What I've Learned From A Concerted Effort to Become the Outsider

A month in Peru (May-June, 2024)

Typically, travel is at most a rough, bastardized approximation of education about a country’s culture. The hopes and fears of a people cannot be attained via paid tour and visits to historic monuments. At this point, I’ve spent a good deal of time alone in Latin America. 

I feel I’ve been in too many cities only to see the prescribed attractions and leave after a few days for the next.

I wanted a different experience — to arrive somewhere and make a concerted effort to learn what daily life looks like in that place —albeit in an unreasonably short timeframe. My goals were to learn the local language, make real community, and keep myself busy with my studies. I wanted a glimpse of normal life somewhere new.

Not yet knowing if I would even leave the US for the summer, I began to split my attention between my medical studies and learning Spanish. The amount of time I spent on language study that month raised some concerns in me that I may fail my last exam of the year. Fortunately, I didn’t.

The week before my final exam of the year, I found a cheap round trip flight to Peru. At the reasonable hour of 2 am, I booked the flight. Suddenly, I was set to be in Peru for just short of 4 weeks, solo once again. My flight itinerary took me on three flights to reach my final destination of Lima, Peru. Bouncing from airport to airport, contending with delays in Colombia and almost falling asleep in the airport, it was a day full of movement and wonder.

I did my best to leave embarrassment behind me. Any chance I got to speak Spanish, I tried. My poor taxi driver from the Lima airport on that first day got the worst of it. I cannot convey the number of blank stares I got in the process of practicing my Spanish. My Spanish remains terrible, but I spent my days studying. I listened to music with Spanish lyrics, watched Spanish-speaking shows with Spanish subtitles, and did Anki to expand my vocabulary. On my third day in Lima, I submitted my Spanish placement exam to a small school in Cusco. The next day, I boarded a flight headed there. After a few days, I arrived at my homestay, with a wonderful restauranteur and mother named Milagros as my host. She said she spoke very little english, although she always was able to help us find the correct translation for a word when we were struggling. (I think her english was better than she let on)

Four hours a day five days a week I received group instruction. All taught in Spanish, I spent half the day in class immersed in a new medium of communication. The other half of the day, you could find me in a coffee shop near the plaza de armas, reinforcing the Spanish concepts I had been introduced to the day before. In between commitments, I would walk through the plaza de armas, around San Blas, up to San Cristobal, and down Avenida de la Cultura. All in a way very akin to the way I live my life at home. Wandering. Nothing was different except language and local culture. Service was slow, honks were heard at every hour of the day (and night), and every time you crossed the street felt like it could have been your last. 

But the honks were more often than not drowned out by laughter. The laughter of school children passing by, the guys on the side of the street joking amongst themselves, with contentment filling the air from the grandmother nearby on the sidewalk calmly enjoying the day. And with time the chaos began to make sense.  The behavior of cars became more predictable, the crowds less stimulating, the markets less daunting, the city more responsive to my needs.

In a way, you could say I wasted my time here. I never saw Machu Picchu, I never saw the rainbow mountain, and never visited Arequipa nor Colca Canyon. Still, I’m very happy with the time I spent here. It easily eclipses the experiences I’ve had elsewhere. If someone looks to the daily routine of these days off and sees wasted time, I ask them to ask what about their daily life is any different. In this past year, of bearing witness to the experiences of patients, of living my life, and of the difficult times I’ve weathered as a medical student, I’ve realized that people are the most important. And that is what I’ve pursued. I’m happy that I have.

There's a lot more work to do. This is only a privileged peak into the assimilation some are forced to do to simply survive. My Spanish remains terrible, my ability to communicate very limited. I didn’t even have to work -- I got to learn at my own leisure. Still, I was touched by the stories of so many lives over the course of this trip. 

Back home, I have friends and neighbors that are still looking for someone to understand them, to give them the space to express themselves in the way they are most comfortable. I may never fulfill this ideal, but for the moment I want to keep the wonder that maybe one day I'll be able to.