The Latest from Lima

You’ve probably noticed that over the last few weeks the majority of my posts have included lots of photos and not too many words. I’m aware of my tendency to verbosity so my last few posts have been my offering to the ADD crowd who can only focus long enough to skim a few photos and cut lines before….Hey! Look! A squirrel!

...Now where was I? Oh, right, I was lying about why my posts have been a bit lacking. The truth is that with all the chaos of the move and the busyness of getting situated in our new home and continuing language study, my days have been pretty full, and when I have had down time, I’ve just been too tired to use the English right and make the pretty sentences. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about it! Every day I see something or think of something that I want to tell you about, something that I think would give you a good glimpse into life in Lima. My instinct is to ramble on and on and on about the city and the people and the things, but then I remember that I do have a good deal of time to share lots about Lima, so I don’t have to try to tell it all right now. But while it is still fresh and new to me, I do want to pass some of it on. 

You may recall that Peru is in the Southern Hemisphere, and consequently the seasons are reversed, so for those of you playing along at home, if it’s summer in the good ol’ U. S. of A., that means here in Lima it’s…WINTER! Yep. The calendar says July and my newsfeed on Facebook is filled with pictures of people’s summer vacations, picnics, beach days, and posts about how hot it is. It’s hard to remember that it’s summer at home when I’m wearing sweaters, scarves, and coats everyday. To be fair, Lima really isn’t all that cold, even by the standards of this thin-blooded Floridian. It’s probably in the mid 60s in the day, and a few degrees cooler at night. Not too bad, right? Well, it wouldn’t be if it was sunny. But as I may have mentioned before, Lima has a bizarre climate. It never rains here, but it is persistently cloudy. My entire time in Lima so far, I think I have seen sun for a grand total of maybe 12 hours. The rest of the time the city is covered in a thick grey blanket, and while it doesn’t rain, we do have wet days. The heaviest precipitation we have seen since our arrival could barely be called rain, even it was closer to what my family calls “spitting.” What we do get is mist. It feels mostly like walking through a cloud. Just enough moisture to get you sufficiently damp, but not enough to warrant an umbrella. Although Lima is known for it’s constant high humidity, mold problems, etc., we have been told that this much “rain” is unusual even for winter in Lima.

 Having grown up with humidity and survived a couple of bitterly cold damp winters in Paris, I didn’t think I’d mind this weather. But what I had failed to take into account is that very few buildings here have any sort of climate control. That’s right, no heat. So while I can enjoy cold weather just fine at home when there are snug restaurants, offices, and homes to go, here there’s not much escape. The company office where I meet with my language tutor has no heat, so on the colder days I don’t even bother unbuttoning my coat; I sit there bundled up for the entire three hours. Last week my supervisor accompanied me to an appliance store and I made a critical purchase: a space heater! It’s a little thing that resembles R2D2,

I can tell that my new friend and I will be very close, so he's going to need a name. Suggestions?

 but it makes a world of difference in my room. I’m a much happier camper now that I know that at least at home I can get cozy!

The few sunny hours have given me a glimpse of a different city. Lima seems like an entirely changed place when the sun comes out, and I can’t wait for more opportunities to see the city at its best. I don’t really think about how pervasive the cloud cover is until I wake up with sun streaming in on my face and I sit there thinking for a minute, “Why does this seem so weird? Ooooh. Right. I haven’t seen the sun in two weeks!”

This move has been a pretty drastic shift. Last month I was living in Costa Rica. It was summer and sunny with frequent heavy downpours, often unbearably hot. As cold as I’ve been the last few weeks it is funny to think that it wasn’t long ago that I sat sweating in my bedroom in Costa Rica praying for rain and a breeze, just wishing I had a fan or some way to cool off. Costa Rica is colorful and chaotic. The buildings, flowers, and sky are all bright and unkempt. Now I live in Lima. It’s winter and cloudy and never really rains, and I’m always cold. Winter seems to envelope Lima’s modern apartment buildings and manicured parks in greyness. Other than both speaking Spanish (and even that is different) the two places seem utterly different.

Here’s what my days look like in general: In the mornings I get up, have some coffee and maybe some Honey Bunches of Oats (ßyes!), and get ready for the day. Since my mornings are “free” I usually am off in some store getting something for the apartment, groceries, or other random necessities. If not, I’ll be working on a number of projects at home, or I may head to Starbucks and enjoy some (more) coffee and internet. (We can’t have our internet set up until we have our residency permits, which as you may imagine takes some time, so we have very limited internet access at the house for the time being.) At 2:30 Carlos, the taxi driver, arrives to drive me the short trip to the Peru office for Spanish class. I meet with my tutor until 6 at which point Carlos returns to take me home. It’s starting to get dark then, so I do any other errands I need to squeeze in and then settle in to work on stuff in the apartment.

