Kick Up Your Heels; It's a Dance Party!

On Saturday morning, I was in a rush to get back to my pueblo in time to attend the church service to mark the 6-month anniversary of the death of my colleague Sr. Rufino Martinez, who was a well-respected city council member, president of the health committee, and major advocate for my placement in this site. 

It was a shock when Sr. Rufino died suddenly, after complaining of a pain in his belly.  He was never diagnosed with a particular malady, he was just here one day and gone the next, which is often the case. (See the blog post “DIARRHEA”).  I was personally invited by his late wife to attend the church service and wake afterward at her home, and I felt it was important  for me to attend and show my respect for my former colleague and advocate.

 

I made it home in time to catch the end of the church service, and while I was rushing out the door my host mom invited me to attend a birthday party for Luisa and Calixto, the sister of my host dad and her husband.  She said there would be a big dance party  today in a remote farming community in my district, and we would need to leave as soon as her daughter Lucia arrived. (Lack of advance notice is typical here).  I told my host mom that I needed to attend the service for Sr. Rufino and I would return after it was finished.

After Catholic mass concluded, as many as 100 mourners filed out of the church and into the home of the widow.  It is customary for food to be served at all events, and this case was no exception:

1^st Course – We were served the local moonshine (called “chicha”) made from corn. I only took a tiny sip, because I had tried it once in the past and it made me horribly ill.  No damage done to my intestines this time, luckily.

2^nd Course -  Hot bowls of chicken noodle soup.

3^rd Course – Potatoes, rice, egg and stewed meat.

Between the 2^nd and 3^rd course I received a phone call from host sister Lucia.  She said that she was waiting for me to come home so that she could escort me to the birthday party. 

 

This is one of those moments when I start calculating the damage to my social capital that will inevitably occur if I’m seen leaving the wake of a prominent authority figure before eating the main course (eating together is very important!), OR damage my relationship with my host family if I stay at the wake and miss the birthday party. (Because if I didn’t leave immediately and go with Lucia I probably wouldn’t be able to find transportation to the remote community).  This is not the first time I’ve had to weigh my options (and reputation) when invited to two different conflicting events, as everyone seems to want the gringa to attend their event, and everyone takes notice where the gringa goes…

After consulting with a trusted friend, she encouraged me to ask for the 3^rd course to be wrapped up for me to take to-go, which I did.  Lucia and I made it to the birthday party just in time to be served the typical main dish of rice, potatoes and stewed meat.  We were seated at the head table, which means I would be encouraged to enthusiastically down as much of that food as possible. 

However, the meat being served was pork, which gave me visions of the pig that was recently slaughtered and dismembered in my house and sold to the neighbors.  I can still hear the pig squealing as its throat was sliced open, seeing chunks of raw meat and fat dangling from hooks and the smell of the inner organs being cooked over a campfire in the back the house where my bedroom is located. Pork has become quite unappetizing, to say the least.

Recently slaughtered goats waiting to be cooked

More meat decorating the kitchen

 

Fortunately, the hostess of the event generously provided as much wine and beer and chicha as anyone wanted to drink, and I discovered that the sweet-tasting Peruvian wine tastes great mixed with Peruvian beer. Mistake?  I think not. :-)

 

A curious drinking custom is the drinking circle.  In any celebration there are plenty of beer bottles littering the table tops, and I usually don’t notice anything peculiar is happening until a small glass is handed to me.  Then I look around and realize that the glass in my hand is the only drinking vessel in the room.  And all of the people at the party who have been drinking the dozens of now-empty beers have been utilizing this same glass to drink them.  The beers are passed around the circle with the glass, and everyone waits for their turn to have a shot of beer.  Besides the obvious germ factor, the participants of this activity have absolutely no idea the quantity of beer they have consumed, and given the seemingly unlimited number of beers, everyone at the party got pretty darn tipsy.

My host dad starting the drinking circle - he's holding the only glass.

After the carb-loaded lunch and several passes around the drinking circle, the band started playing Cumbia music.  The birthday boy and girl had the first dance, and then each invited guest danced with the birthday boy and girl.  The rest of the guests danced in a circle around them and it was pretty fun.

 

Things got serious as the band turned up the volume and played their hearts out for the next 5 hours.  It seemed like everyone in the party wanted to have a dance with me; the little kids who were enamored to meet a foreigner for the first time, the older men who were impressed that a gringa could hold her own on the dance floor, friends, family, neighbors, co-workers and the party hostess. I was so impressed to see men and women of all ages grabbing a partner and hitting the dance floor  -- everyone danced, even my 74 year-old host dad who busted out some good moves.

I danced until I literally couldn’t dance anymore, until the Cumbia music had deafened my ears and all I wanted to do was sit down for a few minutes.  But everyone notices what the foreign girl is doing, and everyone wants to make sure that I’m having a good time, so the offers of food/drinks and dancing never stop.  It’s really exhausting sometimes.  And because it’s considered rude to refuse food, drinks or offers to dance, sometimes when I am completely spent of energy I feel that it’s better to leave the party instead of staying and refuse offerings from the host or guests.

