You Know You're A Redneck When...

So it all started day 2 here in Nanchoc, Cajamarca, which is a town fairly comparable to my Mother’s home town of Pikeville, NC. It’s a small agricultural town that’s more or less in the middle of nowhere and about an hour drive from “civilization.” Yeah, they’re about the same. If you re read that sentence you have no idea which of the 2 I’m talking about…I will say this, at least we have cell phones and internet in Pikeville.

But back to day 2, one of the Doctors at my health post made the rather large mistake of calling me a Yankee. Now to his defense, most Peruvians think that we (that’d be us gringos) are all from New York and therefore are Yankees…Needless to say after a fruitless 2 hours of explaining that I am most certainly not a Yankee, and that Yankee’s are from the north, still no breakthrough had been made. At about hour marker 3 the phrase Redneck came into light. People from the north: Yankees. People from the south: Rednecks. We didn’t get into how that’s not so true anymore due to all of the damn Yankees (which are another breed of Yankee) that move to the south—case and point: Cary, NC. But Redneck was a phrase that just didn’t translate with all of the cultural differences (no matter how literal of a phrase it might be), I tried to explain that a Redneck is much like a person from the mountains here (aka old school farmers), but that too did not translate the signification. In the end they were content with me just explain that it’s a saying for people from the south that live in the country. And that was that. Never brought up again.

Flash forward to my 5th month here in site. I’m working in my garden, and now understand the song lyric “loving me will be like working unbroken ground” because this dirt is TOUGH as all get out! But I’ve been picking and shoveling away at this 10ft by 15ft chunk of land for about a week now—tilling, putting cuy poop in the soil, all that good stuff to make my veggies grow nice and yummy and I’m basically done. But as you all know, no matter how much SPF my sunscreen has or how often I apply it, this white girl’s going to burn. It’s practically a proof in math (yeah math people I’m going there): If there is sun, then Jenny will burn. No doubt or question about it. It will happen. On day 3 of working I switched from my normal t-shirts (al la NCSU logo) to a quick dry t-shirt that had a different neck line—thus exposing my burned neck and the Doctors had a realization, “OH THAT’S WHY YOU’RE CALLED REDNECKS: one of them belted. Why by George I think they’ve got it!



So after a quick 5 minute conversation explaining that yes, most white people burn when exposed to the sun for a larger amount of time, even my mother and brother (two of the tanner people I know) have the ability to burn, they got it. Rednecks because our necks are red. Tada. So apparently sometimes all it takes to cross cultural boarders here in Peru is a little bit of sunburn. Who would have thunk it?