Pictures!

Here's the link to pictures spanning the last few months - it's been a hectic time, and I apologize!

https://picasaweb.google.com/114379609394765551921/FromSoccmaToLimaToTAstayoc?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCLLf9JKQg5qwRA&feat=directlink

T'astayoc

This town is full of incredible contradictions, but perhaps that’s just the way I felt when I was there.   Snow fell brown and white like the innocent painting I had in my room growing up of horses hidden in a snowy pasture.  Abra Malaga mountain intimidatingly rose up, up, up, above the surprisingly paved road. Around each curve it’s terrifying glacial peak juts out further and further into the sky, making me feel like it would topple over onto me, Leticia, and Isabel, the community health worker we had recently appointed in this town.  Tiny, one-room stone houses lay at its feet, the subject of our visit.  We were there to survey every inhabitant of T’astayoc, to get to know who lived there, how old they were, how many children they had, who they lived with, what they ate, used for birth control, what they harvested, what their monthly income was, where their water came from.  The town stretched above and below, separated by this odd and awkward paved road that mountain bikers use, that the townspeople only use when the bus slows down enough for them to get on. 

T’astayoc took us a half hour in a car to go from the top to the bottom.  At the top– a blurry, blizzardy one room home housed seven children and their parents who slept on the wet dirt floor and fed drivers passing through to the mountain.   By the time we reached the bottom house I couldn’t get out of the car I was so upset by what I had seen, so at a loss for what I could do, so unbelieving that this town was only an hour away from my town.  This house at the bottom was sunny, a bright contradiction to the top; they had a store, a motorcycle, and a person whose education reached past…going to school.  Leticia, Isabel and I took the top portion of the community, while the male promotor, an intern, and the driver took the bottom half.  Leticia, Isabel and I traversed through the snow to reach these houses. We were invited in with open arms, given coffee and potatoes, invited in to chat with people who had no idea why we were there.

The women we conversed with sat by their tiny fires in their otherwise heatless, windowless, and damp homes, with guinea pigs running underfoot and told us the story of their lives through census information.  They told us that they had on average between seven to nine children.  One woman had her first child when she was nine years old.  Nine tiny years old, and then she had six more children.  One woman had her first child at 12, another at 13.  Another had her first round of children with a man about 20 years her senior, then when he passed away she remarried a man three years older than her firstborn.  She was 13 when she had her first child – her husband in his early 30s.  I don’t even know how to complete my trains of thought after writing this, except to accept that they end in train wreck.  I have never in my years of working with sorrow, of feeling my body and soul ripped apart by the stories of others, I have never felt this feeling of stumbling upon the tip of an iceberg, asking questions these women had never been asked before, because if they had been asked, then what had happened afterward?  Why hadn’t the asker then gone and done something about it?  These women told me, told me in these tiny charcoal smudged rooms that they wanted to learn about reproductive health, about health in general, about vaginal infections, about how to prevent urinary tract infections, about how to take care of themselves.  In a space where there is only one other NGO who has put in solar panels (they put in one for a house that had no access to potable water, which makes me concerned for their priorities), they wanted so much more.  These women, pregnant at 9, 10, 11, and 12 had lived their lives in a parallel, no not even, the exact same world that I lived mine, where people happily go home to warm homes for holidays, where they live care-free charmed lives and worry, as I have been, about how to create their families to have a proper upbringing in safe neighborhoods where families play together, where families have happy memories together where families have positive associations with the ease and smiles that surrounded their home towns. 

These families that we saw – the lives they described to me were hard, always always hard. The women had animal fat and parts drying next to the fire, they made 200 soles per year (about 60 dollars) if they were able to sell potatoes.  They only grew potatoes, they only ate potatoes, if they had extra money they bought rice and pasta, never vegetables.  They walk about a half hour down the snowy hill, in their open-toed shoes made of old car tires, with a bucket to get water from a spring, bring it back up, and sometimes don’t boil it before drinking it.  Not one house in the entire community has a bathroom or a chimney.   They are merely surviving all the time.  Whereas on the contrary I have been living in surplus, in excess, in all the hype and privilege that is this developed world existence, they have been surviving.  This is so different than the poverty I have seen before because I am intimately aware and acutely attached to it.  We, this organization I manage, has two community health workers here who are able to create an unbelievable change.  We can put water filters in people’s homes, teach them about crop diversification, give them access to birth control and sex education, build green houses for them, give them something that has not been given before.  Until then, though, their reality remains, the faces of those women remain in my memory, marked as something I thought never could possibly exist.

