Paraguay

me.
and 30 pastors.
crazy parties like you wouldn’t believe.

been filming in Paraguay at ICOMB (some words that stands for all the big-shot pastors of every country in the world get together and rave on mad drugs  for 3 days)

by rave i mean discuss church biz and by on mad drugs i mean eat a lot of farmer sausage.

So i had 4 (ish) videos to do:

1. 19 pastors, video them greeting the whole Menno world conference from their respective countries. (for a video celebrating the Mennonite Brethrens existance for 150 years)

2. video of Randy Friesen: Menno Missions kingpin greeting the whole world for MBMSI’s latest batch of DVD’s they are sending to the world.

3. Interview this guy named Victor Wall at a television studio.

4. Get footy and sick pics of Paraguay like this was the BBC and i was filming Baraka

So far on level of amazing the shots are:

1. eeh 8/10

2. mm 7/10

3. totally got effed and we are doing it next week. 0/10 fail.

4. been stuck in a university for the last 2 days. 2/10 fail.

this week: 3 and 4 NEED to happen

In other news:

Picture paraguay. if you can’t picture paraguay picture some other south american city of 1.8 million (or so). by that i mean houses made of red brick, its hot. 8pm.  still 18 celcius. I’m in a university. Think the UFV campus compressed down to 1/10th its size. there is lush vegetation in the form of trees and gardens all around the campus. everything is very compressed. tight walkways, some of the roofs are that corragated metal tin. The rooms are typical nearly 3rd world affair. Picture the house from Fight Club. Every time we use a toilet it needs to be fixed to allow the water to refil, the windows are streaked with grime, the walls should have been white. One time. They are a yellowish tinge. The fan in the ceiling has shed its plastic casing and has revealed its motor and electrical guts for all to see. it circles lazily in the ceiling casting running shadows along the tiled floor in the fading light of the day.

I’m on the top bunk reading “To Kill A Mockingbird” and listening to Bibio on my ipod. Mike, my chinese UBC engineering student partner is playing starcraft on his laptop beneath me. (no jokes) while we banter here and there about brazil, spiritualism and any other sort of thing that pops into our heads.

It is quite for a while. the sun skinny dips itself into the horizon. lazy minutes roll by. the world darkens.

“Hey Clint…”
“Yeah what?”

“…is that lightning?”

It looks like someone is taking wedding photos outside our window. Which is impossible because we are on the 3rd floor.
“hmm”

We take a look into the horizon and galloping towards us: a black wall,kicking out flashes of light like it was a mobile rave. We watch through the darkened, grime covered window for about a minute before heading out onto the balcony on the other size of the building. Mach 3 is how fast this storm is heading. this continental cloud landmass stretches across the entire horizon, looming. at the university: all is calm and quite.
“This is gonna be so, so sick.”

suddenly wind from a refrigerator blasts through our complex and doesn’t let up. 20km, 40km, rocking 60 at least has the trees going epileptic. lighting coming and it doens’t let up. 1 second space between hits. regular thunder battle rollin’ through town. the sky is black when it isn’t electric. closer. closer. closer.

I jump up onto a half-completed wall to sit and watch the show.
“man, haven’t seen a storm like this in a long time.”  -Clint
“I’ve never. ever. seen this.” -Mike

And then its on us. raindrops on steroids. near vertical. might as well have gone swimming. Fog outta nowhere, engulfs all. What once was a good view of the vistas and corrugated steel roofs of the slums has become a wall of white. lighting. too much. no delay between the hits just non stop rolling with it, a strobe light the size of a city. ghost forks snaking like cobras dancing through trees. no thunder. just light. nobody is touching down tonight, its all for show. no use trying to take pictures: all you would get is the purple white of burning ozone. every once and a while the maelstrom saves up a big one. the strobe light slows… slows…

then your blind.

it was midday for a second there except purple. nuclear winter. soaked now and can’t stop yelling into it. Clouds are so low you could scoop a handful of the stuff and put it on your dessert. Yelling at a ceiling 4 feet away and something up high, deep inside it, dead in the heart of that living, breathing thing yells back.

its 3am. time for bed. need to wake up at 6:30.

