Hi Friends,
You find me writing from the interprovincial ITTSA bus heading north along the Panamerican Highway, three hours north of Trujillo, approximately four hours south of Piura. From my window seat the world outside to the west is flat and dry with occasional sand dunes cresting through the scrub. This is pretty much how it looks, with variations on the same basic rock and/or sand theme, along the entire coastal plain of Peru.
I was in Trujillo this weekend visiting fellow BMS mission workers, Michele and Dave Mahon. The primary motivation for the visit was to update the paperwork for the BMS car I now have with me in Piura, transferring it from Dave’s to my name. As usual, we found out things we never knew to ask which anyone only tells you when you’ve got a limited time window to sort everything out. Thankfully Dave had started the process the day before I arrived on Friday and then the woman who attended us at the Notary took a pragmatic approach to things. The ‘flexibility’ of the bureaucratic order here often works in both directions – sometimes against you, sometimes in your favour…So, for all intents and purposes, the car is now in my name. Misión cumplida.
I guess this is an opportune moment to reflect on car ownership and you might well ask why a single person, who mostly works from home, living in a city which is perfectly well-endowed with different forms of transport, which can be engaged easily and at relatively low cost, needs a car. If you’re not asking that question, there’s a good chance it’s because, like me, you grew up in an advanced industrial society where private car ownership has become a given. I can trace in my own family history how being a two-car family transitioned from being a luxury to a necessity (I still remember my dad’s drop handle road bike and his dashing trouser clips as he cycled off to work in the morning because my mum needed the one family car). The car has become emblematic of personal freedom, another thing we’ve become certain is a necessity, rather than a luxury, although I’m not sure who convinced us of this most effectively – the petroleum and automotive industries or the philanthropists and philosophers?
The number of cars in the whole of Nauta, when I first arrived in 2012, could be counted on one hand. Said cars included the ambulance and the police patrol vehicles. The only people I knew in Iquitos that owned cars were missionaries. Everyone else mainly got around on motorbikes and moto taxis, including the pastors we worked with.
In Piura, on one hand the situation is very different. I live in a ‘nice’ part of the city and all my neighbours have cars. They are part of the professional class. On the other hand, I attend church in a ‘not-so-nice’ part of the city, and once again, I can probably count the number of car owners on one hand. Most of the pastors I work with don’t have cars either. Ps Renxon of the Social Action Department was always very generous about helping me get to Association meetings – on his motorbike. He now very much enjoys the luxury of the air conditioning whilst I drive him to said meetings.
Ps Julio and the brothers from ‘Cristo Viene’ church, Victor and Nicolás, were always very punctual waiting for me at the pick-up point in the oldest, most beaten up minivan which was borrowed from another church member. This was when I first started visiting ‘km980’, an out-of-town cluster of impoverished settlements where they’re planting a church and where we’re implementing an eco-stove project. Several times a month I now have the privilege of driving them and I consider it a good sign (about my driving) that Ps Julio usually falls asleep within 10 minutes, or quicker on the way home.
Ps Domingo, Director of Piura Baptist Seminary, who had asked me to teach a class on creation stewardship this semester in Piura, recently added to the ask by proposing that I alternate between the city and the rural seminary branches. So every fortnight I’m now heading off to a small rural town called Morropón, about an hour and a half’s drive east of Piura. My class runs from 7-9pm and if I didn’t have my own vehicle, it would have to be an overnight stay every time. I believe Ps Domingo goes there on his motorbike; the other teachers are either local or have family they can stay with. I’m certain Ps Domingo felt he could ask me to go to Morropón because I have the car. I’m happy because I have the opportunity to share and learn more widely with students from a rural context, in a part of the region I hadn’t had the excuse to visit yet.
But now every time I turn up at church in a moto taxi, somebody has to ask me why I didn’t drive my car and I used to try to explain that I didn’t ask BMS for a car just so that I could drive myself across town when cheap moto taxis are available on every street corner. I realised there’s another potential culture clash double-whammy. Because car ownership is still relatively limited to the professional class and above, it imbues high status to the car owner. This is something I’m keen to avoid playing into, reinforcing the stereotype that all foreign missionaries are rich and of a conspicuously higher socio-economic status than the people we’re usually trying to work shoulder-to-shoulder with.
But when they hear I not only have a car (though I insist it’s not actually mine) and yet I still prefer to spend money on moto taxis (they’re cheap, but they’re not cheaper than the standard car mileage rate), am I now indicating that in reality I’m so rich that I can afford to have a car and still not use it…What socio-economic class does that put me in?!
Between the potholes, unmarked road works, extreme speed bumps and traffic coming at you from every direction apart from the sky, I really don’t feel any great personal relief at being able to jump in the car and join the scrum. It’s far less stressful to hail a moto taxi and let the driver worry about it – plus he’s trying to earn an honest living and I suspect his vehicle is still more fuel efficient than mine over the same journey across town. In Nauta, I definitely felt it was an act of solidarity with my local brothers and sisters to try to travel as they did a lot of the time (I now imagine they just thought it was odd), plus I never had to worry about finding a good local mechanic or decent replacement parts, which can be hard enough anywhere in the world. But then every time I went to Lima, I never once took the two-week river ferry followed by interprovincial bus, I flew every time…
But times and ministry contexts change! The real question is, if it had been possible to fly from Piura to Trujillo this weekend (it isn’t), would I have given in to my cultural conditioning and done that instead of investing 14 hours in the round trip by interprovincial bus at a significantly smaller economic and environmental footprint?
What would Jesús do? 😉
Love Laura x
P.S. The distance between Piura and Trujillo is about the same as London to Durham. However, the journey takes place on an almost exclusively single-lane highway, at a top speed of 90kmph (or 56mph) which is why it takes 7 hours each way, whereas London to Durham would probably be about 2 hours less each way.
P.P.S. BMS has practically phased out domestic flights in its UK-based operations due to environmental sustainability considerations, but then in Europe you have alternatives like motorways and sometimes, even trains.
Laura-Lee Lovering 