Friday, March 23, 2012

South American Salsa: Precious Moments

Sand spits in my face as we race up the dune, and I press my lips together to avoid an open mouthed laugh. We crest the dune and the wheels spin over thin air for a moment before diving down the vertical slope. My stomach drops delightfully as we hit the end of the slope and take sharp right, tires throwing clouds of moist sand. A few minutes later, we come to a stop at the top of dune and our driver does a quick photo shoot before untying the sand boards from the frame of the buggy. Steph, Chelsie and I each take a turn whizzing down the dune.

And that was just the first afternoon at Las Dunas Resort in Ica, a 4 hour bus ride south of Lima. Over our two and a half days there, we managed to fit in pool time, horseback riding through the dunes, a visit to the unique Islas Ballestas (home of sea lions, pelicans, seagulls and penguins), a 2 hour soccer game (my bruises are still healing), and a karaoke night. The weekend was a part of our package price for the semester, and it was a blast!

Since we returned from Ica a couple weeks ago, life has been filled with class, homework, friends, and Spanish tutoring. A while back, I felt challenged to put more effort into my language study. My Spanish tutor, Zule, has been very good at working with me to get a deeper study on areas that I have problems in. This week, one assignment was to write an article in Spanish on a city I’ve lived in or visited. After I correct it, I’m hoping it will become my first Spanish blog post! I have also gone to a couple of our “conversation tables”—basically, people from my group get together with other UPC students and talk about life. Two days a week we talk in Spanish and the other two in English. Although I haven’t been a regular, I have enjoyed the hours spent there in the last couple weeks.

I’ve also had the chance to meet some new friends. Last Saturday, I was invited to a private beach by the daughter of one of my host mom’s friends. It was a nice chance to speak Spanish for an extended period of time and relax away from crowded Lima. I had the opportunity to get to know my new friends Karla, Andre, and Renzo. We strolled through a well-known, upper-end shopping center called Asia on the way back to Lima- I even got serenaded by Mariachi band from Mexico!

Today, I was invited to visit the mother and godfather of my Peruvian friend, Alicia, who I met 6 or 7 years ago working at Bethany Home. I randomly ran into Alicia in Walmart a couple weeks before I came to Peru and talking with her relieved some stress about coming to a new country. Today I was able to deliver some vitamins to her mother, share a delicious lunch, and chat with Alicia and husband over Skype. It was fun to be with her family and talking to her, even though we are thousands of miles apart. Through listening and participating in their conversation, I learned another perspective on some of the politics and recent history of Peru that was a little different than what I have heard in several of my classes, which has left me with some things to process.

With just five and half weeks left in Peru, I’m feeling both excited to return to the States and surprised at how fast these last few months have flown by. With my remaining time here quickly filling with work and fun, I am grateful for the opportunities, lessons, and friends that I’ve made and am expecting many more precious moments in Peru J.

Pool area at Las Dunas Resort- so very refreshing after
a hot day in the desert!
Hanging with the dune buggy :)








We survived!!!
Speeding over the dunes! Look out below!!!
Las Islas Ballestas- home to all sorts
of intersting sea creatures!
Penguins on las Islas Ballestas! No icebergs here!
Horseback riding in the dunes! It's been
awhile, but I loved it!

Dr. Aviles' birthday dinner back in Lima. We went to this
yummy Thai place with a really cool atmosphere. MMM!!!

Relaxing at the beach south of Asia with my new friends!

Draping tree flowers at the resort

More pretty tree flowers- God takes my breath away sometimes :)

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

South American Salsa: Single Scream

The other night, I had a hard time falling asleep. It was the scream that kept me awake. I couldn’t drown it out, no matter how high I turned up my Ipod. Just thinking about it gives me shivers. Imaginary, but powerful, it echoed in my inner being. The single scream of thousands women and girl subjected to rape and sexual abuse as a result of political violence in Latin America. Deep, gut-wrenching, raw, alone- that is how it sounds.

In my Indigenous Politics class, we have been studying a period of political violence in Guatemala that lasted from the sixties into the mid-nineties. Basic summary: several guerrilla groups with socialist leanings rise up against a dynasty of military dictators. Indigenous groups, which make up a signifigant proportion of Guatemalan population and have been historically marginalized and deeply impoverished, tend to side with the guerrillas, whose communal ownership doctrine closely parallels deeply-rooted traditional beliefs. The Guatemalan government begins a scorched-earth campaign in the late ‘70s and into the early ‘90s, attacking not only guerrillas, but anyone suspected of aiding them. In their practice, that meant just about anyone who lived in the mountains and had Mayan features. Torture, massacres, forced disappearances and forced relocation were among a few of their favorite tactics for destroying the enemy and protecting themselves. The extent of the violence spurred the Truth Clarification Commission (CEH), published 3 years after the official end of the war in 1996, classified incidents as genocide. In recent years, members of the military involved in the scorched-earth campaign are beginning to be held accountable by the justice system for their war crimes.
Enter women. I’ve just scraped the tip of the iceberg in reading about rape in war-- specifically, a few articles about rape in recent conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Guatemala, and Peru, and a couple books that included victims’ testimonies of rape as a part of war strategy in Darfur conflict and other civil wars in East Africa.  Based on common themes in my reading, this is a summary of what I understand: The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH), the Red Cross and the U.N. recognize rape in war as a form of torture and classify it as a crime against humanity (Violacion, 263). In many ethnically based conflicts, women are seen as dangerous because of their reproductive capacity (Franco, 29). Thus, being the bearers of the enemy, ethnic cleansing practices often include the rape, torture, and execution of pregnant women, forced abortion and forced impregnation, not to mention gang rape and a host of other atrocities.

