The Power of the Belly in Peru

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.