4/25-29/11
Because I’m sore! So sore!! Getting up the stairs to my bedroom is such a struggle. (Whenever I hear that word now I hear Bradley’s voice in my mind saying “Struggles!”) Today is Friday, April 29th and I am sooo sore. On Wednesday I went to Escuela Pitbull with Rachel and learned some MMA submissions and takedowns with her from Hector Ibañez, aka the man with a bandage covering half of his face. I haven’t written for far too long, so let me write about this week in a bit of detail.
Monday, the 25th, I met with Jacqueline. I’d met with Sonia on Saturday and pondered my project on Sunday, deciding to basically rearrange my topic again and focus specifically on Uchuraccay, the killing of 8 journalists by comuneros in Ayacucho January 26th, 1983. After meeting with Ricardo Caro I had narrowed my topic down to four events, but I just couldn’t get interested in the other three. Uchuraccay really intrigued me because it’s so controversial (still! Lots of conspiracy theories) and first brought the terrorist violence into the national consciousness. She seemed to really support this idea and gave me some good ideas and advice. I finally feel on track! When I got home I typed up some ideas and to do lists, then called Gustavo Gorriti about a potential interview. Last week Jacqueline gave me his email and he’s responded on Friday that I should contact him at the beginning of the week. I’d expected to go about things leisurely and get myself organized, but when I called at noon, he responded very professionally and a bit brusquely that I should come to his office in San Borja at 1:30!! I flipped out. My stomache was doing flip-flops and I was literally so nervous that I shook, but I almost immediately flew out of the apartment, grabbed a very nice cab, and sat outside in the park next to the address and organized myself, compiling interview questions. I didn’t feel prepared at all. I called Jacqueline in a bit of a panic, but she didn’t answer. Oh well, I figured it out. At 1:30 I approached the guard (man, there are so many guards in Peru, and Latin America. I feel like it’s much more of a career path here than it is in the US), told him I had an appointment with Gustavo Gorriti, and waited in the waiting room.
Allow me to explain who Gustavo Gorriti is. He is a famous Peruvian journalist for Caretas, and he was in the town next door to Uchuraccay, Huaychao, literally the day that those 8 journalists were killed in 1983. He was publically attacked, along with the photographer Oscar Medrano and the writer who recently won the Nobel Prize and headed a commission to investigate Uchuraccay, Mario Vargas Llosa. He was attacked by the press, which thought that he was behind a cover up scandal to blame the comuneros. The media speculated that a special division of the armed forces called the Sinchis had dressed up as comuneros and, in fact, killed the reporters. All this speculation was later dismissed as untrue. All of the articles that I’d been reading about the event, and the book I’d referred to, were all written by Gustavo Gorriti. I was a bit starstruck and terrified all at the same time. He, however, was really helpful and very nice. He joked with me, asked me why I hadn’t brought an apple for my teacher (Jacqueline works for him and was in the room next door), told me he’d been to Santa Fe after I told him that I was from New Mexico, and asked me if I was a part of “The Tribe.” Yes, based on my last name he assumed I was Jewish, so I just went with it. For some reason he also wanted to know the name of my temple in New Mexico, so despite the fact that I do not actually have a temple, I just named Temple Albert. He’ll never know. I recorded a 26 minute interview, thanked him profusely, and then headed home feeling super proud of myself. The week was off to a good start!
Tuesday was a really excellent day. Actually, this whole week has been pretty great, but I’ll get to that in a little bit. On Tuesday I went to the archives of El Comercio, an old and conservative newspaper located in the center of Lima. I had to call ahead, get permission, and make an appointment to go there, but I finally made it! These archives are much more like what I had imagined Caretas would be like. A man, the director of the archives I suppose, set me up in glass walled room. He’d run back into a restricted area and fetch the articles I needed, then oversee me reading them. I was by no means alone in there! It was a bit distracting to have a chatty Peruvian lady sitting next to me, but I finally made some progress! I think I got what I need and finally was able to photocopy. Photocopies! Oy. Copies are generally 10-50 cents, with 50 being at the high end of the spectrum. El Comercio, however, wanted to charge me 2 soles and 62 cents!! That’s absurd. So I had to pick and choose what I wanted to copy, and I ended up with 14 pages. When I was ready to go the man, with his overly magnifying eyeglasses that made his eyes look a bit like Professor Trelawney’s (you know the reference), beckoned me into an empty side hallway so that I might pay him. I followed him and questioned him where I needed to go pay and he just told me, “Here, you pay me. Right here.” He gave me a break and only made me pay him 20 soles instead of 36, but it still felt really sketchy to hand over 20 soles to a strange man in a deserted hallway of this prestigious newspaper. So odd.
