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!

Curse of the Babel Builders

I’ve always loved languages and have tried to pick up as much as possible wherever I may be, but I’m by no means an expert. Aside from speaking French, I can make pleasantries in Japanese, handle introductions in Russian, and I’m quite proficient at ordering gelato in Italian. Before I came to Costa Rica I knew a few phrases in Spanish which were not immensely helpful and were largely pop culture jokes in the states. For example the episode of Psych where Shawn stars in a telanovela to solve a crime (Clips from "Lights, Camera, Homocidio.") And I knew a lot of great vocab from Veggie Tales’ 

"Dance of the Cucumber." Seriously though, that’s how I knew the word for cucumber.

But obviously the learning curve has been pretty steep since arriving six weeks ago. I’m not sure I would call myself “conversant” in Spanish, but I’ve managed to have conversations discussing gun laws and alcohol with my Tica mom, and I can have basic conversations with most people. Language school moves much slower than I would like, but the teachers are very nice, and we do get a kick out of some of the things we are learning. Some of the funniest examples come from our phonics book which has sentences put together expressly to emphasize certain phonetic sounds, to the exclusion of logic. Enjoy some of these bizarre phrases that we have been practicing:

Ese pez es de Ester. = That fish is Esther’s.

Ursus suda mucho. = Ursus perspires a lot.

Un zuncho sucio. = A dirty metal hoop.

Había un choque en el bosque. = There was a collision in the forest.

El austere bautista bautiza al gaucho. = The austere Baptist baptizes the gaucho.

El viajero limpia a la criatura. = The traveler cleans the child.

Los ecuatorianos guardan sus cuadros y paraguas. = The Ecuadorians guard their pictures and their umbrellas.

Luis se cuida de los buitres. = Luis is careful of vultures.

Generalmente, agilizo las cosas geniales. = Generally, I speed up brilliant things.

El gerente general es gemelo y se llama Gerado. = The general manager is a twin and his name is Gerard.

Ayer el yelmo tuyo me ayudó mucho. = Yesterday your helmet helped me a lot.

El perro le ladra a Drácula. = The dog barks at Dracula.

El saludo del gladiador fue glacial. = The gladiator’s salutation was glacial.

Important things to know how to say, right? Haha. To be fair, there are also some useful sentences thrown in for practice too:

Es dificil vivir sin ti. = It is difficult to live without you.

Saldremos para el Perú, pues para allá nos manda Dios. = We will leave for Peru because God is sending us there.

Sometime this weekend I was reminded of the Bible story of the Tower of Babel. I think it was around the time Sunday afternoon that I was standing in the dirt under a palm frond bus stop in the “town” of Playa Hermosa (de Jaco). The afternoon rains moved in and my friends and I found ourselves sharing space and conversation with two Israeli college girls on vacation and two local latino men. The older man was missing teeth and muttered in unarticulated Spanish, the Israeli girls spoke some English mixed with a smattering of Spanish words with Hebrew pronunciation. We carried on conversations with both, although they were rife with misunderstandings. It happens a lot when you don’t speak a language or don’t speak it well. You may be able to communicate, but it’s often still a struggle and often involves a great deal of charades, mix-ups and confusion.

We discussed which beaches were nicest with the girls and I asked concerned questions to the local men about the bus on which we were waiting. And I thought how nice it was that, when a bus labeled “San José” went flying past without stopping, I could discuss it with the men in my limited Spanish and learn that it was a direct bus and won’t make stops, but that another bus would be along shortly, not to worry.

It’s true, there are some things that transcend a language barrier. There are elements of human communication and relationship that don’t need words. There are universals. For example, when the crazy guy on our 3.5 hour crowded bus ride home through the mountains stood up in his seat and peed out the window while we sped along, the looks on our faces and those of the Mexican girls nearby were the same. No words in any language were necessary, and you don’t have to translate shocked laughter. But for the most part, if you are going to relate, if you are going to connect with and engage with a person, you need to be able to talk to them.

Bottom line: language is important.

And, language is hard.

But that’s why we’re here.

It’s easy to get bored and frustrated, ready to get down to work and actually start doing our jobs. Classes can be tedious and sometimes when you think you’ve made a lot of progress, you have a moment when you realize you aren’t so much speaking as you are babbling. Learning a new language can be extremely humbling. You go from being a competent intelligent individual to someone who is on the same verbal level as a four year old. And in many cases the four year old will tell you when you make mistakes. And that’s why I was reminded of the story of Babel. God has been using language to humble people since almost the beginning of time! In case it’s been a while since you read it, here’s the text from Genesis 11:

 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.  As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.  They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.  Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth." But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.  Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

  So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.  That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Talk about some seriously lasting consequences of sin! Funny to think that today we’re still dealing with the ramifications of that one people’s sin and pride. Those Babel builders sure caused a lot of trouble for the rest of us. (At least it’s nice to have someone to blame while I’m trying to remember irregular verbs!) But in all seriousness, thank the Lord He uses things like the subjunctive to keep us humble. And, when I really don’t feel like studying, it’s helpful to remember that Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world. That’s a whole lot of people. And, more importantly, that’s a whole lot of people who need Jesus. 

He speaks Spanish. He needs Jesus.

I think that alone is a pretty good reason to spend 4 months learning to speak Spanish.

*Pray for us, and everyone at language school here in Costa Rica, that we will be diligent in our studies and grasp the language quickly.*

Playa Hermosa. An occasional weekend here also seems like a good reason to spend 4 months in Costa Rica. :-)

P.S.- This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R were missing.

P.P.S.- Check out this interesting article that talks about what I sort of touched on in my last blog, about the benefits and drawbacks of life in America.

P.P.P.S- You have to love that Psych rewrites their theme song for special episodes. Here it is in Spanish!