Thoughts on a home town

I wonder if I should really be here sometimes instead of building my life back with the building blocks it has always been built with.  I miss Santa Barbara, that hazy glow of memories heats me up these nights when I regale people with my stories from home.  How we grew up – this holds the utmost importance and as I remember driving up State Street, or most commonly down, I remember these things and how time has gone by and now, looking back, or I guess looking forward, I think maybe I should be back there with these people who never left, making my life so my children can one day tell these stories.  If I don’t raise my children there, then what will happen to those stories?  What will happen if there is no foundation – if my children’s families don’t know their children’s families, if people who I have never known, like Mrs. Honey’s step-daughter who came to my going away party, will never come to their going away parties giving them things like hand made wallets?  These are the things that have built me, and when I’m here building something not wind-proof, not hurricane-proof, not fire-proof I think back to where my life has been and where my family is, not my blood family necessarily, but my other family.  My Petrini’s family, my Woodpecker park family, my Fiesta family, my Skateboard park family, my Hope Ranch family, my Santa Barbara family.  I grow a sense of progressive nostalgia for something that may never be there.  A sense that I may never have the thing that my parents grew for me if I don’t go back. 

If I choose to live this life I may never go back - if only for a rare holiday, or a rare funeral or wedding, if only for a rare event now and again. Those nights when we all happen to meet at the same bar, then go back to someone’s house for drinks afterward, then sneak into the same park we used to sneak into to smoke a joint, that is the time when I think that I will never grow old, that I want my children to experience that with these people’s children, but I know that thanks to technology, to airline tickets, to the fact that I might just as easily marry someone from Peru, marry someone from the East Coast, marry someone form Arizona, or from Northern California, that this may never happen.  This town will cease to be my town.  This sense of family gatherings, where my mother’s friends are the people that her siblings went to high school with - her friends are my friend’s parents whom I have known for twenty years, who she runs into in a grocery store aisle and who then re-attaches my sense of place to this world - that sense is gone because I have chosen this path.  When I go back and see at holidays that everyone still knows me because they know ME, they know how I lived, they know who I am because they were there, that is something I want for my family.  That is something I have never thought about before, but something I desperately want for my family.  Something I desperately want for me family. Am I finally getting tired of moving around?  Am I finally at this point, this mythical point of mid-20-dom where settling becomes closer on my mind than not settling?  I don’t know exactly.  I know that I would love to have a husband and a family and some pets and to be in a place where I can grow old and tell wild and crazy stories not only of my youth, but of their youth, and have those stories intertwined with the same people as my parents, as my cousins, as my grandmothers.  I am absolutely shocked at myself for writing these words.  I guess I miss that aspect of interconnectedness.  In a place where I find myself automatically connected to people and the connection is thin like fishing wire, I miss the times when I can go into a restaurant, sit down with a group of friends who know me to the core, say what I need to say, and have them not be twisted and turned by the elements of who I am.  I miss the times when I can reminisce with those same people going back years, and then sit with them in the same conversation and find out something new and fantastic that is happening in their life.  Time when I can sit in my mother’s kitchen, with my father in the backyard, listening to my dog bark at oncoming visitors, and know that whoever it is will know me, will know them, will be a comfort and not a distress.  This I miss, this I desperately want for my family. 

A delayed update

Aug 17

I sit here feeling awfully grown up for how young I must be.  Dreading this long awaited blog post, feeling the need to apologize to both the computer screen for my long absence, and to those of you who perhaps have wondered, if you have, what may have happened.  Well, too much to put in one blog post, too much to put in any amount of blog posts, so a brief list will have to suffice.  To sum it up I believe that growth has happened.  I realize that the insecurity I was feeling, that need to tread lightly over this job, this experience, this town, these people, was something that has always creeped up from within - a slight regurgitation that gurgles up like those salivary glands that act up before one vomits.  That insecurity, well my need to hide behind multiple layers of masks and tragedies, various forms of wilting flowers on a beige wall, may still be there but in the past few months as I realize that being a manager of this NGO means that I mostly have only myself to stand against when the wind blows too hard, has given me a sense of empowerment that for years I was slowly implanting in clients, partners, friends, and anyone else who would take my handouts.  Now I might be giving it back to myself. 