After that I made my way to the Defensoría del Pueblo to see if they might have archived copies of La República, another newspaper that I’m looking into for my paper. Oy, these archives are so disorganized. Caretas, El Comercio, and the Defensoría del Pueblo all just handed me disorganized folders with browned and torn pages spilling out. The more annoying thing is that these pages nearly never have the author or date on them, so I’m not even sure I can use them in my paper. School has taught me that you can never ever use sources that you cannot cite. Annoying! Especially because I found a perfect map to use for my eventual powerpoint presentation but I don’t even know what the source is. Stupid! El Comercio handed me a folder with articles, most of which weren’t even from El Comercio, and La Defensoría del Pueblo handed me a similar folder. La Defensoría del Pueblo didn’t have many articles from La República, but I did find 3-4 articles from January 30 and 31st, 1983. Useful dates! I bought some yummy plantain chips and sat outside snacking when a lady and her daughter came by offering candies. This is often what beggars in Lima and Cusco do. Rather than simply sit and beg for money, they buy a large bag of candies and up the price, offering a candy for 10 cents. She had the particularly yummy lemony candies, so I bought a handful. It’s not much help, but I feel guilty about how it’s become ok for me to ignore women like her on the street. I often don’t have change and they are so ubiquitous. I remember Jason in Nicaragua telling us not to give to people like this because our few cents don’t help them much, it just encourages them to keep begging rather than doing something with their lives. Begging, especially in places like Cusco and Iquitos, is more frequently done by small children because they get more sympathy, especially from tourists. Though those kids get money for their family, they miss out on the education they should be getting.
In the afternoon Rachel and I had quite the adventure trying to get to the IEP, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, in Jesús María. I love that area! I wish that I’d gone earlier! Miraflores is super nice, but honestly it’s a little too swanky for my taste. Jesús María feels more like a real neighborhood, but still nice and colorful. Love it! The IEP is great too, and the first real library, research type area that has been really useful for me. Hooray! On the way back we actually took the correct bus, unlike earlier, and booked it to Pardo´s to eat Pollo a La Brasa. I was in serious need of grocery and both Rachel and I were STARVING by the time we got home. Most delicious ever.
Wednesday morning I organized myself and my notes, as well as the house. I cleaned everywhere and felt so much better afterward. I think I’m a bit of a neat freak. Then in the afternoon I headed over the IEP again and took more really useful notes from books and theses there. Hooray! Then I took the bus back from Avenida Brasil… only it was quite the right bus. I thought it would take about 30 minutes, but about an hour in I realized that the bus was no longer on Avenida del Ejército, but Angamos. I realized where I was, got off, walked two blocks to the metropolitano, got off at Benavides, and booked it home. Rachel wanted to leave for training at 5, but because of the bus mix up I didn’t even make it home until 4:50! Good thing I left the IEP early! I got dressed super quickly, then we headed out to find a cab to Breña. Breña, it should be noted, it not a good area. When we first went to Lima and Rachel went to the gym in Breña Sonia told her not too go, that it was too dangerous…. Obviously that didn’t happen because Rachel now goes there multiple times a week. Haha, Sonia’s warnings have often turned out to be overly cautious. Breña is pretty warn down and dirty, with tons of graffiti supporting Keiko. Keiko! No! Oh please no. When I got there Hector asked me if I like Ollanta or Keiko better… I responded neither, but I suppose Ollanta because I do not trust Keiko. I don’t think I would trust any Fujimori. Ollanta’s no good either, though. Escuela Pitbull, the gym, is tiny tiny tiny; maybe a bit bigger than my dorm room last semester. Teeny! I haven’t done really any exercise since getting to peru, so I was a bit worried. Neither have I ever done MMA. MMA is like wrestling, sort of. I’m not quite sure how to describe it. Rachel did an interview with two nine year old brothers, but first she had to get permission from their drug addict father. This is a different world…. I didn’t quite know what to do while I waited, but I chatted a wee bit with Hector, the owner of the gym, and his wife Livia. They seemed skeptical that I spoke Spanish, but Rachel responded that I was better at Spanish that this was…. I’m not sure that’s true, but I was just quiet because I felt nervous and uncomfortable, ok? When we first arrived two Brazilian fighter, a man and a woman who were both ripppppped, were taking photos and filming footage for a fight that they will have against two Peruvians in a couple