Valentine's Day at the beach...

After working out today, I decided to head down to the beach and people watch. I stumbled down the hill, crossed the highway a couple of times, and found my way to the sand. I'd walked along the beach before, but never on the weekend. It was packed!

I've decided that I'm going to try and walk the beach once a week, because you can learn so much about a culture, in my humble opinion, by watching people at the beach.

My insights:

• People here are a lot like the story from Goldilocks: not too fat, not too thin, just right. It's funny, because there wasn't a lot of extremes at the beach. In the US, I feel like you see some huge people, some really fit people, and then some average people. Here, it seemed, people had an average build. Which, to me, means they don't worship their bodies, but at the same time they're taking care of themselves, nice moderation.


• There were so many people in the water and playing. I'm not just talking children here, but parents too. It was so nice to see parents running around with their children, playing, and enjoying themselves. It gave me a lot of hope for the sake of families. This told me that they know where their priorities are, they can relax, have fun, and not be stressed about work, or annoyed with their children for being children.


• If you want to earn some money on the weekend, go to the beach. Yes, we've all been to Mexico and seen the people that sell stuff on the beach, but these people, I think, were more creative. There were about 5-8 boats, and I'm talking like wooden 18 foot boats here, that were giving people rides, think manual oars here, in the ocean. It was kind of funny seeing people climb up into these boats, but also very impressive because these little guys had to be in great shape!


• The beach is also the place to wash your car. Forget about the car wash, that takes too much time, and you can only look at the funny birthday cards while waiting so many times. Just drive to the beach and pay somebody to wash your car for you.


• Hungry? Don't worry, the beach acts like a restaurant too. Just sit back, relax, and somebody will come by to take your order.


• Finally, don't take your shirt off if you're a gringo. You can get by without stares with a shirt, but once that bad boy comes off and you show the world the whiteness that is your chest (which hasn't seen the sun in 6 months) people will stare. You will also be charged 50% more than usually because people will need to put their sunglasses on in order to look at you...

That's all I got...Happy Valentine's Day!

What is love? Part 2

This brings us to a second and related misunderstanding. Agape's object is always the concrete individual, not some abstraction called humanity. Love of humanity is easy because humanity does not surprise you with inconvenient demands. You never find humanity on your doorstep, stinking and begging.

Jesus commands us to love not humanity but our neighbor, all our neighbors, the real individuals we meet, just as he did. He died for me and for you, not for humanity. The Cross has our names on it, not the name "humanity". When Jesus called himself the Good Shepherd, he said he "calls his own sheep by name" (Jn 10:3). The gospel comes to you not in a newspaper with a Xeroxed label, "Dear Occupant", but in a handwritten envelope personally addressed to you, as a love letter from God to you alone. One of the saints says that Jesus would have done everything he did and suffered everything he suffered even if you were the only person who had sinned, just for you. More than that, he did! This is no " if" ; this is fact. His loving eyes saw you from the Cross. Each of his five wounds were lips speaking your name.
Grandfathers are kind; fathers are loving.

A third, related, misunderstanding about love is to confuse it with kindness, which is only one of its usual attributes. Kindness is the desire to relieve another's suffering. Love is the willing of another's good. A father can spank his child out of love. And God is a father.

It is painfully obvious that God is not mere kindness, for he does not remove all suffering, though he has the power to do so. Indeed, this very fact-that the God who is omnipotent and can at any instant miraculously erase all suffering from this world deliberately chooses not to do so-is the commonest argument unbelievers use against him. The number one argument for atheism stems from the confusion between love and kindness.

The more we love someone, the more our love goes beyond kindness. We are merely kind to pets, and therefore we consent that our pets be put to death "to put them out of their misery" when they are suffering. There is increasing pressure in America to legalize euthenasia (so far only Nazi Germany and now Holland have ever legalized euthenasia), and this evil too stems from the confusion between love and kindness. We are kind to strangers but demanding of those we love. If a stranger informed you that he was a drug addict, you would probably try to reason with him in a kind and gentle way; but if your son or daughter said that to you, you would probably do a lot of shouting and screaming.

Grandfathers are kind; fathers are loving. Grandfathers say, "Run along and have a good time"; fathers say , "But don't do this or that." Grandfathers are compassionate, fathers are passionate. God is never once called our grandfather, much as we would prefer that to the inconveniently close, demanding, intimate father who loves us. The most frequently heard saying in our lives is precisely the philosophy of a grandfather: "Have a nice day." Many priests even sanctify this philosophy by ending the Mass with it, though the Mass is supposed to be the worship of the Father, not the Grandfather.

More Earthquakes

I felt my second earthquake today. I'm getting used to these little guys...but I certainly don't want to feel one of the big ones!

