The Office of Provisional Normalization

On Monday morning, a jovial, well-rested Peruvian border agent brought his children to work with him, read them our names, showed them our passports, gave us our entry stamps and wished us a good journey. From that point, the day was a blur of towns and transport, too many people crammed into a series of white station wagons, the windows open, the roads dusty, the mountains, rivers, high desert plains and planted fields rushing by.

We went through hilly, twisted-street towns, past adobe huts painted with political slogans, along wide, business-lined boulevards crammed with cars, trucks and moto-rickshaws. In some rural stretches there were so many rickshaws, palm trees and rice fields that I wondered if this was in fact Peru and not Southeast Asia somewhere.

Then we found ourselves stranded in a hot, metal-roofed adobe shed in Bagua Grande, waiting for a colectivo that was promised but nowhere to be found. The young woman on duty in the shed put her feet up against the door frame and watched her telenovela. The five of us—the same five who had waited for the hostel to open in La Balsa—avoided saying out loud that we seemed to be in for a re-run.

But a driver did eventually come. By 9:00 that evening, after a long, slow ride up into the mountains, we arrived at last in Chachapoyas. In two long days, we’d covered 189 miles as the crow flies.

Our first morning here, still exhausted and disoriented, I saw a sign that said something like The Office of Provisional Normalization. “I should probably stop by,” I thought. “Some provisional normalization sounds like just what I need.”

Except for the gleaming white cathedral, the buildings that lined the plaza all looked identical to me at that point—two-story, white colonial buildings with wooden doors, red-tiled roofs and wooden balconies under the second story windows. The streets too seemed impossible to tell apart—there were no street signs, not even placards at the street corners. (Later we learned to look for the address plates over individual doors, which also give the name of the family that lives there.) Everything was dusty, and the sun was hot and so bright I kept reaching for my sunglasses before realizing I already had them on.

Everything we needed to do involved learning new words and navigating new systems, and that morning it all felt overwhelming. We worried that if we plugged in the computer, the 220-volt current would fry it. Finding a laundry service and dropping off our dirty clothes seemed an almost insurmountable task. Every word of Spanish abandoned me, and I felt like we were staggering around, confused, bumbling and blatantly out of place in our gringa-ness.

It didn’t help that when we met the director of the school the night before, he didn’t seem quite sure who we were. He appeared surprised to learn we hoped to arrange home stays, and he kept alluding to some difficulties the school had been experiencing. It would open, he told us, five days later than scheduled.

The delay has turned out to be a good thing, though. Now, five days after our arrival, we are well settled into big, thick-walled, wood-floored rooms that open onto a courtyard full of flowers and small trees. We look out over tile roofs to the mountains to the west and south, and at night the sky is full of stars and the courtyard full of fireflies. Our landlady, Andrea, has a warm smile, honest eyes and a lot of patience. When we were moving in, she indicated she’d like me to come downstairs and sign a piece of paper summarizing our agreement. I understood what she said, but could not get a reply together for the life of me. She just laughed and gave me a big hug, as if to say, “Oh, you poor thing! You’re in way over your head, aren’t you?”

(KK)

We’re getting there though. Staying in one place and catching up on sleep has helped enormously. The streets have started to take on individual identities, and we’re quickly building our web of local landmarks—the school, the market, the vegetarian restaurant, the café with the decent internet connection, the shop with the really good lemon pie.

And our fellow teachers have taken us in hand. One of the first nights, Gregory, the academic director, sent word he wanted to meet us. He was a bit in his cups when we arrived, but kindly and welcoming. He explained the splatters of blood on his shirt with an involved story about a chicken that got caught in a closing door and subsequently needed comforting.

“Where is that chicken?” he asked Fidel, the director of the school and the owner of the pub we were in.

“In the toilet,” said Fidel. I had to hope he meant the bathroom, and in fact, a little later on, Rie discovered there was a live chicken perched on a red bucket in there. Before long, Fidel brought it out to the bar and they all gave it a cuddle.

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Then he made us Pisco sours, and Gregory and Tom, another teacher, insisted we carry them to the roof of their lodgings a few doors down. It was a great place, with a view over the rooftops to the cathedral on the square. In the other direction, you could see the lights of the houses climbing up the hill to the west. Gregory pointed out the South African flag he flew from one corner of the roof, the internet router that hung from a telephone pole inside a plastic bucket to protect it from the rain, the few stalks of corn he has sprouted in a pile of clay apparently intended for repairing the house.

A few days later, they took us off on a strenuous but wonderful hike, delivering bits of teacher-to-teacher advice and local knowledge along the way. (“Only eat the cebiche in the market on Wednesdays—that’s when the fresh fish comes in.”) Next up is the trek to Huancas, which Gregory keeps recommending, though in his South African accent it comes out more like “Wankers.”

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(MK)

We met more of the teachers at a staff meeting last night, including the two kind souls who will teach us Spanish, and this morning we went by the school to pick up our books. The secretary’s desk and the bookcases that normally lined the walls were all pushed into the middle of the room and the computer screen had a cloth draped over it to protect it from the dust. A radio was playing and a painter was rolling blue paint on the walls. In the midst of all this, the secretary was registering two little girls for school, that is, until Fidel sent her out for glue to repair the teacher’s manuals he wanted to give Rie and me. The CD for my audio-based class is missing, but I’ve been assured it will be in hand by Monday.

A little later, in the copy shop/laundry service where I went to pick up our clothes, I found, next to piles of pantyhose and unidentifiable pieces of hardware, something I’ve been looking for for days:  a notebook! With that and a pen in hand, I’m as ready as I can possibly be to start classes on Monday.

