Three Months in Peru

2008-06-17T14:09:00.000-07:00

[You can click on the pictures to enlarge them.]

Arrival

I arrived in Lima at about 10:30 PM on March 3^rd. Fr. Philip met me at the airport and I got my first, confused view of Lima—busy, crowded, dirty, full of narrow streets, tiny cars, and murderous drivers. The rule when driving in Lima is to get there before the other guy. Everything is a passing lane, and traffic lights, when they exist, do not have as much authority as an American is accustomed to.

We drove about 45 minutes to Ñaña, technically a suburb of Lima, but a much less developed area. This was where I spent the first two months of my stay. Ñaña is very poor: for several days I thought that the poorer houses were construction sites (missing roofs, exposed structural elements, and everything covered in dust). There are nicer houses, but you can’t see them because they’re all behind walls, and the walls are topped with spikes, broken glass, or both. The monastery and its grounds, too, were surrounded by a large wall. (Not technically a monastery, and the brothers are not technically monks—they’re not cloistered—but “monastery” is easier to say.)

The grounds are a sharp contrast to what surrounds them. There is a largeish field that is kept watered and cut by the groundskeepers. Besides the main building, there is a chapel and a guest house. All are well-constructed, simple, and clean, and make use predominantly of natural light. Just beyond the grounds are large hills, or small mountains, startlingly brown and dry to my New Hampshire eyes, but very beautiful, and always looking different depending on the shadows.

Daily Life

5:00 AM – Brief prayer together in the oratory (a small room near the sleeping quarters: little more than chairs and a monstrance). Afterwards you go back to your room to shower (not technically a shower: we used a bucket, a cup, and a washcloth) or whatever you needed to do. I didn’t realize for a long time that you weren’t supposed to go back to sleep, which is just as well, because I was grouchy enough anyway.

6:00 – Mass and Lauds (Morning Prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours) in the Chapel. The Chapel is beautiful and simple. One takes off one’s shoes to enter. There is a large mural behind the altar of Jesus ascending to the Father, surrounded by clouds. He is turned away from the viewer; but one of his hands hangs down, and you can see the nail mark.

Mass would start before dawn, and the light—pouring through a hidden skylight above the altar—would slowly grow as it went on. I liked Fr. Philip’s sermons the best, but Fr. Isaac’s were the easiest to understand, because he speaks Spanish with a strong American accent.

7:15 – Breakfast. Consists, on weekdays, of bread, cheese, fruit, and coffee. Silence is observed from the conclusion of Mass until Noon – which I found pleasant, since I hate chatting in the morning, especially in a language that I speak even less well when I’m tired.

8:00 – Rosary.

8:30 – First two hours of Eucharistic Adoration in the oratory. Concludes with Daytime Prayer. I didn’t feel bad about falling asleep sometimes, because everybody did. The dogs (big gregarious German Shepherds) would nap outside the oratory and then start to whine as soon as they heard us sing the Tantum Ergo, because they knew that was the end of prayers and they would get taken outside for exercise soon.

10:30 – Chores and housework. When you finish, you’re free until lunch. I did things like sweep the floors, clean the bathrooms, organize the books, etc.

1:00 – Lunch. Each week it’s a different brother’s turn to cook for everybody else. Lunch is the big meal of the day – the other two are relatively light. Usually it would consist of LOTS OF RICE plus something else. I found Peruvian food delicious, once my stomach got used to it. I never got around to trying guinea pigs, but I did eat chicken feet (feels just like biting into a finger, but tasty enough, and fun to suck the meat off the bones) on several occasions, and once a chicken heart. Over there they are a lot less picky and squeamish than we tend to be.

3:00 – Vespers (not sure why so early) and then more Adoration until 4:00.

4:00 – Free time until dinner. On Wednesdays the groundskeepers and other local guys would come over to play soccer. They were very good but didn’t mind me playing—on the contrary, they (and just about everybody I met in Peru) seemed to go out of their way to be friendly and welcoming. I felt better about my soccer skills when I saw what they looked like trying to throw a football. Other days I might play my flute, throw a football around with one or two of the brothers, write, or read.