All of these tactics were systematically employed by the Guatemalan military and paramilitary groups, who were responsible for 93% of the humans’ rights abuses during the conflict (Bird, 27). The Peruvian military also used many forms of rape as torture in Peru’s conflict with the Sendero Luminoso in the 1980s. For example, many women, some suspected to be associated with the Sendero Luminoso and others who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, were gang raped by the military according to rank and then shot (Franco, 28). The eye-witness accounts and victim’s testimonies that I’ve read are gruesome, and as I’d like to keep this PG-13, I won’t go into detail. It is also worth mentioning that rape is just one form of torture employed by these militaries. Evidence found by truth commissions in both countries indicated massive humans’ right abuses in several different categories.
As I read, the obvious question is: How did we get to this? How can one human being do this to another?
I have several beginning thoughts on this, the first of which is that “ideas have consequences.” I’m borrowing this principle from “Discipling Nations,” a book on holistic, sustainable community development by Darrow Miller. Basically the theory goes like this: Our ideas or worldview leads to our beliefs. Our beliefs lead to actions. Our actions have consequences, good or bad. So our ideas matter. In fact, they are vitally important.  

When I was a kid, there was a popular saying that went: “Believe in something or you will fall for anything.” However well-intentioned, this statement is destructively misleading. What you believe produces consequences in your life and in others’ lives. Unfortunately, at both a personal and international level, we often look no deeper than the consequences or the actions because the closer to the root we get, the stickier and more uncomfortable the issue becomes. That, however, is a whole soap box in itself, so let’s get back to the point.
What collective ideas could have caused practices like those in Guatemala and Peru? The idea that another race is subhuman, for one. This idea has some responsibility for several major consequences in Latin America and other parts of the world, like ethnically based social and political inequality, genocide during the Guatemalan civil war, etc.

 How about this one: “look out for number one.” At a personal level, this idea is responsible for destroyed relationships, lack of integrity, greed, and compromise. At a national level, it takes on names like corruption, ethnocentrism, and genocide. In Guatemala , it looked like a “scorched-earth” policy that protected only the military and left tens of thousands of innocents dead.
My second thought is that cruelty doesn’t develop overnight. I’ve never heard a kid say, “I want to be a torturer and rapist when I grow up.” But given a certain environment, a few too many compromises, some wrong ideas, and a sense of impunity, perhaps undergoing abuse themselves, a process of desensitization can occur, leaving disastrous results in its wake. Those who participated in ethnic cleansing and torture through rape in Peru and Guatemala made a series of choices and compromises, granted sometimes out of fear for their own lives and those of their families, which built the character and capacity for cruelty.

And one more thought for now- personal is so deeply connected to collective. There has to be me before there is we. Societies, families, nations are made up of individuals- individual ideas, individual compromises, a combination of individual actions. As much as it would be nice to think that what I do (which is a consequence of my ideas) only affects me, that is not reality. When combined, what I think and what you think can break, create, destroy or build people, relationships, cultures, and nations.
So, to sum up:
-I’ve never been a fan of Machiavelli, and what reading I have done has convinced me that the end does not justify the means. Torture should never be used as a widespread, systematic form of punishment or information gathering, even in times of war. 
-Ideas have consequences, so what I (and we) believe matters.
-Twisted character is a process, not an event.
-Individual action (or lack of action) creates a ripple effect that has a way bigger impact than imagined at the beginning.

Now, as the scream of victims fades a bit, a different tune echoes in my heart, sending chills down my back:
“Oh, be careful, little mind, what you think.”



Sources:

Bird, Annie."Genocidal General Wins Presidential Elections in Guatemala." Upside Down World. 7 Nov. 2011.

Franco, Jean. "Rape: A Weapon of War." Social Text, Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer 2007. Duke University Press.

Miller, Darrow L. and Stan Guthrie. Discipling Nations: The Power of Truth to Transform Cultures. YWAM Publishing: 2001.

"ViolaciĆ³n Sexual Contra la Mujer." The Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Lima, Peru. 19 Mar 2002.