Ted, Ted, Ted

Every few years a missionary family is expected to come “home” to the US, for an extended visit called a furlough. The immediate point is to promote the mission project to the congregations whose donations support the missionary. The family also sees family, gets medical checkups with doctors who are more trusted than those available in the “field,” and so on.

At a deeper level, the furlough has the function of defining and maintaining the boundaries within which a missionary and his family are expected to “go native” under the mission model in use. There is a range of choices in this. Some mission projects see their missionaries as more or less permanent parts of the lands they live in. They move in for good, adopt the local dress and language in their homes; if they have children while doing this they sometimes give them names from the adopted culture. Their furloughs tend to be far apart, sometimes skipped altogether. Many of the grown children end up missionaries themselves, and sometimes they grow up to identify themselves as part of the country where they live. People who do it this way tend to be from the more fervid wings of old-line Protestant denominations, like the Methodists, some of which got their start in missionary work in the first decades of the 20^th century. The model was not so popular with the new wave of evangelical missionaries after the second World War.

The wholesale emigrant model includes a similar degree of lifelong commitment to the project, and also the unusually high religious fervor, but the emigrants are not as interested in assimilation. In Central America we ran into occasional communities of Mennonites and Quakers who looked and behaved, as far as one could tell, exactly like their counterparts in rural Pennsylvania or Iowa. They wore the gingham dresses and bib overalls, spoke with European accents, and raised chickens or cattle pretty much as their ancestors had in the old country. They were present in foreign lands for religious reasons, but you couldn’t really call them missionaries. But like the more mainstream missionaries, their relationships with the people around them tended to eventually adapt to the familiar patron-client pattern that was so deeply rooted in Latin American economies since the colonial period.

There are lots of variations on this. One school that we went to in Costa Rica was run by an elderly Quaker couple named Bob and Marian Baker, who had moved to Costa Rica during the Vietnam war because, without an army, it seemed like a good place for pacifists. They were part of a community of maybe a few hundred Quaker families that had made the move for similar reasons. The Quakers had quickly become taken up a slot in the local economy as small farmers and traders. They kept speaking English, and sent their kids to college in the US, and in their social lives seemed to mix mostly with Americans and Europeans, but they had Costa Rican passports and didn’t intend to go back to the States. They lived in ordinary middle-class conditions, if there is such a thing, and not on common farms like the Mennonites.

Even the Mennonites had some variety. I had a friend in junior high school with the resonant name Ransford Heatwole, from a Virginia Mennonite family that had broken with the hyper-traditionalists and taken up missionary work on a model similar to the one my Dad was practicing. Their ways still placed them on the more conservative fringe of the missionaries we knew – for girls, dresses only; for men, those Abraham Lincoln beards – but their lives looked pretty much like ours otherwise.

After the war, the US pastor or lay person called to missionary service for a few years became the norm. Even among career missionaries like my Dad, who expected to spend their whole working lives in the “field,” there was little thought of integrating into the local society. Most of the people we knew assumed they would retire the way other preachers did, near their folks back home. My parents would occasionally poke fun at their own grandparents with jokes about never going back to the “old country,” but they never forgot where their center of gravity was.

We first visited the US in 1972. When you are a young child, the only place that’s real is the place where you are, and even one year is a long time to be anywhere. After four years in Lima, most of my knowledge about the US came from hearing my parents talking about it. They had not yet lost the habit of comparing and contrasting the way things were done locally to the way they were done in the US, almost always to the disadvantage of the local way. I remember being vaguely aware that there were wide streets and freeways without potholes in the US, and grandparents, and apples, peaches and evergreen trees.

Getting around Lima, for those without Land Rovers, was all about jumping on and asking questions later. The shortage of transportation was severe enough, and the job market thin enough, to drive many men to throw their own cars or vans into service as informal cabs and buses. They would stick a hand-lettered sign on their dashboard with the name of their ultimate destination, and take to a major street. They were always packed. Even during off hours, buses routinely sped along with people hanging off their steps, and sometimes some boys sat up on the roof, gripping the luggage rack.

For a slightly more civilized ride you could catch a “colectivo,” which was a sort of taxi that ran a regular route. This is mostly how we got around when my Dad was away with his Land Rover. The four of us stood on the sidewalk while my mother leaned into the window asking, in surprisingly good Spanish, where the car went on its way to the place named on the sign. We piled onto strangers’ laps and rode. Our favorite place to go was Parque de las Leyendas, a sort of combination zoo and theme park on the outskirts of town. We took a colectivo to an outdoor bus depot downtown, then got on a special bus to finish the trip. The park was near a collection of markets where knick-knacks for the tourist trade were sold wholesale, and tourist shops lined the boulevard that led to the park from the bus stop.

