I woke up this morning to the sound of machete hacking apart bone in the next room. Apparently they were getting an early start on moving that thing. I hung out in my room for a while, avoiding walking out during the blood bath, and eventually just shuffled out the door with toothpaste in hand. I was surprised to find a bunch of people at my house, a couple women were off to the side building a fire with a big pot on top and doing something to a giant bucket filled with what looked like fat. There were little kids hanging out with Mishel and doing a puzzle. They had the sink hooked up to the hose, so I wandered around looking for the other end of the hose so I could brush my teeth. I made a run to the bathroom and on my way back, the women working over the fire outside asked me if I wanted to help, slightly teasingly and with a bit of a laugh I said, “Noooo, thank you.” They laughed at that, which was good. Sometimes being the weird gringa saves me from judgment, which I am grateful for. I walked by my host mom, who was on the phone and crying again. When I got back to my room, I grabbed my camera, stuck it out my bedroom door and snapped a picture of lord knows what.
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| This would be...Lord knows what. |
I spent most of the day with a bandana drenched in body spray wrapped around my face to block out the smell, which I’ve decided smells like sour milk, clotted blood, and gangrene, and with headphones in my ears to block out the sound of them hacking that thing to pieces. I somehow stopped feeling sick long enough to work out and then gave myself a much needed hair wash in the sink. When I had finished washing my hair and was standing in front of the door to the butcher shop I hesitated, because from outside, with the door shut, you could still smell that horrible stench. I heard Celina start to laugh and with a turn of my head, found her sitting in Mishel’s room, cracking up about either the fact that I had a towel wrapped around my hair (which I don’t think they do here), or because she could tell I was hesitating to walk into the room.
“It smells horrible!” I said in my own defense, but still laughing with her. I know I must look like an idiot to them in my towel. I’ve definitely gotten used to laughing at myself here.
I finally braved it with breath held, until I got into my room. God it still smelled so bad. I’d never been so thankful for my Glade spray that I’d bought at Metro (big grocery story in Cajamarca City). It wasn’t as effective as I would have hoped though.
About an hour later, when it was clear that they had stopped doing anything with the meat, I started to get upset. How was I going to sleep with a bandana wrapped around my face? The smell made me horribly nauseous and they had promised they would move it and they still hadn’t. I was literally the only person whose room was affected by it. It was like being locked in a butchers shop. A half hour later, I heard them moving around in there and I opened the door to see if the pile of cow parts had diminished and it had.
“I’m almost free!!!” I cheered, and shut my door again. I heard Celina laughing through the door. A part of me thought, for a very brief second, about helping, but considering that gloves were unavailable, I already thought the smell would make me vomit, and I had a hard time looking directly at the chopped up dead cow, I figured moving giant bloody pieces of it with my bare hands was not going to happen. They didn’t move all of it, but they moved a bunch and the smell diminished in intensity.
Later that night, I was in my room waiting to be called to dinner, and Celina came and knocked on the door. I opened it to find her holding a cup of hot milk. Although milk and the smell of it…and its connection to the chopped up animal in the room she was standing in was not exactly appealing, it was one of the most thoughtful things she had ever done for me. She said there was a lot of cow in the kitchen, and she thought I would rather eat in my room. I was so incredibly grateful to her for thinking of me and not judging me for my aversion to large hunks of bloody meat. I thanked her profusely and set the cup down on my bedside table. I let it cool off and then tried to take a sip. I’ll be real, I missed milk in the States. I miss it anyway, but really fresh, unprocessed, unpasteurized milk, because of what I’ve been drinking my whole life, tastes super weird. However, I haven’t been getting any calcium in my diet other than the powdered milk I put in my hot cocoa sometimes, and so I asked my host mom a few days ago if I could sometimes have some of the milk that the school gives to Mishel everyday, which Celina just ends up drinking because Mishel hates milk. She said of course, but lately, because of the strike, the cheese house where all the women sell their milk is closed and some of the milk we get each day from our remaining cows, Celina is giving me. I’ve actually been terrified that I’m becoming lactose intolerant because every time I’ve had their version of packaged milk, this horrific stuff called “Gloria”, I get stomach pains and all the other icky stuff that comes along with lactose intolerance. This is a super problem, because not only do I LOVE milk, I love cheese, and yogurt, and ice cream.
