3-18-11 (Friday) …Plus catching up on 3-16-11 & 3-17-11
Sorry I haven’t written in a while! It’s been too long and I don’t even remember what I did on Wednesday. On Thursday the speaker was Jaime Urrutia again. He spoke about the Internal War. I think I’ll ask him to be my ISP advisor. Maybe I can even interview him. That night we went out to karaoke with the entire group plus our three Spanish teachers. I don’t know why it was obligatory for class seeing as we didn’t have to sing in Spanish, but it was a fun time. Now I just keep hearing Casey and Justin singing one particular song in my head. We wanted to sing that one song by Don Omar and Loca by Shakira (two of peru’s favorite 5 songs), but this place didn’t have them! Boo! Anyways, here’s onto the next day…
Friday Finally. I feel like this week went oddly slow, but at the same time oddly fast. For example, I talked to Donaldo on Monday and that seems like ages ago! Oh, by the way, my freak out yesterday about the Biblioteca Nacional in Lima closing for inventory and messing up my entire project idea is no longer a problem! I talked to Sonia today and she just called up the magazine directly and found out that I can use the magazine’s own archives. I just need to bring my passport as identification. I’ll just have to be super cautious travelling around Lima with both my laptop and my passport… The one bad thing is that the archives are only open Thursday-Saturday. I’d sort of been planning to spend most of my time at the archives. Hopefully they have photocopiers so that I can just make a billion copies to read over the week. That’d be better anyways cause I’m sure that there will be tons of vocabulary that I don’t know or never hear in colloquial Spanish. A strange side note, in Spanish archive is spelled and pronounced “ArCHivo.” However, every single time I say it English gets in the way and I pronounce it “ArKivo.” Urgh. Well, if I’m working there I’d better get past that. Maybe if I’m already in the building all the time it will be easier to get possible interviews with reporters? Ah, this is scary!
I love our Spanish class discussions. Today we talked about health care in Peru and how, of course, the best care and best hospitals are too expensive for the majority of Peruvians. We explained the health care and health insurance system in the united states to her and she couldn’t believe it. According to BrynErin, and I believe this, one in every five Americans does not have health insurance. Therefore it’s incredible to believe that just to talk to a doctor for a few minutes in a short appointment would cost you more than a hundred dollars without insurance. Even with insurance it’s what, fifteen dollars? Even that amount of money is outrageous for Peruvians. But you’ve got to hand it to the US; I think that our hospitals are for the most part clean and they don’t prescribe antibiotics for every little ailment like they do in Peru. Our teacher told us a story about a man who went into the poorest hospital in Cusco recently. He needed to get a leg amputated because of gangrene and the doctor CUT OFF THE WRONG LEG. Therefore, the doctor then cut off his other leg. Apparently Doctors are the highest paid professionals in Peru and they change with just about every presidential cycle. Ambassadors are supposed to change, not doctors! This means that the highest paid doctors are not actually that good of doctors. No wonder people turn to traditional or alternative medicine. Often times it works much better and the people you deal with might actually care for you rather than your money.
We went over formal and informal commands (good! I’d forgotten them, although I’ll always hear Mr. Rayburn in my head saying “No me digas” when I think of negative informal commands. Oy, what a strange man. I remember him rollerblading through the halls of the 10-12 and putting people in the corner of the classroom in “Bobolandia”). When I got home for lunch I’d found that my host dad had returned from his stay in Sicuani with Papa Angel aka my fave. He reported that Tia Luciana, the hilarious blind one, was worried about me and wanted to know how I was. Aw, how nice. In the afternoon we had a seminar about the Amazon and exploitation of resources and people specifically by gas companies.
After class Rebecca, Lauren, and I went to Mega to buy groceries to make pizza! We bought a ton of ingredients that Peruvians never use like garlic, onions and basil, then collected the rest of the group to go to Rebecca’s house to cook! Rebecca and I did really all of the work, but I was totally fine with that. It’s not productive with too many cooks in the kitchen! Yum yum yum it was delicious and a nice change from what we usually do and what we usually eat. There ended up being about nine of us there, but it wasn’t too large after all. Very successful indeed!
xoxo,
Claire
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