Susan Munroe » Spanish

points of re-entry

Susan Munroe — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:25:00 +0000

The United States is quiet. No car horns. No shouting vendors. No roaring, muffler-less combis or downshifting buses. It’s clean. I took a walk around Syreena’s suburban neighborhood and found a single piece of trash: a cardboard McDonald’s box. Everyone has American accents, and I no longer have to do a double take when I see blonde hair. I’m back in the land of the gringos. From Miami to Orlando to Baltimore to Odenton to Boston to New Durham, New Hampshire, I’ve spent the past three weeks working my way up the coast, readjusting to strip malls and Starbucks and fast-moving interstate traffic. As a houseguest, I marveled at the commonplace luxuries of middle-class America: vacuum cleaners, microwave ovens, lawn mowers, Swiffer cleaning products, dishwashers, pre-sliced deli meat.

I was nervous about coming back. What do I eat? How do I find pay phones? How can I get around without a car? I tried to practice asking directions in my mind – the words formed in Spanish. Strange, this time around, I didn’t hit that point in the trip where I felt glad to be going home soon. Up to my final days in Huaraz, I was still wandering the streets and visiting friends and forgetting, completely, that I should be saying goodbyes. I spent a lot of time talking to people, asking questions, trying to draw some conclusions about what I’ve seen and learned. What separates Peru from the first world? I asked. What is halting the process of development? Juan, an older man I met in the Plaza de Armas in Huaraz told me that Peruvians lack knowledge, education. Max, a mountain guide, said that it’s corruption holding them back. It’s there in every layer of government, individuals working for themselves, thinking only of the short-term: national individualism instead of national unity.

Antonieta, the woman who ran the hostel where I was staying, had spent several years living in the United States. One of her sons was born in Miami; the other earned his citizenship with help from his father’s business contacts. The older boy has done two tours in Iraq. It was disorienting to see an “Operation Iraqi Freedom” blanket embroidered with the American flag folded over the back of a chair in her living room. She described the first time a car slowed down and waved her across a busy street in downtown Miami. “Here, they don’t care, they’d run you down.” She loved being greeted by cashiers in US grocery stores, or receiving a simple “hello”, or a smile of acknowledgement from people on the street. “The women in my church – people who didn’t know me, who’d barely met me! They surprised me with a baby shower. I’d been feeling so alone, so overwhelmed at the thought of having another baby in a foreign country. I didn’t know if I should have it at all.” Back in 1970, when she was 10, her parents were killed in a massive earthquake that destroyed Huaraz and surrounding towns. “I was all alone. Not a soul came to help. Not an aunt, or a friend, no one.” Peruvians, Antonieta told me, “lack humanity.”

Good things for me to hear about the States before returning. Good things to remember against my dread. And, like all good encounters, speaking with Antonieta raised more questions for me to consider. What is my role as a traveler from the US? The neutral observer who learns to blend in? Or the bringer of culture and light to the third world? Is it arrogant to imagine myself teaching through examples, such as not throwing trash on the ground, like ceding passage on sidewalks, like smiling and being open and friendly instead of sinking into the surly masses? In the Amazon I wrote that to know a culture one has to live a culture. But has my romantic traveler’s lens blinded me, awed me into imitating behaviors that would appall me in the US?

I spent several days visiting a girl my age named Emely, who worked in the open market, selling jackets imported from Bolivia. From eight to five every day, she sits in the street in front of the rack of coats, haggling with customers, crocheting afghan squares, passing the time with the abuelitas who sell dried corn and flaxseed and other grains next to her. I met Emely when I stopped to talk to the abuelitas; I was looking for someone to teach me a few words in the local Quechua dialect. Emely’s twenty-four, with a three-year-old daughter, and single. And with dreams of traveling to “La India”. “These coats are just for now,” she’d tell me. “I’m from Lima; lots of people in this town are from Lima [the coastal capital of Peru]. If I opened a restaurant, with real food from the coast – you can’t get that here, not good food, well prepared. If you did it right you’d have good business.” She told me about her ex-boyfriend, the father of her daughter. “She will never, never live with him. Even if I have to go to Spain to work and save money, I’ll leave her with my family, or I’ll bring her with me.” The strength of her determination to provide a better life for her daughter, her fears of having to leave her behind to seek better employment, her occasional struggles with depression when life overwhelms her – I heard it all as I sat with her on the cold curbing. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this kind of story from a woman my age, but it still blew me away, each and every time.

Sofia, a Belgian NGO worker living in Huaraz, had suggested that among the women, it’s a sense of self that’s missing. A Peruvian woman of the lower class is the spouse of a, the daughter of b, the mother of x, y, z. “When I asked a group of campesinas what their dreams were, they didn’t understand the question. They thought I wanted to know about what they’d dreamed the night before.” So what about Emely? And Wilson, and the scattered others I came to know who are driven by the strength of their hopes and dreams? How are dreams sown and cultivated? How are they harvested?

