The Invitation: Camila's Next Big Adventure

When I dream of Tacna there is dirt and dust and our little cement house on the edge of nowhere, its bright cerulean blue a beacon on our street when I return home late at night. I dream of dust on my window pain, as I look out in the mornings and see the deep blue of our patio walls, mismatched chairs scattered about, collected over many years. A fine layer of dry dust covers everything here,  so different from where I grew up: a coast that battled damp and mildew and mold each and every day, a fine layer of mist settling onto my head and shoulders as I walked out the door each morning. If you were to ask me to pick a color for Tacna, the first word out of my mouth  would be  brown. It’s a light, yellowish brown, the brown of sandy dirt  where nothing much grows. I could also tell you grey, the grey of cement and concrete, the grey of houses and streets and cars and buses. These are the colors I live and breathe as I move about the city.

Sunday brunch with my loving host family   My blog, which began as a way to keep friends and family up to date as I served with JVC for two years in Peru, has transformed into a tool with which I can process my experience of being a foreigner living abroad. It is an opportunity to honor the small differences in daily life and create a space for me to explore my discomfort with the bigger challenges I discover when culture clashes come knocking. Many of the experiences I write about might seem trivial to the average local. Why write about bus fairs and the local market? I'm sure you would never have found me writing about the strangeness of combination gas station-restaurants in the rural US. or our habit of only singing the national anthem at sporting events. But here I am, an American citizen abroad, taking delight in the differences I find before me. Little did I think that my observations could be interpreted as an accurate picture of Peru in general.