What comes to mind when you think of Peru?

I now know that people more globally conscious than I am often associate Peru with Machu Picchu, one of the most recognized tourist sites in South America. I’m ashamed to admit that on my first trip over to Peru in 2008, the extent of my imagination was imageless Spanish-like sounds. Needless to say, I didn’t know anything else about Peru and was thoroughly surprised to learn about the wide variety of cultures, traditions, histories, peoples, faces, languages and climates that make up the country.

To express my current perspective of Peru’s overwhelming grandiosity, here is a brief multifaceted look at my adopted country:

• Peru has three geographically-diverse regions. If I were adventurous enough, I could leave the sunny beachside to go mountain climbing in the Andes and finish the day off visiting the mosquito-filled hut of an Amazonian shaman. The diverse climates beget high biodiversity and there are over 5,000 plants and animals unique to the country.
• Spanish is the official language, but many Native Americans speak various dialects of Quechua, Aymara and around ten other native tongues.
• Blond-haired Peruvians inhabit Oxapampa, a little town in the central rainforest. They descend from Austrian-Germans who were invited to colonize the area over 100 years ago.
• Afro-Peruvian music originated from Chincha in Northern Peru, where there is a large population of Peruvians with African roots.
• The first Asians to land in South America were the Chinese and Japanese who arrived in Peru’s port of Callao in the 1800s and established one of the West’s earliest Chinatowns in Lima. Nowadays, comida chifa (Peruvian-style Chinese food) is a mainstay in Peruvian cuisine.
• Two traditional Andean dances of Peru made the UNECSO Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010: la huaconada — a masked dance of Junín where the dancers symbolically whip all naughty people during the first few days of the year — and la danza de las tijeras — an elaborate dance from the Southern Andes where dancers create a rhythm with pieces of metal used like oversized scissors.
• Not only are there Incan influences, but Pre-Incan cultures also continue to have a strong presence in today’s Peru, from Chimor’s Chan Chan to the Nazca lines. North of Lima is Caral, the oldest city in the Americas of the oldest known civilization in the Americas, the Norte Chico.

If the mere tip of the Peruvian iceberg can rouse such awe, what more when I consider the entire world and all of its history? The largeness of the world makes me feel small yet connected to humanity, humbled by its infinite knowledge, grounded to generations of wisdom and motivated to continue absorbing the little things.

What does the largeness of the world make you feel?

If you can excuse the Peruvian beer ad, the underlying message of the following video is one of unity. At the beginning, they sing: “From droplet to droplet, the sea is formed. Grain to grain, the sand, the beach. Leaf to leaf, the forest and the entire jungle.” Each person is just one droplet, one grain of sand or one leaf from the standpoint of the universe, but I believe that we are each an important contribution to humankind.