Language study is going well. Having a personal tutor makes a remarkable difference. I meet with her at the office for three hours every afternoon. She’s great and I certainly have learned a lot, but a solid three hours of one on one conversation in a foreign language is exhausting. I leave each day feeling like I need a brain transplant. We have three more weeks of language study, and then it’ll be time to switch gears and get to work. In the meantime, I’ll be cramming in as much español as possible and continuing to run all those little errands that are involved in getting settled. We did check one big thing off the list this week: We got our cell phones! J Yay!

Thanks for your prayers during our first weeks here in Lima. I hope to get into a better schedule of posting now that we are starting to get settled.

Batllama. No, there is no explanation for this. 

I also need to make a belated birthday shout-out to my awesome friend, Carolyn! 

She turned the big Two-Five this week and I’m so bummed I wasn’t there to help her celebrate the quarter-century mark. She’s just a wonderful person and friend and has been such a blessing in my life these last 11 years! The really great thing about having been friends for so long is that I have quite a repertoire of amusing/embarrassing anecdotes to share about her, but because I love her so much I’ll refrain…for now! ;-) ....But photos are a different story, so here ya go!

Sorry, Care! But you have to admit this photo is kind of awesome.  Love you!

Butterfly Moments

Thursday the sky had been working up to a rain all day.  By the time I was walking home from the Institute in the late afternoon the light was beginning to fade, a low blanket of grey clouds hung over the city, and the normally colorful neighborhood seemed to have absorbed the monochromatic pallor of the sky. The weeds along the sidewalk, the trash in the streets, all seemed to add to the general dreariness of the day. I walked quickly towards home, staring at the grey sidewalk to avoid tripping on some chunk of concrete or falling into a gringo trap (more on those later). That’s when it caught my eye balancing on a piece of litter in the weeds along a vacant lot: a small butterfly so brilliantly blue that it seemed to produce its own light. I stopped in my tracks and bent to examine it. It would have been beautiful at any time, but the grim grey day seemed to provide the perfect backdrop for the butterfly’s luminescence. I could tell it was injured and I as I held out my finger, it climbed on, slowly shifting its wings. The tiny miracle poised on my finger, a gorgeous shimmering spot in a drab world. My friend accompanied me as far as the corner before it fluttered awkwardly to a nearby clump of grass and hid itself among the blades, and I walked the rest of the way home alone, smiling.

Just a few days before, when discussing a butterfly garden, I had told Brittany that while I thought butterflies were nice, I had never been impressed by them. 

Dolly Parton and I do not see eye to eye on butterflies.  

But this one…this one impressed me.

Life here in Costa Rica is pleasant. I have a comfortable home with a very nice Tico family. I am surrounded by friendly likeminded Americans. We have access (albeit it expensive access) to most anything we could need. But after being here five weeks things have settled into a routine, and there is a certain monotony to this season of language learning. Here’s a look at my typical weekday:

5:15am- Wakeup because the sun is pouring in and the other family members are already up and making noise. Go back to sleep.

6:00am- Wakeup for real. Quiet time, check email, get ready for the day while watching Foxnews.com videos and catching up on the world.

7:00am- Breakfast. I want a cup of coffee. Instead, I am fed a bowl of cereal, fruit of the day, glass of juice…and coffee. I try to cram it down while making conversation with my Tica mom in Spanish, and usually learn something about a family member’s life that makes me wonder if she isn’t just pulling plot lines from a telanovela.

7:20am- Walk the 5 blocks to school.

7:30am- Conversation class starts with a prayer in Spanish. We discuss directions, household objects, and very useful things like the word for “chef’s hat” (el gorro) or a “large paintbrush” (la brocha).

8:25am- Phonics class starts with reading a passage from the Bible (in Spanish of course). We practice over-pronouncing our vowels and appropriately slurring our words together. And sometimes, if we’re lucky, we play hangman.

9:30am- Break time. Tuesdays and Thursdays we have an optional chapel service which is always nice. The other days we hang out and chat, study, have a snack, or grab a quick nap.

10:20am- Grammar class starts. We try to learn the difference between the 6 different verbs that Spanish has that mean “to be,” and strain to remember the long list of exceptions to every rule we’ve learned.

12:00pm- FREEDOM! Head home from school and hope we beat the rain.

12:15pm- Lunch with my Tica mom and her 11-month-old grandson, Matias. We chat about my day, but mostly I make silly faces at Mati and my Tica mom tries to get him to identify where the parakeet is. (It’s been at least a month and he has yet to even look at its cage. I don’t think he cares about the bird.)

