Update

Due to a family health issue, I will be returning early to Seattle. I hope to leave you all with a small photo capture of Lima and some rambling thoughts at a later point. With love
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Studying the sociology of sexual health in Lima, Peru

On my first day of work my colleagues told me that, in order to arrive safely, I would have to sprint the three blocks between the bus stop and the Barton health clinic in Callao, on the outskirts of Lima. I spent that day observing gynecological exams given to female sex workers from the neighborhood. For someone who usually gets queasy just seeing a q-tip change color as it´s dabbed, zooming in with a camera and watching cells in the cervix change color was pretty intense. The next day I observed the treatment for male patients, including one young man who tested positive for HIV, syphilis, throat bacteria, and a urine infection. We also advised a young man on which hormones might be most useful in becoming more physically effeminate. Next came a day with the clinic social worker, in which we talked with a 17 year old working in order to make fast money in order to pay for her father´s medical bills. Though prostitution is legal in Peru, it is only legal in government certified locals, for women over 18 years of age. A record of health checkups is also required. As an experience with reality it has been both shocking and also inspiring, if that can be understood.

The Barton clinic is working with the University of Washington to research HPV/HIV infections in the sex worker population of Callao, as well as looking at the effects of violence and pressure on incidence. Every afternoon the clinic provides free exams and treatment to sex workers from the neighborhood. Each patient also meets with an on site social worker. The clinic runs an outreach program using promoters, who bring in folks to the clinic, and site visits to local government approved brothels.

Every one who works here and who comes in have struck me as just lovely and incredibly strong. It´s been really marvelous, and I often wish that these doctors could see themselves the way I do, if only for a moment. 15 plus years in the clinic has made their work into a routine, as is the usual way of things. To me they are incredibly inspiring folks, doing work which I find to be immeasurably important and neglected, in an isolated corner of a huge city in the vastness that is Latin America... such programs are just such tiny specks in the face of social ills, or social change, or reality, however you want to look at it. But one thing I´ve learned this year is to really appreciate these bastions of health and constructive action amidst what can be very dismal or difficult spaces. And the whole system runs on paper and stamps! No computer database at all!

Of course personally my mind is all over stimulated with fantasies for the kinds of ways that I could intersect with this kind of work without becoming an MD toting doctor. Ideas of sociological studies incorporating oral histories, working simultaneously to empower and support these vulnerable populations (esp with the women) while working hand in hand with public health programming (which doesn´t currently exists) to form larger projects to improve living conditions etc. Projects dealing with drugs and homophobia, violence and pressure, antagonism towards immigrant populations, and so on. How exactly to get my hands on this sort of work and make it happen is still a mystery, but that´s part of what keeps me young and idealistic, no?

Also, June 2nd was international sex worker rights day! Which originated in France. I marched with a collection of sex workers and their supporters through downtown Lima, wearing a glittery mask and waving a little noise maker. Sort of a strange place to find oneself, unexpectedly. We were such a small group that it felt like the police were making more of a cage for us than a protective barrier... but I think it was good for the jarring of many Limeños senses, a good kind of message, and folks were generally pretty positive on the streets, if shocked. Of course the general sort of condescending humor directed at the scene was hard to counter. But still, I think visibility is important for the movement.

Lima in general is a strange place. It´s hard to remember that it´s a desert city on the edge of the sea, or that it´s old, or that it´s in an Andean country. I love my neighborhood. Lima sits along the Pacific ocean along a set of cliffs that drop off to beach access, and Barranco, my neighborhood, looks out over the water via a series of tiny alleys and bridges. People keep telling me to fear for my life in this city, but I feel pretty alright most of the time. I have a lot more exploring to do, and no time to see even a third of what I would like to in Peru in general, but so it goes. I went trolling through some museums- found an exhibit on the indigenous art movement and one documenting the times when the MRTA and Sendero Luminoso and the government created a state of civil war and mass deaths in Peru. Tried very hard to locate myself in time and space, remember how close all the Andean culture is both historically and geographically from here. I wish I had more time to be out of the city. I miss Bolivia.