days. After then the Peruvian opponents arrived and did the same. Then we began our class. It was Rachel, three or four Peruvian teenage boys, and me under the direction of Hector. Hector speaks quickly, but he is even harder to understand because he has a huge square bandage places directly over his mouth… Rachel explained most things to me in English, actually. Part of the warm-up included somersaults and backwards somersaults. I remember in gymnastics I could never to backwards somersaults, but I did them. Hooray! We learned various takedowns, which are like expert tackles, and submissions, which sort of involve getting the opponents limbs all tangled in an uncomfortable position that they cannot escape from. You get them there and hope to inflict pain basically until they tap out. It’s a bit like Uncle. I went against Rachel, but literally had no foundational knowledge. I think having done rugby I caught on fairly quickly, but I NOT prepared for the last part of practice in which Hector had Rachel and I “roll” in front of a circle of about 10 peruvian strangers. We were basically trying to get the other person down in a takedown or submission. Hardly fair since Rachel is really good at this and I literally had no idea what I was doing, but I actually did have a good time. Hector seemed impressed by the fact that I did Rugby too. Rugby is not a word that Peruvians can say. Neither is Claire actually, which is why I just say Clara. Easier for them. I felt uneasy in the middle of that ring with such an audience, but I did it and I think you need to learn to laugh about these things. As we were rolling they kept trying to say rugby over and over again, and in my mind at the time I thought they were just commenting and laughing at the fact that I do rugby. I get super defensive about that because I hate people assuming that I can’t do things, and that is most people’s reaction when they find out I play rugby. Yes I’m small, yes I’m bubbly, but don’t discount my ability please.
At the end Rachel did another interview, and then Hector walked us to the street corner to get a taxi. Apparently he always does this with Rachel because Breña really isn’t a safe area.
Thursday – aka soreness attack! So sore! Going up and down the stairs in killer. I’m sore in my neck, my back, my thighs, my upper arms… Everywhere! I finally got a hold of La Republica on Wednesday morning and got an appointment to go to the archives on Thursday. Their archives are what I imagined archives would be, finally! Old and a bit disorganized, but spacious and studious. Loved it! They allowed me to take photos, which was a nice change from El Comercio… After that I went to Caretas for the last time to double check that I had what I needed and had some real awkward conversations with Miguel, then headed home. For some reason I decided to walk up the eight flights of stairs to our apartment…. Why I do not know, but it seriously contributed to future soreness. Stupid! I worked and read about the Royal Wedding, which was great I’m sure, and procrastinated a bit.
Today, Friday the 29th, I’m sitting in a Starbucks reviewing notes and starting to write. I chatted with Marina the other day as I was skyping with Norah, and she seemed shocked that SIT was basically asking us to write a thesis in one week in another language. Yes, Marina, thank you for stressing that, but I’m well aware. I’m avoiding thinking about all the stress that next week will undoubtedly hold. Oy vey! I’m sure my paper will not have the best writing or the best grammar, but the simple accomplishment of writing a 30-40 page research paper in Spanish will feel good. I’m not even sure how much the grade of this paper will count or if my grades will even count at Conn, but I’ll do the best I can. Rachel is ambitious and writing her paper twice; once in English, and once in Spanish so that she can give it to Escuela Pitbull as well as promoters in America. I think one paper is enough for me! I have at this moment written about 2 pages of my paper. Well, at least I got a little bit of progress before I started procrastinating by writing this blog. Sorry I got so far behind and I know that these long posts are hard to trudge through. I missed all of last week too… I’ll get to that eventually.
The Iquitos girls arrived in Lima yesterday and though I have not seen them yet, I’m excited to celebrate Leah’s birthday tonight with them! Hooray! I’m glad that we can lighten the mood after a tough couple of weeks both academically and socially. I leave Lima next Thursday the 5th, and then I leave Peru for good on Sunday, May 15th. Only a little more than two more weeks. I wonder how I will feel about leaving and what I will miss about Peru. Oh! Another accomplishment of the week: Julie, Nate and I definitely have a place to live over the summer! Hooray! I can’t wait, it’s going to be super fun to be reunited with them.
Oh, and I feel like an old man since I ache all over and move slowly like an old man, if that wasn’t clear enough.
Au revoir!
xoxo,
Claire
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