My closest peer among the Peruvian church members was Eduardo Ramos. He was about my age, with a younger sister named Raquel and an older brother and sister whose names I forget. The Ramoses were not new arrivals from the countryside, like most of their neighbors. Eduardo’s mother, Consuelo, was related to Chinese immigrants, which was not unusual. Chinese people had been settling in Peruvian cities since the 18^th century and had mixed pretty thoroughly with the rest of the population by the 1960s. Almost every family had a kid the others would call “Chino” or “China” for any feature slightly more Asian-looking than the rest of the family’s.

Eduardo and his family had been among the first occupants of one of the barriadas on the southern side of the city, the sand dune region. Their zone was named Emmaus at first, after the city in the story from Matthew, but in the patriotic fervor that took hold after the Velasco coup it was renamed Mariano Melgar, for a hero in the war on independence from Spain.

Being in the first wave of settlers gave the Ramoses a small edge over the later arrivals, and their house showed it because it was located in the first few blocks off the main road and large parts of it were built of brick instead of straw mats. Everyone seemed to put every spare cent they earned into their houses, putting up walls of red brick or cinder block as soon as they could, then replacing the sand floors and then the straw or zinc roofing with poured concrete. Crews of 20 or 30 men would put up a roof together by first building a thick forest of vertical poles inside the house to hold up the wet cement, then laying rectangular forms made of wired-together rebar across the top. They would build a yard-wide wooden ramp from the street in front of the house up to the roof level, with a switchback or two if needed, nailing scrap boards across it a step or so apart for traction. They would mix a giant batch of cement in the street, using the sand that was there for the taking. Then each man would fill a square bucket, about 12 inches on a side and two feel deep, hoist it on a shoulder and haul it up the ramp, ant-like, to dump it over the wood and rebar. After a few days of drying, the lumber supports would come out and there would be a new brick-and-cement bunker, lacking only water and electrical service to be a regular middle-class homestead.

The big political struggles, in fact, seemed to be over water and electricity. The highly organized character of the invasions spilled over into the struggle to get the authorities to deliver services to what were, despite their gritty reality and their dire need, still just illegal squatters’ settlements to the official world. “Invasores” would set up roadblocks with picket signs demanding a water pipe to their neighborhood, stage sit-ins at government offices, and so on. All the standard techniques of popular mobilization, either invented on the spot or adopted from India or the southern United States.

By 1969 or 70, these great masses of desperate people perched at the rim of the capital city had to be costing the local rulers some sleep. This was the time when revolutionaries elsewhere were preaching abut surrounding the cities from the countryside, and even though this particular surrounding was not instigated by any conscious method, a glance at a map would tell you it was a quite thorough surrounding. But I can’t imagine that there wasn’t someone elsewhere in government who recognized that having masses of poor people focused on such workaday development matters as water and electricity would inevitably divert their attention from the underlying, more or less permanent, and ever starker inequalities in power and wealth.

Someone must have learned something about the value of material concessions in gaining people’s acceptance of the larger economic and political status quo. That may be why the local ruling class allowed the Velasco group to throw out the feckless Belaunde and rule for a few years. Velasco’s achievements included a lot of symbolism, such as a rhetorical commitment to restore the native Quechua language as the country’s official language, but mainly he bought time for the class system in Peru, still almost as rigid and cumbersome as it had been under the viceroys, to adapt to the new conditions. After a few years, a group of more moderate generals got the nod to throw him out. They managed things for a few years and then turned it back over to Belaunde.

The neighborhood of San Gabriel had been renamed José Carlos Mariátegui, under the rule of the populist generals, in honor of Peru’s chief representative in the world communist conspiracy. Mariátegui, a Basque immigrant in the early 20^th century, had been a friend of Lenin’s and a founder of the Third International, and was the patron saint of what remained of the traditional left in Peru. I suppose the choice of a name associated with communist revolution was no more incongruous than one associated with Christian compassion.

To get into Mariátegui, you turned left off the Pan American highway at an unmarked place where people had formed a spontaneous market and bus depot off to the left side of the road as you drove south from Lima. Rickety old buses and vans dodged women carrying big plastic mesh bags full of vegetables. At lunch stands shaded by sheets of plastic held up on bamboo legs, women fried strips of meat or cooked big pots of stew over kerosene stoves. Workers on their way home would swing off the buses and sit down on rough benches under the plastic sheets for a bite.