I met a young man from Texas at the start of my trip who told me that he believes that those capable of traveling as I do have a responsibility to give back in some way. This idea lingered, and as my encounters became less touristy and more humbling, it returned with a large question mark: how? And is my responsibility to my fellow Americans or to the people I meet as I travel?

I’ve been back in the US for a month now, and the adjusting continues, quicker than I thought possible. Jeni, my Machu Picchu hiking partner, returned to her native North American home several months before I did, and wrote to warn me about “how quickly [the shock] fades and you find yourself buying a coffee that is worth a chicken, a dozen eggs, a bag full of produce, and a massage in Peru.” She’s only exaggerating a little. I’m struggling with our consumer culture, all of the Stuff™ that our economy and lifestyle affords – things I haven’t seen in nine months. This is the point of progress, right? To be able to afford to buy things to make life easier. Wouldn’t Emely jump at the chance to have a washer and a dryer in her own house? Walking with Sian one day in Boston, we noticed a line of people waiting outside a tidy Newbury Street storefront with black awning and pictures of cupcakes with bones crossed underneath. These were young people, trendy, university-types, with hair cut into hard angled shapes to match the plastic jewelry and large square sunglasses covering their faces. They sat wrapped in fleece blankets in canvas folding chairs, leather-booted feet stretched out and propped up in front of them. Others sprawled on inflatable mattresses and looked up videos on their laptops. “What are you waiting for?” Sian asked a girl with curly black hair.
“He’s releasing a new t-shirt design,” she responded.
Oh. Is it free?
“No, no,” she laughed. “$75.”
How long have you been waiting?
“Since Wednesday.”

This is my culture. Seventy-five dollar t-shirts and leather couches and the $1,000 laptop I’m using to write this blog entry. Now that I’m back, comfortably settled in the belly of the beast, what do I need to do to live up to my responsibility as a traveler? How do I “give back”, as my Texan friend advocated? In the past nine months I’ve lived a different life, an intensely personal one. Traveling alone I’ve internalized everything that I’ve seen and experienced. Now I have to find a way to dig it out and put it in context for the people who ask about my trip. I have to figure out how to teach and show without bragging, to change minds and inspire selflessness without lecturing. And relearn how to live in the United States. And keep in touch with Emely, with Antonieta, Max, and Sofia, to keep the cultural interchange open in anticipation of the day when we find a way to help each other, and maybe even the rest of the world.

on the rocks

Susan Munroe — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:25:00 +0000

The streets were slippery in the rain. My battered red sneakers slapped against the gray concrete in a steady rhythm, and I twisted my wet hair back behind my ears for the tenth time. Dawn was red this morning. The trees of the park outside the hostel’s front door blocked most of the sky, but from where I sat in the window seat I could still see the purple and red furrowed clouds through the branches. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning, I’d murmured to myself, and now, three hours later, the colorful sky had faded to the same gray as the streets on which I ran. I followed the road that wound along Puerto Natales’s dingy waterfront, passing beached wooden fishing boats and elaborate shrines painted in white, some erected in memory of Natalinos passed on, others in honor of saints and heroes of local folklore. Beyond the boats was the rocky beach and beyond that, the water of the Ultima Esperanza Fiord. To my left, colorful houses made of corrugated metal, scrap wood, and wire blurred and blended together in the soft morning light. It was about 9AM and only the street dogs were stirring. A skinny terrier rummaged through an open garbage bag. A black mutt with a shepherd face ran beside me for a minute, wagging his tail and looking up at me hopefully, begging shamelessly before giving up and moving off to sniff between the legs of another shaggy white male who was marking fence posts across the street.

I left the last couple of houses behind and changed my pace slightly as the paved road gave way to gravel. Natales is a small community, a collection of slightly shabby buildings clustered in a rough half circle extending outward from the waterfront. Beyond the houses the land is hilly and brown and empty, dotted with scrub and thin grass, and about 150 km away, in the middle of the grass and the crap and the scrub, sits the jewel of Patagonia, the Parque Nacional de los Torres del Paine. The park is the main attraction of the region, and every year draws hundreds of thousands of hikers, climbers, and sight-seers from around the world. During the months of January and February, the town explodes with activity; buses form convoys, restaurants put out feeding troughs, and hostels install revolving doors. Few people spend more than a week here. Most cruise through on tight schedules: one day of kayaking, two of hiking, then get them to the airport on time. This is where I landed when I got off the Navimag ferry. That was six weeks ago. I knew little about the area when I arrived, but after ten days hiking in the park, I knew I didn’t want to leave. As it happened, the hostel where I stayed when I got out of the park was looking for help to start immediately. I took a night to sleep on it and then started work the next day.