Peru6

some pics for you:

Peru5

Do you want to murder someone…? …how badly? ….how much would you pay?
think about this for a second. what to you seems like an acceptable price to have someone murdered?

Lima is quite the city.
They have McDonald’s! I was the happiest gringo that ever lived when i practically skipped through the doors of the McDonald’s here in Lima, giddily ordered myself two double cheeseburgers from their value menu and let out a girlish squeal of delight as i gorged myself upon the bestest fakest hamburgers western culture has yet to produce. The horrified Peruvians had never seen such a fierce assault upon a beef product in their lives.

Food is cheap. Dang cheap. Most smaller hole in the wall food places offer a special feature at lunch which is basically whatever they are cooking; your eating. And its almost always amazing. 3 course meals even. all for 12 sol’s which roughly translated is $4. The fanciest, most exclusive, snob-filled restaurants in town usually cost around 60-70 sol’s. $25 for a meal!? King crab and steak at the keg is what; $50? its rediculous.
- Peruvian fast food is something else. Apparently some industrious germans (when are they not?) opened up a fast food chain decades ago dealing in the most artery clogging garbage you’ve ever seen, and the Peruvians embraced it even more than we did McDonald’s.
here is the meal: steak (lots of grisle) fried on a platter with 2 eggs. add potatoes. a bowl size-serving of rice included. 2 huge pieces of farmer sausage. and a coke. all for 15 sol’s

yes.

It´s incredible how cheap it is to eat here, way WAY cheaper than actually making the food yourself. Yup even the taxi´s are cheap. for a half hour taxi ride its about $4. why would you even want a car here? yup everything here in Lima is dirt cheap.

Even human Life.

But more of that in a second.

Lima has a lot of malls. more than Terjillo. They only have 2. Here in Limo though there is a lot of western culture being imported. Besides TV, which is massive (every house here has a TV) the Malls are showing people here what is cool in North America. In Terjillo is fascinating. they Just got their mall a year ago. it blew people away. they were scared of the escalators. Suddenly bam; Volcom! Billabong! Hot Topic! Hollister! AX! all of it. Right in everyones face. They´ve seen it on television for years, now its here, to be purchased! and yeah it costs the exact same here as it does in Canada. Which is a fortune in Peruvian standards. Lima is much more advanced in their westernization. They are just a couple years behind:

Everyone here still thinks its hardcore to be Emo. they haven´t graduated to scenester status yet. Just wait though. Neon can´t be resisted.

So what happens when you suddenly have these outrageously expensive brands and culture being imported?

Lima is a city of 9million people. roughly 1/3 of them are living below the poverty line. and by below i mean waaay below. inhumane below. Probably another 2million are walking that line, yeah, like johnny cash. And all of this was before the stock market crashed and the world economy started going straight to hell. Rapidly things are getting worse here. people will do anything to get some cash. support the family, buy that hollister. organized crime here is huge. its massive. Import/export anything stolen its here.

So how much does it cost to get someone killed? If we are living in Canada man, it´ll cost you. I don´t even know, probably 25 grand at least. your guess is as good as mine.

here?

$100.

hundred bone gets you a motorcycle and a guy with a handgun. Think how much money you have. You know how many people you could kill? You could take out a neighbourhood if your going to university, and once you get a trade man; every couple weeks you could take out a city block. It´s all disposable here. Think of it as ordering a very, very expensive pizza.
It´s very defeating: people talk of humanitarian aid, helping the poor, Bono shaking hands with some famous person, the RED campaign etc. etc. etc. it´s gotten nooowhere. the mountain of work that needs to be accomplished is for all practical purposes, insurmountable. Lima alone, not even taking into account Africa, China, Thailand, the rest of South America… is a challenge of biblical proportions.

This post doesn´t really have a conclusion.

So i´m done.
- can i borrow $100?

