In The News.

Peruvian poverty opens the eyes of two Kansas City playwrights
By ROBERT TRUSSELL – The Kansas City Star

Jeremy Lillig and Damian Torres-Botello thought they had a pretty good idea of what poverty looked like.

 

Torres-Botello, 30, had interviewed homeless people on the street. Lillig, 28, had ridden along with Kansas City police to a homeless camp under the 12th Street Viaduct. And a few years ago, they wrote a play, “Whispers From the Streets,” based on about 200 interviews with people in homeless shelters and soup kitchens.

 

But then they went to Peru to gather notes for another play.

For two weeks in July, the two theater artists who are dedicated to dramatizing social justice issues met people living at different levels of poverty in Lima and its outskirts. And they encountered conditions they were not prepared for.

 

They conducted seven formal interviews and met dozens of Peruvians living with no more than minimal amenities. Lillig said he couldn’t get his head around the dirt floors. And both agreed that they never got used to the omnipresent smell — a pervasive mixture of raw sewage, rotting garbage and frying meat.

 

“It seemed to me that we were getting a perspective on different levels of poverty,” Torres-Botello said. “So it kind of ranged from those individuals who had one- or two-bedroom homes to a family in the hills in a shack.”

Indeed, the South American country has a 44.5 percent poverty rate, according the current CIA World Factbook. Peru has enjoyed gradual economic growth in recent years, and the poverty rate has decreased correspondingly. But the English-language Peruvian Times reported earlier this year that 11 million Peruvians live in poverty, and 3.7 million of those are in “extreme” poverty.

 

The playwrights met people whose roofs were made of blankets and who got by on one meal a day. They saw neighborhoods where water was distributed from a rubber hose attached to a communal spigot.

They saw kids playing near raw sewage. They saw rows of primitive homes seemingly stacked in terraces in the hills above Lima.

 

But they saw something else, too — a sort of can-do community spirit that makes the best of a bad situation.

 

“I was surprised they don’t feel sorry for themselves,” Torres-Botello said. “They don’t have that sense of sadness. Like when you see the Sally Struthers commercials, and the kid looks all sad and depressed — that’s not how they are. The kids are truly enjoying life. And to feel sorry for them would be almost insulting. … If you don’t know any other way to live, that’s your life. And it is what it is.”

 

Torres-Botello and Lillig come from a Catholic tradition of fighting for the cause of social justice, which a few years ago motivated them to start up the nonprofit Full Circle Theatre Company.

To fund the trip to Peru, they applied for a $2,000 grant from Sisters of Saint Joseph of Carondelet, a Catholic order based in St. Louis. They raised another $2,500 from private sources, including fees they earned writing and performing in a TV commercial for the José Pepper restaurant chain.

Sister Patty Clune, part of the order’s leadership, said the project dovetailed perfectly with the order’s values. It helped that Lillig was an associate of the Sisters. Associates, she said, are men or women who “feel a connection to the charism of the Sisters, but they lead their own lives. They share our values, and yet they don’t take any vows.”

 

“His project to kind of expand his study and research of homelessness fits right into what we’re committed to,” she said. “It was a no-brainer.”

The order also happens to have about 30 sisters in Peru, and they were instrumental in setting up interviews and serving as translators for Lillig and Torres-Botello, neither of whom speaks much Spanish.

 

Each took about 100 pages of notes, and they hope to have a finished play in six months. The challenge will be to write a five-character play that tells a dramatic narrative, unlike the “talking head” format of other projects.

The experience had an impact. Neither sees poverty as he did before the trip. 

“It would be easy for us to come back and say Americans don’t realize what poverty is like,” Lillig said. “But it’s all relative. And that’s what we’re trying to focus on. Poverty here is bad because of the way our society is (and) poverty there is bad because of the way their society is. But to do a comparative analysis of the two, they’re worlds apart.” 

In some ways, Torres-Botello said, the people are like people anywhere. 

“There’s really no difference,” he said. “Just like here, they want to survive. They want to wake up in the morning and live another day.” 

Lillig said the trip made him reconsider the concept of the “American dream.” 

“It’s not really the American dream,” he said. “It’s just our version of the (universal) dream. Because they have it, too.”

 

Top photo by Shane Keyser – Kansas City Star

© 2009 Kansas City Star and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.

Discovering Something New.

In the past few days I have discovered things. Like we all do, I suppose, when it comes to our own lives, discovering something new about ourselves or something we’d forgotten, not realized, ignored. And what we discover can be very personal in experience or very casual. Depending on the person, what is discovered can alter a life, or not; be taken to heart, or not. I prefer to take my discoveries to heart because I feel there is something to find with each new thing.

I just returned from Lima, Peru and this experience was… Well, it’s not easy to say which says everything. Seriously and genuinely this was a truly life altering experience. How? Not quite sure. I can’t form the words just yet, or fully comprehend the magnitude of things as it becomes embedded into the soul of my being, but I know the case for change and transformation is present. To witness hard working people, poorer than any sort of poor I have ever seen, continue waking-up with the desire for more life floored me to the core. As an American I can’t fathom having any sort of drive for life when there are dog food bags and blue tarps being used for ceilings in one-room huts with children playing inches away from sewer runoff. But, when all you know is what you know then everything is what it is. Simple thinking? Yes, but in the end you are your universe. In my observation, the people I met on this journey in Lima did not believe the grass to be greener on the other side because the only grass they had was in front of them. What they wanted the most was to make their patch of grass as green as it could be. This was done with their heads high, their eyes forward holding tight to a vision and a persistence.

