Brassed Off!
Paul and I took a night off to rest and relax. After putting Will to bed, we made popcorn (on the stove, our new fun night-time treat) and sat down to watch Brassed Off!, a movie from the fantastic collection of our host family.
It was a great movie — and I was not too surprised to find out that it was written a directed by Mark Herman, who also wrote and directed Little Voice, one of my favorite movies. (If you haven’t seen LV, I highly, highly recommend it.)
For tired parents, it was just as fun as a night out on the town!
How to damage your kid 101
Salon is one of the online magazine sites I like to paw through every once in awhile for light reading. I was messing around tonight reading about different parenting strategies and experiences (potty training just around the corner!) and came across an article about Babywise, a terrible and sadistic method of torturing newborns. I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of it before… maybe because no one I know would do something like this to their kid?
And so my rant: is it so difficult for parents to realize that the needs of babies don’t follow a system of convenience for us? That the role of a parent is to provide the comfort and care a newborn needs? That a crying newborn, left uncomforted, is learning fear, isolation, and insecurity?
Kudos to parents who understand that part of being a loving parent is being flexible to your child’s needs. I’m sick to death of American-style parenting that revolves around the selfish needs and schedules of over-indulged adults.
La hora del resto
It’s time for a little rest.
The past few days (especially yesterday) have been long and busy. I feel great, but there are a few things going on that are letting me know that I should stay en hogar this afternoon. Or at least en vecino. So I’m working at home (well, goofing off right now) reading articles, researching, and thinking through possible questions.
Yesterday, I left just before 8am via taxi to Hospital Maria Auxiliadora to meet with Michaela, the director of the MAMIS program. The taxi driver, an older gentleman who drove very nicely, did something that usually makes me nervous: he took back roads. I felt that I could trust him and his methods were obvious: you could see the major road ahead with traffic and he’d turn on a side-street just before the main road. The way we weaved in and out of the side streets felt uncomfortable, but I trusted my instinct of him and all was fine. (Taxi drivers are suppose to stick to main roads. There are local reports of taxis driving into back roads where they meet up with a gang that surrounds the car and robs you. So, we are advised to tell taxis to stick to main roads and be cautious about the details of how you both chose and engage in the use of a taxi.) It so happens that we got to the hospital in 20 minutes (wow). I probably should have asked him for his name and number for future calls, but the “back roads” method did not set well with me (Valerie has strickly schooled me on this and I felt a bit badly about not following her wisdom and experience) so paid and let him go. I arrived at the hospital grounds 40 minutes early.
Arriving early was a great thing. I got to observe the chaos of morning appointments. Under the SIS plan, Lima’s poor may enroll in government health care programs for children under the age of 18. (How poverty level is established and monitored by the program, I am still trying to figure out.) I believe that many appointments are first-serve: hence the incredible morning lines throughout the hospital. I also managed to speak to a guard and get into some of the main hospital, where I decided to sit in the cool hallway bench outside of x-ray. I wasn’t there more than a minute when I was joined by a young woman, no older than 20, and an older woman who must have been a mother or mother-in-law. The young woman had very recently endured a terrible beating to her face, she was in awful shape. As they sat down beside me, not noticing or making any motion toward me, I heard a whisper from the older woman to the younger, “dejeme hablar“. She was telling the girl to “let me talk.” The irony: I was there to meet with the director of the hospital violence program and was sitting beside a woman who was both an obvious victim of violence and a victim of silencing. What could I do? Options limited, I remained in my anthropologist role.
Moments later, the x-ray hall was filled with several nurses pushing a square office cart, filled with blankets at the top — babies. One of the nurses noticed me and promptly plopped down beside me to chat. She told me she was also pregnant (3 months) and did the obligatory “belly display” where pregnant women show their bulging middles pressing through their clothes. We chatted causally, the obvious questions… what in the world is a pregnant gringa doing in this hospital, on this floor, on this morning?! Once curiousity abated, she brought over one of the babies (there were three in the cart) as the other were brought one by one into the x-ray center. The magical moment: I held him, one day old, while the others went in!