You proceeded up the broad, dusty main street of the barriada, which led up a slight slope at right angles to the highway, more or less where the river would have been if there were any water to drain out of this valley. Half a mile to either side, a line of hills provided the boundaries of the barriada. Sidewalks were unknown; pedestrians, children and dogs shared the space with cars and trucks. Satellite lumber yards and brick and concrete supply places alternated with the dwellings. The houses on the main drag tended to be a little more finished than average, with a greater proportion of brick and concrete to straw mats. Anywhere you turned off, straw mats would begin to predominate again a few yards in. There were no commercial establishments, like bank branches, doctors’ offices or retail stores. The economy here, huge as it was by now, operated strictly on a cash basis

The main road went on for several miles, cutting into the low, rocky hills that backstopped the coastal dunes. It petered out eventually when the ratio of level ground to hillside dropped below some unstated profitable level. To get to our house, you went about a half mile into the barriada and turned right on a street that was called 15 de abril, in honor of a battle in the war of independence, I think. You followed this street straight up to where the gravel and flinty, pocket-sized rock, which could be shaped to some degree with pick and shovel, met a strip of wheelbarrow-sized granite rubble, which couldn’t. This was the very outer edge of urbanization, and this is where my dad had come into possession of a lot to build his dream house on.

A narrow two-lane paved road, built a few years before with money from John Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, ran the length of Peru’s coastal plain. It was called the Pan-American Highway, and in the barriadas to the south of the city it was the only paved road. It more or less bisected the expanse of dunes that had been become shantytowns, and it was the main street and shopping mall and industrial route for the whole place. If you drove south and turned toward the ocean you were in Mariano Melgar and Villa El Salvador; if you turned left toward the hills you were in another set of barriadas. In one of these, called San Gabriel, my dad had a small church going.

Any American in Peru in those days was involved, to some degree, in the culture of foreign aid that dominated Peruvian politics. The Kennedy administration, with its bright young economists and its mania for heading off communism, had raised hopes for a period of accelerated, state-led capitalist development that would leave Peru and its neighbors looking something like the post-Depression United States. In this scheme, Kennedy’s people had invited the assumption that the pump was to be primed with US investment, loans and grants. The part of that combination that touched the lives of ordinary people the most directly, by far, was the grants. There were warehouses around town packed with surplus soybeans, grain and powdered milk from the US, and armies of US Agency for International Development experts running around figuring out how to dispense it where people could get their hands on it.

Distribution was the weak link, which may explain why my Dad found he could routinely walk into these places and, after slapping some backs and talking some basketball, drive off with his Land-Rover filled to the ceiling with 50-pound bags of Indiana corn. In a barriada, he found, a big bag of powdered milk commanded far more attention than printed tracts or large megaphones bolted to the roof of the car. (Not that he gave up on those methods either. Anything that might work.)

I know that he worried about the effect his attention-getting technique had on the character of people’s interest in his message. I heard him talking about it with my mom and on occasion with fellow missionaries. It was impossible that there weren’t at least some people who cared nothing about the finer points of Luther’s theory of salvation exclusively by grace, but needed to supplement their children’s milk intake badly enough that they would listen patiently as long as they had to, nodding and smiling. A missionary in Asia years earlier, in a fit of ethnocentrism and callousness, had called such people “rice Christians.”

I guess my Dad decided that the risk was worth taking, because some of his church groups, such as the one in San Gabriel, began to revolve around food activities at least as much as the worship services. Before long, he and some of the local mothers had a regular breakfast program going, feeding a few dozen small children a bowl of hot oatmeal with milk every weekday morning, a few of the more outspoken mothers directing the labor. I have no idea how he drew the ratio of stomachs filled to souls won, worked his calculus of salvation, but I know that I never saw him enjoy his job more. There was a drive and a purpose about him that was different from when it was just about knocking on doors and talking about the Small Catechism.

This had been going on for a year or so when my dad decided that the church in Peru needed a central building somewhere. I think he also had noticed the incongruity of keeping his own family in a moderately privileged neighborhood far from the barriadas, and wanted to move closer to the action. He combined the two things by designing a three-story brick and concrete house with office space on the second floor and a residence on the third. He chose a location in the San Gabriel barriada, at the end of a steep street up against a low, rocky hill.