Since I have gone to Lima (aka since the last blog post), much has happened.  I have felt lonely, friendless, as though all the other foreigners in this town could just do “this”, live here successfully, better than I could.  Some people are better at it than me.  Acceptance can be monolithic.  I have made messes and cleaned some of them up.  I have watched the transient nature of this town unfurl, and been left broken hearted by it.  I have been alone, and sought companionship, been left alone again, and found that that process might have a healing element.  I have found an attractive part of me which I own and which is not dependent on past relationships.  I have seen immense suffering and confusion, to which our organization has tried, failed, and eventually realized we could not handle.  I have felt guilty, futile, and helpless.  I have lost my immigration card, and I don’t know what that means.  There has been a child in this town named after me.  I have filed my first ever police report, and found that support comes out of the strangest places.  I have seen in myself and others the hilarious circumstance by which Spanish and English personalities differ.  My friend has asked me to be the godmother of his new minibus, to which I gladly accepted.  I have fallen in love with the five puppies we now have in our office.  This love has only been surmounted by the love I have for my new baby lamb, Yalo – which has created a dilemma that everyone I know foresaw as I was planning on eating him in six months.  People have money placed on this!  Our organization has doubled the amount of community health workers we have, as well as the amount of communities we work in.  While in the jungle with my tios, Joe and Maureen, I saw two jaguars, a sloth, and got stung by a sting ray.  A few days later, we were walking through the snow on an impassable road near one of our communities.  I realized, through that visit, that I live in a wondrous place.  That my life is one of beauty, that my job is incredible, that my day to day is something I have been looking for for a long, long time.  I have realized that making friends is difficult, and having friends who essentially are like family can transcend countless borders. 

Excitingly, in the past few months, the thought has crossed my mind that this could be something I could actually dedicate more than a year to. 

My Mailing Address

Hello!

A few of you have been asking after my mailing address.  The post office here doubles as a minimarket, and there's sometimes adorable kittens running around.  It's also the same place I pay my electric bill.  There's a pile of mail there and if the woman is in a good enough mood, she will let me go through the whole pile and pick up mail for the staff at the office.

Becca Williams
c/o Sacred Valley Health/Ayni Wasi
Pilcohausi s/n
Ollantaytambo, Cusco
Peru



The "s/n" means "sin numero", or "without number".  I've seen mail delivered to people with only their names and "Ollantaytambo, Peru" written on the envelope.  It's not preferred, and it makes the woman a little angrier. 

If you would like to write a letter, I would love to hear from you!  Also, anything over 2 pounds will get sent to the main post office in Cuzco which is two hours away. 

Lima

6/21/13

I am enchanted with Lima – it’s a certain kind of dark, sprawling poverty that is different than the stagnant, dirty poverty of rural Ollanta.  It’s precious, homely, beachy, comforting and uncomfortable.  Misty and glorified in the way typical of big capital cities, history peeking out in the faces of the unbecoming.  It’s something I will always miss, even when I’m in the middle of it.  It reminds me of a younger, idealistic me, discerning the right from wrong, falling in love and wanting to live in these places, taking a step back and realizing I already do.  It’s a dark, damp place that brings out a fighting spirit.  It’s a cultural divide, a racial divide, a lack of access that spurred my undergraduate delight.  It’s a thinking cap heaven, a sprawl, a sprawl unbeknownst to the human imagination until it’s there, and I’m grateful that throughout all my travels I still have never actually seen a place like this, although my heart feels at home.  Ollanta, cold and dirty, a poverty that is simple, a simple negativity, not a justified positive, just a rural way to not have any ends meet.  Lima, Lima, a big city so massive with its 68 districts, makes me feel like I’m riding a motorcycle through Togo, driving my car through LA traffic on a sunny day, and meeting to play backgammon with Puerto Viejo locals all at the same time.  It’s pertinent, sweaty, the first place where the cold and humidity meet and I play with it delicately while drinking beer and eating ceviche.  The colors make me want summer to happen. I want to sit in a window with Afro-centric music playing, drinking a sweaty drink, looking out at the colors and feeling incredibly busy and weighted at the thought of everyone else trying to get by.  I want to live here, love here, be here, forever warm and eclectic, searching and finding these social problems as they exist in the pounding hammers of the construction workers, in the broken down homes in the black neighborhoods, in the desolate, desolate frighteningly alone road to the south where people put up one room homes only to be blown away by the light wind that creates the sand dune highways.  Lima – wow!

