of stuff into a three bedroom second floor apartment (no elevator, no balcony). Six sturdy Peruvians stoically dragged boxes up and down the stairs, calling out the contents at the door so they could be stowed in the right room. (As an interesting aside, it is fascinating how many different inflections of dismay and disbelief can be infused into the phrase “more books”.)

Secondly, the container arrived with a large dent in the side and corresponding damage to a number of bits of furniture. Not, unfortunately, the ones I would have liked.

If memory serves, it was V.S. Naipaul in A House for Mr Biswas who introduced the concept of ‘insuranburn’. In my case it was a matter of insuranhope. With any luck my ancient TV and the more hideous of my accumulated 'artworks' would be ruined and I could buy myself a nice flatscreen with the insurance money. Unfortunately, the TV survived but my California King-sized mattress arrived with all the springs sticking out. If you have ever seen the size of my husband you will understand what a problem this is. And until the insurance claim is approved by the company in London I cannot throw out any of the damaged stuff. This means that at the moment there is no space to organise anything, let alone install such basic necessities as fridge, stove and washing machine. So for the moment, the future is orange.

Last week I took advantage of the nesting instinct and had my very first solo taxi ride. It was cunningly done. I had an appointment for my weekly check-up with the obstetrician and I omitted to remind anyone until I was fully bathed and dressed, then I waddled nonchalantly down the stairs and out the front door saying breezily, “voy a la clinica” before anyone could stop me. Of course, my mother-in-law was not home at the time. She had left my father-in-law in charge of my welfare and he would no doubt catch hell if anything happened to me, but he was safely ensconced under the refrigerator at the time.

Getting to the clinic was no problem, it's well known and on a large avenida. I was a bit nervous about getting back in case I had to give complicated instructions in Spanish, given that my sense of direction sucks. I once tried to drive to a shopping mall 15 minutes from my cousin’s home in North Miami Beach and ended up in Boca Raton. In London, even with a Tom Tom navigation device I got consistently lost. (That was not my fault however – the Tom Tom had one of those supercilious female voices which you just know belongs to a woman better looking than you and who is obviously giving herself a manicure rather than paying attention to where you’re supposed to be going.)

Anyway, on leaving the clinic I followed all my suegra’s taxi-taking advice to the letter: “Don’t take the smaller taxis, don’t pay more than 7 soles, and you must look at their faces first.” She always walks along a line of waiting taxis, craning her neck into each window to scrutinize the driver minutely before deciding on the 3rd or 4th in line and opening negotiations. I did all this but realised that she had never got around to explaining what I should be looking for in the faces, so I chose the best looking one and jumped in.

And had a most Peruvian conversation.

I asked to be taken to the junction of avenidas Canada y Rosa Toro. “Ah” he said in instant recognition, “the street with all the cevicherias”. I had noticed there were a lot of restaurants devoted to this favourite Peruvian dish near to the house so I confirmed the location.

“So,” he said, letting in the clutch and inserting himself into the traffic, “you’re going to eat ceviche”.

“No, I’m going to my house.”

“Oh, you don’t like ceviche? There are lots of chifas on Rosa Toro as well” (chifa is Peruvian for a Chinese restaurant).

“I know, but I’m just going home.”

“So you like ceviche?”

He was obviously irretrievably ceviche-focused so I confessed that raw fish in lime juice is fine but that I’m not a big fan of onions. Clearly I was a foreigner.

“Where are you from? The Caribbean? Don’t they have fish there?” (yes, and onions) “What else do they have? Fruit? They must have fruit. Fruit is good, I like fruit, we have good fruit in Peru.”

I admitted to fruit and to fish but gave Peru the edge when it came to other seafood and shellfish. He was fascinated to meet someone from the Caribbean and wanted to know all about it.

“So what other food do you have?”

I attempted to broaden the scope of the conversation by telling him about Trinidad’s proximity to Venezuela, the hispanic influence on Christmas music, etc. He listened politely and nodded in a fascinated kind of way.

“So do you have sugar? And coffee? No coffee? What do you export?”

Petroleum and natural gas left him completely cold.

“What about rum? En el Caribe you must have rum!”

By this time, if I had had any rum I would have drained the bottle and hit him over the head with the empty.

Until I acquire a Peruvian accent and a non-foreign look, that is the last time I attempt to leave the house alone. Next time I will drag my father-in-law out from under the fridge and haul him to the clinic with me.

Part II

While my suegro behaves like Mr Clean on steroids, my husband, on the other hand, spends a great deal of time poking my protruding belly button in a fascinated sort of way and asking questions like “how do you hold them again?” and “I don’t really have to learn how to change diapers do I?” (He was shocked to discover that a self-cleaning diaper had not yet been invented and I had to explain that it isn’t the diaper per se that needs to be cleaned.)

A few weeks ago his colleague's wife gave birth early and that catapulted him into a whirlwind of activity – rushing around to finish paying the clinic and exhorting Smuggies to help me pack the overnight bag. So he thinks his work is done.

But, as I have mentioned before, you get a lot of looking after here if you are pregnant (not necessarily from one’s husband, obviously).