We took a right turn off the Pan American highway and drive several miles along a gravel road to the tiny town of Puerto Lomas. Fishing was no longer a major source of work for ordinary Peruvians along the coast; industrial-scale ocean fishing had long ago driven most of them out of business. But Puerto Lomas still had enough people fishing, for the restaurant trade or for their own consumption, to feel like a real port town. It smelled like seaweed and rotting fish. Little boys ran along the piers, nonchalantly jumping into the deep water and leaping out again and again. The specialty in the restaurants was an extraordinarily tasty fried sole. There were also huge crabs that people pulled out of the surf, red monsters with legs eight inches long. I don’t think we ate many of those.

The town of Puerto Lomas was at the south end of what seemed like an infinitely long stretch of yellow-sand beach, separated from the endless desert inland by a long dune perhaps a dozen feet high. We ate fish at a restaurant in the town, then my Dad turned his Land Rover onto the sand and headed out along the breakers. A mile or two north, he chose a spot according to criteria of his own, and we piled out and began to set up camp. There was one large olive-green army-surplus tent for the kids, another slightly smaller one for the parents, and a third medium-sized tent to hold the food and cooking stuff.

We spent our mornings hiking north along the beach, watching the surf for the penguin corpses that the cold Pacific current habitually deposited along the South American coast as it flowed up from Antarctica. We weren’t supposed to touch them, but we made sure to get very close looks.

On the landward side of the long low dune that separated the beach from the desert there was a strip of sun-bleached crab shells and fish bones. There must have been a heavy traffic of crabs coming up here to die over the years, because you could often be crunching ankle-deep in their remains. The predominant crab on these beaches had a red-orange, squarish body a couple of inches across and hung out in large herds on the wet strip of sand, dashing sideways into deceptively small holes in the sand when they saw us coming.

On occasion we would come across a whale skeleton, lying farther inland than the other animal signs, dried out and gone bright white in the sun, grainy and pitted like old wood. A vertebra could be turned on end and sat on like a stool, and the ribs, where they were still together and upright, arched over my head. We played among these bones – we weren’t an especially reverent set of kids – but it was a little like playing in church. You felt a compulsion to keep your voice down.

One year we noticed a certain muckiness to the water for a few days, and then bird corpses began to wash up in the waves with their feathers all fused together, blackened and sticky to the touch. There had likely been an oil spill out on the ocean and this was the aftermath. We guessed that most of the birds were cormorants, a duck-like species that commonly follows freighters for their castoff food. One of them turned out to be alive, barely, and we pulled it out of the surf and named it Skippy (after our favorite peanut butter), and tried to feed it so it could stay alive long enough to slough the petroleum out of its feathers and get back in the game. It lived for a couple of days, I think, and we buried it in the dunes under a nice little shrine, with its name spelled out in seashells.

Somehow they decided to chance it – we weren’t doing anything else pressing around there, just heading for the beach – so we loaded up the Land Rover and bounced out to where someone had suggested we might find the fearsome Dr. Reich. Near a shed in the middle of absolutely nowhere, a Toyota Land Cruiser was parked, without a sign of anyone around. When we got within a few yards we could see a pair of feet propped up on the rear seat of the Toyota. It was Maria Reich, taking a nap.After some whispering in the front seat of our car, Grandma was delegated to go knock on the jeep’s window and see what would happen. I guess the theory was that being woken up by a fellow middle-aged woman might upset Reich less than a brood of children. Grandma could speak German, too, in case language was a problem. Grandma went over, and Reich, to our shock, walked back to us with her. If the kids could be trusted to keep to the paths, she told my parents, we could follow her on her rounds. She climbed into our car and told my Dad, in curt English, where to drive.

I guess we spent a couple of hours walking in single file along the white lines, half-listening to the mathematician and concentrating hard on staying where we were supposed to be. I remember a long pause at a spot where Reich had stuck hundreds of sticks the shape of popsicle sticks into the ground along a particular set of curved lines, and tied string between pairs of sticks according to some complex geometric formula. She crouched there, an animated finger pointing here and there, explaining in a loud voice the relationships between this calculation and that, and I could only think about how the desert made you yearn for a popsicle.

The only thing I remember going wrong was when my straw sun hat blew off in the breeze and wheeled away over the black rocks. It was closer to another white path, but to get there without leaving the lines I’d have to walk for what seemed like miles. There was a quick conference, and then Reich nodded to signify that I could retrieve it. I stepped carefully across the black desert, not moving a stone, and when I got the hat back I jammed it on as tightly as I could.

On the ride back to her parked Toyota Reich held my sister Nicky, about a year old then, cooing at her and wondering if she would remember any of this when she came back. On the two or three-hour drive to Puerto Lomas that afternoon, my mother marveled at how out behavior had improved in the presence of the fearsome German. It didn’t seem that surprising to us.