12:45pm- The rest of the afternoon is spent in various combinations of sleeping, reading, studying (maybe), Skyping, jogging, editing photos, zumba class, and eating oreos (they are the one American snack cookie readily available so I keep a stash on hand).

6:30pm- Dinner time with my Tica mom again. Usually the conversation involves how ridiculously hot it has been that afternoon and what funny thing Mati did. She sometimes feeds me bizarre things like a green bean omelet or neapolitan ice cream with cherry jello, but for the most part the food is good.

7:00pm- See “12:45pm” above.

We do have opportunities to serve on the weekends and do some exploring, 

We got to explore Sarchi, the town famous for the colorful painted ox carts that many associate with Costa Rica. Beautiful artwork!

but the day in and day out routine can get a bit mundane, especially with so much down time and when we’re anxious to be on to the next part. But, like that grey day helping me to appreciate the remarkable beauty of that butterfly, sometimes the commonality and sameness of everyday life can help us appreciate the humor and joy in little things that we might otherwise overlook in busyness. 

Here’s a few recent “butterfly moments" (and yes it bothers me to call them that because it's quite a bit girlier than I am comfortable with, but it seems to fit so I'm just going to go with it):

-If you haven’t gathered from my facebook posts and pictures, it rains a lot in Costa Rica this time of year. Generally in the morning it’ll be sunny and dry, but by lunch the clouds are building up and moving down off the mountains, and then by mid-afternoon or early evening it’s raining. I love the rain, and hopefully will STILL love the rain by the time we leave in August. One afternoon a week or so ago it was sprinkling when I left the house to walk back to school for a zumba class taught by a fellow student. About a block away from the home, the skies opened up and the gentle mist turned into a torrential downpour. My umbrella provided little protection from the wind-driven rain and within a minute I was drenched…and grinning like a fool. I laughed uncontrollably all the way to school, and was thankful that there was no one else out on the streets. If the Ticos could have seen me sopping wet and giggling I’m sure it wouldn’t take long to get the reputation in the neighborhood as the crazy gringa. (Although, there’s plenty of competition around here for that title. So many gringos live in the area they call it “Gringo-landia.”)

-Facebooking the other evening I was reading a status update of one of my translator friends in Haiti who normally writes in French or Creole. I read it and about half way through realized that while I was understanding it fine, something was weird about the French. I thought perhaps it was creole and read it again, but I knew that wasn’t right either. I could NOT figure out what was wrong with this French! And the simple reason was…it was in Spanish. One month and I can no longer differentiate between the languages…oy vey!

-In that same vein, last night I was walking up the front steps and my Tico dad was at the kitchen sink and called out a greeting to me. I replied with a very cheery… “Bonsoir!”

Bonsoir? Really?! I can carry on a decent conversation in Spanish now (the verb tenses and gender agreement are often wrong but you can get the point) and I still randomly pulled out a French greeting. I was really hoping that the running water drowned it out or that he would think I did it intentionally just trying to add a little international flavor (like I need more of that!?).

-I was introduced to Hillsong in Spanish and it’s awesome. I mean, Hillsong in English is great, and I loved when they would do bilingual worship at Hillsong Paris, so I shouldn’t be surprised. I highly recommend downloading the albums: “Con Todo” and “Unidos Permanecemos.”

-Last week we visited church with some other staff members and the Spanish song that they sang during their “welcome time” was to the tune of “Red River Valley.” Many of the churches we have visited use primarily English hymns and praise songs translated.

-In grammar class we are constantly having to make up sentences to practice whatever rule we are learning. It gets tedious after a while writing sentences about situations that you would likely never have to discuss in real life. I entertain myself by writing a great deal of my sentences about llamas. My favorite of this week: “The llamas are mad because they are in a pen and are not playing on the hillside.”

This llama IS playing on the hillside. But he is still mad... and also considering eating that family. 

There are a lot of those moments, the little things that just make you smile or appreciate something simple. I am trying to learn to live with more gratitude and I pray that I will be aware of and thankful for the small "butterfly moments" that fill each day. What little things are you thankful for today?

*Thank you so much for your continued prayers and encouragement. I say it a lot, but it really does make a difference! Please be in prayer for us that we will continue to learn the language quickly, that we will be sensitive to the needs and opportunities around us, for a deepening hunger for God, that we will develop strong team relationships, and for continued health and safety. Also be praying for my good friends at home, Rachel and Velyn, who are preparing for extended trips this summer to serve in East Asia and Africa, respectively!*