Two earthquakes jolt Peru
2009-02-14 09:01:35

Print
LIMA, Feb. 13 (Xinhua) -- Two earthquakes hit Peru on Friday, but there were no reports of victims or damages, according to Geophysics Institute of Peru (IGP).
The first earthquake, measuring 5.2 on the Richter's scale, struck early Friday the city of Pucallpa, in eastern Peru's Ucayali province.
The second one, measuring 3.8 on the Richter's scale, hit the province of Callao, west of Lima. It hit at 11:42 local time (1642GMT) with an undersea epicenter.
The quake triggered alarm in Lima, Peru's capital city.

What is love?

One of my big goals while I'm here in Peru is to learn how to love more perfectly. Since I got a lot of positive comments about the last daily reflection I posted, I thought I'd share one on love by Peter Kreeft, in a series of postings:

Without qualification, without ifs, ands, or buts, God's word tells us, straight as a left jab, that love is the greatest thing there is (1 Cor 13: 13). Scripture never says God is justice or beauty or righteousness, though he is just and beautiful and righteous. But "God is love" (1 Jn 4:8). Love is God's essence, his whole being. Everything in him is love. Even his justice is love. Paul identifies "the justice of God" in Romans 1:17 with the most unjust event in all history, deicide, the crucifixion, for that was God's great act of love.

But no word is more misunderstood in our society than the word love. One of the most useful books we can read is C. S. Lewis' unpretentious little masterpiece The Four Loves. There, he clearly distinguishes agape, the kind of love Christ taught and showed, from storge (natural affection or liking), eros (sexual desire), and philia (friendship). It is agape that is the greatest thing in the world.

The old word for agape in English was charity. Unfortunately, that word now means to most people simply handouts to beggars or to the United Fund. But the word love won't do either. It means to most people either sexual love (eros) or a feeling of affection (storge), or a vague love-in-general. Perhaps it is necessary to insist on the Greek word agape (pronounced ah-gah-pay) even at the risk of sounding snobbish or scholarly, so that we do not confuse this most important thing in the world with something else and miss it, for there is enormous misunderstanding about it in our society.

Feelings come to us, passively; love comes from us, actively, by our free choice.
The first and most usual misunderstanding of agape is to confuse it with a feeling. Our feelings are precious, but agape is more precious. Feelings come to us, passively; agape comes from us, actively, by our free choice. We are not responsible for our feelings-we can't help how we feel-but we are responsible for our agape or lack of it, eternally responsible, for agape comes from us; feelings come from wind, weather, and digestion. "Luv" comes from spring breezes; real love comes from the center of the soul, which Scripture calls the heart (another word we have sentimentalized and reduced to feeling). Liking is a feeling. But love (agape) is more than strong liking. Only a fool would command someone to feel a certain way. God commands us to love, and God is no fool.

Jesus had different feelings toward different people. But he loved them all equally and absolutely. But how can we love someone if we don't like him? Easy-we do it to ourselves all the time. We don't always have tender, comfortable feelings about ourselves; sometimes we feel foolish, stupid, asinine, or wicked. But we always love ourselves: we always seek our own good. Indeed, we feel dislike toward ourselves, we berate ourselves, precisely because we love ourselves; because we care about our good, we are impatient with our bad.
We fall in love but we do not fall in agape. We rise in agape.

God is agape, and agape is not feeling. So God is not feeling. That does not make him or agape cold and abstract. Just the opposite: God is love itself, feeling is the dribs and drabs of love received into the medium of passivity. God cannot fall in love for the same reason water cannot get wet: it is wet. Love itself cannot receive love as a passivity, only spread it as an activity. God is love in action, not love in dreams. Feelings are like dreams: easy, passive, spontaneous. Agape is hard and precious like a diamond.

Some hilarious cartoons a friend sent me...

A few more pics from the Andes

Tough Day

So, today was a tough day. I woke up sore from working out, made my traditional oatmeal and Peruvian coffee, walked upstairs and started reading my daily news. Then I began plugging away researching and writing some new grant proposals.

I took a break in the afternoon and saw that I had received an email from my dad titled "Bad News." I hate messages with that title because you expect the worse. "Who died?" I thought. Well, thank God nobody died, but there are some lingering "issues" from my car accident. Needless-to-say, I don't know what's going to happen.

It makes me wonder why these things happen at the worst possible times, but, thank God, I'm really not in control here. If I were, I'd really be stressed. Instead, I just have to trust that things will work out.

With that being said, does anybody know a good lawyer...?





On the bright side, who would have thought that my childhood fascination with Star Trek would help me learn Spanish? Turns out my roommate has Star Trek on DVD in Spanish and it's practically tripled my vocabulary in a week.

All I have to say is: "Hagalo numero uno!"

