Preparing to write and reflect on today's visit to Peru's National Museum (Museo de la Nacion), I of course Googled first to verify the spelling. Discovering no museum website, I did learn I am not the first person to wonder why the museum is such a large building, with concrete walls, with so little information visible in the elevators or elsewhere about what can be seen and where, and no signs with directions to the bathrooms. The gift shop was closed and locked. Much of the lighting was turned off. Dark, empty corridors led to empty rooms. The sole women's bathroom we could find had a toilet seat in one stall, paper in the other, but not both in both. A resident of Peru wrote a review on TripAdvisor: 

"This museum use to be really good and complete, now it is only the remains of a great museum, great example of a still poor country that do not allocate resources to preserve this cultural pillar."

I don't know the full history--another TripAdvisor/Lima resident wrote that the former Fishing Ministry, a concrete block from the Velasco era, was converted to a museum, is not suited for exhibits, though it is more modern than (the commenter's words) "Soviet-era monoliths."

As a setting for an exhibit about the Shining Path years, this cold, concrete monolith is perfect. The walls and small rooms are situated in ways that make you slightly uneasy that you will disappear and never be seen again. The entire budget seems to have been spent on enlarging photographs, which seems appropriate--tell the story and don't wait until a cushiony budget for color and three-dimensional display space becomes available.  And given the horror of the stories to be told, a carpeted gallery would hardly seem right. I don't know for sure that these choices about spareness were intentional or simply a byproduct of limited dollars, but it doesn't really matter. The captions are in Spanish and English, which extends the reach of this story to Americans and millions of others. I read about the Shining Path and surrounding events before leaving Omaha for Peru; having visited the museum I am clearer on some topics and more confused on others. This will require (and motivate) further reading.

Speaking with a classmate on the bus while returning to the hotel, we marveled that a country could ever recover from being so torn apart.  The war was only a short time ago, within the lifetime of most of the people on this trip.  Is the recovery actually incomplete, but simply not visible to those of us who don't know what we're looking at?  How "recovered" was North America from its Civil War within 30 years? Europe after the world wars? More subjects for further reading. 

On the first floor of the museum, I spent a joyful 45 minutes viewing contemporary art, trying my best to memorize everything I was seeing. My memory of an artist's name is not what I wanted it to be (my backpack and notebook weren't accessible at the time). Juana Vendana? I don't recall the name of the style of artwork that combined colonial Christian and South American pagan iconography. An exhibit was shown several months ago at the Joslyn Museum in Omaha. Juana ?'s room-sized sculpture seemed to be saying something important about the price of forcing one culture on another--the characters in her birth-of-Christ scene have out-of-proportion necks and are stretched out of shape in general. The three wise men bring what appear to be the traditional gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. There are also three smaller people (or children, or just smaller because their meant to appear farther away)--one empty handed, one carrying yarn, and one carrying firewood. Peruvian artists also reinterpret the traditional "altar" art form to incorporate recent civil war history. One altar/sculpture had angels and other protective beings overlooking an agricultural village, with miniature uniformed soldiers in control of a bloody scene at the base of the altar. One artist showed multiple sculptures of angels' faces, in traditional designs, but the angels are crying. 

The art exhibit, and the war exhibit, represent the quality of story-telling that the citizens of Peru deserve for their national museum, or at least what I would want in mine. I have to wonder....was insufficient money allocated? Or was sufficient budgeted, but someone made off with part of it? 

Visiting the museum also got me thinking about Peru promoting tourism for its jobs and other economic benefits. Does a shell of a national museum say what the country wants to say to its visitors? I'm reminded of scenes I see in the central United States, in states also promoting tourism as the future, healthy, post-agricultural economy. I've also asked myself as I drive across Kansas: Do landfills, abandoned freight trucks and wrecked demolition derby relics on Main Street say what Kansans really want to say about their state and people? In both places, tourism requires investment in infrastructure. Both need new money injected into the economy to fund necessary infrastructure. But if we can't supply your visitors with clean bathrooms and scenes that are worth the cost of visiting them, they won't come. And we won't have our tourist economy.