My parents believed strongly in getting out and seeing things, especially archeological sites and beaches, neither of which was much in evidence in the places they came from. There was one beach in the port city of Callao, next to Lima, made of rocks the size of my fists, worn smooth by the waves. I remember going there for picnics fairly often. Just south of the barriadas on Lima’s southern outskirts, near a pre-Inca ruin called Pachacamac which we explored several times, there was a wide sandy beach between two big rock outcroppings like bookends. Waves had dug a tunnel through one of these rocks, and if you squinted just right you could make the rock look like a lion lying with its head up and its front paws in the surf. The beach was called Leon Durmiente, Sleeping Lion.

I think there were three summers when Dad wrapped everything up for a month and took us on a 6-hour drive down that coast to a town called Puerto Lomas, or Port of the Hills. I don’t know how he chose that particular place. Two of those times, my mother’s mother was visiting us. Her husband, a minister, had died a year earlier and she had retired from her job as the organist at their church in Ashland, a small town on the Wisconsin shore of Lake Superior. She had always liked reading National Geographic stories about Egyptian pyramids and Mayan temples, and this was her chance to see the real thing.

To get to Puerto Lomas you had to go through Nazca, a town that had taken shape in the desert near a place where people before the Incas had drawn these huge, vaguely significant markings on the vast, flat desert floor. This part of the coastal desert was not the movie-standard desert of shifting sand dunes that we were used to. Here the ground was as flat as an airstrip for as far as you could see, except for some low foothills where the desert began to give way to the Andes foothills, and it was covered with small dark rocks sitting on top of a layer of powdery, off-white dust. Thousands of years ago someone had methodically picked up the rocks in long lines and laid them aside, exposing the dust, so that from a distance it looked like someone had drawn on the ground with a thin stick of chalk. Some of the lines projected as straight as a ruler along the desert floor and up into the hills, oblivious to the topography. Other lines twisted around on themselves and made strangely schematic pictures of monkeys, spiders and birds, each laid out over as much as a square mile of ground.

Naturally, the place had drawn the attention of all kinds of scientists and oddballs from the US and Europe. A Swiss guy named Erich von Daniken had published a couple of bestsellers about how early humans had been prodded into civilization by visitors from other planets; the evidence relied heavily on speculations about the artwork at famous archeological sites like Chichen Itza in Mexico and Macchu Picchu and Nazca in Peru. I loved this stuff. Hippie tourists from Germany and the United States, and the occasional Bible-thumping Protestant missionary, frequently came to pay tribute to or gather intelligence on whatever they thought they saw there.

Some mainstream academics had tried to make sense of the place by quantifying its artifacts and cataloguing its symbols. A.L. Kroeber, known for his association with the famous native American survivor he named Ishii, went to Nazca in the 1920s to try to count things up. The chief proponent of this approach was Maria Reich, a German mathematician who thought the lines and curves could be interpreted as some sort of calendar or guide to the Nazca people’s cosmology, and one could measure the angles to figure out what pointed to where. She had gone to Nazca in the 1950s to do this, and was still working at it when we came through in 1969 or 1970.

We reached the town of Nazca, just north of the archeological site, in the afternoon and checked into a hotel that had a swimming pool and some nice broad shade trees to counter the roasting desert sun. In the morning, after our oatmeal and café con leche, my brother and sister and I went out to the pool. A dark-skinned man lounging on one of the chaise longues asked me where we were from. I said, “Somos americanos.” “So am I,” he told me. “So is everyone here,” he added, gesturing at the other swimmers, the pool cleaner and the women carrying towels in and out of the rooms. “Don’t forget that.” I don’t think I’ve ever said the word “American” since then without thinking about that guy.

My Dad, Mom and grandmother had been debating for days whether to try to see the Nazca lines while we were there. Maria Reich had a reputation for guarding her site fiercely. She had been known to chase amateurs off at slight provocation, throwing stones and insults. It wasn’t surprising, when you saw the macho jeep tracks blasted across the ancient markings, and the Pan American highway cutting right across the whole site, as straight as any of the lines. In the town we had caught sight of a man unloading a station wagon, a missionary from the look of him, with white dust covering his sandals and irritation on his face. My Dad said someone had told him Reich had chased the man off the site just that afternoon.