The meeting with Michaela went splendidly. She proved to be a wonderful contact. Some surprises: she ushered me into the main offices and introduced me to the Director of the hospital(!) and several heads of departments. We discussed meeting again for a more formal interview (con grabadora) in the future.
After my meeting with Michaela, Angela met me in front of the hospital gates with a taxi. From there, we road off to Las Pampas, a puebles jovenes in San Juan de Miraflores. Las Pampas is the community most studied and programmatically served by PRISMA (local NGO I’ve mentioned in previous posts). Angela is conducting her disseration research in this community and I joined her — got a small tour of the neighborhood, met the staff, helped out with some IRB applications (specifically for a great photovoice project Angela is doing) and then took part in a focus group with 15-17 year old boys (part of Angela’s disseration). It was after 6:30 when we finally started the trek back to Miraflores.
¿Dónde debemos vivir?
Paul wrote a nice post about our frustrations with the tax situation in our States-side home, New Orleans. He also posted to the Uptown forum about the situation and the responses were very interesting. Some examples of the responses to his forum post:
“We pay the highest life insurance ratets, the highest car insurance rates, one of the highest electric/gas utility rates IN THE NATION, high if not highest health insurance rates, highest water/sewer rates ( did you know some places provide it free to their citizens?) and some of the highest property tax millages (for those of us who pay the tax, along with businesses) IN THE COUNTRY. I also am ready to leave, shut down my business, go somewhere else where it’s easier…”
“I have been here over 60 years, through thick and thin, have endured the heartache of violent crime, and generated lots of sales taxes, paid lots of property taxes. I’m afraid, though, that I’ve reached that “tipping point” where it doesn’t make sense to do it any longer, and that saddens me to no end. I want it to be different, but do not see that it will.”
It is hard to live in such a wonderful place and not be able to enjoy it. Between the high costs of daily living and incredibly high costs of child care (which is not specific to New Orleans, necessarily, but endemic of our society as a whole) we truly are slowly going bankrupt. It is a ridiculous situation when you consider our current earnings. Granted, I am a doctoral student, and by definition, we are seriously financially constrained folk. But now that I am done with classes, getting on track with a disseration, and do not have the requirement of being in the general vicinity of my program, does it really make sense to stay??
Which brings us to the question: where the heck do we want to live? The bottom line is that we have no idea. Added to that is our love of community: we adore our neighbors and we love our current quality of life. But, as discussed above, it’s hard to feel good about living there. Peru is looking better and better for the next 2 or so years while I work on my disseration — we have to be here for a least a year for the research phase of it, and there is no reason why I couldn’t stay here to write. Plus, with a committee member (Valerie) living and working here, it may be a great situation…? Still, the question… what do we do with our house in the States? Do we rent it? (This would happen most likely at a loss, getting what we need out of it to pay mortgage, taxes, and insurance is in all likelihood impossible.) Do we sell it? And if we do sell it, when? Before/after the baby? Do we still make repairs? If so, how much? And do we pay to store our stuff and go into the “2 year” countdown of putting our equity into another home? I think if we sell, we’d want to buy a small investment property… somewhere… to store our stuff. But again, where??
If anyone wonders what keeps us up at night these days, this is it!!
Potty Time
Out of nowhere, Will has developed an interest in sitting on the toilet. He tells us it’s “potty time” or announces the need for a “poo-poo” and prompty pulls off his pants. We are instructed (at penalty of a seriously upset kid) to put him on the potty. He sits there for a minute or two, announces he is done (nothing has really happened, he just sits there and says words like “tinkle” and “poopie” and sings for awhile) and then hops off to have his diaper and pants put back on.
Maybe my dream of potty training Will once we get back to the States (i.e.: before the birth of child number 2) is actually something that could happen?
A speech to go down in history
Paul posted a link to this speech on his weblog. But it is important enough, sage enough, truthful, honest, and clear enough, to be posted on all weblogs.
Wynton Marsalis – Renewal Series Address – Tulane University – MLK: 1/16/06