"Trash Shifters" transformed to Classier "Recyclers"

From this week's TIME Magazine, the picture is taken in a neighborhood just down the road:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1878475,00.html

Peru's Scavengers Turn Professional

Jose Luis Gonzalez, 60, has been called many things — almost none of them nice — in his 40 years working the streets of Lima, Peru's sprawling capital. "They call us vultures or scavengers most of the time, but sometimes they are meaner, saying we are thieves, criminals. It has never been easy work," he says. Gonzalez is one of an estimated 100,000 people in Peru who make a living diving through garbage to collect refuse — paper, metal, glass — that can be resold for a profit. It is a hard-scrabble life but one thing positive may now be handed to him and his fellow trash shifters: a new name for their profession.
Early each morning, he mounts his modified tricycle cart, peddling through the streets of the seaside district of Barranco in search of treasures. He foregoes a shrill horn for his booming voice, shouting for glass, paper or used items that can resell. "You have to be considerate and not make a mess. If you cause trouble, the police will take your cart and then you're stuck," he said. On a typical day, which usually includes six hours collecting goods and two hours sorting and selling items to middlemen at a municipal lot, he clears around $3.50. A good day means double that, which is still not very much for him, his wife and the four school-aged kids they still have at home. He earns around half the monthly minimum wage of $175, average for people in his line of work. (See pictures of India's slumdog recycling entrepreneurs.)
Now, the new National Movement of Recyclers of Peru is hoping to change that. The group, founded six months ago, has an ambitious plan that would double income levels while helping the country's municipal government deal with the problem of solid waste. The first step is changing the image Peruvians have of this army of cart-riding men and women, promoting the word "recycler" instead of more traditional, and derogatory, terms like "garbage-picker" or "scavenger." "The movement increases self-esteem. Society has always scorned recyclers, seeing them as the last rung on the ladder," says Galo Flores, who provides support to the movement through a local organization, Ciudad Saludable, or "Healthy City."
The crux of the program is economics, both for the members and the districts where they work. Flores says by working with the recyclers instead of seeing them as a nuisance, local governments could save a bundle by cutting fuels costs of garbage trucks and the fees paid to dispose of solid waste. Associations of recyclers would be registered as micro-enterprises and members would be eligible for social benefits, such as health care, while contributing small amounts to the country's tax base that would make them, according to Flores, "real citizens for the first time." (See pictures of garbage wars in Naples.)
The movement kicked off the new year with 30 recyclers' associations, two-thirds of those in Lima. It gets its inspiration from a similar group in Bogota, Colombia, and a few other organizations in South America. The Peruvian movement was formally launched a few months after local recyclers took part in the first world conclave of recyclers held last March in Colombia. One of the outcomes of the meeting was the commitment to start an international group, "Recyclers Without Borders."
Peru's recyclers, with the help of Flores and the backing of a few companies and some lawmakers, have moved quickly to solidify the movement. They have a strategic plan for the coming five years and helped draft legislation on behalf of recyclers. The bill, submitted in October and currently in committee, would facilitate the formalization of recycler associations by granting them government recognition. The legislation has the support of President Alan Garcia's administration through the Environment Ministry, because of the contribution it could make cleaning up this Andean country's towns and cities and contributing to Peru's efforts to slow global warming. See the top 10 green ideas of 2008.)
Peru currently produces around 20,000 tons of solid waste daily, according to government statistics. Most of this waste is dumped indiscriminately, ending up in rivers or the Pacific Ocean. A clean-up campaign in late January removed 30 tons of garbage from a three-mile stretch along the banks of the Rimac, the principal river in Lima. Peru has only eight properly designed and operational landfills nationwide.
The government estimates that recyclers are currently reprocessing about 1,800 tons of materials daily, but the goal is to increase the amount to 5,000 tons by organizing them in associations. "There are more than 100,000 recyclers in Peru. We hear them in Lima with their horns and calling for used bottles, paper and metal. They are generating income and doing a job that in other countries costs a fortune," says Environment Minister Antonio Brack. Apart from cleaning up the environment, Brack says each ton of recycled paper saves about 20 trees, contributing to Peru's ambitious goal of setting aside more than 50 million hectares of forests — double the size of the state of Colorado — to help mitigate the effects of global warming.
Brack is bullish on the recycling idea even though the prices for recyclables have crashed along as part of the international financial crisis. The price for paper, glass and other products in the U.S. have plummeted in recent months, falling by more than 75% in many areas. And so Brack is busy promoting the policy in person. He was at the center of the Jan. 22 kickoff of a new recycling campaign by the local branch of U.S. manufacturer Kimberly-Clark. He played master of ceremonies in a tuxedo made from recycled paper and crafted by one of Peru's top fashion designers. Kimberly-Clark has been importing used paper for its plant in Lima, something it hopes to change by encouraging recycling locally.
Gonzalez, pushing his cart through Barranco, said he is encouraged by what the recyclers' movement has to offer. "Organizing is a good idea. I have never liked joining groups, but I think this association will help us."