Having also sampled the medical ambiance in the US and UK, I have reached the conclusion that one of the main differences is that outside of those two countries, medical professionals are more willing to communicate directly with their patients rather than strictly between each other. In the States, if you have good insurance you can – and do – get referred for every test known to man, each performed by yet another specialist. But at no stage will said specialist actually tell you what they find. They hook you up to complicated machines, squirt you with gel, attach electrodes and squish you into claustrophobic tubes, gazing portentously at monitors and shaking their heads dubiously all the while. Then they retreat to a back room, consult with various technicians and write lengthy reports in code. Ask them anything and they say “the report will be sent to your doctor” (Or rather, in the case of the US your ‘Primary Care Physician’ or in the UK, ‘your GP’s surgery’.) Depending on the facial expression or the state of his/her digestion, you then spend the next week thinking you have an inoperable brain tumour or some new and fascinating disease. The Primary Care Physician is no better, so cautious is the diagnosis that you will either end up being sent for more tests or being asked to sign several disclaimer forms before you are told that it’s merely the common cold. It must be the fear of being sued.

Here in Lima, I get sent for loads of tests with specialists who are more than happy to give me their opinion and to explain the process as they go along. I can now tell you exactly what a foetus’s kidney looks like and the possible causes and effects of a misplaced placenta.

Of course, there is such a thing as too much information.

Because the level of my amniotic fluid seemed to be lower than normal, I was sent to have a Foetal Non-Stress Test, which involves monitoring the baby’s movements and heart rate via electrodes attached to my tummy by two elastic belts for about ½ hour. It is to ensure that the baby is moving strongly and can resist the rigours of childbirth.

The test was performed by an elderly doctor who bore a striking resemblance to the mad scientist in Back to the Future. Like one of those specialist players they have in American football who sits on the bench the entire game and only gets called on to punt the ball, he is not in regular circulation, and had to be summoned from the lower floors of the clinic trundling his monitor, to which he attached me, giving us an enthusiastic history of late-stage foetal testing all the while.

According to him, years ago they used to test foetal blood by inserting a needle through the cervix and drawing a vial of blood from the baby’s head. But they found that since the head was being squeezed in the pelvis, the blood wasn’t useful in indicating stress. Then they invented a test where they would insert a syringe directly through the mother’s womb and into the baby to draw blood. 1 in 6 babies died that way. “They never forgive you when that happens you know. I used to do those but then I started telling patients that my arm was hurting so I couldn’t do it. Who wants those kinds of odds?”

“Nowadays” he continued, “all the monitoring is indirect. You can’t take the baby out, check it, then put it back in, so this test is the most important. I’ve done about 100,000 of these. Forget all the stuff you see on the ultrasound screens” he continued, attaching the electrode to where the ultrasound of 10 minutes before had indicated Smuggitos’ bottom was located. “Here’s the heart” he said.

When the monitor indicated no cardiac activity he adroitly slid the electrode to the correct location and continued unabashed. “Yes indeed, this test is crucial. I once had a lady in here – same age as you actually – almost no foetal movement, we had to operate so fast! The baby was born 900 grams. The placenta was the size of a dinner roll and as white a chalk. Another few hours and that would have been it.”

By this time both myself and the baby were wiggling furiously. He continued to regale us with tales of near misses and unintended disasters the whole 30 minutes of the test. “You don’t mean to kill patients you know. Doctors usually don’t but sometimes you try to cure them and it has the opposite effect. You have to be so careful, people don’t pardon that kind of thing.” He unstrapped me, pronounced that we had passed the test with flying colours and accompanied us back to the upper floors. “Look at that” he said as we waited for the elevator, sliding open the window and pointing upward. “About 6 months ago a man jumped from the top floor. He bounced off that air conditioning unit right there and landed in the courtyard below. You could see his feet sticking up.”

“Did he die?” I asked.

“Very much so! He was a depressive and had been diagnosed with severe arthritis. He asked the doctor what the prognosis was and the doctor told him it was incurable so he jumped. Obviously there’s no cure but arthritis isn’t fatal. He thought it was like cancer and he was going to die. That’s the problem with some of these doctors. They have no tact.”

Mothers-in-Law and Other Saints

2009-10-05T10:21:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: On either side of the nine months of a planned pregnancy is a period known as the TWW – the Two Week Wait. The first is the nail-biting anxiety between fertilisation of the egg and the earliest possible official confirmation of pregnancy. The second is the last two weeks of waiting for the due date. This is generally characterised by a striking resemblance to a beached whale and extreme irritation and grumpiness. Given that I have now entered the second of the TWWs, whatever I write in the following posts may, with impunity, be vigorously denied at a later date.

Now I may be a lot of things but I am NOT cute! Why then does my mother-in-law insist on treating me like a puppy in a pet shop window?

Whenever I am in her presence she marvels continuously and vocally at my achievements, drawing the attention of anyone within earshot to my many talents:

“Oooh look, look! She’s making pancakes! ¡Que bonita! And you know what? She went to the market all by herself today!”

She gazes wonderingly at me, shaking her head in silent pleasure when she has run out of “ay hijas” for five minutes or so.

It is completely unnerving. I do not cope well with being cooed at. Treacly sentiment makes me itch. And I have discovered that I am completely allergic to being addressed in the diminutive.

This is a peculiarly Spanish language affectation, where speakers use the diminutive form (like sticking –ito or –cita onto the end of a noun) in order to express not only the smallness of something but affection. It is usually used when speaking to small children but also by adults trying to show intimacy or fondness. In moderation it can be endearing. In excess...not so much.