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Hopefully i will have some pictures up soon. So far i’ve taken 12Gbs of photos. i’m not even half done. 
eff. i’ll be done photoshopping them just in time for next christmas.

Done the first story of 3 for Peru. yaaay. shot about 8-10 hours of footy.

Synopsis:

Name:Maria De Carmen
Age: late 40’s
Status: Single

Maria lives in a town half an hour away from Terjillo, a city of 1million. its a tiny town. population maybe 300. Everyone farms sugar cane. fields and fields of it. i was too scared to walk through the field out of fear that a velociraptor would tear my face off. the fields are beautiful tho. they really are.
Most people in this village live in “homes” made of mud brick and corregated steel roofing. Floors are either hard wood (and by hard wood i mean actual wood that is really. hard. that was cut into planks and a floor was made from it; not mulched trees formed into snap-together blocks with some fake wood grain laminated on the top to add a sense of style. no i mean the floor is probably harder than stone.) or concrete.
Maria’s house is pretty nice by peruvian standards. it has 4 or 5 rooms. and a kitchen. and 2 bathrooms. sorta…  she lives with her mother. 

i know eh. still hasn’t moved out. jeez.

Anyways when you travel to places like this you feel (well i do anyways, you may not, or you may have never travelled somewhere where people live in buildings that appear actually worse off than the treehouse your incompetant father tried to build you when you were 6) pretty bad for the people living there. I mean. barely have running water, good luck with the dust and dirt, flies and mosquitos no way, thank god it doesn’t rain here. So i felt kinda bad (as any westerner would) for Maria. I think actually it should be the other way around.

See Maria is probably way smarter than me or anyone else wasting their time reading this blog. She’s a genius, almost. Our translators had a hard time understanding her spanish, not because they didn’t know it well enough: because she speaks with words and in such a way that is above most people’s level of comprehension. 

Maria is a microbioligist. And she lives in a farming town of 300. 

Pick up a soup can. or any food packaging. look at all those nutritional facts. how do they know the exact amount of nutrients in a can of peas? Microbioligists apparently. This is something Maria does. One thing anyways. It’s a side project of hers. Companies have to get their food tested by Maria before it gets approved. gotta pay the bills you know. 

Maria is also a doctor. she volunteers\runs 3-4 clinics in other towns all around the terjillo area. She treats AIDS, Cancer, TB, all the really nasty diseases that kill you good and slow. She wakes up… get this: at 5:30am to take a 2-3 hour bus ride (depending on the town) to a clinic. the clinics are really packed sometimes. She has assistants help her with her work. 

Oh she also leads a women’s bible study at the local church. 
And shes a great cook. i don’t know what half of the stuff was that i ate. but it tasted pretty good. 

\\Wait, Rewind.

Everything really started for Maria when she was walking around in Terjillo and went by the slums and saw all these people living Mad Max style in the filthiest settings you can think of, people suffering from AIDS and all sorts of diseases. She thought something should be done about all of that, these people should get some help. and here is where she’s a little different than you or me; she went and did something about it. What a strange idea. 

\\Fast Forward

The thing about AIDS and Cancer and diseases where theres a good chance your life is gonna look nothing like it was before is that suddenly your life kinda sucks. and you get depressed. Maria wanted to help these people recover from the mental drama of hearing the news “you have TB” so she went to university for phsychology to learn how to do grief councelling. Microbiologist Phsychologist. sure, why not?

Catholicism is the main religion of Peru. Well, sorta. census numbers for religion don’t mean squat. Culturally a lot of people are Catholic. Which means they might go to church on Christmas or Easter. hmm. Maria was “Catholic”. but she had those annoying christian friends in her life that keep inviting you to Bible study or church or to “hang out” but then they always steer the conversation towards God. yeah they kept on hounding her. so annoying.
But there was this point for Maria where she came to a realization that even being a microbioligst; combating the sickness in peoples lives head on, being a phsycologist; helping them deal with their lot in life and recover mentally… was just not enough. She alone couldn’t really solve the problem. she could help but she couldn’t truly help these people. aaaand then it all falls in place for her that only Jesus Christ can truly help these people accept their condition and still have hope and joy in their lives. 
Ah crap sorry, i talked about god and jesus and all that stuff. Sorry if your offended. no hard feelings. don’t mean to preach or make you feel uncomfortable. maybe we should “hang out” sometime? 

