The Adventure continues ...
The journey that began so early Monday morning has come to a momentary pause, giving me time on this Tuesday to stop, contemplate, and electronically scribble a few thoughts for those who are interested and for web posterity. I hope to get some pictures up soon to compliment my ever-so-inadequate descriptions.
I awoke as the plane prepared to land in San Salvador with waves crashing on the beach and what appeared to be perpetually immanent rain, and prepared to spend the next six hours in the airport, which is a dinky little excuse for an international airport: it appeared that TACA and American Airlines was keeping the place up for the most part. I was able to get a decent breakfast of coffee (oh the glory of it!) and pupusas (Wee Sister, you have to try to fix these up sometime) and prepared for my next flight.
Even in this small Central American airport, I began to feel the apparent contradictions of Latin culture bombarding my senses. Though there were a million bottles of rum, cigarettes, eua de cologne, and cheap Salvadorian trinkets all for sale duty-free, yet not a bottle of toothpaste to be bought anywhere (a señorita, a bit bewildered when I asked her, said I would need to find a druggist and of course there would not be a druggist in an airport!). The bookstores sold pulp fiction right next to major works of Liberation Theology (Sobrino, Romero, Segundo, Gutiérrez, and others) right next to lavish cookbooks bought more for the airbrushed pictures of the finished meal rather than for their instructions. So, chuckling a bit, I sat down and enjoyed my reading lackadaisically, ruminating on the infinitely aesthetic rhetoric of historically enacted peace inherent in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, on how much my stupid pride had been hurt by the abysmal state of my Spanish, and how much I desperately needed a shower. And so the rain fell in torrents, accompanied by the soundtrack of glitzy renditions of 1990s praise songs sung in English coming over the loudspeakers, and I proceeded to board my flight to Lima at long last.
Coming into to Lima went smoothly (I have to idea why everyone around started throwing up their arms and shouting "¡Gloria a Dios! ¡Aleluia!" when we landed safely), and I arrived at my quite adequate hostel where I rejoiced in sweet slumber, hot showers, and complementary breakfast. Today, walking the streets of Lima, I am reminded of sights and smells that once again bombard my senses and bring me back into my former Peruvian life.
Lima is a city of stark contrasts which consistently make me pause and cock my head. On the one hand the wealthy live in campy opulence. I am confronted by the usual Spanish name like Juan, but also with the occasional Indian name like Xuxa (the señorita who sold me my bus ticket today, pronounced "Shooshah"), or an attempted creation of an English-sounding name like Waldir. This morning I walked into Wong's, a grocery store which in attempting to imitate a North American supermarket goes far beyond with an internal courtyard with a fountain, a grand piano with its paid ivory tickler (something akin to Nordstrom’s in the US) and a mosaic of the "Virgin with Child" complete with votive candles. Just a few miles over, however, the poor struggle to buy rice of such poor quality that they have to pick out by hand the grains of white and gray sand mixed with the rice. The street book vendors regularly carry Umberto Eco's latest novel or philosophical work, Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, C. S. Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism, or Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (just a sample of what I found this morning), yet at prices that few can buy (Perú has an unemployment rate of 60%) or even read (given its horrendous rate of illiteracy). This is just a smattering of what I have found just today, and reflects my experience in times previous.
And indeed, many limeños are living testimonies to these extremes. Coming from the airport, my taxi driver himself used to be a Human Resources manager but, as he says, "times are difficult," and he is now among the growing number of professionals and laborers competing for the few jobs out there. Lima's gloomy cloud cover, cold humidity, and dingy industrial architecture reflect the desperation sometimes expressed and often felt here in this expansive and burgeoning metropolis.
It is for sinners like these that the Son of God became a man like us and was named Jesus. It is for sinners like these that our Lord Jesus Christ shed his blood. It is for offenders like these that he rose again and ascended to his Father. He came to those in spiritual darkness, those in the shadow of death, those under not only the oppression of the strong and wealthy but those oppressed by sin, Satan, and the wrath of the living God. And it is by his coming that we, whether Peruvian, Argentinean, or American, have been granted in him his Life, his Light, and his Righteousness through faith in him.
It is in the name of this Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior that I continue in the Adventure to which he has called me. The details are indeed hazy at this point and my Type A personality grates against this. But having come by his call and glorying only in his death and resurrection, I pray that he may glorify his Father in, through, and even despite me here during my short week here in Perú and afterwards in Argentina. May he with his Father and the Holy Spirit be praised and honored forever and ever!