Being coaxed every lunchtime to eat “una sopita con un pollocito y un arrozcito” is the Spanish conversational equivalent of being invited to have some “soupy-woupy with some chicky-wicken and some ricey-wicey”. I’d rather gnaw on the sharpened blade of a knifey-wifey, thanks all the same.

When I do persuade her to let me do something for myself, I get trained.

“Oh my goodness! My daughter-in-law is washing her daughter’s school shirt – I must see how she does it! No, no, my dear, not like that, like this...”

In Latin America it is considered impolite to tell your suegra to fuck off so I try to smile and point out mildly that in the Caribbean we also have soap and water and, though our washing methods may differ, the results are generally the same.

The thing is, it is not that she has trouble believing that I am a well educated professional woman who has worked and supported herself all her life. That she accepts and is pleased with. But she is absolutely amazed that I can also use a stove and have conquered the mysteries of Peruvian washing machines (same brands as everywhere else!) with ease. She herself is an educated professional who has been taking time out from her job to ensure that I am not run over in the street on a daily basis.

This is a woman who has listened in person to one of Castro’s three-hour speeches in the Palacio de Convenciones in Havana and is an official auditor of World Bank funded government projects in Peru. She has decided political views and prides herself on organising her household while maintaining her career but seems to feel that I would be incapable of the same. Either she has some very erroneous ideas about my pre-Lima lifestyle (references to the nanny may have contributed to this – though household help in Lima is common for anyone making above a living wage) or she considers herself unique in executing this dual role and is somewhat put out to discover that others also do it as a matter of course. Or maybe I am over-intellectualising the whole thing and it is just the visceral pleasure of having a daughter-in-law to mould.

In vain do I tell her that I have been all over the world in all kinds of conditions; that I have travelled on the back of tractors and forded piranha-infested rivers in Guyana; that I have fended off hostile takeovers of observer missions in remote Pacific provinces. Her reply is invariably “yes, but it’s different here”. The difference “here” apparently is that one must never walk too close to the edge of the pavement, cross the road against a green light, or leave one’s shopping bags unattended. Every time we leave the house she grasps me firmly by the elbow with both hands and shepherds me through the streets of Lima as though I’m a blind paraplegic with agoraphobia.

It is of course, nice to be so looked after and I have to give her credit for making a herculean effort not to interfere. She has maintained an admirable silence in particular on the question of Names. She was told by her son even before I arrived in Lima “¡no te metas!” and she hasn’t, though the temptation must be great, particularly for a good Catholic like her.

I may have mentioned in passing that Peru is a somewhat Catholic country. This means that saints abound and securing their various patronage is key when it comes to naming babies. Saints all have their days (don’t we all!) so the date of birth is influential, but one assumes that one can also pick and choose one’s area of interest. For example, if you want your kid to grow up to be Dr Doolittle, you name him after St Francis of Assisi or, in Peru, after St Martin de Porres, a mulatto Dominican monk who once urged his Order to sell him so they could pay off their debts and who is renowned for reasoning with mice to get them to stop chewing on the ecclesiastic robes.

You ignore the saints at your peril because, if you aren’t careful, you could unwittingly end up with a not-particularly-edifying saint (my father, I was delighted to discover, shares his name with the patron saint of syphilitics). If you don’t go for saints then there’s no excuse for not naming your child after a family member. Imagine generations of Julios and Juans with only their middle names to distinguish them. With all due respect to the many John Jrs and George IIIs of my acquaintance, it’s a boring practice and I’ll have none of it.

My own preference was to name the Baby Inca ‘Hugo’, after my hero Chavez but my husband, an apolitical but instinctive conservative with Fujimoristic tendencies, refused. We also considered Quechua names but while the girls names sound quite pretty the boys names are harsh. I cannot in good conscience name my son Wayna or Wanka – two of the more popular names we came across. And Tupac, unfortunately, is now firmly associated with gold teeth and gangsta rap.

So we are In Discussions and, until such time as the issue is resolved, we have applied both the masculine and diminutive forms and he is being known as Smuggitos.

The Power of the Belly in Peru

2009-09-30T09:14:00.000-07:00

The thing about being pregnant in a Latin American country is that you get more respect. In the UK my experience was more “OK you’re having a baby not a heart attack. Get on with it.” The fellahs at work used to laugh at me when I complained about the elevator not working. “Pregnancy is a condition, not an illness” they droned, while admitting that the sight of me waddling up the stairs provided hours of amusement. Cheeky sods.

The NHS treat you like you’re a whiney wimp if you want to see an actual doctor instead of some overworked trainee midwife who looks at you incredulously if you expect to be weighed and examined once a month. They inform you with great condescension that you can have a £100 voucher and two “home visits” after giving birth. If you put £3 (exact change only) into a little machine they might even give you a blurry photo of the foetus at 20 weeks. I had friends who never saw the same midwife twice throughout the pregnancy and birth. And a doctor? For what? If anything goes wrong at the last minute – they assured me – we’ll find one. I had visions of some passing GP, fresh from administering swine flu vaccinations, being stuffed into scrubs and cutting me open after hours of unsuccessful labour under the disapproving eyes of burly Jamaican nurses: “Gyal, wha yuh bawlin’ so fuh? Ent yuh have a chile already?”

