Yesterday I began teaching English to a handful of twenty-something students in Huaraz. We sang "You've Got a Friend" and "Imagine," practicing pronunciation.
They are shy, but eager to learn. We discussed media and I gave homework. For today, they should find a Spanish article or program and describe it in English in a few sentences.
There are no movie theaters in Huaraz. But the festival of el Señor de la Soledad continues all week, massive, explosive, dancing, drinking, and celebration, fireworks.
Neighborhoods and civic groups prepare for years to perform in elaborate regalia with complex choreography, sometimes in competition, with drumming and shakers and whistles, continuing some nights until dawn.
"It is impossible not to dance" is printed on the back of one group's brightly colored costumes, with feathered headdress and masks that blur facial features and gender.
Dogs and children enter the church, where the crowds light candles and pray and the priests say ritual mass, with singing, all at the same time. It is dizzying, exhilarating.
In the pulsing crowd of people watching and participating, I appear to be the only tourist.
While it doesn't seem like a drug culture in Peru, there are daily reminders of the historic religious use of psychedelic substances. In several areas, there are ayahuasca ceremonies and shamans. School children can be seen poking at the mescaline laden San Pedro cactus growing in the yard. Coca leaves are sold at the market, a full bag for 30 cents.
With the religious activities here outside the church of el Señor de la Soledad, adding additional substances seems entirely unnecessary.
I like the appropriateness of honoring "soledad," or solitude, at this church. I am alone on this trip, but I have not felt alone even for a minute.
Maybe it's because I just finished reading George Saunders' "Lincoln in the Bardo," where the dead live on, speaking and passing through the bodies of the living. But it has never seemed so real to me that Lee is here. Everything I see and hear and do, I feel she is experiencing as well, her vision restored. The children, the colors, the scenery, the tradition, the majesty, all are hers, fully, finally.
This is the afterlife.
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