6:00 – Dinner. Something light: soup, or omelettes, or bread and cheese and fruit again. Meal times tended to be a little disheartening for me at the beginning: everybody was very animated and cheerful but I couldn’t join in the conversation, since I knew the language only slightly. There were several native-English speakers—half of the brothers are from the US—but I was self-conscious about making them speak English just for my sake. As my Spanish improved, meals got more and more enjoyable.

7:00 – Depended on the day. Sometimes there would be private Spiritual Reading; sometimes we’d get together to play a game (usually Uno. For some reason they loved Uno); Tuesdays they had a Business meeting, where they discussed whatever practical matters came up during the week. Thursday was Corazón (heart) night: everybody got together and aired what was going on inside of them, good or bad (I didn’t get to come until about a month in). “Nothing gets swept under the rug here,” Fr. Philip told me. That was true. I’ve never met a more honest, or more tightly knit, bunch of people.

9:00 – Compline (Night Prayer). And then you get to go to bed. Unfortunately, bed is a sleeping bag on the floor. I liked to leave the windows open all night, although the mosquitoes took full advantage of the situation and the roosters next door liked to start up about 3AM.

Friday-Sunday the schedule changed a little bit. Friday night around 5 we would go to visit families in Vallecito; Saturday around 5 we would have an evening Mass in Vallecito, and stay to visit afterwards; and Sunday was mostly free time.

Vallecito

A five-minute ride down the road was Vallecito (“the little valley”), a little village—slum, really—spread out among the lower slopes of the big dry brown hills. It was desertlike there, and very poor: many houses without windows or doors, some without real roofs, most without electricity or water. The majority of the community’s work was in Vallecito. They helped with some material things—food, jobs, clothes, medicine, building houses (they didn’t build them themselves, but paid for them & hired people from the community to work on them; something like 32 houses in Vallecito and environs came from them), money sometimes.

Great as the material need was, though (and is), the spiritual and emotional need was greater, and this aspect of FJH’s work was what the people of Vallecito, by their own account, needed and appreciated most.

The community is called “Family of Jesus, Healer” not just because they are family to each other, but because they are family to the people they minister to. There was weekly Mass and confession, Bible studies, and men’s and women’s groups; but also there were more informal things, like the Friday night visits to families—sometimes these were spent just listening, listening to problems or memories or news. When FJH first began making the visits, Mother Agnes listened to a woman tell her problems for six hours. Nobody had ever listened to her before. And people would always be dropping by just to talk.

My main contact with the people of Vallecito was on Saturday evening Mass. Mass was at 5 and we’d show up at about 4, so the priests had time to hear confession and the rest of us could set everything up and visit with everybody. The first time I came, their welcome was immediate and overwhelming: they hugged and kissed me and put their children in my arms. (I commented on this later to Fr. Philip and he said, “It’s because, to them, you are one of us.”) The brothers showed a lot of physical affection, especially to the children: Br. José María told me that many or most of them had grown up in terrible family situations (plenty of drunkenness, violence, and abandonment) and, having been so little on the receiving end of affection, didn’t know how to give it to their kids, who were hungry for it. Many of them, he said, had started to treat their own children very differently just from seeing how the brothers treated them, without a word being spoken on the subject.

As for me, I usually just played with the kids. It was a lot easier to communicate with them, and they taught me to say a lot of useful things, like “jump” and “put me down” and “again.”

The Mass itself was always simple and intense. The “chapel” was a kind of concrete patio outdoors, sheltered by a thatched awning. There was plenty of music—I got to join in here, usually singing, often playing the flute, sometimes banging a big hide drum, and once playing the guitar when Fr. Isaac was sick. They were always very grateful for music.

Easter time was especially intense. On Good Friday we had Stations of the Cross, taking turns carrying a real cross (not quite as heavy as the original but not too light either) and wearing a real crown of thorns, tramping around the dry hills in the heat. The Easter Vigil was filled with music (we even got a gong from somewhere) and was followed by a solid three hours of feasting and dancing.