Most of our reading material, aside from our Bibles and catechisms, came from my mother’s sisters in the US. Caroline, a teacher, would pack up a box of castoff library books every few months and send it to us. We looked forward to those boxes pretty intensely. It was luck of the draw, but there was usually something in there for each of us. I was most excited about novels of the rockets and rayguns variety. I liked Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov a lot. All of us read Edgar Rice Burroughs, and reread him until we couldn’t stand it any more.

Every time we moved my dad would clean out his four or five 55-gallon oil drums, repaint them and stencil our new address on the top and sides. Into them would go all our clothes, records, toys and cooking stuff. One or two of the barrels were for books. Dad’s study had maybe 500 books, and between us the kids had another 100 or so. Some of the ones that started out Dad’s books eventually became mine by a slow process of appropriation.

My dad, in his wild youth, had acquired the strange hobby of collecting right-wing kook literature. Maybe collecting is putting it too strongly: that stuff was all over the place where he grew up, and collecting it probably amounted to little more than not throwing it away. He had a copy of the Blue Book of the John Birch society (which proved that Eisenhower was a Communist agent) and two volumes of Henry Ford’s bizarre series about the international Jewish conspiracy, and a few other things. He made a token attempt to keep this stuff on the higher shelves and out of our hands, but there wasn’t much there that I didn’t know about. There was his complete collection of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s works in paperback; this was during the 70s, at the height of the pathetic windbag’s popularity.

My favorite kook was Ayn Rand, whose books my dad tried especially hard to keep secret. I happened on them, fortuitously enough, when I was about 12 or 13. An early teen is a perfectly receptive audience for appeals to logic, objectivity and most of all self-interest. I couldn’t follow the philosophical tracts (although their titles – The Virtue of Selfishness! – thrilled me), but I ate up the novels, especially We the Living, the only one that took a sort of science fiction tack. It was like a shorter, chest-beatinger version of Orwell’s wan and pitiable 1984, which I had only managed to finish because it was set in the future, so it qualified as science fiction. The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged were mysterious and interminable, and I read them as fast as I could by flashlight under the blankets. They each featured breathy love scenes in which women said stuff like “Take me,” and the guys did, saying nothing. And each book included a long speech by the manly hero near the end, in which the contents of the nonfiction tomes were conveniently boiled down to a dozen or so pages of concentrated rhetoric perfect for reciting to annoying teachers and parents.

Years later, when I first read Marx, I remember noticing that same thrill of clarity, and the same urge to memorize, and I’ve always wondered, running into something mentally stirring like that (Martin Luther, Roque Dalton, Trotsky), how closely the things I think are tied into the things I feel, despite all my efforts to act like I’ve reasoned things out in the approved cold, dispassionate fashion.

My dad was joined one year by another missionary from Minnesota. He was older than my dad and a bit more sedate, more interested in the standard functions of the clergy, like preaching, albeit in the same low-key style that my dad tried for. The Olsens had three daughters and a son, each about the same age as one of my sisters, so we got together fairly often to play. They lived in another white-collar neighborhood called Barranquilla, which had become my favorite part of town for its quiet, foggy mornings and the way the smell of salt gave away the presence of the ocean a few yards away.

Lima sits on a plain just above sea level; a line of 80-foot cliffs made of hard-packed dirt separates the city from a broad yellowish-brown beach. (I imagine the dirt cliffs in Santa Monica looked the same, before LA got its water and ceased to be desert.) Some neighborhoods, including Barranquilla, sprawl right up to the edge, and in the early morning the foggy, salty air rolls softly up the cliffs and into the streets and mixes with the fog-filtered sunlight for an effect that is painfully pretty.

The Olsen girls had to go to all the same Sunday services we went to, out in the barriadas, but it seemed to take their parents longer to give up the habit of making them dress in their Sunday-going-to-church clothes. I think my folks had figured out early on that wearing your finery to slog through wet sand and dog poop was either too silly or too much trouble to be worth it, so we were allowed to go to church in civilian dress. The Olsen girls seemed uncomfortable in the sand-floor churches, and I wondered (but never asked) if we looked as uncomfortable as they did, and how much it had to do with the requirements of keeping their dresses neat. I never did figure that out.

Every country in the world, I think, has at least one school for the children of foreign diplomats, missionaries and business people. There are three kinds: there are schools run by and for missionaries, usually named something like Central American Christian Academy and characterized by a high degree of religious fervor. There are independent secular private schools, usually smaller and idiosyncratic, catering to the more demanding expatriates, including some missionaries. For most families from the US, there is a school run by the Defense Department that tries to offer something close to the standard mainstream schooling experience in the US.

