 Dusty:Starlight:Culture
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Scars and Genes
2005-09-19 8:25 p.m. Odd title, I know. Is scarring genetic? Maybe some. That would make these arbitrary and otherwise unrelated ideas make sense, even outside of my head. Would make a great first novel title! Scars first - and I could only be talking about Peru. It's haunting me, from my five Peruvian students (in three separate classes; where were they last year when I needed info before the trip? Oddly fitting somehow. What's with the influx of Peruvians in my classes?) to random movies I keep catching on cable to the rubber band I found today in the library that said "Produce of Peru" on it. The first scars I keep thinking about are the literal ones: the welts left on Steve's leg from those burrowing jungle mites are now only starting to fade. I'm afraid they're with him for life, just like the little West African bug bites that forever left their marks on my neck. Steve's will fade over time, like mine did, but our traveling to Peru has altered his body forever. As for me: I had a bit of a dizzy spell again this weekend, which made me think instantly of that odd post-fever equilibrium problem I had been having in Peru, which also followed me home. It may or may not have been related to the Dengue I may or may not have had, according to my inconclusive blood test. Either way, the dizzies went away after a week or so, and I'm fine and dandy, Dr. M. swears. But that out of balance, honey-is-the-floor-moving feeling came back for a minute, making me wonder. Second thought: coulda been the booze. You just can't trust Thomas to make you drinks, me thinks. Someone asked me yesterday "how I do it", regarding staying in good shape. "Go to a third world country for 1-2 months every summer," I said. "Between the odd food, digestive issues and the...interesting transportation systems, you're bound to lose a few pounds." She laughed, but I wasn't really kidding. The trade off, though, to a pretty fit body are those scars - that harshness you put your self through, that assault on your poor, sheltered immune system. It must be a little hard for your body to defend itself against diseases that have been eradicated in your country of residence since 1919. So what might be living in our liver, waiting for just the right moment to shine? Who knows! Isn't that fun? It's funny, I guess, and that's the only way to look at it. Just keep drinking that green tea and eating that oatmeal. It was hard, psychologically as well, to be in Peru when we were. I've already said - repeatedly, I'm sure - that many Peruvians we encountered seemed a bit...moody. Understandably so; one woman we became quite friendly with over the few days we were in Pisac and Urubamba complained of her government's willingness to sell off resources local people are desperately in need of. Money now, good. Sustainable development...well, what is that, anyway? Who cares! And the biggest perpetrator, I'm ashamed to say, is our government. Take the Camisea Gas field, for example. It's a vast swath of Amazon rain forest in Southern Peru that has remained untouched by outsiders. The Smithsonian institute calls it "an intact wilderness with abundant biodiversity" - a true virgin rainforest. Because of its remote and nearly impassable location, it's also been able to shelter (and hide) a few thousand indigenous people who choose to remain isolated from the rest of the world. But this could only last so long, especially since engineers discovered 13 trillion cubic feet of gas under the jungle floor. The Peruvian government recently sold this land off to American and Argentine companies after a few decades of failed negotiations. And what are the companies - one of which is our good old friend Haliburton - up to? Total destruction. Engineers, who of course need to mow down trees and build a road, are piped in weekly. They employ the cheap labor of the locals to survey, chainsaw, and bulldoze acres a day to reach the gas and turn their profit. The environmental group Amazon Alliance reports that lawyers helicoptered into a remote village in the area recently attempted to persuade village elders to sign right-of-way documents (for forest clearing and building roads) by offering $3,000 and helicopter rides into town (!). The elders refused, but the gas companies' lawyers are pushing the Peruvian government, who will most likely cave. There are a spate of regulations and protections in place, but if Lima can't get its drinking water to a potable state and continues to place its landfills on the Pacific shoreline, I highly doubt the country will get it together enough in time to save this jungle. Feeling the Peruvian's frustration at their administration's failures, particularly in times of crisis, wasn't quite unfamiliar when we were in-country. But the feeling was re-invigorated and became quite visceral, ten-fold, when we came home in just enough time to watch the Hurricane Katrina disaster unfold. I know the president was on TV the other night talking about it, but I don't know what he said, and frankly, I don't care. I'm not going to applaud someone for doing something three weeks too late. I hope at least he apologized profusely, saying "I'm a spoiled, entitled little man who gave my unqualified football buddies swank jobs. Now people are dead because of my errors and oversights; it's all my fault. Please put me and my buddies in jail for treason and have John McCain carry out the rest of my term. Thank you and God Bless America." But I don't think that's how it went down. Poor, poor Peruvians are used to such debacles - enough so that several of them talked to us about it openly once we had been out with them enough times to discuss something heady like politics. And speaking of hauntings and scars - I saw this the other day. I laughed, and laughed, and laughed. I also am going to be obnoxious and say I called it: Fujimori will run for president again. Peru will re-elect Fujimori, WHILE he's in exile in Japan. They will drop all drug and embezzling charges against him, and celebrate his return as if he'd been off to war, defending the country - not hiding, claiming asylum thousands of miles away for fear of prosecution. Well done, Alberto! Now that's the Peru I know and love. It feels like a painful scar that just won't go away, these bad decisions that people who have been metaphorically beaten into submission make. I see odd parallels among Peruvians regarding their administration to the way Americans regard ours: a strong division down the middle, and a very polarized state. In Peru, the North blames the South, and the Europeans blame the Indians (and vice versa). Here, the coasts blame the middle, the middle blames the coasts, the liberals blame the conservatives, etc. Nothing gets solved there, nothing gets solved here. Just a bunch of fighting and silly, angry men competing for whose is bigger. Ack. So onto genes: I saw much of my extended family this weekend at my Uncle's birthday party, and spent lots o' time with my siblings and my mom. Since I'm watching the movie Gattaca with a few of my classes, I can't help but think about gene configuration and random selection and all that - and it's sort of surreal to be in that state and looking around at faces that represent the equations in your head. The family sort of became walking models for what I'd been thinking about and what Gattaca - and Huxley's Brave New World (the book I'm reading with the class that is watching the film), for that matter - raise about the nature of genes and the social contexts we place them in. But thinking about Peru makes me soooo tired still, and Globe Trekker is on in five minutes. Besides, I need me a juice pop. Genes galore tomorrow, I promise. xoxox
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