The heartwrenching part of all this was that, two months after I arrived, FJH was moving from Ñaña to Puerto Maldonado, all the way on the other side of the Andes, a dicey two-day trip by car.

FJH was founded ten years ago in Tampa, Florida. Five years ago they moved to Ñaña. Now they were moving again. It had to do with a severe difference of vision between FJH and the bishop of the diocese, which had reached such a state that the community felt that, should they remain, it would be impossible for them to be what they were called to be. The people of Vallecito were heartbroken, and the community equally so. Lina—a single mother I met on a house visit, and afterwards became good friends with—cried for half an hour when she heard. There was nothing we could do.

Fr. Philip preached repeatedly, in the final few Masses, about the necessity of bringing Christ to each other: that the people of Vallecito must learn to give to each other what FJH had given to them. The final Mass that we had together, at the end of April, was very hard. We got there at about 4 and stayed until after midnight. There were confessions and Mass as usual; after Mass, food and music and dancing; and then hours of goodbyes.

But FJH has not left a vacuum there. Another order, the Family of Apostles, took our place in Vallecito. I have since heard that they are being accepted and that things are moving forward; and that certain members of the community are continuing the work that FJH started. The property there in Ñaña will be kept as a novitiate house, and the workers kept on.

The Move

We’d been packing for a month. As we approached the move date, things got progressively less routine. Three of the brothers had flown to Puerto Maldonado early, to arrive in time for the new semester of studies at the seminary there. More and more dishes were vanishing into boxes. We also had to move everything out of the Sisters’ house, which we did with the help of a truck slightly larger than a pickup. We loaded furniture into it until the pile was about ten feet high, then realized that we would need a place to ride—so we climbed on top of everything. Mother Agnes got the highest seat. She looked exultant up there. A lot of people stared. Even in Ñaña it is not usual to see a Nun, in full habit, perched ten feet in the air on top of an armoire.

One brother was to travel by plane, bringing two of the dogs (we had to leave the others; the workers will take care of them); three of us (including me) were to travel by bus; and the rest would drive in the community’s pickup and minivan. The trip by plane would take about 45 minutes; to drive, on the other hand, would take 40 hours. We took it in two stages, stopping in Cuzco for a few days inbetween.

The trip from Ñaña to Cuzco was easy, even enjoyable. Our bus was wonderful. Soft, soft seats that reclined until they were almost beds; food service; movies. I hadn’t been so comfortable in ages. The drive was gorgeous, too: the landscapes looked prehistoric, and the mountains looked as though they had erupted suddenly from the ground. The last couple of hours in particular stand out—we ascended the Andes in lazy arcs, rounding view after view of increasingly deep valleys.

Cuzco is high in the mountains—you get altitude sickness (headaches, fever, nausea) if you don’t drink plenty of coca tea. The sky is a brilliant blue. It is a European-style city—a central plaza with a fountain and a cathedral, several beautiful Churches, and no end of shops and restaurants, tourist-trapp-y and otherwise. We stayed at a hotel called “Misters Inca’s Exclusive Hotel Palace,” which was an overstatement but, since it had beds, was luxurious enough. There was some sort of a dance competition while we were there, so we got to see several troupes performing traditional dances in the plaza. There was also, inexplicable, a man in a Barney suit.

The bus we took for the second stage was less luxurious. It didn’t have a bathroom; they had sold too many seats, and so there were people sleeping in the aisles; and there was next to no leg room. The roads over the mountains, despite being fairly well-travelled, are mostly unpaved, and are treacherously windy besides. I woke up in the middle of the night and, looking almost straight downwards out the window, was surprised to see headlights hundreds of feet away. Some time around 1 AM we got a flat tire, and stopped for an hour as they fixed it. The stars, anyway, were wonderful (whole new constellations! and the familiar ones were in unfamiliar positions. Orion was sideways, and the Big Dipper completely inverted). Some time around 4 AM we stopped again, for a long time: a largeish truck, about the size of a dump truck, was stuck in the mud ahead of us, blocking the road completely. Eventually I heard the words “mud” and “push” and “pull”—my Spanish still wasn’t good enough to get the details—and ran out just in time to join about 50 of my fellow travelers in getting the thing unstuck by just plain pushing it. That was cool.