This is the way I live!

June 8^th

Oh my, how this place is different than that other place-that other heart and soul place, that other life and green place, that other smell and sight place, that other home and hearth, that other heartbreak and alone place, that other heat and death and warmth and light.  How this place is different.  Different?  Different!  I wake up, heart slowing me down, blankets all around, bed swallowing me up like its meaning to eat me alive, thoughts running slowly slowly through my head, slow motion like life here.  Adrenaline leaving me as quickly as I think the thought that it might be approaching me.  Heartache?  Elephants?  Sweat?  Skin and whiskey and hot rain and rivers and genocide and freedom and bugs and bugs and love and oceans are a fast thing of the past.  So fast they leave me, so far behind they run from me.  Here I smell like cold dirt, here I feel like I am being built upwards and outwards, not inwards and sideways.  Here is slow slow slow, energy and heartbeats enter and exit in my dreams and even then, it takes me layers and layers of eyelids to push past them, wake up and see that this place, oooh this place has slowed me down.  How is life here, life here in Ollantaytambo, so…steady?  So steady.  I am here and I am not going there, there to that place and this hostel and with those people to this restaurant at this time with these drinks and then to see that temple and then on this night bus I am just here. 

In comparison to Mae Sot this place does not compare.  I do not feel dangerous, I do not feel harshness, I feel warmth leaving as soon as it enters my body.  As soon as I leave the warm circles of water in my shower, I am back to being cold.  I feel a lack of adventure, a riskiness come and gone.  (am I growing up?).  I saw a need and filled it.  I work to provide people health services.  I network to begin a mapping project in our communities.  I discuss the utility of obtaining domestic violence and sexual assault statistics in high altitude regions to begin an awareness campaign.  My roommate and I talk about, over breakfast, how I can implement a program whereby our promotoras teach his program participants about reproductive health, and in exchange they can translate for us and get free food.  I have never worked this hard in my life.  This pace of life is slow, so slow and so easy at times.  I wake up, make my bed, eat breakfast, hike Incan ruins, go to work, work about 10-12 hours, then drink a beer, or not, make dinner, or not, and go to bed.  And I think I love it so far. 

A dose of reality

June 1st

I saw her, limp and lifeless in pajamas still pink, with dust and a little dirt on them, a little dirt from the town that she was not from, from the town she should have left that morning with her family had they arrived at the bus station a few minutes earlier to get back to her home, her home with her toys, her food, her kitchen, her clothes, her life.  Her life left her here in this strange place and her eyes, open wide and unmoving, looked past me, past the crowd and into the mountains where her soul must have been playing.  Her hat was left outside our office.  Her blood is still there, and on some mornings now, if I’m not careful, I step right on it, and curse myself later when I think about it.   

Her hat is gone now.  She is gone now, I knew she was gone when her eyes were open, unmoving, open and crusty like little girls’ eyes are, looking at me, through the crowd and into the mountains and the air moved through me and I realized I am old now.   Looking back to a movie I watched when I was young and in it, a little girl died - she was sick, on a bed, and when she took her last breath and died, her eyes closed.  I cried and my dad comforted me, ensuring that she wasn’t really dead because when people really die their eyes open.  This was real death now, little pink pajamas, my boss and co-worker yelling, pumping her chest, her family silently beside her, shocked that two minutes ago she was playing on a street corner before the minibus came barreling through.  I stood there quietly, pushing curious children behind me so they wouldn’t see, holding a box of latex gloves, watching this scene, watching her eyes and knowing she had left.  She was three tiny years old, and her family missed their bus home that morning.  I walked back, after her body was taken to the hospital, back to the crowds waiting in front of our office, back to expectant eyes.  Back to questions – was she alive?  Was she breathing?  I wiped my eyes and told them no, saw their faces and realized I didn’t know who I was talking to, and quickly said, no sé, I don’t know.  I don’t know. I walked up to the office and sat down, letting her eyes be open and open and open in front of me.    These days, I feel life slipping away from here, from me.  As much as I feel I have blossomed here, I recognize that certain sadnesses will never stop.