Going into this project I had wanted to know what makes a person have desire for life. In whatever the circumstances, be it mine, yours or theirs, people truly want to wake up in the morning. In all people, I believe, there is an innate hope that tomorrow will be better than today regardless if today was the best or worst day of their life. What I have discovered in the people of Peru is that they see today as another gift from God, just like yesterday, and that alone makes it a blessing. A daughter of 13 has dreams of her future, bright and optimistic, but is reminded by her mother to stay focused on today. The future is uncertain as the future always tends to be, but right-now is present so be inside of that and cross tomorrows bridge when you come to it. Practical advice from practical people. It’s like my mother said to me growing up: paciencia y fe; patience and faith one day at a time. It’s never easy, but it wouldn’t count if it was.

I don’t mean to sound naïve through my ramblings though, to some I’m sure, they could be misconstrued as such. It is my intention to point out that any sort of sadness or emotion of “feeling sorry for the less fortunate” is not present in my contemplation. I ask, how could those feelings be there when they don’t have it for themselves? It would be almost insulting if I did. They don’t believe in hand-outs but rather working for something. Maybe it’s an ingrained habit formed from a need, maybe there is no other choice, but when listening to them speak about their daily lives an established work ethic is very apparent and starched into their fabric. How does someone like me translate that?

To get more life you have to work at it or else life is nothing but a slow death. In the play Death of Cupid, the goddess Hera, in explaining mortal life, says birds live to live, humans live to die. Well, perhaps in America the latter could be true. In the slums of Peru, however, they live to live because “why not?” when living is literally what life is all about.

And that blessing extends beyond the new day. Their “things” are blessings; a fridge in the living room, a television held up by boxes, their homemade picture frames of their family, everything including the first steps of the morning are filled with gratitude. Could it be because they sacrificed much to attain the things they possess? Or that maybe they have an inherent appreciation for their belongings? I can surmise that the definite answer is an astounding yes. But then I look to the boy down the street who saved his money to buy a car, or the lady who worked hours on her garden to reap the rewards of beauty come springtime. Appreciation comes from what is worked for. To attain a goal a vision is adopted, sacrifices are made, and once attained, gratitude for having achieved it is given. There is a little bit of “Peru” in us and little bit “American” in them, but then we are all people, humans of the world, and we’re not that much different.

As I begin to formulate my portion of this collaborative project my hope is that I can capture that “desire for more life.” Sure, to show the world another perspective of poverty is the mission, but beyond that there is something more. Humans are human in every way. We want to get ahead, to be successful and to have a good life. Fathers are men, mothers want the best for their children, children have dreams and the elderly want to leave a legacy. From the hills of Peru to the burrows of New York, and across the United States the drive to live is all the same. To say Americans are one way and the Peruvians are another, as if to say one is better, would be unfair. That’s generalizing and we all carry our own crosses and know our own individual worlds however they were created; there is no right or wrong, good or bad in that, it is what it is.

The strategy for this project would be to have the audience recognize themselves in the play. To find commonality can be controversial and comforting, it can stimulate conversation and motivate understanding, it can create a proactive movement and generate awareness. Theatre is at its best when it can entertain and enlighten at the same time. When the message is so engraved in the story that at the end you realize something new about yourself without ever being told what or how to think then you know, life is different, in some small way, because of what you saw. Again, naïve? Yes. Very. But naivety can drive your determination and persistence and belief to make your-reality a world-reality.

I believe without any hesitation that a world absent of theatre would be less human. And to be less of our own humanity can have chaotic results.

This play, I believe, will add to the cannon of humanity. How, I don’t know. But it will.

This post can also be read at www.damian327.blogspot.com.

Getting Ready

As many people who know me are aware, I hate to use the word “surreal.”  With the surge in popularity of the reality show and the increasing number of people trying to be articulate in describing their publicized “outrageous predicaments,”  it is my opinion that the word has become overused and has lost its “umph.”  However, at this current moment in my life I can’t think of a better word…

We’re roughly 3 weeks away from embarking on a journey that in the immediate past is 2 years in the making and in the bigger picture is 8 years in the making.  It’s surreal. We never thought when we began this campaign to make the world aware of the issue of homelessness that we would be where we are today.  Now we are about to take our efforts to another country!  We go to gather research and to bear witness.  Seems a little broad in nature but it is anything but.  We are going to get down to the very detail of what it is like to be in poverty in Peru.  We are going to look at a fellow person in this world of ours and listen to their story.  We are going to take a greater trip than any plane can make.  We are going to look into their soul, their person, and see them and their experiences.  We will share, collaborate, and experience life in a culture other than the one we so safely inhabit. 

I’m nervous for this trip.  In my experience 27 year olds with bachelor’s degree’s don’t do fellowships.  We don’t research, we don’t write like this.  But we never let the norms stop us and we continue that journey.  A person with whom I owe a great deal of respect, S. Marie once used the phrase “standing on the shoulders of our ancestors” and it has stuck with me ever since.  We once again accept that invitation to stand on those shoulders and will research in order to report, collaborate, and hopefully inspire.  As we ready ourselves for what will be another life-changing experience, we do so with humility, and peace as has been exhibited to us.  It is our hope we can do the same level of excellence as has been done before us.