The landscape got more and more jungle-y, and the roads less and less paved, as morning approached. The driver eventually got sick of going 30 miles an hour and took the last two hours at a speed which, while not breakneck, was fast enough to rattle everybody’s teeth. We arrived in Puerto Maldonado some time around 8:30 AM.

The others, who traveled by truck and van, arrived hours later. They had had their own trials, twice stuck in the water where rivers had flooded the road (Brother Pío, ever resourceful, pulled the van out with the truck), and once forced to spend the night in questionable lodgings (in the room adjoining Mother Agnes’—which she had to pass through, carrying her suitcases—a wake was going on, in the wee hours of the morning. The mourners were smoking and drinking tequila; the corpse was lying on a table).

Everybody had been saying “jungle” so much that I was expecting something involving huts, anacondas, and possibly lepers. Puerto Maldonado instead turned out to be a small city—true, more or less surrounded by jungle, but on the inside all motorcycles, shops, and restaurants. Compared to any North American town at all it would look tremendously dirty, run-down, and disorderly; but I had just spent two months in Ñaña, and it seemed downright developed.

There was a crowded market section including fruits and vegetables, meat, craft materials, and ordinary kitsch (one memorable sign: “Sarita’s—Barbie, Winnie Pooh , Transformers, Spiderman”). There were dozens of little restaurants, most serving only a dish or two; and in one section every other shop seemed to be a mechanic’s, fantastic unruly places with huge piles of rusty parts and metal shavings and welder’s torches going all the time.

We rented a two-story, three- or four-bedroom apartment in the middle of town. I was not happy to go from the wide-open spaces and private bathrooms of Ñaña grounds to sharing a room with three other men and a bathroom with nine.

The noise of traffic was constant at the height of the day, though it was mostly motorcycles—they are much more efficient, and the ditch-ridden dirt roads would be hard on a car. It was common to see a family of three or four go by on a single motorcycle, mother holding a baby on her lap.

It was, actually, a very noisy place. Aside from the motorcycles, there were the brass bands—a parade seemed to be happening every other day at least, and you would hear marching bands at all hours (literally: for example, once at 7AM and another time at 1AM). They did not play well. There was the bread man, who would pedal his cart past the house every morning at 5:30 sharp, honking a bicycle horn. There were the fruit sellers, who would wheel their carts past in the afternoon, reciting their list of goods through a bullhorn in a kind of nasal, droning singsong (anyway it sounded nasal through the bullhorn).

For some reason, thinking about all of this makes me feel nostalgic.

This is probably because I was very happy there. After the initial hurdle of moving and organizing and cleaning, we settled back into the routine. Life was simple and interesting (even though I still missed cigarettes and hot showers). I could speak much better Spanish by this time, which went a long way to alleviating the loneliness (cutting off all contact with the rest of the world had been a scary experience). Living in such close quarters was difficult—even among semi-saints, personalities often grate against each other—but it also drew us closer together. I mean, you know, besides just physically. I prayed a lot, read a lot, had good conversations.

Also there was the seminary across town. There were 28 seminarians there. Most of them were my age, some a little older. Three of the FJH brothers took classes there, and the rest of us were made welcome to play soccer with them once or twice a week. Being from North America, I can play soccer about as well as they can throw a football, but they were very happy to have me play; or possibly they were taunting me and I didn’t speak the language well enough to realize it. But I suspect the former. In general I found them, like most of the people I met there, to be welcoming, friendly, and unselfconscious. (Is this true of most Peruvians? I have no idea. Almost all the Peruvians I knew were friars, priests, seminarians, or had been living under the potent influence of FJH for several years; so I may be biased.) On Sundays, too, one or two of them would meet us to play basketball.

They called me “Yoey”. I called one of them “Wilson” for several weeks before realizing that his name was actually Zosimo. I’m not sure how that happened. I’m pretty sure there really was a Wilson. There certainly were plenty of English names—I met an Eddie, a Wilbur, a Milton, and even a Jefferson.

