Traveling with Family to Peru

Ours has always been a fun-loving family. My partner and I wanted to raise our two children in ways that some might find a bit quirky, to say the least. Since we each have children from previous relationships, we also had ideas about raising children that were based on; let’s face it- previous mistakes. While the humorist Dave Barry has suggested that first children are an experiment which might as well be thrown away when you’re finished with them, we don’t take quite as extreme a point of view. However, there is a nugget of truth, I have always felt, in his tongue-in-cheek suggestion: first children are almost always the unsuspecting recipients of their parents’ haphazard attempts at parenting. These efforts result, more often than not, in the emergence of certain “imbalances,” shall we say, in how firsts conduct themselves once they are out in the world. How often their parents’ botched methods produce traumatized serial killers should be a subject for further study.

But getting back to the main topic, regarding the two children we had together, a son and a daughter, we were determined to bring our hard-won knowledge about how to and how not to parent, to the family we had created together. So we decided to home school.

With a home schooled family, we would be able to bring our ideas of education, not just book learning, to the somewhat clean slates of our children’s minds. We would immerse them in authentic experiences, bring them to the actual places most kids only read about in their geography texts, and, in short, expose our children to many different and interesting cultures, disciplines, and languages. By doing so, we hoped to raise whole, well-rounded individuals who were not afraid to work (a side benefit to be sure), and who did not separate their lives into categories of work, play, school, home, us and them.
We wanted them to overcome the narrow perspective that can come from living in one region for their entire lives. We wanted them to gain firsthand experience of other countries and cultures.

So we took them to Peru.

When we first conceived of the idea of visiting Peru for an extended period of time, it was nothing more than a pipe dream. While their father had always had an interest in Latin American cultures, and while we had traveled from one side of the United States to the other, it was, indeed a leap to consider bringing children to such a new and strange environment. We had been intrigued with the biracial and bilingual children of a couple who were friends of ours, who were living in Brazil at that time, and we thought: what better education was there to be gained for our kids, than the one that could be achieved by bringing them to a new culture, exposing them to new languages, new people, new foods, (a particular challenge for my fastidious son), and different points of view, from those to which they were accustomed?

There were prejudices to overcome as well, the pre-formed notions “First Worlders” sometimes hold about visiting developing countries. Could we drink the water? Would people prove hostile toward us because we were North Americans? Would we be robbed/kidnapped/ torn to pieces by the fangs of wild animals? Would our children refuse to eat anything, while faced with heaping platters of foods they found unacceptable?
Well, none of these things happened.

And in fact, I have to say that our great experiment has been, in many ways, a success.

For my son, Gary, it meant having to change what he ate, that was for sure. My kids made fun of the aromatic cheeses that are found here for example, saying they were redolent of “stinky feet.” But little by little, they actually learned to like them, and came to barely notice the differences in flavor. What else could they do? Although anxious parents may fear otherwise, children will not starve themselves to death when there is food to be eaten. They just aren’t that stupid, at least, not in the long run.

My daughter, Alice, had trouble making friends at first and kept to herself for the first few months. She heartily resented being brought to a place where the customs and language are so different, and let us know at every opportunity what terrible parents we were for doing that to her. After a while, however, she discovered many things that seem cliché, I suppose, until you are actually forced to recognize them, the most important being that language is not a barrier to friendship. Alice was forced to become more confident and to overcome her shyness; she learned to speak Spanish (both Gary and Alice are now fluent in the language and culture) and learned to dance salsa. Both Alica and Gary are now not-so-typical Peruvi-American teenagers.

And, isn’t it ironic that, at one time, their father and I would use our high school Spanish to disguise subjects that we wanted to talk about without our kids being able to understand? That situation has now reversed itself. With the Peruvian Spanish jergas (slang) they have picked up, Alice and Gary now have the ability to completely baffle us when they wish to, by talking in fast Spanish, sprinkled with slang, about topics they don’t want us privy to.

They may never thank us, but they won’t be able to say they were bored.

Laurel Thompson is a writer, mother and the international marketing manager for Kuoda Tours, a Cusco-based travel company that brings families on educational adventures to Peru.