My first child was in fact born via emergency C-section so I feel I had some cause for concern. But she was born in the Dominican Republic and that is a different thing entirely. First of all, not only do the medical professionals there take good care of you, but the community as a whole feel they have a vested interest in your welfare. I got bombarded with unsolicited, contradictory and often utterly ludicrous insights and directives from formerly pregnant women, extended family members, co-workers and total strangers. The more remote the personal experience of childbirth was from the advisor (whether through age or biological impossibility), the more emphatic and insistent the advice. I had elderly women telling me that I must drink lots of stout and eat okra so the baby would “slide out easier” and men lecturing me on hormonal changes and breastfeeding.

Far from being embarrassed by the process, men in the DR treat pregnant women with a kind of lascivious appreciation of fecundity. In the UK and Trinidad and Tobago a pregnant woman seems to be considered hors de combat and therefore an unfair target for sexual innuendo. In the DR I regularly got comments in the street along the lines of “¡Ay chula, ese barriga te queda muy bien!” (Aye, cutie, that belly looks so nice on you”). Which, at the risk of offending all right-thinking feminists, I must admit does wonders for the ego of a seven months pregnant woman waddling up the road to keep her doctor’s appointment.

Peruvians are a bit more respectful in general and don’t tend to shout at women in the streets. But the power of the barriga is strong. There are dedicated parking spaces at supermarkets and preferential lines at checkout counters and banks and even where there aren’t, a judicious waddle goes a long way in Lima. I am enjoying myself immensely. I jump queues to go into places I have no interest in entering. I hover at pedestrian crossings trying to make traffic grind to a halt. I have even conquered the infamous Peruvian police.

Despite the fact that a recent UN report said that Peru should have more police per capita – there are currently 1 per 1,200 people as opposed to the recommended 1 per 250 – they seem to be everywhere. They are particularly keen on directing traffic and stopping motorists to check their papers and are reputed to be uniformly corrupt. “Con 10 soles se arregla todo,” you are constantly told by Limeños. This is apparently the going rate for ‘fixing’ any infraction (whether real or imagined). 10 soles is roughly £2 so, depending on how sinful you are, it’s a bargain. This accepted emollient practice was explained so earnestly to Smuggies by one of my brothers-in-law that she wrote in an essay on Ways to Help Save the Environment that “shops and other businesses should bribe people not to litter”. Even so, the sheer visibility and forbidding appearance of the police can be intimidating.

Last Sunday we went to Mistura 2009, the Second Annual Gastronomic Festival of Lima held in the Parque de la Exposición, the largest available open space in the capital. Peruvians are deadly serious about their food. After all, this is the birthplace of the potato and the country has several distinct climatic zones with the resulting variation of ingredients and cuisines. There are 2,000 varieties of potato, 2,016 varieties of sweet potato and 35 varieties of corn and Peruvians use them all. If you go to the market and ask for sweet potato they ask you what kind. You tell them camote, they ask you what colour. And so on. Their favourite pastime is eating, closely followed by talking about what they have eaten and what they plan to eat in the future. It all gets a bit much. In my view there are only so many times I can have a gripping discussion on the infinite combinations of raw fish, lime juice and onion. But Peruvians disagree. Food outlets outnumber other shops in malls 5 to 1 and restaurants have employees with menus prowling the streets and flagging down motorists to lure them into their respective establishments.

In fact, the only thing that Peruvians respect more than a pregnant woman’s belly is their own, so you can imagine the crowd in attendance at the food festival. An estimated 300,000 people attended and about 200,000 of them were in the line ahead of us on Sunday. No preferential line here! Just an unending queue of patient Peruvians (many of whom had arrived in busloads from the provinces) stretching around the entire perimeter of the Parque de la Exposición, overseen by police of every variety.

After about 20 minutes in line with little progress I asked husband for some money and told him I was taking a walk. I edged my way to the crowd control barriers at the very front of the queue, unzipped my jacket and aimed my belly at the nearest policeman with what I felt was a defenceless look. “Disculpe jefe…” I began. He took one look at my barriga, which – me being fairly tall and him being an averaged sized Peruvian – hit him about eye level, and said hastily “¡pase señora, pase!” and ushered me straight to the ticket office. There was a respectful shuffling back of the crowd and I emerged two minutes later with our entry tickets. When I returned to the very back of the line to retrieve my law-abiding husband and father-in-law they were astonished.

My husband is still convinced that I bribed the policeman and I have continued to say to him in tones of great condescension, “stick with me, I’ll show you how to manage in Lima”. You may think I’m being cruel but it's payback time. The first time he traveled to Trinidad alone he tried to tip some lady traveler who helped him through immigration. She refused and gave him her phone number instead and I’ve had to live with hearing all about his “encantos masculinos” ever since.

And then Jesus Said to the Rabbis...

2009-09-19T09:37:00.000-07:00

About seven years ago my youngest niece and I were in a shopping mall when she dropped her box of M&Ms. In one fluid motion she snatched the chocolates off the floor, made the sign of the cross and stuffed them into her mouth. Seeing my quizzical expression she explained, “If you make the sign of the cross Jesus will take all the germs off.”

Now that’s the kind of pragmatic approach to religion I approve of. If Jesus is going to be hanging around claiming to be the Messiah he might as well make himself useful by cleaning a few candies.

But these things can be insidious and He and His relatives should stay off my turf.

Having been initiated into the mysteries of First Communion gift-giving, my daughter came home from school last week highly excited after her first Religion class. They had watched movies about the Bible she said. So much for the “context which reflects the multicultural nature of our society.”