So life for me settled down into a more or less peaceful rhythm, broken up now and again by little events—a visit to the Serpentarium (the only snakes I ever met in the jungle were in cages); a day-trip with the seminarians to a park in the middle of the jungle to play soccer and swim in the river (there was even a rope swing!); a Charismatic Mass at the Cathedral on Pentecost (too much jumping for my taste); the week it was my turn to cook (stressful and time-consuming but at least I got to show off my teriyaki chicken); and just as I was starting to get the hang of it all, it was time to go. As is so often the case.

On my final night Brother Karol, Brother José María and I put on a skit. Brother José María has a talent for impressions and a lively imagination: he wrote most of it. The premise: Mr. Bean visits FJH. I was Mr. Bean; the others took turns parodying everybody else. Afterwards we had one more Corazón session, which is of course none of your business; but which I will always remember.

I expected the goodbye to be harder than it was. But Christians don’t say goodbye; they say Hasta la vista.

Brother Pío

One final section. Skip it if you want. It is a small portrait, and I could write pages more about him or almost any of them. It is slightly more personal than the rest.

Pío is in his early sixties and looks like he is, or used to be, a thug. This may not be far from the truth; I never got the whole story. He grew up in Colombia and had lived for twenty years in Tampa, Florida, working as a truck driver and speaking next to no English, before joining FJH. With his swarthy, leathered face he could have been from Peru, Italy, or somewhere in the Middle East. Take all this together with his powerful old-guy build, big belly, meaty hands, jet-black-but-graying hair and beard, and often-furrowed brow, and you had somebody that bad men would be afraid of but children would know immediately was pure good.

They did, too—at Mass in Vallecito he would always end up with one sleeping over his shoulder and two others gathered around his legs. I never saw him trying to get their attention; they were drawn to him. He would give them a twinkling look that said: I know what you’re up to because we are two of a kind; and that would be that.

He is a man of many talents, and fond of tinkering, or anyway jimmy-rigging. More than once he blew fuses in the house trying to install a new outlet or switch; but it always worked in the end. He loves to cook, especially to deep-fry. He can put people at their ease, and within two weeks of coming to Puerto Maldonado he seemed to have connections with every junkyard, mechanic, and carpenter in town. In Ñaña he had an impressive garden out back and would often bring in a harvest of bananas or passion fruit. He was the one that, en route to Puerto Maldonado, was responsible for pulling the van out of the river—twice.

He is hard of hearing and has a complex hearing aid that he would sometimes, during Adoration, take out and clean, blowing into various little tubes, causing the thing to emit a shrill feedback-squeal. He is allergic to most condiments and all citruses. Most meals he would drink a hideous purple juice made from, possibly, beets and corn. He often appears dour but, when thoroughly amused, will literally cackle with glee.

When he drove, I could never tell whether he was immensely talented and in control, or simply out of his mind. At times I feared for my life, and wondered whether Sister María Teresa, praying her Rosary with intense concentration in the back seat, was being especially pious or was just plain terrified.

He would sometimes take me on errands that were almost missions: I never knew where we were going, often because I didn’t understand what he was saying but usually because he didn’t think it necessary to tell me. He introduced me to Eddie, a local artisan who made jewelry from seeds, string, hemp, bone, and wood: Pío was learning from him how to make Rosaries. I tagged along to the junkyard and then to the refrigerator repairman while he found and then contrived to repair an old washing-machine motor out of which he planned to make a bead-polisher. He taught me to deep-fry almost anything, and at dinner would try to distract me and steal my food, just like my grandfather used to do.

I could say something about his faults (Br. José María says: “Pío is a person with all the things in him that make a bad man, except he’s a good man”), but of course that is not my place, and anyway they made me like him more.

I miss him the most.

* * *

Thank you all for all your prayers. You will not know just how, or how much, they helped until the Last Day, but judging by what happened to me, they were potent indeed.

Melanjolly

Three Months in Peru