One milk was more or less room temperature, I decided I’d have cereal for the first time in almost 9 months. I haven’t had cereal since I left the States because they don’t have good cereal and their milk is awful. I recently bought some Fitness Fruits that I found in Metro in Cajamarca. It was nice to eat cereal and milk, even if it all tasted a little off.
I finished reading Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. It was unlike any book I’ve ever read. It was really interesting and a little weird. I decided to start reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I’ve been thinking about reading this book for over a year and just haven’t. As far as religion goes, I know where I stand and I’m reasonably content with it, but sometimes I get jealous of people who have a strong faith in something. What a wonderful comfort that would be to so solidly believe in something. To have a firm idea of where you’ll go when you die, to have a community to support you and be part of, to have confidence that there is a higher power with stakes in your life, and to have some kind of understanding in how it is involved in your life. I think that would be wonderful but I’ve had a hard time connecting with organized religion in my life. I figured if anyone could draw me into Christianity, it would probably be C.S. Lewis.
I guess I wasn’t completely right about that.
In the first 30 or so pages that I read, I think I gained some things from what I read, but I also didn’t buy all his arguments and conclusions, and he actually kind of pissed me off at one point.
I suppose before I jump into this, I should put a mini disclaimer that I don’t have anything against other people who believe these things (I previously stated I sort of envy you), and these are just my own personal thoughts, obviously, because it’s my blog.
One of the first things that C.S. Lewis talked about was the Law of Human Nature, that we are all governed by a natural law of what we ought to do, and that often this law is the vehicle through which we can override more basic human instincts, or at least choose between them, to do what is universally considered “right”. He says we don’t always adhere to this law, hence things like guilt and excuses. His ultimate claim is that the Law of Human Nature is God manifested in the world of man. How do we know that the Law of Human Nature has always existed? Given knowledge about the mental capacity of our earliest ancestors, I’m not sure that the Law of Human Nature has always existed, and if not, then isn’t it a social convention? C.S. Lewis admits that we learn the Law of Human Nature from our parents, but argues that by choosing one morality over another, like a Christian morality vs. a Nazi morality, we are measuring it against a universal standard to decide what is better, as if that’s proof that the universal standard was created by God. Couldn’t you just say that as a species, as we evolved mentally, we managed to develop our herd mentality into something more complex based on love and justice to ensure a peaceful survival? Who’s to say that just because we can’t pinpoint the origin of this social governance or code that it is God? He even says there are exceptions of people who adhere to the Law of Human Nature, but why would God be absent from certain individuals? That only makes sense to me if it is no more than a social construct.
The other half of it that actually kind of pissed me off was when he was talking about the Life-Force philosophy. This philosophy seems decently close to what I believe, although I usually avoid thinking about anything pertaining to religion in relation to evolution. He looks at it as related to evolution saying that the Life-Force idea means that the evolution of man happened due to the “striving and purposefulness” of a Life-Force. His argument was that if this force has a mind, then it is thus God and in agreement with the religious perspective, but if it doesn’t, then how can it strive or have purposes. It’s a good point, this isn’t actually the point that pissed me off. For me, I couldn’t say if this higher force, power, whatever has a mind. A mind seems almost too committal, too involved for my liking, but without a mind, there isn’t the comfort of being listened to when you feel like there is no where else to turn.
It’s funny, I wanted to do this, to plunge into this, but I have always had a complete aversion to unanswerable questions. They drive me crazy! If something can only be personally reasoned with no conclusive answer, I usually prefer to leave it super vague for myself and ask no more questions. No turning back now I suppose.
Ok, so the part that pissed me off. He said that people like the Life-Force perspective because it gave all the emotional comfort of believing in God without the less pleasant consequences, aka you have no consequences if you do something bad. He said, “Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?”
So why does this piss me off? I guess I don’t understand the additional consequences for bad choices if I believe in the God of a certain religion. I go to church and say I’m sorry? If it’s really bad I’m denied entry to heaven? I don’t think saying Hail Marys is going to feel worse than my own disappointment in myself. Maybe these “divine consequences” are imperative for people who are not good at holding themselves accountable, or who can’t make good decisions or feel the necessary disappointment or guilt if they make bad ones. I think I’m mostly offended that what he said made me feel like he thinks I believe what I do to shirk responsibility for my own actions. I also don’t think that people should make good choices out of fear of God and consequences, but to be a good person and to love others.
Well, that’s enough of all that for today.
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