The erratic rock hostel is a hub for the adventure-seekers, a house of buena honda (good vibes) and good people. Bill and Rustyn are the owners (“backpackers, not businessmen”), US ex-patriots, originally from Oregon. What they lack in organizational professionalism, they more than compensate for with their willingness to service the backpacking community. Only four years old, the hostel has built a reputation for itself primarily on word of mouth (“tell your friends, not the guidebooks”), particularly for its comprehensive park-information sessions and killer breakfasts. In a country where desayuno is typically a cup of instant coffee and a piece of bread, the rock’s spread of cereal, yogurt, cheese, jam, homemade bread, omelettes and cowboy coffee wins grateful smiles morning after morning. I work and share a room with Kat, a student from northern Cali, who’s studying abroad in Santiago and spending the last month of her summer break working down here at the rock. Our job is to bake the breakfast bread, keep the hot coffee coming, make reservations, answer questions about the park, sell bus tickets, rent camping equipment, do the shopping for the hostel, cook lunch for the staff, and to keep putting out the vibe. I love it. I get a free room, free food, and I’ve started my own mini-panaderia, baking and selling cookies out of the hostel kitchen. The baking keeps me busy during the days, and the extra cash will help to extend my trip, one peso at a time. The atmosphere is chilled out and the people even more so. Everyone who walks through our door is excited, either with anticipation of hiking to come, or exhausted and euphoric with the hike they’ve just completed. It’s a revolving door, but each spin spills a fresh batch of positive energy into our day. There are 15 beds, but we often have guests and friends sleeping on couches or crashing on the floors. It is Laid Back. Overachieving, type-A Susan has taken a while to get used to having a job where it’s okay to take a nap on the window seat in the afternoon, but hippie Susan digs it.

I ran until the wind started to pick up, driving sheets of water from the beach onto the road, then turned back towards the town. A shopping bag blew past, a white plastic parachute, until it dipped too low and ensnared itself on the spikes of the barbed wire fence on the side of the road. Plastic bag graveyards stretch on either side of Puerto Natales, unused land that’s littered with bags that have been blown off the streets and caught and shredded in the low scrub brush and fencing. “Chilenos se encantan bolsas. ¡Bolsas, bolsas, bolsas!” Chileans are infatuated with bags, George, the owner of the supermercado tells me. George and his wife Marina run the Proa Norte, the small market next door where Kat and I do some of our shopping. The daily shopping missions are what remind me that I’m living in Chile. There’s no such thing as one-stop shopping – buy fruits here, buy meats there, some days you can find tortillas at the place around the corner, buy the yogurt at this one but not on Wednesdays, get bread from the panaderia and when you see peanut butter or brown rice, buy the entire supply because who knows when there will be more. Food comes in bolsas. Jam, mayonnaise, yogurt, olives, spices, cereal are all packaged in plastic or cellophane or foil bags. My favorite store is the fruit and nut guy’s place. He sells top quality dried fruit and nuts from a tiny stall along the main street, and keeps his outdoor speaker system cranking with Deep Purple, Eric Clapton, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix. George and Marina’s place is the store where I spend most of my time, popping in to buy tomatoes and avocados for lunch, coming back an hour later for icing sugar so I can finish the frosting for my sugar cookies. They never remember my name but they know my face and they joke with me in Spanish. Some days I can understand them and joke back, other days I smile and shrug and shake my head. Chileans speak a fast, slang-ridden, mumbling version of Spanish that can be almost indecipherable. I win small victories in communication here and there, like the day that I hunted down potting soil AND high-efficiency light bulbs by asking for help and directions from various shop owners. Most of the time, in the hostel, I’m speaking English. Our guests are from the US or Europe, though we get a lot of phone calls in Spanish. Negotiating anything over the phone in Spanish wins double points, because there are no helpful hand signals or body language to aid comprehension.

Wet, tired, and sweaty, I push open the hostel door, setting off the wind chimes that hang overhead, and wish buen dia to the two Germans and the Aussie who are sitting on the couch watching “Fargo”. It’s the third time in two days that someone’s picked the film from the hostel’s extensive collection, but I still pause to watch Steve Buscemi being fed into a wood chipper, and catch my breath. It’s good to have a routine, good to unpack the rucksack, good to have some stability. It’s nice not to feel like a homeless person, to recognize faces and to be a source of local information rather than another confused, slightly-lost backpacker asking for directions. I run, I write, I cook and bake, I meet people and answer their questions, and I read on the window seat. There are worse ways to spend a month and a half, I reckon.

(so you see – this is what i’ve been doing and why i’ve been so behind on the blogging. i’ll do my best to catch up soon.)