Carta

Carta is the spanish word for letter, but it is also used as ´card´as in playing cards. We have ¨played¨ a few cartas on this trip so far. I´ll get back to the cartas in a second...

We left Lima yesterday morning to head south. Our next destination, Arequipa. The medical school here is smaller, everything in Arequipa is smaller, hasta los taxis, y la gente so we expect the work to be a little less stressful--we´ll see tomorrow.

Our trip out of Lima, the gray city, consisted in a 5hr bus ride south along the coast. The poverty we drove through was horrendous. I´m no stranger to it, but I don´t know if it was the endless gray I´ve lived under for the past ten days or what, but this poverty was hard to see. I couldn´t see the hope in any of the shanty towns we passed. Maybe the difference is that I didn´t see the people, no faces,only my imagination to draw a miserable pictureof life in these pueblos.

We finally reached Ica where we took a taxi out to this little oasis five miles fromtown where the most incredible sand dunes rose high, high above the gloom of the coast. There, we were greeted with smiles, the people were happy and suddenly I found myself enjoying a small piece of paradise. We rented some sandboards for $3 dollars and spent the afternoon carving up these enormous slopes until the sun had well set and the dessert cold was blowing in. It wasn´t hard to imagine while walking up these dunes that I was in the Nimibian dessert in Africa or well, the Peruvian dessert in Peru.

We boarded another bus at 8pm to head down to Arequipa where we arrived at 8am. Just enough time to take a taxi to church for a little Sunday worship. Here is where we pulled out another ´carta.´ We spent a couple hrs one afternoon in Lima passing out surveys in a hospital as part of a project ofsome local investigators in Lima. We completed the same amount of surveys as other researches did in twice the time it took us. We chalked it up to the international card. I also credit it to my aptitude to just walk into anywhere when I am in a foreign country. That´s how I ended up in the office of the director of health services for Andhra Pradesh when I was in India. OK, other cards played, the gringo card-no understand spanish-Rochester card, people oddly know more about the school here than I did before I came. Now in Arequipa, it was time to play the ´mormon´card. A friend inLima has a boyfriend, who´s family lives in Arequipa. The mom was baptized four years ago and hethought she would love to meet us. So we went to her house for lunch and after being in the home for five minutes, they refused to let us find a hotel or hostel. The family is so, so nice. And the house is great. I took a hot shower with pressure and all for the first time today since I left DC. We will be here in Arequipa until our work is done. Probably three or four days.