The movies were obviously aimed at the pre-indoctrinated and were in Spanish, so what she gleaned from them was interesting, if presumably unintended. They had clearly made a big impression and before she had even changed out of her school uniform I had received what seemed like the Twitter version of the life of Christ.

“Mum, Jesus and his mum and dad were riding around on a donkey and then they all had to go to this place like a big market with a temple and you had to take an all-white sheep to the temple like this (arms crossed offering an imaginary sheep up for celestial approval) and if the sheep had even one stain and wasn’t all-white they wouldn’t accept it. But you only had to give sheep if you were rich. If you were poor you had to give money. And if you didn’t have any money or sheep and you had bad thoughts if you even put one foot in the temple like this (a tentative toe thrust forth) you would just drop dead. The people didn’t kill you, God did, because he KNEW! And then they all went back home but then they couldn’t find Jesus and they looked everywhere. “Jesus, Jesus, have you seen Jesus?” And finally they found him in the temple talking with all these old guys, I forget their names. (“Rabbis?” “Yes. Mum, have you seen this movie??”) Jesus was asking them lots of questions because he was very curious. And then later on when he grew up he got married and they all went to this cemetery and...(“He got married?” “Yes Mum, he got married. There was this girl see...” “Did he have children?” “No Mum, don’t be ridiculous, if he had children, then his children would have had children and there would still be little Jesuses today.”)...and they all went to this cemetery and they saw Jesus’ father on a tombstone with his arms crossed like this...(“Jesus’ father? You mean God?” “Yeah, God. He had died of old age. Or maybe it was on the cross, I don’t remember.” “I think it was Jesus on the cross.” “Oh yeah, so God must have died of old age.”) Anyway, then later on Jesus went to the desert and the Devil appeared and started to ask him questions and offer him things. (“How did the Devil look? Was he all red and have horns?” “No Mum, I know a lot of people think that but Jackie (her last nanny) said that the Devil is always very good-looking.” I smiled reminiscently and agreed. “So the Devil was very good-looking?” “Oh yes.” “And what did you think of Jesus?” “Well he was a bit hairy.”) And every time the Devil tried to get Jesus to prove things he said I only have to prove things to God my Father and the Devil was getting very grumpy. And then Mum, you know it was very bad in those days because on Saturdays you couldn’t do anything. You couldn’t cook, you couldn’t sleep, you couldn’t watch TV! But Jesus was telling everybody to go and do things. (“Ah, a bit of a rebel then?” “No Mum, he was just helping out”) And one day the guards caught Jesus telling people to do things and they took him to the temple and kept asking him why he wouldn’t follow the rules and he kept saying “No, it’s all about the Love” and he didn’t have a sheep to give them and they said “where is your sheep?” and he said “No, it’s all about the Love” and then because he didn’t have a sheep he dropped down dead right there in the temple and they hung him on a cross. And the teacher says that these days you don’t have to give a sheep, you just have to pray. And Mum, did you know that Catholics have a big table with bread and wine and guess what?!!”

“The bread and wine get turned into something else?”

“Yeah, into Jesus’ body and the wine gets turned into blood!!”

“Doesn’t that strike you as pretty creepy?”

“But Mum, the wine at your wedding tasted great!”

“That was ginger ale you were drinking.”

Out of this blizzard of information she seems to have extracted two key lessons:

1) Precocious questioning of adults is a Good and Blessed Thing; and
2) God is the Answer – no matter what the question.

Being an Olympic-class manipulator she lost no time in putting these precepts into practice.

She had a spelling test coming up and I was trying to get her to focus on practicing the words.

“Spell technology.”

“T-E-C-N-“

“No, start again.”

“But why?”

“You missed out the H.”

“No, I said it, you just didn’t hear it.”

“Yes you did”

“No I didn’t”

And so on. And on. And on. Every word had to be debated, every error converted into an aural failure on my part rather than a lack of concentration on hers. Losing patience, I told her to shut up and just spell the freaking WORDS!!!!!

After a prolonged power struggle and repeated attempts to re-litigate the issue she completed the spelling list and was dismissed. Pausing at the door before stopping just short of slamming it she sniffed, “I don’t care what you say! God knows what is in my heart.”

“Then maybe HE can take the bloody exam for you!” I yelled after her in a fury, “and while you’re at it, have a word with Him about transubstantiation because you’re getting tuna sandwiches for lunch for a week!”

The Talk

2009-09-16T18:46:00.000-07:00

I knew it was coming and should have been better prepared.

I assume that in the lives of all parents comes the day when they have to have The Talk with their children but, just the same, I was caught off-guard and think I made a bit of a hash of it.

I am of course not referring to sex. That was taken care of when she was five and came home from school announcing that she was going to get married to Guillermo, a boy on her bus. When my “hmm, that’s nice dear” didn’t satisfy her she insisted “and do you know what you do when you get married Mummy?”

“What dear?”

“You kiss, lie on the bed and have sex.”

That got my attention.

“And who told you that?”

“Sophia, a girl on my bus.”

“And how old is Sophia?” (Through gritted teeth)

“Sixteen.”

The next day I rampaged into school and read the riot act about the shocking lack of supervision which allowed teenagers to proselytize sex on the school bus. It turned out that Sophia was actually eight years old. A note was sent home to her parents about inappropriate conversations while in-transit but the damage was done.

