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!
Wednesday 9 February 2011
There’s a Llama on your DNI!
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!
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!
Sunday 2 January 2011
No, You Can’t have It All
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...
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...
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