From Rio to Bahia

It´s impossible not to get to excited about Rio. Even for me. Even in the dark and in the rain in a car I couldn´t help being like - IS THAT A MOUNTAIN RISING OUT OF THE SEA IS THAT WHAT THOSE LIGHTS ARE YEAHHH RIO. The city is actually pretty small, but nice, and stunning, clearly. I hear that Rio has the beauty but São Paulo, now São Paulo is the city. Which is probably true. Sampa has the culture and the ethnic neighborhoods and the crazy complexities, and Rio is, as they say, basically a beach town. Of course there are the favelas, but they might as well be in another country- so so isolated and invisible. Which is a whole different story, for another day perhaps. I got to enjoy the whole fame-appeal of Ipanema and Copacabana (named after the beach in Bolivia due to a series of shipwrecks, survivors, and saints), plus walk around the lovely neighborhoods of Urca, Lapa, Santa Theresa, and the center, where there were a number of super interesting tiny museums and cultural centers to be visited. Also two glorious garden-parks set against the jungley hills and filled with treats like carnivorous plants and GIANT lilly pads! Oh, and Paris Hilton does beer commercials here.

Of course the best part about being in Rio is that I was finally with Paula!!! She picked me up at night at the bus station and brought me home, where they were in the midst of holding a giant housewarming party for the place. Brazilians are overwhelmingly friendly, and way more curious than most Latin American´s I´ve met. I field all kind of quesions on behalf of the US all the time. Hope that´s ok with folks. I have also been asked by three different young Brazilians whether, in the US elementary schools, we are taught that the Amazon is an international and/or US territory. Quite the urban legend, no?? Or have any of you actually been told that?Anyhow, everyone here is lovely and they have taken me in and around and I have received a(n alphabetised hand written) list miles longs of movies and books and CDs that I am told are necesary to really appreciate Brasil. One of the ladies here has her own radio station- streaming here. We also went to a Samba club (Samba is deceptively impossible to learn) and a punk rock karaoke bar, so I guess I have Rio´s music scene covered?

Salvador, Bahia, is finally getting into the North of Brasil. When I come back I´ll have the whole North East (and the interior) to explore. The region is famous for being poor, African, hot, and beautiful, with some of Brasil´s best music and beaches. Unfortunately I don' t think Salvador, where I'm staying, is the best place to enjoy it. It doesn't help that I'm sick and sleepy and staying in a hostel that reminds me of some kind of frat-gym, and oh, it's raining. On the plus side, I'm in Barra, right by the ocean, and taking a week of Portuguese classes which come with free Capoeira classes (so awesome! If you would like to see some American made Capoeira-taken-to-the-inner-city-to-save-youngsters-from-gang-violence, check out the film Only the Strong, which I was lucky enough to see on one of my many bus rides in Bolivia). Salvador would be beautiful if the historical center weren't so so touristy that it had ceased to resemble any kind of actual city. These days it's mostly good for finding any object imaginable plastered with the Brazilian flag. I was seriously tempted by some short shorts, I must say.

Also it's national museum week here, which is cool. Brazil is super into popular works and street theater which caters to and involves the general population, with a special focus on the favelas and homeless folks, integration and "social harmony". Pretty cool. Also once the weather cleared the beach was pretty translucent and nice. And the African-Christian church ceremonies and the drumming and the samba. Also nice.

If I weren't so sick I would go into the traditional culture up here, the history, the Candomble religion, etc etc, but I'll give yall a break this time.

Headed to Peru on Sunday to work for a health program run by the University of Washington for a month or so. More on that soon.

xo

Brasil!