I spend several traumatized hours on amazon.com trying to find sex education books for five-year-olds. They all seemed a bit advanced but I managed to find two, one which was nicely illustrated with a serenely smiling, fully clothed woman producing a grinning baby after a “special cuddle”, a vague process of tadpole transfer, and the gradual growth of the resulting fertilized egg. The other put the whole process in the context of a swimming race (starting off at Sperm School, with all the tadpoles being instructed via blackboard and diagrams on how to swim a straight line and head directly for the egg) and introduced a rather spurious genetic twist which suggested that successful sperm produced babies destined to be a second Michael Phelps (“Sammy wasn’t great at maths but he sure could swim! He was a winner!”)

The result of all this was that my daughter, who has badly wanted a sibling for some time, took it upon herself to follow myself and my husband around (particularly at bedtime), urging “special cuddles” and explaining in great detail how his tadpoles would be travelling to my egg via both our belly buttons, therefore Bigboy and I reading newspapers while relaxing on opposite sides of the bed was not an option.

Having achieved her goal of getting me pregnant she is now working on a PowerPoint presentation illustrating the process, which she intends to use to assist Bigboy when the time comes for him to explain sex to her (as yet unborn) brother. She is convinced that Bigboy will make a poor job of it and will need all the help he can get. Also, according to her, boys are dumber than girls and therefore need things explained better.

So no, it wasn’t about sex. This was the Religion Talk.

She has of course been exposed to the R-word for some time and counts herself as an enthusiastic Christian in the same way as she is a devoted fan of Santa Claus.

Christianity as her religion of choice has been influenced by her last two nannies. The first was a Jehovah’s Witness who would occasionally take Smuggies to the Kingdom Hall when I was away on travel duty. I banned her from dragging my daughter round the neighbourhood on their Saturday morning annoy-the-ungodly routine. When Smuggies questioned this, I asked whether she would appreciate me poking her awake on a weekend to tell her that I believe that the sky is orange and that watching TV is evil and insisting that she believe the same. She saw my point. She did, however, develop a taste for Bible stories.

The next nanny was also a Christian – though of a less annoying and far more pragmatic variety – and when Smuggies started worrying that “Mummy says she doesn’t believe in God, what will happen to her?” she soothed, “we’ll just have to pray for her.” So now my daughter is given to ostentatious nightly appeals to Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild who she implores in loud and pointed whispers to “bless Mummy and TAKE CARE OF HER” (subtext: even though she is an ungodly heathen).

On my first day of school my father gathered myself and my siblings together and said, “They will ask you what religion you are. You tell them you are a practicing atheist.” We were officially excused from Religious Instruction classes. I went anyway because I, too, found the Bible highly entertaining, but there was never any danger of me developing an allegiance to a deity as psychotic as the one lauded in the Isaac and Abraham story.

Smuggies on the other hand, has never been to a religious school (mine was nominally Anglican). At her last school, which follows the International Baccalaureate (IB) programme, they learned about religion in the context of cultural differences. In one segment they were allowed to choose different religious symbols and illustrate them in art class. She, predictably, chose Christianity and came home proudly bearing an unconvincingly rendered stuffed cross made of grungy grey denim and foam rubber. When I refused to let her sleep in my bed clutching this creepy object she explained patiently “there’s no need to be afraid Mummy, this isn’t the actual cross they crucified Jesus on.” My (Catholic) colleague at work found this hysterically funny and posited that perhaps the Romans had velcroed Jesus to the cross. (Which of course would put His suffering and sacrifice on our behalf into an entirely new light.)

I had as yet made no serious concerted attempt to convince her of the illogicality of religious belief since she might then start demanding inconvenient truths about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, though it has to be said that all of these provide more tangible benefits and less horrendous consequences for non-compliance. I have instead encouraged her to think logically and for herself.

However, when we decided to relocate to Peru – a country so Catholic that at Easter it is de rigueur to visit seven churches in one day – I realised that the delicate balance between the atheism of the majority of my family and the lure of Jesus and his cherubim was about to be upset. Resorting once more to amazon, I bought her a great little book called ‘Maybe Yes, Maybe No: A Guide for Young Skeptics’ by Dan Barker.

Barker doesn’t mention religion at all until about halfway through the book. Instead, he demonstrates – by way of a ghost story – that “you should prove the truth of a strange story before you believe it.” He then teaches the essentials of critical thought through the application of scientific rules such as:

Check it out;
Repeat the experiment;
Try to prove it wrong; and, most importantly
Always Ask Questions.

And it seemed to be working. I didn’t shove the book down her throat. I waited until she had to practice her English reading anyway and then presented it to her. She got interested and read it in one sitting and seemed to have been adopting proper scientific methodology if the increase in “but Mum, why...?” questions is any indication.

But then she started school.

I had toyed with the idea of sending her to a local school but was told that all schools in Peru – other than private ones following the international curriculum – required children to produce upon enrolment baptism certificates not just for themselves but for both parents and, no doubt, all their ancestors. So off to an International School she went. I was slightly reassured by the brochure which insists that religion is taught “within a context which reflects the multicultural nature of our society”. I am hoping that this refers to global society rather than Peruvian society, which is fascinating but not noticeably multicultural – particularly when it comes to religion.

But this all became – pardon the pun – academic. Turns out that about 80% of the students are Peruvians, whose parents no doubt want the advantages of an international education within the comfort zone of familiar religious norms. On top of that, it seems that Catholic children take First Communion around the age of eight, so recent First Communion celebrations are currently the talk of the school yard among my daughters’ classmates.