Peruvian Economy

In case anyone's wondering how the economy in Peru is doing...

Maybe we should take an economic lesson from a third world country...

Peru: Years of growth will help to combat crisis
The Associated Press
Published: February 10, 2009

LIMA, Peru: Nearly a decade of growth has given Peru the strength to counteract the global financial crisis and maintain the Andean nation in the upper echelons of global economic growth, with a 5 percent rate this year, Peru's finance minister said Monday.
"Things are going well in Peru; out there it's different," Finance and Economy Minister Luis Carranza told Lima-based RPP radio.

The surpluses Peru has enjoyed over the past three years will allow the government to boost public investment by 52 percent this year to maintain employment, Carranza said.
The boost is part of a $3 billion anti-crisis package the government announced in 2008, aimed at infrastructure and public works.

The finance ministry estimates that the economy grew by 9.4 percent in 2008, the highest growth in the region and one that surpasses even booming China's 9 percent growth rate for the same year. Official figures for Peru will be released this week. The economy, which has been expanding for more than seven years, grew 8.9 percent in 2007.

Peru, which holds $32 billion in U.S. dollar reserves, is currently running a "small" deficit equal to 0.7 percent of its gross domestic product, Carranza said. He said it will be covered with savings from last year.

"We are not excessively increasing the debt, we are using only a part of the surplus from 2008 to finance 2009," Carranza said.

He said the strength of Peru's economy and the boost in public spending will hold growth at 5 percent this year and 6 percent in 2010. The government and the International Monetary Fund had previously projected 6 percent growth in 2009.

Analyst Enrique Alvarez says a 3 percent to 4 percent growth rate is more likely, as Peru's exports, particularly top mineral exports, are hit by the global

financial crisis and an extended recession in the U.S. and other purchasers of Peru's goods.
"The reasonable approach at this time is to expect something lower," said Alvarez, head of research for Latin American financial markets at IDEAglobal in New York.

The U.N.'s Economic Commission for Latin America projects 1.9 percent growth for Latin America as a whole in 2009, while the IMF projects global growth of just 0.5 percent.
Peru is the world's top silver producer and one of the biggest exporters of copper, gold, zinc and fishmeal.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/02/10/business/LT-Peru-Economy.php

The Gym and Terrorism

On a lighter note, day 3 of working out is going well. It's funny how there's a universal idiocity at the gym. It doesn't matter what country you're in, they're always a few idiot guys that think they're really tough.

What's really funny is that in Peru these gyms are pretty new, so none of these guys are really that buff, but that doesn't stop a group of testosterone pumping fools from grunting and flexing in the mirror. Quite commical actually. Anyway, hopefully in another few weeks I'll have something to flex and grunt about in the mirror...

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,490306,00.html

By now all of you have heard about the fires in Australia. Very tramatic and devastating. Now the government is warning against fire terrorism.

Are you kidding me? Some of us talked about this after 9/11. Where have our government leaders been? I don't have a national security background, I don't have any terrorism experience (although with a beard, it may look as though I do), but what I do have is common sense.

Here's what I think is next:

• Environment terrorism- it's cheap, easy to do, and you can get away with it. Talk about fear and destruction too!
• Hydro terrorism- how easy would it be to contaminate our water? I really don't know, but it seems with easy access to our canals, it really wouldn't be that difficult. Not to mention destroying a few dams in select areas. Forget using a nuclear weapon, this could completely wipe out a city in no time.
• Utility terrorism- our electrical system runs tens, if not hundreds of thousands of miles. None of it is protected. They could take out a few high powered lines and shut down several cities and cause quite a bit of damage.
• Economic terrorism- the last time we were attacked was during a recession with a new president, sound familiar? Why would they waste resources when things are good, kick while they're down.

With this being said, I hope the Obama Administration doesn't pull back on many of Bush's War on Terror policies because now is not the time.

The Thomas Weekend Update

So I found where my 1989 Jeep Cherokee ended up. They gave it a nice paint job, some new wheels and sent it down to Peru. Looking real good!
Played a little soccer this weekend...well...I was on the field, I don't know if you would call what I did out there "playing." It was fun, good exercise, and I didn't break anything...success.

How did I play David? Thumbs up...riiiight.

This little guy in the stripped shirt owned me on a few plays. I told him to meet me on the basketball court and we'd see what would happen...

Also, my roommate "accidently" locked me out of my house for a couple of hours yesterday. I'll post some pictures on my Mission Impossible moves to get back in. Don't worry Alejandro, nothing's broken and I'm ok...