Crossing the border into Brazil involved 24 of the sketchiest, scariest, longest hours I have thus far spent in the South. In short, between the 8 hours to kill in central Uruguay (at least there was one major soccer game to be watched in the neighborhood bar), the pitch black 5 am solitary arrival (only passenger left on the bus), the borderless border (no blockade, no crossings, just step across the street and you're in Brazil! great for illegal immigrants, less great for Americans in need of visa stamps only to be found down deserted streets and by passing passports beneath locked doors into the hands of- hopefully- police) and the dubious conditions of the local bus stop and apparently notorious highway to Porto Alegre, I'm counting my blessings just to be here.I celebrated a little bit with Minha Menina, a resolutely cheery tune (hear some of David Byrne´s thoughts on Brazilian music here, thanks to Laura for the link).

Brazil has been a long standing fantasy of mine, as it seems to be for many an American over exposed to pictures of gorgeous palm laden beaches. I arrived in the pouring rain to a very chilly very non-beachlike urban center. Porto Alegre is ugly but super chill, known for its gaucho culture (which just goes to show that borders have a lot less to do with culture than geography) and its pretty indie kids. I was stoked about it after many years of reading about the World Social Forum events and the Participatory Budget, though I was a little shocked to arrive in such a big, crazy space. Ultimately I suppose it's impossible not to over simplify in scholarly work, but still, the neighborhood-citizen focus of what I read seems illegible in real life. Ah well! I stayed with four wonderful ladies, all friends of a lady I met in Bolivia. They basically adopted me into their lives for a week, taking me around town, to a fantastic modern art museum, a terrible play, some crazy bars, a park good for mate drinking, and a great cliff for city views, among other treats, of which I have not a single photo, so you'll have to take my word for it. The best part was that the FOOD here involves veggies and beans and other things I haven't seen in months. Meu deus. My Portuguese is pessimo, and it's harder to communicate than I imagined. I get by on Spanish, but every time I think I'm improving I realize I'm just dragging everyone else down with me into Portuñol, a Spanish-Portuguese hybrid in which both parties invent words that seem probable. It works out.

I stuck around all week in order to go out to an MST encampment. The MST is the Landless Workers Movement, Brazil's most famous. I've long fantasized about visiting one of their occupied territories, and was just so so happy to get to go. This particular area is about half an hour outside Porto Alegre, in the countryside. They've been fighting for their land for more than eight years, and now run a cooperative school and cooperative farms on the land. Under Lula the movement has continued to face precarious conditions, but these folks seemed optimistic. The MST also run a national university with degrees in cooperative management and other activist related fields, much like the popular university of the madres de la plaza de mayo in Buenos Aires (so awesome). The lady who showed us around was super powerful and eloquent and friendly, and, as it happens, had stayed with friends of mine at the MTD I worked at outside of Buenos Aires. Reminding me that, as Laura says, the world has a total of 35 people living in it. It was nice to see that the reality of the MST areas was just what I had hoped. Though what one can take concretely away and into ones life from such a place... much harder. I did buy a radical planner? Well.

From Porto Alegre I headed south to Florianopolis. Renan, a crazy, marvelous, revolutionary journalist who took care of me in POA sent me to stay with his son, a musician and recording artist on the island. After which he wrote me: "I tell you about the beaches of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and off you run. Revolution: postponed". And I suppose he's right on some level. That's Brazil for you, a massive place full of contrasts and complexities, histories and realities to study, and ummmmmm beaches to sit and drink cheap beer on... Apparently the south of Brazil, up to Rio, is the wealthiest part, and poverty really kicks in up north. All the Brazilians down here like to add that, down where they live, everyone is attractive because they are descendants of Europeans, but up north they get all ugly and indigenous. No racism in this country at all, eh?? You should hear what they say about Bolivia...

Floripa is a super ugly city built on a super incredible gorgeous piece of land. Fortunately you can easily escape the city center and troll on the more chill interior of the island. There are something like 40 beaches on this tiny stretch of land, plus two lagoons. Renan's son put me up for free in his bandmate's hostel, right on the Lagoa de Conseção. One could step from one's bed directly into a hammock, into a kayak on the lagoon, into the ocean on the other side. It's hard not to love something so easy, but my capacity for sitting around is, somewhat surprisingly, not all that high. Met some lovely Brazilians and kids from southern Cali to take me around. Plus we got to see Jeco's band play!

