david's web-log

On the Lima coast with my roommate's charango

Hi everyone, I’m writing this post from Lima, Peru, where I’ll be living over the next year as a volunteer/intern with Socios En Salud, which is part of the medical organization Partners In Health. I’ve been an enormous fan of the organization for quite some time now, so you can imagine how excited I am to join their team. But, I’m getting ahead of myself; let me first give some life context for those of you with whom I haven’t spoken in awhile.

I spent the last year — from September 2008 to August 2009 — taking all the pre-med classes at Bryn Mawr College, which is a small liberal arts school in the Philadelphia suburbs. This August, I finished my final pre-med requirements (curse you organic chemistry!), took the MCAT, and completed my medical school applications. Over the course of the next year, I will be going through the long medical school application process. After the MCAT adventure, I hauled my stuff home to Michigan with Mom and Dad. I then stayed at home with the fam for most of the month of September.

San Borja

I flew to Peru almost exactly a week ago. Here, I’m living in an apartment in the San Borja neighborhood of Lima. It’s actually a really nice neighborhood — probably one of the nicest in all of Lima. So, although there is considerable poverty throughout Lima and Peru in general, San Borja looks a little like some of the nicer beach neighborhoods of Los Angeles. As you can see from the photo, our street has a pretty boulevard down the middle.

As far as living arrangements, I’ve really been taken care of. My two roommates and I live in an apartment in a six-story apartment complex on the same block as the organization’s offices in San Borja. My depo (short for departamento, or apartment) is very nice. We have a beautiful dining area, a large lounge space with comfy couches, wireless internet, our own bedrooms, and probably more cable channels than I have at home. We also have help keeping the place clean from the organization’s wonderful cleaning service. In short, I must say these are by far the best digs I’ve had since leaving home to go to college. I’m very lucky.

Socios En Salud, the organization I’m working for, is a subsidiary of Partners In Health, which is an international medical NGO that works in many countries around the world — most prominently Haiti, Rwanda, and, of course, Peru. (Socios En Salud is just “Partners In Health” in Spanish). The organization is affiliated with a hospital in Boston (Brigham And Women’s Hospital) and Harvard Medical School. The history of Partners In Health and also Socios En Salud was described in Tracy Kidder’s book Mountains Beyond Mountains. It’s a great read, and I highly recommend it. Socios is very well known worldwide for its spectacular success treating drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis with community-health workers, but the organization has a number of other projects in areas such as infant health, microfinance, education, and home-building. My particular role is to serve as kind of a research assistant for two doctors here, as well as support the organization’s work with publications, presentations, Socio’s website, and other projects I can help with.

Lima, Peru.

Socios does much of their work in the outskirts of Lima, areas which are generally less well off than the central areas of Lima. A previous intern with Socios En Salud has explained this feature well:

If you made a topographical map of Lima by using household income instead of meters to measure altitude, that map would be almost a direct inverse of the actual topographical layout of Lima. That is to say the poorest people seem to live in the hills, and the higher up you go in the hills, the poorer people are. As it was explained to me, during Lima’s population explosion in the last generation, droves of people moved from the country into the city (again, often a trip downhill from the Andes but seeking higher socio-economic ground) and began these squatter settlements or “pueblos jovenes” in the unclaimed, unaccommodating hillsides. As new families move in, they simply build higher and higher up the hills. The cruel irony of this arrangement is that the people with the best views of the grandeur of the city have the least access to its resources.

Lima's historic center: Plaza de Armas

I don’t feel comfortable making many generalizations about Lima as I’ve only been in the city for one week. However, from what I’ve gleaned, it’s a unique city for a number of reasons. Here are a few things about Lima I didn’t know three months ago:

• Lima was founded in 1535 by Pizarro after his conquest of the Incas. However, present day Lima was not the original capital city of the Incas; that was Cuzco, which is located off the coast. Pizarro wanted a port city to be capital to take advantage of the seafaring nature of the Spanish.
• It is said the name “Lima” derives from the Quechua word limaq, which means “talker.”
• Lima has a fascinating microclimate that I don’t quite fully understand yet. It’s considered a coastal tropical desert and gets only about a few inches of rain each year. The sun rarely comes out during the winter.
• Greater Lima has a population of 8 million; one-third of all Peruvians live in the Lima metropolitan area.

I would be remiss if I also didn’t mention the food here. Peruvians take great pride in their national cuisine, which has been considered the best in all of Latin America. Peruvian food is an eclectic mix stemming from its diverse background:

Thanks to its pre-Incas and Inca heritage and to Spanish, Basque, African, Sino-Cantonese, Japanese and finally Italian, French and British immigration (mainly throughout the 19th century), Peruvian cuisine combines the flavors of four continents.

Some typical Peruvian dishes include ceviche (raw fish marinated in lemon juice and onions), lomo saltado (beef tenderloin with tomatoes and other spices), ají de gallina (chicken stew made with cream and cheese), and many more. (I’ve had the second two — delicious.) I have the privilege of trying a different Peruvian dish almost every lunch, so I will make sure to report back with my findings in a few months. I also must mention that Peru is home of the famous Pisco Sour, which is a cocktail made with pisco, lime, and egg-white. Pisco is a liquor distilled from grapes, and there is a long and complicated dispute between Peru and Chile over the rightful owner of the pisco denomination. I have been told in Lima, however, to always remember that El PISCO ES PERUANO.

Well, that’s about it for now. I welcome you to follow along in my further updates! Thank you for stopping by.