But, I also get a lot of flack about leaving early, especially from the little old ladies who dance until the wee hours of the morning, despite having awoken very early that morning to slaughter animals, prepare food, decorate the house, make chicha and otherwise prepare for the party.  The stamina they have is impressive!  I am definitely working on getting my stamina up to that level, and I’ll have another opportunity to show off some moves at the next “Baile” (dance party) next Saturday.

Baile (dance party) at Sr. Rufino's home after the baptism of his granddaughter

Dancing with my host dad at his birthday party

Dancing with my host dad, my host sister Lucia and host brother Orlando



Take my baby, please!

The native language of the vast majority of Peruvians is either Spanish or Quechua.  Quechua (pronounced Ketch-WA) is an amalgamation of the various languages of the indigenous people of South America.  It is mostly spoken in the Andean highlands of Peru, fortunately not along the coast where I live. (I’m having a hard enough time learning Spanish!)

If you learned to speak Spanish from Mexico or Puerto Rico, you might be surprised by some of the differences in Peruvian-style Spanish.  For example, Mexicans call cars “coche” and Peruvians laugh when they hear that word.  They use the word “carro” instead, as it describes a modern-day car and a “coche” evokes images of horse-drawn carriages.

Another difference is that a “tortilla” is not a flat bread used to roll up tacos or enchiladas – in Peru, it’s an egg and potato omlette (otherwise known as a frittata).  

 

And a “taco” is not a Mexican-style rolled-up snack, it’s a high heel:

Image of high heel

 

Like any other country, the dominant language is spoken a bit differently in each region.  I live in a region in the hot, dry northern part of Peru in an area called Baja Piura.  I’ve been told by native Spanish speakers from other parts of the world that the style of Spanish spoken in Baja Piura sounds like it’s from somewhere in the backwoods-boondocks.  Just think of the bad grammar and pronunciation of the rural south…and then place it in the Nevada desert.

One characteristic of Baja Piura lingo is the astonishing brevity used by locals.  To put this in context, one evening soon after arriving in my site my host parents and I were watching the latest installment of the most popular telenovela Corazon Valiente, and during a commercial break my host mother asked me a question. “Cuando estamos?” (which literally translates to “When are we…?”).  My host father realized that I had no idea what she was asking me, and he jumped in to explain that she wanted to know what is the date today.  (Normally, a phrase like “Cual es la fecha de hoy?” is used to ask such a question).  

This is just one example of the phrases used by the residents of my pueblo that clearly have some basis in legit Spanish, but have been twisted into head-spinning combinations that perplex even native speakers.  None of my cumulative years of Spanish lessons had prepared me for these kinds of exchanges!

Another example of brevity is when a girl about 11 years old knocked on my door and she said only “Sabe ingles.”  She was basically telling me that I speak English.  I replied that yes, I do speak English. (I can safely assume that everyone in my pueblo is aware of that by now ;-).  What she was trying to say was that she has an English class and that she needed my help.  You can imagine that there was no way I could have deduced that from her initial statement!

It reminds me of my former life in Japan, where speaking in a concise manner was highly valued.  In fact, it seemed to me that the Japanese language was constructed for that very purpose; each word packed in so much meaning that it was possible to make an elaborate statement with only a few brief sentences.  Home of haiku poetry, Japan practically invented brevity:

 

Image of haiku

Given the substantial migration of Japanese citizens to South America after WWII, maybe there was some influence, or at least an affinity of language construction?

 
One of my most notable experiences of miscommunication comes from meeting women with small children who often speak about “regalitos” (little gifts).  There is a long history of foreign organizations coming to Peru loaded with handouts, which is counterproductive to what we are trying to accomplish (we teach skills instead), and volunteers sometimes encounter locals who expect foreigners to be fully stocked with free stuff, including gifts for the kids.  Each time I encountered this type of situation, I got into the habit of launching into an explanation of my purpose for coming to their community and the type of work I would be doing -- which includes teaching skills, but unfortunately not handing out gifts for kids.

 

During one of these encounters with a relative of my host family, I went through my explanation of my purpose for coming to Peru and she didn’t seem to grasp my meaning.  She kept showing me her baby and saying “Un regalito,” and I became more earnest in my explanation.  She interrupted me to ask bluntly “Do you not like children?” and I responded “Look, I don’t have any gifts for your kid!”  Another family member kindly explained to me that she wanted to give me her baby as a gift, but I had interpreted “Un regalito” to mean that she wanted me to give a gift to her baby.  Apparently, it was a joke…..ha, ha?

And that sparks an entirely different conversation about mothers telling their kids that if they misbehave the foreigner is going to kidnap them and take the child back to the U.S.  (Sigh)

Little girl who just made a tippy tap

Girls participating in the celebration of the anniversary of the school

My host family's grandson Juan