My Friend’s Here, My Friend’s Here! (May 10th, 2014)

There’s a scene from Tina Fey’s Bossypants when she describes how she felt when Amy Poehler came to SNL—essentially “My friend’s here, my friend’s here!”  That pretty much sums up how I felt when Lauren, the volunteer from Huari, came up to Huantar.

My host family had been pushing for a while to have my fellow dark-siders come up to Huantar to visit, and this weekend was not only Mother’s Day, but also my host sister Nicoll’s seventh birthday.  There was only thing for it—Celebrate!

So they killed the pig.

But before the pig killing occurred, my family and I got into a tizzy about having a visitor.  My host mom swept and reorganized the upstairs, and I swept my room, put up some new decorations, and, to top it all off, I showered.  We were pulling out all the stops.

I don’t think I realized how excited I was to have someone visit my town.  I wanted everything to be perfect; I wanted to show off where I lived and the people I lived with.  I had to stop myself from telling random people on the street that my friend was coming.  And I’m fairly certain I might have skipped through the streets at some point.  Internally I had hung a banner across the entrance to the town saying “Welcome to Huantar Lauren!”

Huantar is fairly tranquilo—Lauren in fact was told this by practically everyone we ran into in fact.  The day’s itinerary involved walking around town and walking through the countryside (mountainside?).  We walked throughout the town and to the sites.  We hit up the mirador and the tree on the hill.  And since there was another gringa in town I finally got some shots of me in Huantar:

We walked and we talked and I just kept on smiling.  The weather and the birds conspired to make Huantar especially lovely.  The sun shone down on green fields of wheat and corn.  The birds chirped merrily as we walked along, and the clouds in the distance briefly parted to let the Cordillera Blanca shine on through.

And to top the evening off, we ate some Dark Side of the Rainbow Skittles (ever so appropriate to eat on the Dark Side of the Mountain):

The next morning we ate breakfast with a family down the street that owns a parrot named Polly.  Polly very much enjoyed eating Lauren’s fingers:

I wanted to write about this because having someone visit me made things feel so much more real. Here I am, living in a strange land, and most of the time I feel at home.  But to have someone who also spoke English, who also is living in a strange land, come visit me, made things feel slightly less foreign.  For once I was the resident expert on all things Huantar.  I’m working here and for the next two years am a part of this community and it felt so nice to be able to share that with someone else.

Besos!