Of summer

This might be the shortest summer yet. Peru was amazing, but it wrecked my entire sense of time. Usually by the time we hit August there's something inside telling you summer is almost over, some little time gague that has been slowly filling up since June. Peru shattered the said time gague, into which late mornings and sunny afternoons have traditionally slid so easily. But two weeks in Peru was two weeks of winter and clouds. It's tricky. The annual fireworks, too, are always a hallmark of the beginning of the end for summer, but for me, the fourth of July passed quickly and largely unnoticed in a socialist country. My sense of time, never particularily good, has been entirely debunked. I want my summer back.

Hey There Delilah

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbJtYqBYCV8

The past few days I've had a fragment of a song stuck in my head, and no idea where it was from. I went through a couple of my newer CDs today, trying to find it, but couldn't. Finally I googled the only phrase I remembered-- "two more years and you'll be done with school"-- and after finding and scrolling through the full lyrics, I remembered how I'd heard the song.

It'd been in Lima, driving back from a long day at a private school where we'd washed, scrubbed, and painted until we felt sick and light-headed from the gas-based paints and the turpentine they'd given us to get the stray green drops off the concrete floor. We were exhausted and, realizing we were still only halfway through the trip, it was hard not to long for home.

The phrase "a thousand miles away" resonated as we drove over dusty roads in a rickety old bus, looking through dirty windows at dirty dogs and a dirty gray sky that matched the flat land rising up to meet it in the distance. Children who would never be without lice waved and ran alongside the bus as we bounced by, thirty-six white kids in face paint and mime costumes whose hearts mourned with the acoustic guitar for the ones we'd left behind. Paul. Of course it'd hurt to say goodbye to him, but the feeling of unreality and excitement for the adventure ahead had temporarily softened the sense of loss, even as we counted the days I'd be in Peru.

Six days in the dust, speaking nothing but Spanish for eight hours out of every twenty-four, though, had burned through the illusion. I wanted home. I wanted trees and a real sky. The night before I'd left, Paul and I had walked the neighborhood until eleven, tilting our heads up often to admire the brightness of the stars. I'd marveled that in just a few days, I'd be seeing the same lights from an entirely different continent, with people I'd never met who spoke a language I'd only heard in school. Would I feel any different? Such romantic questions were a joke, I thought as the bus jostled on. There were no stars in Lima. I'd planned to walk outside each night to talk with them for a minute or two, whispering goodnight to Paul.

Ha. A few days into the trip I realized that my words would never reach the stars, that the clouds of dust hovering in the night sky had obscured their light for years, and weren't about to move now. Nothing here was the same, and it would be a long time before I'd see the moon again, especially from a square of clean sidewalk, surrounded by the strong, protective arms I loved so much.

"That song makes me miss my boyfriend," Noelle sniffed as we stumbled off the bus and started for our cabin, still dizzy and half-painted. "You too?"

"Yeah, I miss him." Dang, I missed him.

"Hey there Paul Miller, what's it like back where I come from? You're a thousand miles away but boy tonight you look so handsome, yes you do...."

¡De Peru!

I´m here! So sorry, guys. Internet costs and, to be quite honest, the few minutes that I have convinced myself to buy have been mostly devoted to emails to a certain....someone.
There´s a lot to say and no time at all, so I´ve been drafting posts in a notebook on bus rides to and from work sites. This one was written yesterday, so here goes.

Yesterday was probably one of the best days of my life. We went to one of the poor villages to do childcare/laundry/hairwashing/drama. And it was amazing. The drive there was around forty-five minutes, and I was cracking up the whole time. Everything is exactly like Sr. told us back in Spanish II. I saw a moto (small car used for transporting very large numbers of people) with a picture of the gorgeous Che Guevara (ha, Mom!), a sign advertising clean restrooms with a picture of a duck sitting on a toilet with a roll of TP that said ¨Jesus loves you¨ on it in Spanish. Also funny was a wall with ¨no pintar¨(the Spanish equivalent of ¨no painting¨) on it, followed by a cynical ¨jejeje¨(our ¨hahaha¨). Some things are the same in every culture.

When we got to the village, I immediatley volunteered to help with the children, along with six or seven others from our group. They led us into a tiny room crowded with a few cribs and twenty to thirty young children (probably between 1 and 5). There were a few women in teh room also, and although everyone was excited adn happy to see each other, it quickly became apparent that no one had any idea what to do next. Tehy didn´t speak English, we didn´t speak Spanish. The kids stared at us, waiting. This was my chance! I asked the lady to help me get the kids to sit down,a dn then asked them (everything in Spanish, of course) if they wanted to sing. They said they did, adn we quickly began to chant Ï´ve got the joy joy joy joy¨song we´d learned in language training as loudly as we could. The kids loved it. After that, I asked if we could go outside, and we split into groups to play duck duck goose (only we made it pero y gato, as no one could think of the word for ¨goose¨in Span), jump rope, and be taught new Spanish games by the kids.

It was so much fun. Most of the kids´ parents work during hte day, adn you could tell they were thrilled to have new people to talk to ad play with. They were so cute. I knew there was no way they´d be able to correctly say (and definitely not remember) my actual name, so I introduced myself with the name I´ve used in Spanish class all year-- Miriam. They didn´t seem too suspicious, and you coudl tell they were relieved to hear a name familiar to them. Very familiar, actually. I happened to be standing with two little girls. and asked them what theier names were. The second one said her name was Miriam. ¨¿Tu tambien?¨I asked. (you, too?). She got the sweetest shy smile on her face, adn she and her friend giggled over the coincidence for a long time.

I must not forget to mention that I have found, as one of my roommates put it, ¨a new man.¨That is, I met Raul. He is ten years old, and although of course nowhere near as gorgeous as Paul and probably not my type anyway, I have to say he was pretty cute. I´d noticed him following me at a distance, his friends laughing as they looked at him and then at me, then poked him before bursting into laughter again. Finally I had to ask them what was up.
¨¿Que es tan comico aqui?¨I demanded playfully. (What´s so funny here?)
¨Talk to her,¨I could hear them whispering to him in Spanish as they pushed him forward. Raulito himself wouldn´t look at me, but kept smiling as they shoved him closer.
¨Do it!¨They urged.
Finally he looked up, shyly.
¨¿De donde eres?¨He whispered, before looking quickly back down at the ground.
I told him. His friends nudged him again.
¨¿Cuantos anos tienes?¨ I almost busted out laughing.
¨Demasido anos para ti¨I wanted to say, but refrained.