I love to wake up early in
the morning. Today i woke up before 6. The sun falls laterally at this hour and
the hills around the house throw long shadows. You can see their relief much
better than during midday. They turn into something magical, calling you to
visit them, to discover every pleat and they reveil secrets, which are hidden
during bright daylight.
On one of the hills, there
is a surveillance tower from a military installation on the other side of the
hill. I know it is made to survey the military ground so no one can approach
from the back. But I like to think at it as if it would be watching over my
small valley. I live in a neat residential area, most of the buildings here are
two to three stories, with tiny front-gardens which have only a decorative
purpose for the one or two families living inside each house. The people here
are the growing middle class of Lima.
They send their children to universities they just start being able to afford
since one or two generation. They have relatively good cars and are able to
support the growing consumption habits of the mega-city: cinemas, shopping
malls, restaurants, bars, theatres, concerts and other spectacles.
This
citizen, they suffered the hardship from the years of high inflation and
terrorism, but who knows if they actively remember it. Everything seems so calm
here. We have parks with trees which are barely visited. People don't go out to
the parks here, don't sit by the trees and enjoy the sun. ... The people in my
area, they are mostly homey people, polite, cultivated and reserved. But the
parks are necessary. Lima
is a desert, it’s brown and grey. If you go out of Lima, you will see that the whole coast is
like that. It has its own beauty, especially during morning and evening hours.
When I visited Huarmey, the landscape was impressive. It made me remember these
American movies where you make a road trip over the desert. The dunes are not
yellow like the ones you imagine from the Sahara.
They are grey, brown, even a bit white. Sometimes they shine and the air plays
freely around them, painting beautiful formations on the hills backs. ...But in
Lima, you don't
have this openness from the desert. It's full of houses, and streets and
pavement. The limeños used to paint their houses green, and red, and blue and
yellow. When I arrived here 15 years ago, the city looked like a chaos to me.
All colourful, nothing had an order. Today, my eye is not that of a European
used to proper order anymore. I got warm with the chaos, I learned to love it. But
today the Limeños are getting tired of it. The colours of the houses around my
area are more decent nowadays. Light yellows, light greens, light greys.
Everything starts looking more harmonic now; the parks are the only things
bringing colour into the scenery. It's like the citizens are starting to get
used to moderate, civilized conditions. No bombs anymore, the current war they
are fighting is mostly against corruption, and they have many battles won. Not
everything is yet clear in the state of Peru, not at all, but the process
is started, and people forget, people seem to forget quiet quickly.
When i was living here 15
years ago, you bearly couldn't carry a handbag with you. You usually closed it
up in the trunk of your car or put it under your seat, and made sure to close
the doors and no matter how warm it was, the windows stayed closed too, …at
least, in most of the city areas. Last saturday, I was on a local transport
driving through Surquillo, when I saw something, which reminded me, how much
the city has changed and how little the citizens notice it. I was sitting in
the transport when we stopped at a red light. And there I saw it: A car next to
me, with a couple around their sixties. They were driving an old car, a model
which might be 15 to 20 years old or so, one which has the door security locks
on top, not the ones which are placed in the middle of the door and you can't
see them from outside. The door locks, ... they were open! Inside me, all the
security bells rang. We were driving through Surquillo. One of the former dark
parts of Lima.
There have always been worse parts in the city, parts you can't even access, if
you don't live there, but you could say, it has always been the bad part of the
town which is surrounded by most of the residential areas like Surco,
Miraflores, San Isidro.
That means, in former days, if you wanted to visit someone living in one of the
other residential areas, and you had to cross Surquillo, you used to check
again on all the doors, all the windows and nearly hold your breath if it
started being late. When a car or a bag got stolen in the residential areas, if
you were quick, you could have probably found it back in one of the ambulant
markets or garages of Surquillo a few minutes later...
But now, ... things have
changed, or people seem to have forgotten. They seem to be relaxed. I wonder
how that can be?
The area looks truly
different. Big, global supermarket-chains and handcraft-markets have opened
modern shops here, with automatic doors and attending personal in uniform, with
price catalogues, and shopping trolleys. You have a very famous clinic which
treats for low budget, but nevertheless has a good reputation, from Surquillo I
always take one of the very modern trans-city busses, el metropolitano,
who has a special trace and therefore practically flies you through the immense
city... and all over Surquillo there are placards announcing "Surquillo
está cambiando" (Surquillo is changing), repeating it again and again,
like when you speak out a wish in a fairy tale. And every three times you say
it or read it or think it.... something actually changes in Surquillo...
But the people, when they
speak, they say that Lima
is getting more and more dangerous, that the organized crime is taking over the
city, that the government is making a dissatisfying job ensuring the area.
People seem to have forgotten what it was, truly living in fear. People
in the civilisation often ignore the drums of the wild, the coldness of
the winds in the desert, the desperation of the darkness during the nights.
Here, in the city who never sleeps, full of lights and of progress, of green
calm parks and light painted two story houses… Here, a watchtower on a hill of
a residential area -seems to me- is of high necessity. And be it only to remind
you that there was a time, where such a watch tower was needed in the middle of
the city, in the middle of residential areas.