The horn on the bus goes Beep! Beep! Beep!

The one absolutely essential key element for getting anywhere in Lima is that your vehicle horn must work. If it doesn’t, driving is out of the question. I cannot begin to paint an accurate picture of traffic in Lima and all other parts of Peru that we visited. Maybe the best illustration would be to imagine a 3 lane divided highway at an intersection. It is perfectly permissible for the driver in the far right lane to turn left across all traffic and the driver in the far left lane to turn right. All you need is the guts to try it. Beep! In the meantime, the cars in the cross street are doing the same thing. Meanwhile, "normal" traffic is trying to navigate straight across the intersection.

Did I mention that there are no traffic lights or yield signs at this intersection? Doesn’t matter. If you can wedge your vehicle in front of another and blow your horn louder than the other guy you can go for it! Beeeeep! And the amazing thing is that the traffic does not gridlock; if you are blocked, just pull in front of the guy in the next lane. Beep! Up on the sidewalk? Pedestrians do NOT have the right-of-way. Beep! Near collision? Hey, the driver had at least 3 inches to spare. The mantra on the bus soon became “Don’t look, don’t listen.” You really didn’t want to know how close we came to that other bus. We felt somewhat fortunate that our bus was bigger than most other vehicles and mass carried a certain clout traffic-wise. Here it is parked outside the clinic. We really learned to hate this bus.

All cars are small. Fifteen passenger vans are legion, and then come the buses and trucks.On the route to Ventanilla most vehicles are either big trucks hauling cargo containers (Lima is a major South American Port; there are miles and miles and acres and acres of stacked shipping containers along the highway) or they are little motorcycle-based taxis, like this one.

There is no Metro or even City bus line. There are thousands of privately-owned taxis and gypsy buses and vans of all sizes. On most of these public buses there is a guy who hangs out the window, scouting for passengers; if someone waves, he has the driver stop. Anywhere. I was told it was possible to flag down a bus from a bus.

To make up for the absence of traffic lights and yield signs the highway department is overly generous with speed bumps – even on major highways. And every bump was one more jarring blow to the posterior. Altogether, we spent more than 35 hours riding buses and vans, 5 hours on trains and 18 plus hours on airplanes. By the end of the time, no wonder most of the team was singing, “I left my butt in South America.”

Where do I start?

I guess with the reason we went to Peru in the first place. A friend of ours is the Program Director for Olive Branch Ministries, International. That means she begs, cajoles and twists the arms of a lot of doctors, nurses, PAs and other medically-related people into donating their time and paying their own way to usually remote places in Central and South America to conduct week-long medical clinics for people who might otherwise receive no care or treatment.

So how did we end up with all these doctors? Eyeglasses. In addition to the opportunity to see a doctor, Olive Branch offers vision screening for both reading and distance glasses and the only qualification needed for this chore is the ability to stand on your feet for long periods of time, point to a chart and say important things in Spanish, like ¿Para leer o para lejos? (for reading or for distance?) and ¿Mas claro o menos claro? (more clear or less clear?).

We’ve done this before; Mom went to Guadalajara, we both went to El Salvador and now we’ve done Peru. The question is will we do it again? It was a hard, hard, trip. We stayed in a relatively nice hotel in Lima and took a 2 hour bus ride each day out to Ventanilla, a large community of shacks in a barren wasteland where Comunidad de Niños Sagrada Familia –a large orphanage - is located (lots more about that later). Nine to five we tested vision and dispensed glasses to hundreds of people daily. Then we got back on the bus and took a different route back to Lima.

The different route was not for sight seeing. There’s nothing worth seeing in Lima. It is a dirty, arid industrial area with no trees, few parks or lawns to speak of and sand and grime everywhere. It is a coastal city, but the beaches are rocky and the ocean is a dumping ground. No, we took a different route – each and every time we made the trip – because the driver could not consistently find his way there and back! I am not making this up. We never went the same way – coming or going – in 12 trips! On the one occasion the driver got lucky and got us back to the hotel in less than 2 hours we gave him a standing ovation!

Vision testing in this environment is frustrating. There is not a language barrier – we work with very capable interpreters who in a few hours can do the job better than Barbara and I can – but there is a mind-set barrier. People will come in who are obviously blind as a bat. They cannot even see the big ‘E’ but when we start trying lenses on them they complain that they are too strong, or that they make it blurred. We work our way down to the very lowest prescriptions and they still say too strong. We explain that that’s the weakest we have and we can’t help them and they sit there and look at you. We explain that if you are not used to wearing glasses it can look strange and “strong.” No deal. So they go away disappointed and we stay there frustrated.

In reading glasses, Barbara had to be very careful that the test set had identical frames or the person would adjust their vision requirements to their frame preferences. And make no mistake; these people know how to work the system. Some come for unneeded glasses simply because they know they can sell them later. At one clinic they discovered someone had gotten hold of a medical form (the "ticket") and sold forged copies. The only problem was they use metric sizes down there and the page was not 8 1/2 by 11!

But every once in a while, you get someone like the little old lady in El Salvador that nearly danced out of the clinic she was so happy. She told everyone along the way, “I can see now. I can see.” Or the two teen-age sisters this trip who literally could not see the chart, and walked out with -7 prescriptions (we’re talking coke-bottle thick, folks) who could now see clearly. They may be few and far between, but you do get your blessings.

In case you were wondering...

I'm sure that my 10's of readers outside of the family wondered just where in Austin my November banner picture was taken. Can't get a thing by you guys and you've already guessed that's a picture of Machu Pichu, or as those who have just climbed up there say, Mucho Peako!

We're back and I have about a year's worth of material about the trip to blog about - so much so that pretty soon I'll be the only one who doesn't skip right over my posting when they see that it is YAPS (Yet Another Peru Story). You have been warned. But now it's off to bed.

Hiding from the HEB greeter

The other evening we ate at Brick Oven and then wandered down to the HEB in that same shopping center. Mom was looking for some Styrofoam ice-chests with handles to help her with her Meals-On-Wheels deliveries. For the record, at this point she is delivering them - not receiving them. That may change.

There was a jovial greeter at the front entrance - sort of like Wal-Mart, but much happier. He asked if he could direct us to some needed item and Mom described what she was looking for. He told us where to find two versions that they stock and that there might be others over in another section of the store. He described the chests they had, gave us the temperature coefficients of each and drew us a map. Okay I made part of that up, but as we were walking away, Mom said, "That was a little too helpful."

We checked out the chests and Mom decided they were not what she needed. On the way back to the entrance, I commented that we were going to have to deal with Super Greeter; she said she was okay with that, and sure enough, SG was poised - very disappointed that we did not have ice chests in hand. He then directed us to the alternate location and all but scooted us off in search of the ideal chest.

We did go to that area to look, but SG was wrong - there were no chests in that area. Rather than have to tell him he was wrong, we went to the exit at the other end of the store, thinking we would just avoid the issue - but you're way ahead of me, aren't you? You already know which door SG was at now, don't you?

I'm not proud of it, but we hid. We waited until he was occupied, then scooted out with heads turned and faces hidden.

When I become a Wal-Mart greeter I'm going to take this lesson to heart.

It makes a statement...

...but it certainly doesn't tell the whole story.

I'm not sure I uncovered the whole story. I certainly have issues with each and every Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidate, but they don't let you say "None of the above" yet, so I made a choice and I'll live with it.