We went to all three of these kinds of schools at different times. The only experiment with local schools was carried out by Johanna, my oldest sister, who did one of her junior high school years in a public school in Costa Rica that was known for the quality of its music instruction. She had a knack for the flute, and my mother, also a flute player, encouraged her to take a chance on it.

Public education in Latin America was done in those days on what I think is a European model, with uniforms, early tracking, and lots of sir-and-ma’am and lining up. Dewey and Summerhill and all the rest of the things that changed public schools so radically in the US did not have much impact on the schools we saw. Jo chafed at the regimentation and didn’t go back after that year.

When possible, my parents put us in the smaller, independent schools. They liked the cultural diversity, I think – you were likely to be sitting next to the Dutch ambassador’s daughter and across from the son of a Taiwanese export magnate, both of whom spoke English as a matter of course, so all the better. And the teachers seemed often to be whatever expatriate oddballs were bumbling around the country at the moment. The first one I remember was Miss Thomas, a middle-aged English woman who loved C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories and Bedknobs and Broomsticks and the rest of the British children’s canon. She would gather the whole school – there were only about 50 kids – for a morning assembly, call the roll and then read to us with great drama. I don’t know when I figured out that Narnia was fictional. Or that there was R in it.

Miss Thomas had an elderly dog named Mary Plain (after a character in another British children’s book) who had been in a car accident and had a bad back. When it came time for Miss Thomas to go back to England, my parents volunteered to adopt the dog. It was clear that this was a great honor, as Miss Thomas had said Mary Plain couldn’t just live with anybody. You had to be very careful and respectful of her aches and pains. I was the main dog walker and feeder. We were living in a shabby middle-class neighborhood near downtown Lima, and I remember walking Mary Plain around the streets, past the old men in thin ties standing idly around the corner stores.

We kids got used to being scrutinized very closely, our blue eyes and blond hair as unfamiliar as tails or fur. Women, especially, would swoon over our pigmentation. Some would offer wistfully to trade their dark eyes for our blue ones, which disturbed me a little, until I learned to joke along with them. In fact, there were lots of blue-eyed, blond Peruvians, but we and the people who were so interested in us didn’t know any of them. They lived, as they do today, in isolated communities behind high walls, where they get together to discuss the economy, elect presidents and so on. To the pobladores, they might as well have been from a distant country.

I didn’t like the constant inspections of my eye color, but the joy of all that sand usually overrode any misgivings I had about riding along with my dad on his rounds. Sometimes he would need to spend an hour or two in some family’s estera home, and I would be free to play in the sand as long as I didn’t wander too far from the shack. One time when he had taken particularly long, I had been playing with the little boy who lived there, digging a very deep hole in the sand with a couple of aluminum pots that had lost their handles. It was getting dark, but I was not happy about leaving. As we drove off, my dad observed that each of us boys wanted to be in the other’s place.

To help themselves understand the local culture, my parents enlisted a guitar teacher named Mr. Maguińa. He was an elderly man who drove a black Nash Rambler (I think) that was already ancient then. Every two weeks or so we would get together with another missionary family, the children on the floor and the grownups in a circle of chairs, and Mr. Maguińa would slowly work his way through his huge repertoire of songs that had been popular in Lima in the pre-Beatles era, showing my mother the chords as he went. One of my favorites was “Yo vendo unos ojos negros.” They were short, concise songs, mostly in three-quarter time, almost always sad in a detached, ironic sort of way, with many references to traveling great distances in pursuit of love or a memory. I can still hear almost every word of them.

There was a strange beauty to the straw-mat cities the first few weeks after an “invasion,” as the moves were called. The mats (they were generically called “estera,” meaning reed, in the sense that “estero” means a reed-filled swamp, but I think they were actually made of bamboo trees that had been smashed into flat sticks) were a whitish yellow when new. From a distance they seemed to glitter almost silver in the bright light, and they gave off a pleasant reedy odor. The sun turned them golden after a few days. My dad liked to drive his Land Rover to the top of a dune when he didn’t have anywhere particular to be, and gaze out over the vast sweep of straw and zinc. You could hear the trucks rumbling through with their water and construction supplies, and the dogs barking and children screaming. There was almost always a smell of burning plastic from the informally-designated dump sites.

The intense sunlight – every year had six months of uninterrupted sun and six months of gray skies, never rain or any other weather at all — would leach the color out of the straw before long. The royal yellow would turn to a sickly gray as it dried out, and the bamboo would gradually lose its flexibility until the wind blew holes in it or something hit it, and the owner would have to patch it with a new sheet. Eventually you would have a shambling collection of variously patched straw sheets, with wings heading this way and that, to the borders of whatever sort of plot you had been able to stake out on invasion night.