From Floripa I headed up to the super eco super organized city of Curitiba (and stayed with the super lovely family of my friend´s uncle), from which one can drop a little (via train, bus, and then boat) and access the Ilha Do Mel, a somewhat more isolated island experience. The train, bus, and boat rides were so astoundingly gorgeous that I figured the island would be sort of beside the point, but no, it was still pretty much a Brazilian fantasy paradise.


This is the only place I´ve really been alone alone in my travels, which was a little rough. Though very empowering and exhilarating, the solitary travel can be a bit much at times. How can one really complain about paradise? Lots of folks are ready to adopt me everywhere I stop, but it´s not always for the best. I have zero complaints about my strolls around this nearly deserted marvelous place though. I´m enjoying being everywhere off season, while it´s still warm enough to do everything. I can´t imagine these places swarming with surfers and hippies and such, though perhaps they would have provided company beyond my hostel kitten and my hammock.

From Curitiba up through São Paulo, which I hadn't planned to visit, but, connected with more friends of friends, I decided to swing through. 24 hours in a city of 12 million, how much can I really say? I stayed at a tiny, homey hostel my friend Paula recommended, and it felt a little like staying in the SoHo of São Paulo. Lots of cute art galleries, super expensive clothing and home decorating stores, and lots of tiny restaurants. It was pleasant, especially given what I'd heard about São Paulo, the only city to boast a river running through it so polluted that it has reached an oxygen level of zero. I also swung by the modern art museum to check out a really cool Max Ernst exhibit. It was so wonderful- wild evil lurking in the corners of real life, women floating happily about as the world drowns and dies, and the most delicately cut and pasted critiques of state power and bourgeoisie life I've ever seen. I went out for some beers with a friend of Paula's who works for the newspaper Brasil de Fato, a paper created in a World Social Forum meeting designed to provide coverage of Brasil's social movements written by and for activists. Pretty neat.

2010 is a big year for Brazil. Presidential elections (Lula's time is up), world cup (viewing basically shuts the whole country down), plus the usual soccer craziness (currently two major cups) and prep for the Olympics and the home turf World Cup in the future... interesting years ahead. I feel that if I start to get into the idea of this country, the socio-politics of the geography, the history, the craziness that it is... well. It's just impossible. But I keep talking about it, so you can see I want to. Well.

Sitting in Rio, yet another longtime fantasy, I think I'll bring this to a close for now. I'll leave you with a couple of lovely lines by Mario Benedetti (my new favorite bit of Uruguayan poetics)-

We are the emigrants
The pale anonymous
With the impious and carnal century on our backs
Where we pile the legacy of questions and perplexities.
Who will amputate the discrepancies
On what dock in what chance in what twilight
Will the veins uncover their century
To present the complete and the free.

----El Acabose

Beijo----

Across the River

I had forgotten how much I love Uruguay. I love crossing the giantness that is Rio de la Plata, I love getting on the bus in the sun and looking at the green flatness and palm trees. It isn´t wild or exotic, just lovely. I´ve missed the ocean. I´ve missed watching the sky change over it.

I have discovered that I like certain parts of traveling alone immensely. I love to leave and arrive places by myself. To cross borders. To look out my bus window. I´m not such a fan of the parts where company would be nice- like while walking along the sea at sunset, or getting dinner, or catching an Uruguayan punk band performance. But I´m just not into people enough to do the whole friendly hostel companion thing. Fortuitously, I think my number of travel days without a single companion comes out to less than 10. I´ll manage. And in spite of myself I seem to have acquired a troupe of of Brazilian theater kids who sing and play absolutely every kind of Brazilian music imaginable and are headed to the deserted Uruguayan coast. Can't wait for Brazil.


