Encounters With the A*r F*rce
Sunday, February 11th, 2007We promised to let you know how the movie (La Oscuridad or The Dark) was and so, good to our word, we will. It was creepy. It was weird. It involved welsh folklore, blonde look-alike children, and a lot of sheep. The sheep were especially creepy because we’ve seen so many of them around these parts and, inevitably, we`ll be running into some soon. Baaaaaaa.
So, after a movie like that, operating on about an hour of sleep in the last 48 hours, and trying to navigate a city that we`d arrived in that morning, we left the theater very disoriented. Creepy horror film movie music still played in our heads. It didn’t help that Chiclayo is a chaotic coastal town where the taxis honk constantly just to announce that their intention is to keep moving through intersections without stopping.
We had walked about two blocks when a woman stopped us in a crowd and asked us if we were American. As it turns out, we’re conspicuous. But then she threw us for a loop: “Are you with the A*r F*rce?” Maybe we`re not so conspicuous. “Um… no,” we answered. “Oh, well are you with the Military”… “Um… no… still no.” Megan at this point was afraid that she was Peruvian searching the streets for American military personnel to ream out for Human Rights Abuses. But it turned out to be nothing that sinister. The next words out of her mouth were: “Oh, well, you`re American. And YOU’RE GIRLS! What are you up to? Do you mind if I tag along?”
It turns out she is a Texan, currently a secretary with computer skills in the A*r F*rce, stationed in Lima and working for the week in Chiclayo. (What, might we ask, is the United States A*r F*rce doing in Peru?) She is the only woman in over a hundred A*r F*rce personnel here for some kind of training, which explains her delight at our femaleness. Over the next half hour she took advantage of our feminine listening skills and told us about her life.
She grew up in El Paso, the oldest of five in a Mexican immigrant family. Her mother was over-protective. Her father was machisto. She joined the JROTC in high school but didn’t meet the GPA requirements to join up after graduation. Instead, she “wasted” (her word) a year in community college, living at home, with a 10 pm curfew at age 19. On the advice of an already-enlisted friend, she joined the A*r F*rce, thinking “if I don`t get out of El Paso, I’ll die here.” Since then, the A*r F*rce had taken her to Hawai’i, Japan, Germany, Italy, and Peru. It had seen her through one marriage and two children. As a single mother, she was given the choice of heading off to Iraq or putting her Spanish language skills to work in Peru — logically, to our minds, she had chosen Peru. It was not that obvious a choice to our new friend — “my friend in Iraq told me that even the ugly girls get lucky in Iraq — there are 35,000 lonely men out there now, and the ones who are married are cheating. I should’ve thought harder about my decision. Men here just come up to my boobs and only want me for a green card.” Suffice it to say, neither of us had considered the advantages of being a single woman in the A*r F*rce before. The evening ended with a plea to join her in a night of Karaoke with her all-male comrades, which we politely declined. Neither of us were up for a night on the town with American A*r F*rce soldiers, especially after our harrowing bus journey and creepy movie experience.
However, the next day, after a trip to the best archeology museum either of us had ever visited, we started seeing white Americans with buzz cuts everywhere. They were eating pizza, they were ordering ice cream, they were drinking Cristal (the national beer of Peru). Quickly realizing that we would not be free of our countryman for the rest of the weekend we retreated to our hotel where we commandeered the public television and watched “What Not To Wear” (“No Te Lo Pongas!”). Tomorrow, to Huarez!
— Las Dos
*Names altered to protect the innocent, namely Megan and Sarah.
admin