I don’t know much about such things but, according to Wikipedia, in Latin American countries First Communion involves parties, girls wearing “fancy dresses and a veil attached to a headdress, as well as either long or short white gloves... Gifts of a religious nature are usually given, such as rosaries, prayer books, in addition to religious statues and icons. Gifts of cash are also common.” These days I understand that the distribution of party bags to school mates is also a feature.

Parties? Fancy white dresses with gloves? Gifts? Cash?!! Now they are speaking Smuggie-language!

She came home from school yesterday with a few post-communion trinkets and a million questions. Why hadn’t she done her First Communion? What is First Communion? How had she overlooked this lucrative revenue stream?

So we had The Talk.

First I had to explain the difference between the various Christian denominations. “Which ones are the ones that knock on doors?” “And what do Catholics believe in?”

I then pointed out that there were many other religions in the world and many contradictory and illogical beliefs and that she should keep asking questions and not automatically believe everything she heard. I touched on the role of religion in war and the important role of scientific enquiry in the development of the human race.

“So Mum, if God didn’t make us, where did we come from?” And there she had me.

I was buggered. I had omitted to prepare. I had forgotten to brush-up on Darwinian theory for nine-year-olds.

I gave it my best off-the-cuff shot but my burblings about the big bang, primordial soup, amoeba, and fish crawling out of the sea and growing wings and feet and then learning to use tools began to sound about as convincing as the virgin birth, resurrection, angels with flaming swords and burning bushes that talk. And worse, none of this gobbledygook seemed to involve presents or cool necklaces. How do you get a child to grasp the concept of evolution when it doesn’t involve presents?

I was losing my audience and it was incredibly tempting to throw up my hands and say, “You know what? God did make us. And it only took seven days. Now eat your dinner or you’re going to hell.”

One thing you have to say about atheism, it is never the easy option. But, la luta continua, so I’m off to surf amazon again.

TO BE CONTINUED...

In Search of Creative Solutions or "So your Honour, that's when I snuffed them..."

2009-09-10T13:09:00.000-07:00

Well the water heater is fixed so I don’t have to bathe in a bucket anymore. On the other hand, life inside the pumpkin is getting increasingly stressful on the sleep front.

The bed is not that large and I find myself every night trapped between my daughter the nocturnal contortionist and my husband, who snores for Peru. My daughter refuses to sleep on the camp bed provided for her (it is really uncomfortable) and even if she starts off in it inevitably crawls in next to me at her first opportunity.

Her fertile imagination has made her terrified of the dark, being alone, doors, diseases. The other day I asserted my right to watch CNN instead of the Disney Channel and have paid a heavy price because she is now paranoid of swine flu. She seems to think she can catch swine flu from herself so she sits in the room rubbing antiseptic gel onto her hands and getting me to scratch her head when it itches. The TV remote control gets the same treatment even though she’s the only one allowed to use it.

Once she is asleep she grows an extra set of limbs and thrashes around while I try to protect her unborn brother from pre-natal decapitation. And for those of you who are now saying to yourselves “I told her so, should have trained her child to sleep in her own bed years ago” (you know who you are!), why not turn your self-satisfied omniscience to finding a cure for snoring?

I’m not talking about a benevolent buzzsaw here. This is the Hallelujah Chorus without benefit of tuning fork. I lie in bed at night with the words of that old limerick running through my head:

There once was a man from Calcutta
Who anointed his tonsils with butter
Thus reducing his snore
From a thunderous roar
To a soft, oleaginous mutter.

As the volume, tempo and pitch rise and fall I think to myself: did I marry the wrong nationality? Should I be seeking some similar culinary solution? Some pisco down the gullet? An ear of choclo inserted into each nostril?

As the hours pass I fantasize in verse:

An enterprising chick in Peru
At her husband’s snoring debut
Solved the problem right quick
With a dynamite stick
Two clothes pegs and super-stick glue.

So far my family members have survived each night unscathed (and wake up rather more rested than me!) but if we don’t find an apartment soon I cannot take responsibility for what may happen.

In other areas things are improving. I am slowly weaning my mother-in-law off my arm, though she still tends to loom over me at unexpected moments like a benevolent Norman Bates.

Daughter starts school Monday so I have been buying a most comprehensive uniform in grey and red which involves many layers. Shirt, tie, tunic, knee socks, jumper (or chompa as they call it here), and jacket for daily wear and an equally complicated kit for sports. In true schizophrenic latino fashion the shop assistant also sold me dark blue lycra shorts to wear under the tunic so the boys won’t see her underwear in the playground but, in the same breath, advised me to shorten the skirt to a couple of inches above the knee.

Smuggies starting school is a Good Thing. In addition to her getting an education I will now have access to the TV and will not have to deal too often with the recent excess of creativity which has resulted from prolonged inactivity in the house.

Over the last week she has designed and made a dress for her abuela fashioned - with the assistance of a pair of paper scissors and glitter glue - from an airline blanket she nicked off Virgin Atlantic. This was greeted with cries of delight but regret that – unfortunately – it did not fit. She then designed herself a rather sexy blouse by cutting out the crotch of a pair of tights and putting her arms through the leg bits as sleeves. Again, with liberal application of glitter glue.

It is not that I object to her creativity. It is most admirable. But you try explaining to a psyched-up nine-year-old that she can’t wear her work of art in public because the non-cognoscenti might think she is actually walking around with a pair of torn panty-hose around her neck.