Every day has some kind of mistake in it—Rie asked our landlady’s granddaughter where her birthday was, and I apologetically told a woman we met that unfortunately she didn’t speak Spanish very well. And every day there’s some kind of technological breakdown, whether it’s the electric shower head sending out sparks or the power going out entirely. But bit by bit we are becoming provisionally normalized, even coming close to feeling at home.

(KK)

Postcard from Limbo

Well, we made it to Peru, sort of. We were expecting the two-day overland trip from Vilcabamba, Ecuador to Chachapoyas, Peru to be our transportation boot camp—rough roads, uncertain vehicles—but the first leg went like clockwork. The windows of the bus from Vilcabamba rattled and the whole thing jounced, and the road was narrow, steep, winding and unpaved. But the surface was dry, and though we passed several recent rockslides and drove through a number of streams, nothing untoward happened.

In fact, what we’d been told would be a seven-hour trip to Zumba took just five and a half hours. And instead of waiting there for the ranchera—an open-sided truck fitted with padded wooden benches—we went in with some other travelers and hired a yellow pickup truck taxi to take us on to the Ecuador/Peru border at La Balsa, a river crossing between high green hills.

We should have known things were going too well. No sooner did we get our Ecuadorian exit stamps from the little building on one side of the river and step onto the short but grandly named International Bridge than a young man with a German accent stopped us. He was sitting in front of a glass-enclosed shrine on the Ecuadorian end of the bridge, in the shade from the corrugated metal roof, luggage all around him.

“There’s nobody on the Peruvian side,” he said, smiling ruefully. “The border agent took the key and went off somewhere. Nobody knows when he’s coming back. Maybe tomorrow.”

He and his girlfriend had been traveling in Peru. Now they wanted to enter Ecuador but couldn’t without getting their Peruvian exit stamps. And we couldn’t legally enter Peru without entry stamps. On our way to the border that day, we had been stopped at a checkpoint in Ecuador, and though we had no problems, the frown on the face of the young man in camouflage there reminded us that we don’t want to be traveling around without our papers in order.

“So you’re still in Peru and we’re in no man’s land,” I said. I looked at the short, concrete bridge, wondering if we would end up spending the night there. At least there was shade at the shrine. Or maybe we could re-enter Ecuador, but there didn’t seem to be much point. Yes there was someone at their border post, but beyond the barrier we had just crossed, there was nothing but a small group of shacks.

The three travelers we’d shared the cab with—Jacob from Utah, Natalie and Fannie from France—joined us and we filled them in. The German man’s girlfriend walked over from the Peruvian side. A good-humored, take-action sort fluent in English, German and Spanish, she was a handy person to encounter just then, and she gave us all an account of the phone calls she’d been making. She’d already done everything any of us could think of and more besides—she’d asked around to see when the border agent might be back (no one knew). She’d called embassies. She’d checked whether in such a situation you can legally continue on to the next town of any size. There was nothing for it, she reported, but to sit tight and wait for the border agent.

But eventually we realized there was nothing to stop us from simply walking around the wooden barrier on the Peruvian end of the bridge and getting something to eat at the little restaurant we could see there. It was right next to the brown wooden customs building—if the agent showed up, we figured, we would surely see him. The German pair stayed where they were, but, driven by hunger and heat, the rest of us unceremoniously entered Peru.

The restaurant was a little blue-painted cinderblock place with red tablecloths and green chairs, steamy despite being open on two sides, and the music was at high volume. I ate a plate of rice and fish, then the five of us pushed two tables together and got a game of rummy going. A burly Peruvian man came over and, speaking so grandly none of us fully understood him, shared with us his conviction that music was the universal language and knew no borders. Out of respect for our country, he said, he had asked the man who ran the restaurant to put a special CD on the sound system. Somewhat puzzlingly, given the fact that we were collectively from France and the U.S., the special CD turned out to be Rod Stewart.

We sweated and played cards and an hour went by. Another German traveler showed up, this one a young man who was also trying to get to Ecuador. Jacob went off and came back with the news that there was a hostel next door. It wouldn’t be open for another half hour, but we decided we should form a line outside the door before the ranchera from Zumba arrived and poured another couple dozen people into our little state of limbo.

So we sat on a concrete ledge in front of the tienda on the first floor of the locked-up hostel.

And we sat.

And we sat.

Two hours went by, and though the tienda owner was smiling and apologetic, the key was still nowhere to be seen.

It wasn’t like there was nothing to do. We watched chickens peck at the corn the tienda owner scattered for them. We watched two little girls race their bikes up the dirt road. Rie and I took turns wandering back across the bridge to the Ecuadorian barrier or a hundred yards or so along the road on the Peruvian side, not sure quite how far you could go in a country you weren’t legally in. As if to taunt us, horses or donkeys would occasionally canter loose across the bridge. (“Where’s your exit stamp?” Jacob called cheerfully to one headed for Ecuador.) Pickup trucks, white collective taxis and moto-rickshaws brought more travelers to the Peruvian side. Most sat down outside the customs building. Others wandered. Eventually, most of the Peruvians dispersed again.

But still we sat on our ledge, the hot afternoon going on and on. Around 5:00, there was a stir: the key had arrived! “One more minute,” said the tienda owner. We saw people go in the building with sheets and towels. This looked promising. Another half hour went by. Three-quarters of an hour.

“A Peruvian minute,” said Jacob.

By 6:30 or so, we were in, trundling up four flights of stairs to small, dim, smelly rooms for which we were by then thoroughly grateful. Rie’s and mine had one small bed and a bathroom with no door, toilet seat or hot water. But it got cool as night came, and it had a stunning view of the stars over the Ecuadorian mountains. And we slept, more or less, and are now ready for whatever today might bring. A border agent would be a nice start. (KK)