My Life in Peru
Jerren
November 20, 2005

I've done a good deal of writing since I've came here, but most of it reflected personal insecurities and fears that I had. A lot of the writing I did was cynical, attacking, and judgmental, and even jepordized the relationship I had with Steve. I can see now what role my parents had in shaping into the person that I am today. They are not themselves to blame because their parents contributed in raising me. But now that I am basically an adult, I have the responsibility of my life in my hands, and it is up to me to fix the damage of past emotionally painful experiences.

I came here looking for a greater purpose in life. Before coming to Peru, I was basically rooted in American culture and way of thinking. I still kept a critical attitude and analytical frame of mind, but I was nonetheless caught up in the values and the luxuries and the hedonistic lifestyle that almost everyone my age and older lived. I wasn't caught up to the point where I lived the lifestyle completely but it still enticed me. When I thought about my life goals and plans, I figured that I would graduate from well-known university and get a well-paying job and meet a beautiful woman and start a family and live in a nice house and become a grandfather eventually and die happily. That was roughly my conception of the purpose of human existence. And money was the all-important factor to realizing my dreams.

As a teenager I began to challenge the beliefs and values of the society in which I lived, which had to a certain extent become my own values and beliefs. I often took long walks, sat out alone amid nature to think, and spent hours in my room reading and writing. I started listening to a wide variety of music to understand other people's perspectives as it relates to music. I watched television less and played videogames less and drifted away from such-minded people.

Because I became so introspective and comtemplative, my values and beliefs shifted away from the accepted norm. My goals in life changed. I lost the desire to pursue the things that I once thought would bring me happiness and well-being. I underwent a paradigm shift in my fundamental values and belief system and worldview, which I am still going through today. I don't think that I will ever stop learning and changing and growing.

I lost the solid direction in my life that I once had. I felt lost, confused, and left out. I wanted to partake in the things seemingly everyone else centered their lives around, but I could so clearly see how absurd it was and therefore couldn't bring myself to do it. Because I steered away from the norm in my thinking, I began to increasingly feel out of place in American culture. I was a stranger in a strange land, in a place I had lived all my life. I realized that my changing values and beliefs rendered me unable to live the much-sought after American lifestyle. Seemingly "good" things like money or fame or sex or material things didn't have the same value and importance to me anymore.

When I think back to my experiences with my family and most of my friends, I realize that I didn't understand what I was feeling at the time, that I felt misunderstood and judged.

"Dude, you think too much...", my friend Tom said flatly. I was sitting next to him in his dorm room, eight o'clock at night, watching TV with him. I noticed he didn't make eye contact with me when he said it, he kept his eyes on the television screen. I felt offended. I didn't want to be around him after he said that. I remember wanting to go back to my room, but there was nothing to occupy my time in my room, so I stayed with Tom. I realize now that I never felt fully accepted around Tom, which is why we eventually drifted apart.

And my family often would joke with me saying, "Here's Mr. Philosopher" or "You can't make a living from thinking all the time." I lived in an invalidating environment and I had no one that I felt emotionally safe around. I lived my life in a psychological shell, protecting myself from rejection and emotional hurt.

Peru isn't much better than the United States. In fact, in some ways it is a lot worse. But really, that's just looking at the surface. There is so much that could be done here as well as in other poor countries around the world. The children are so intelligent, so bright, so loving, in the ideal state of human being. But I am speaking about children in general regardless of geographic location. They don't care about the same things as adults do. I would say that they are more mentally free than adults are and therefore much happier.

When I was in Tembledera staying with a family, they had a baby named Andrea. She would often stare at me with bright eyes and smile with an open mouth. It was the kind of smile so sincere and full of positive energy that it made you smile in return. Others would vie for her attention but almost always when I was around her, her eyes were most often on me. I felt special in a way and a little important. I think people are attracted to babies because they are in the ideal state of a human being. They are unburdened, unworried, unimpeded. In a word, they are free. We wish we could be like them, as happy as they are.

But then the parents and the culture ruin their minds. The parents' limitations become the children's limitations. Too many children often cannot see beyond their particular culture, which stifles their worldview. The lack of emotionally supportive and understanding parental figures or such a living environment for the children eventually shapes them into emotionally needy people.

In the United States, most people spend so much money on CDs, and going to the movies, and junk food, and clothing, plastic surgery, makeup, and excess luxuries that they could easily survive without. People are so worried about outside appearances and what other people think about them. And yet in other places of the world, people are literally starving to death, where even one dollar given directly to someone in need could make the difference between someone getting something to eat or not.

There are times when I feel like giving up entirely. I just want to disappear, not exist. Not exactly commit suicide or watch the blood run from my arms, but more just get away from everything, stop the world.

I came here with 150 U.S. dollars to my name. I had faith that somehow things would work out regardless. As I examined my wallet while waiting for the flight to Lima from Miami, I thought: I leaving all this behind because I want to help, not live a life of excess chasing after dollars and cents. I was thinking about going back to the United States because I'm running out of money here. I am doing well here otherwise, but the financial burden of supporting myself is such. Industrialized society with all of its man-made strictures, like laws and the concept of money, to give life a sense of order and purpose is ultimately absurd. The law-makers and people in charge have missed the point, I think. They are trying to create in building modern societies what are essentially large-scale ant colonies except with humans. And I feel resentful towards them a little bit.

But the truth is that my life is my responsibility. I put myself here. I am here because I want to be, for better or for worse. And I don't feel resentful anymore. I feel unburdened when I don't focus on other people and take responsibility. Really, it seems that my life ultimately isn't in my hands, that it is in the control of a deeper spiritual force. I do feel a sense of cosmic unity with all things and that things are led in harmony with everything else. I'm not sure how to explain it. I wrote about it in a journal entry covering as much as I could at that time.

I think the title is a bit misleading, too. It seems like I was going to write about Peru itself: how bad it is, what its problems are, the people, what I think needs to be done, and some more self-righteous commentary. Or maybe write a story to evoke sympathy and play off of people's emotions in order to encourage donations to keep me here. I could teach English here, but I don't have the confidence to do that. I speak Spanish on a sheer basic level. I still have yet to have a decent conversation with Laura beyond simple questions like what time it is or whether she likes something or not. That would be like a guy from a Spanish-speaking country coming to the United States with little knowledge of English, staying for two months, and then trying to teach Spanish to the people there. If you can't communicate with other people effectively, it makes teaching much more arduous and difficult, let alone getting the job in the first place since it's the United States. So, I feel frustrated right now.

I would rather not teach English as a job here, but more for fun because I like working with kids. Making it into a job would put undue pressure and stress on me, and I would have to be there at a certain time and leave at a certain time. I would feel restricted. I value the feeling of freedom. It would be like a job in United States except I would be getting paid much less. And if that is the case, I would rather work in the United States, even though it is so mentally unhealthy there for me.

If I had my way, I would write more and help with the suicidal teens that I chat with online, basically what I am doing right now. I've found that I am more of a thinker and a writer than I am anything else. I guess my problem is that I don't have the money to live like that, just writing and thinking and helping other people. So maybe that's just life or reality or the real world or whatever else you want to call it.