She then decided that husband and I had not had enough time together and needed to go on a date. She persuaded her abuelo to drag the kitchen table and two dining chairs up on the roof where she jury-rigged a spotlight and set up dinner for two. I was required to put on a dress and when poor Bigboy got home he was stuffed into a tie and had his hair brushed. Then we were both herded upstairs and offered an extensive menu written in yellow highlighter on white paper (i.e. completely unreadable) which turned out to consist of a choice of leftovers served with great élan and much broken crockery from running up and down the stairs in the dark. All to the delighted stares of the neighbours since most roofs in Lima are used for hanging washing and nothing else.

Today she has been planning a great surprise which involves much secret research on the internet and I caught her packing my underwear into an overnight bag. I told her that whatever she is planning we can't afford it, so now she is trying to extract her wobbly tooth with a length of dental floss so the tooth fairy can subsidize the trip. This is accompanied by a gory blow-by-blow commentary. "Oook ummy, dere's blud!"

Enough! Let school begin.

Barefoot, Pregnant and Bathing in a Bucket

2009-09-06T17:51:00.000-07:00

I thought I had accomplished my exit from London with considerable aplomb. No long speeches or those icky farewell emails copied to All Staff Global where half the recipients have no clue who you are. Nope, some cheerful "see you laters" and a typically chaotic exit from MH with Charlene yelling at taxi drivers and my nearest and dearest colleagues milling around in the lobby waiting to wave me goodbye and retire to the pub.

It all went according to plan until we were about to board the plane at Heathrow the next morning and I realised I had forgotten my Kindle in the airport hotel. I cried from Heathrow to Schiphol with KLM flight attendants pressing water and tissues on me and no doubt wondering whether the crazy pregnant lady would do something unpredictable and force an emergency landing.

After being very supportive and concerned, once daughter had established that I had recovered she did not omit to point out "when you put me on a plane at the airport I never see you crying but you lose your electronic book and look what happens." Ah! Nine-year-old emotional blackmail, nothing like it!

So here I am in Lima missing my coven and my 3rd vice and getting used to being unemployed.

Spent the first weekend trawling round maternity clinics trying to get signed up to give birth to the baby Inca. They all say "ah señora, you're eight months pregnant? We're going to need all the monthly payments in advance..." I felt like Mary being dragged round Bethlehem on a donkey on Christmas Eve. And them fuckers at the NHS never put proper notes in my records. Every time I went for a blood test they just scribbled "bloods" instead of putting what the test was for so now I have to do a whole set of them again. I guess there's a reason the NHS is free.

We are staying with my in-laws, the three of us living in a bedroom painted pumpkin orange with matching curtains and sheets. The climate here is weird, coldish in the morning and hot in the afternoons but always either foggy or smoggy. It is officially the tail end of winter here and Limeños seem determined to insist on their seasons. Despite the temperature never dropping below 12 degrees they all walk around in boots and jackets. At home my father-in-law, a teeny tiny fellow with cheerful bushy eyebrows, walks around in fuzzy pyjamas and one of those knitted caps from the Peruvian highlands with ear flaps and strings, looking like an ethnically correct Santa's Helper.

My mother-in-law follows us around anxiously begging us to put on socks. She is convinced that we have arrived in Lima after a life of extraordinary luxury involving deep-pile carpet. "I know in the Caribbean you are used to warm weather, but you must wear shoes in the house here. The floors are dusty. Put on socks! You will catch a cold!" In vain do I remind her that we have spent the last six years in London where the depths of a Lima winter is often equivalent to a breezy summer's day.

My efforts to prove that my background and lifestyle is as middle-class as hers have been somewhat interrupted by the fact that, while Limeños would not dream of leaving the house without well-layered protection, they seem to think nothing of bathing every morning in bloody cold water! I, on the other hand, would laugh in the face of anyone who suggested that I put even a toe in the water at Brighton Beach at the height of summer. Since the heater in the house is broken, my in-laws now labour up the stairs every morning with a pot of boiling water so I can bathe in a bucket. Of course they won't let me carry it - I'm pregnant. My embarrassment is only very narrowly outstripped by my utter refusal to freeze my ass off even for hygienic purposes.

I am not allowed to leave home alone because, according to my husband, Lima is terribly dangerous, particularly for people like me who look so obviously foreign - by which I suppose he means that I am taller than most people and don't have straight black hair. Since he is working all week my mother-in-law accompanies me everywhere.

My mother-in-law is very nice but all mothers get a bit much after a while, particularly when one is pregnant. My own mum is a hoverer...circling around the periphery of my tolerance, occasionally seizing an opportunity to rush in and snatch shopping bags from me or put a hand on my forehead in a futile effort to take my temperature before I snap her hand off.

My mother-in-law is more of a clinger. She captures my arm and gives me lectures on pre-natal nutrition (Nada de grasa. Nada de gaseosa. Nada de condimentos. Nada de sal. ¡Mucha leche!); and marital relations (¡Tienes que poner reglas! ¡No gastes tu proprio dinero! ¡El tiene que mantener su propria familia como hombre!), stroking my hand all the while, gazing at me with great concern and sighing "¡ay hija!" by way of punctuation.

Since I no longer have the excuse of having to check my blackberry every five minutes, I am having to adjust to life with only one functional arm.