Another thing I forgot about Uruguay is the absolutely fantastic hospitality of all its residents. This whole welcoming, friendly thing is pretty much the standard in Latin America, but here it might be at its max. On every visit, every person I have met has invited me to share anything they have to offer. They have a running joke that an Uruguayan will show up at your house, knock on your door, and ask what time dinner´s at and where the bed is. But this joke is only charming because, in fact, anyone here would cook something up and make a bed for you at a moments notice. A lovely friend of a friend showed up to walk me around the city, took me out to lunch, and then took me home with her to northwestern Uruguay, where she cooked me food, showed me her paintings, and lent me her bike. When I have a door again, consider it open anytime.

Maria and I checked out this marvelous underground public museum in Montevideo and were delighted to find it taken up entirely by an exhibit on city spaces as utopias- as spaces of creation, discovery, wonder, and exploration. Cities designed to play to our human desires for whimsy and for home, for the environment, for play. I´ve spend loads of time studying this idea, from Debord and the situationists, to Latin American ethnographies of space and studies of the history of domination and oppression written into city architecture, in Latin America and worldwide (check out Wikipedia´s definition of psychogeography, it´s neat). It was a lovely treat and really smartly done.


Uruguay has a grant total of 3 million residents. Maria tells me they sometimes think they would have been better off staying a part of Brazil, thus winning 5 world cup titles. I was in Montevideo during the biggest game of their national season. Our power went out 5 minutes in. No riots though! We carry our mate gourd and thermos to the grocery store, to the beach. Jose Mujica, the new(ish) president, is a marvelous lefty expolitical prisoner, who says charming things on his radio show. Maria was good to ask, however, how a country of 3 million can justify being unable to support the entire population. The poverty may be more low profile, but it´s still here, after all.

I´ll resist the temptation to back track and wax on about Argentine political history and current realities-I spent too long studying it to get into it now, and I was on vacation. But don´t forget to read about the exciting stuff going down at Bolivia´s alternative climate change summit right now! (and more). Chaves, Evo, Ortega, Correa, Naomi Kleine, Noam Chomsky, and Eduardo Galeano (those last three being three of my all time favorite folks), will all be in attendance. Adelante, pues!

55 Hours To Buenos Aires

All you busy folks with real jobs and lives keep saying that you just want some time to think your thoughts and come to understandings, but I can now definitively say that after 55 hours on a bus I have no thoughts left to think at all, and no profound realizations to extol. I now know that one can actually become motion sick from sitting down in a cafe and NOT seeing things rush past outside the window, and that most of the part of Northern Argentina that links up with Tarija is pretty, but uninteresting. That`s where Rush Hour 3, The Marine 2, and 10 hours of the bus uniting telenovela Corazon Salvaje come in, I suppose. And at least 7 of those hours were spent just getting across the border and then through the following 5 identical security checkpoints all paced about 20 minutes apart on the highways of Northern Argentina. Nothing like bureaucratic transactions at 4am to reaffirm the ridiculous nature of borders and nations, and the consistency of corruption in low level positions. I was feeling very much like a co-sufferer along with my 100% Bolivian bus group, until we hit the checkpoints. There, my passport was both an invitation to mild ridicule and an easy pass out of any real inspection. Though my light ray based water purifier (I was camping in Mexico!) and my bottles of prescription meds inspired a lot of smug chuckling (where´s she from- the states?) I didn´t have to unpack anything or put up with the insistent derogatory questioning the other folks had to deal with.

55 hour nest

I thought coming back to BA would feel a little more like coming home- I did live here, after all, but mostly it seems just like any other huge city... Seeing my old friends again is wonderful though, and I have a tiny space in a tiny bed in a tiny apartment, so I`m all set! And that`s really the idea, after all. Seeing folks. We have an american queer dj to see spin, a drummer celebration to attend, a Colombian birthday party, and who knows what other strange and largely improbable places to end up. Plus 3 years of local politics to catch up on. And onwards!

ps- keep your eyes out for a guest post on some Bolivia adventures, and a snapfishlink to photos of the crazy boat and motorcycle trip I took last month to the Bolivian Amazon!