In his zeal to get close to the people he wanted to serve, or to be the first missionary on the spot in what was rapidly becoming a competitive proselytizing environment, my dad actually was able to catch wind of some of these land invasions ahead of time, and he accompanied one or two of the groups on their midnight moves. It seemed to win him some friends, or at least some patience on the part of the “pobladores,” the land invaders, because I remember at least once watching him nail up some esteras, the morning after an invasion, onto an extra-large wood frame of his own, on a plot he had claimed the night before. He was always a handy guy with wood and things like that. He affixed a cross of two-by-fours to the outside of the structure, set up some rough benches he had built at home for pews, and called it a church.

Only desperate people leave the only home they know to move to a brutal desert near a giant, dangerous metropolis without any assurance of success or even subsistence. Marx, who was familiar with the things desperate people do, noted that they seem to put emotional safety, or spiritual comfort, very near the top of their agendas, even when food and water are by no means guaranteed. My dad’s modest church buildings filled up pretty quickly. The services were entertaining, I think, with songs and rituals a bit like the ones used in the Catholic church but different enough to be interesting. And there was plenty of novelty in just getting close to the roaring Land Rover that brought the tall, burly bald man in from some other world with his thin, smiling wife and her guitar and their pale, loud children with their unintelligible bickering.

I remember that the light in Lima, especially in the early morning, was intensely bright, as if warning about the heat it planned to bring along later. We stayed in a pension, a sort of bed & breakfast hotel, while dad went around town looking for the right place to live. The pension sat behind a low garden wall on a boulevard in an ancient middle-class neighborhood called Miraflores. Somewhere, Vargas Llosa was writing about this neighborhood right then. Huge trees stood along the center of the boulevard. Their trunks had been painted white up to my eye level. Nearby was a large army barracks, with soldiers idling around the gate. At right angles to the boulevard, you could walk along past large houses within walls, until you got to one of several deeply shaded parks where young people necked and kids ran down gravel walks.

We drank café con leche, warm milk with a little coffee in it, by the pitcher. We ate little oval buns that were delivered every morning in a huge basket by a little boy. Some mornings we would wake up to a shrill panpipe kind of sound; this announced the knife-sharpening man, who ambled through the streets pushing a one-wheeled contraption hung with jingling cutlery. If you stopped him for his services he would turn the thing upside down so it stood on three legs, crank the wheel really fast with a bicycle pedal he had rigged up, and hold your knife against it until it gave off sparks.

We had been there a month or so when a group of generals pulled a coup d’etat against the president. The next few days, we stood on the front steps of our pension and watched tanks and armored troop carriers roll up and down the boulevard, in the traditional show of support for the new man, whose name was Juan Velasco. I held my mother’s hand and bounced with excitement. I was barely five years old.

The deposed president’s name was Francisco Belaunde. He was unusual in South America for the way he came to power, which was through an official, more or less peaceable election, but he wasn’t so unique in his lack of interest in the really grim stuff that was going on. Peru right then was going through its own version of the crisis of capitalism that struck all the Latin American countries in the second half of the 1960s. Half-baked industrialization plans had led to the collapse of the rural economy that had survived essentially unchanged since the Spanish conquistadors had set it up, and the people who had provided the labor for that economy, unneeded now, were moving in large numbers to the city, figuring they had at least a chance of surviving there. They gathered in poor inner-city neighborhoods and scraped by on the charity of relatives and strangers.

Every few weeks, a group of families would get together to buy some woven straw mats, about six feet on a side, and rent some trucks to carry them on. Then, in the middle of the night, they would drive out en masse to a trackless area somewhere on the sand dunes to the south of Lima or the rocky, dusty hills to the north. They would mark off some de facto streets, throw up frameworks of planks and sticks, nail the straw mats to them, tack a sheet of corrugated zinc on for a roof if they could get one, and move in their families, dogs and chickens. By morning there could be a town of several thousand where there had been nothing the day before. Buses, sewn together by their owner-drivers with rubber bands and speaker wire, would begin stopping there almost immediately. A market would pop into being somewhere between the new settlement and the nearest main road. Tank trucks full of water would begin rolling up as soon as the sand was packed firm enough to hold them, and people would line up to fill their jugs and buckets.

The year we arrived was when this “barriada” phenomenon really hit its stride, and Lima’s population began to multiply yearly. This was what my dad had come looking for. He immediately bought a Land Rover eight-seater and plunged into the barriadas looking for someone who would listen.