No Me Digas!

---

At 10 am his face was on the screen of the intercom, and I buzzed him in as he said "I come up." I had never met him, but had gotten a call the day before:

I am .... Tomorrow I will show you how to get to work. I'll be there are 10.

This was probably the fifth or sixth of these calls that I had gotten in my first five days in Lima, and I'm still not sure who all of these people are. I locked the door behind me to the empty apartment, since the woman who's home I had been living in still hadn't come back from vacation, and met the boy downstairs. Mundo Libre is the shelter for abused, homeless, and drug-addicted children that the volunteer organization had set up for me to help at, which is about 45 minutes by car from where I live. The only problem was that there are actually two completely different locations, and no one had told me at which I'd be starting work the following day.
The boy and I waited for about 20 minutes at the paradero before we decided we were not at the right stop, and walked some more until we found it. There aren't any "bus maps," or any real bus stops in Lima, and there aren't really even real buses. There are combis, which are these little mini eighties type vans that surprisingly can hold about thirty to forty people. They might stop at every single corner, or they might not stop at any; they might stop in the middle street while you dodge cars to get to it as the cobrador screams "Baja baja baja!" And while the driver flies down the street, often making one or two lanes into three or four, the cobrador jingles his change at you as he walks down the often completely packed isles, waiting for you to pay so he can hand you a little piece of paper in return. He jumps out at every stop, yelling to pedestrians to where the combi is headed, especially to people who might be trying to just cross the street, or those eating a churro on a park bench. They're not actually waiting at a bus stop, but maybe if he yells at them enough they'll decide,

Well, I had planned to pick up my son from school, but I think instead I'll go to Los Olivos!

We finally arrived at Mundo Libre, which I deduced when the kid told me

This is Mundo Libre.

Great that he had showed me how to get there, but it was the other building than where I had had my interview... I still had no idea where I was supposed to show up the following day. We rang the bell of the long, white house and a woman opened a little door so that we could see her face through the bars, castle style. Fortunately the kid stepped in, since at this point (and still now...) I felt like anyone who was speaking Spanish was just yelling at me in tongues, and I'd just look bewildered and nod. She had no idea who I was, and she also didn't know where I was supposed to go. Oh well! For my first two weeks here, I was a cloud. This was no different.
I finally figured out that the kid was the son of one of the women who is somehow involved with the volunteer organization, and that he is related to the dozens of Chinese Americans and Peruvians who I had spent my first week with. It was a grandma's birthday, so there were all these people visiting, and I was the white girl eating dinners and going to reunions and parties with their family, who just kind of smiled and ate and looked confused, but smiling and nodding (and always laughing on cue. That's probably the most important thing I've learned in my month here in Peru... always laugh when other people do. Which is even better when other people are joking about me and I have no idea). They were awesome, and the first people I knew in Lima. When we got back to Miraflores, he told me that his cousin, who I had met the night before, was going on a bus tour of Lima with his friend (also from the states). So I was like ok, since I had nothing else to do. I met the guy and his friend at some apartment that I had been to, and a van picked us up from there to take us to the tour bus. It was amazing. The tour was pretty bad, but everything else... wow. Of course I ended up sitting next to the fat woman in a bright red tshirt with CANADA across it, windbreaker tied around her waist under her fanny pack, and camera around her neck. I feel like it would have made more sense if she was American, but she really seemed to love Canada, so that's fine. EVERY TIME I leaned forward to look out the window she'd sputter,

Do you need to switch seats?! Do you want to sit here?!

By about the fifth time I had the audacity to lean forward to see around her bloated frame I said,

I'll tell ya! I'll tell ya when I want to sit there!

and this seemed to shut her up. Except that then she started huffing.. LOUDLY.. with exasperation every time she couldn't get a picture because our bus was... surprise... moving. I have a great video that unfortunately stops right before she raised her hand to ask the tour guide if we were ever going to stop, because she thought we were going to stop and she wanted to stop. Later, underground in the Catacombs, she pulled her huge red shirt over her mouth and nose and ran through the tunnels ahead of us, trying to yell through muffled CANADA that she couldn't breathe.
It's possible that the tour guide was even more entertaining. I got the feeling that he actually had no idea about the city or the dozens of dates he listed off for three hours, and that he was merely saying anything in English that he could remember was actually English. After every maybe fifth word, Manuel (or "Mike" if we preferred) would say HMMM? with wide eyes, how I imagined a history professor at a large university would lecture after years of experience, challenging someone to disagree with him. The transcript to my beloved video clip of Manuel:
Manuel:

Why, in Lima, there are, ehhhhhhhhh, eight million of people. Because, at the beginning to the seventies, we had... a big problem. The terrorist groups, you know, Sendero Luminoso. At the beginning to the seventies, Hmmmm? Many people comes here from the Andes. They were looking for a job here in Lima. For this reason Lima, Huh? little by little, was more bigger. Hmmm? South Lima and North Lima nowaday, you can find a typical shanty towns. The shanty towns belongs to low class... Madame?

(Enter CANADA). Screaming.

---

Comments

[Burreee]

ok ok
So I wrote this one late night in November, I didn't finish it, but here you go! I started out intending to do the travel blog, I swear!