So for Maria that happened 2 years ago. And now she has plans to build more clinics, create a resource center for nurses and people to learn how to treat disease, A center for HIV patients, elderly and sick people who can’t support themselves, an orphanage. 
yeah what the heck. you gotta be kidding me. She’s making us look bad! we should feel sorry for her! i mean we’re the ones that live in North America. Give me a break. we have carpet in our homes! Their youth don’t even know who sufjan stevens or daft punk are!

Take what you want from this little story about Maria. I think she’s a pretty cool gal. If some random woman from a farming town of 300 can do that much, kinda makes you feel bad about how your biggest goal in recent history was to score tickets to a AC\DC concert. which you failed to do. 

Listening to M83, James Blackshaw

Peru3

Expensive camera gear recovered from Peruvian authorites accomplished.
7 casualties. Stormed the airport with my Peruvian terrorist friends. we all wore bandanas over our faces. oh and had cool scars. Yes we used Ak’s, what do we look like? amateurs?

Anyways did an 8 hour bus ride from Lima to this town called Terjillo. When you think of Peru you probably think of cool things. like rainforests with beautiful birds. or machu pichu! or pirhanas that you can fish for in ponds. Let me tell you what this place is actually like: The Moon.
yes i kid you not, for 6 hours of that bus ride i could have sworn we were going to pass an american flag and a leftover moon rover. If the moon landing was faked (which it totally was) they probably shot it here. Basically all along the coast of Peru is AMAZING beach… and then miles of desolation. Either the moon… or Tatooine (desert planet from star wars) 
oh. airline food? Miiiles better than Bus Food. I’m pretty sure what i ate didn’t actually have food in it.

In Terjillo we keep all our gear in the missionaries house. Its nice. condo with 2 bedrooms, offices etc. All our video gear we keep here becasue apparently no hotel is safe. Peeps will rob you when you leave. We are staying in a hotel though. its like a block away from the missionary home. We are near a fairly busy part of the city. Get this. Terjillo has a population of 1million and there isn´t a single building over 10 stories tall. lotta earthquakes. BUT they have 3G iphones. i showed up with my ipod classic expecting to wow the locals with my amazing devices from the future and they are like:
“what? it doesnt have a phone in it?”

Everywhere i go. bloody Mac hipsters. no v-necks however! finally. 

-Got my own hotel room. 

Seen the movie apocalypse now? Remember at the start of the movie? Where Martin Sheen’s character is drunk in his hotel room in Vietnam due to stress leave; the movie begins with him doing some crazy ritualistic kung fu dance. He slowly moves about the room, covered in sweat, punching the air in his darkened hotel. Its humid, with the honks and sounds of the city bursting oppresively in through the window, he suddenly turns and punches the full-length mirror in the room, shattering it. Blood flows from his hand. He slumps down looking at the blood flowing from cut hand while he lights up a cigarette.

yeah i feel that cool

heres a neat little fact for you christians: The church here? you step into a bar or club, smoke a cigar or cigarette and man your done. Think christians judge harsh here in NA? got it eeeasy. 

Filming has been good. i had a glamour photoshoot with a highly photogenic parrot. it was sexy. John has some BALLIN gear. his wireless LAV kit is more pricey than my camera. 

Mkay done. 

Listening to El Guincho, TV on the Radio and James Blackshaw.

Peru

I am going to Peru tomorrow and I am so unprepared it is not even funny.

Part of it is not being told exactly what my responsibilities were to be… until yesterday. What i thought was going to be a more low-key documentary shoot has turned into a really stressful situation. So yeah, definately stressing out on this one.

- oh started a Blog. how trendy.