We flew to the United States in January. Our leg from Miami to Chicago was diverted by snow to Denver, where the airline put us up in a hotel to wait for better weather. The TV in the hotel room was in color. We’d never seen that. The over-saturated reds and greens of the football [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
My closest Peruvian friend was Eduardo Ramos. He had 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, came from a Chinese family that had immigrated in the previous century. (Chinese people [...]
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 20th century, had been a friend of Lenin’s and a founder of the Third International, and was the patron [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]