Choquekillca Round 2 (Becca's Version)

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 May 24th

Now, for my version of Choquekillca.   As I mentioned earlier, my host mom had some cargo deliveries to make, so I graciously assisted, unaware of what I was getting myself into.  My host sister tagged along for some deliveries, and a friend for another delivery. I assumed these deliveries would be like the toffee deliveries I used to do for my mom during the holidays – I would go with some bags of food up to the front porch, engage in a short but meaningful conversation with a person I knew meant a lot to my family, then hop back in my car and listen to my teenagey music.  I knew it was different when I walked around behind my host-family’s kitchen and saw a battle occurring: woman vs. cuy (guinea pig).  This is what we were delivering.  Every day of the fiesta had a different food theme – we were delivering cuys for Cuy Day, which was Tuesday.  Ana Maria grabbed the cuys by their necks and threw them in a bag, being sure to give families equal parts boy and girl cuys because they taste different.  The cuys screamed like baby pigs, then, as Ana Maria told me, quieted down because they knew they were going to die.  As I carried bags of guinea pigs to these parties, they would sometimes move, and I wondered about the loveliness of these gifts if I were to be bringing them to a similar party back home.  We went to the first cargo at 11am.  Women were preparing food in the kitchen, and although it was pig day, the men outside were skinning the head of a cow.  There’s really no other way to put it.  It wasn’t pleasant, but they placed it in a friendly position for me to take a photo of it, before yelling at a child to not sit in the blood.  Then they gave the child a piece of raw head meat to play with.  Then they served me, my vegetarian friend, and Ana Maria some corn and beef.  I ate the beef while looking into the eyes of its owner.  I think I’ve grown a lot since I’ve been here.  They gave us beer to drink as well, as a gift for the gifts we gave them. 

We arrived at the second cargo just as the dancers were returning from their stint protecting the Senor.  I knew Ana Maria had a plan to mooch some lunch off this cargo, so I played the part.  I got a beer right away, and also got Ana Maria’s beer, since she wasn’t drinking.  We sat at the VIP table for some reason, and watched the latecomers and newbies get whipped.  Ana Maria gently sipped her Inca Kola while murmuring insights like, “Jose?!  I can’t believe he would be late.  And Sonya!  That girl.”  It was like watching a strange sporting event.  They served us tripe and stomach soup, along with chicha, a pisco and papaya blend, and that brown water-bottle liquor.  I drank for both Ana Maria and myself.  After the tripe soup, my food nemesis arrived:  lechon de choncha.  Pieces of pig, roasted with the hair still on it.  It smells terrible, and there is about one full bite of edible meat available, of which you have to look anxiously for with your hands under the thick, hairy pig skin.  Children often pull at the skin with their mouth, causing me to gag.  Last time I ate this dish, I was unable to get out of bed for the next two days.  I had to do it again though!  I washed it down with more beer.  I wasn’t feeling too sick, due to Ana Maria’s foolproof plan for lechon eating: first the lechon, then pisco, then the brown liquor, then cold water.  No water while you eat the lechon, though. That’s what I did wrong last time.  A few hours after you eat lechon, you have to drink mate, or herb tea.  I did all that, as recommended, and did not feel sick.  After sitting there for a while, surrounded by people dressed in full costume, masks included, we went to the third cargo to deliver that last cuy installment.  Here, I was handed one more huge beer.  The owner of the cargo poured me some chicha, at which point I regally declined, saying I already drank too much and ate too much, and pointed to my bloated belly.  She begged me, “please mamacita, take this one glass of chicha, its just one glass, it only has natural alcohol.  Please do me the favor, please”.  I couldn’t say no!  They then sat us and served us, I kid you not, more lechon de chonca, which I started in on again.  I don’t know where or how my stomach expanded to fit all of this into – I think somewhere after looking into the cow head’s eyes my brain maybe shut off.  Buckets of pig parts were being brought in and brutally chopped up, and I munched on my lechon and drank my chicha, telling girls in their costumes they looked like princesses.  Looking back, I’m betting by this time (about 2pm) I was pretty toasted.  Ana Maria didn’t seem to mind though.

We realized then that we were late for the bull fight.  This day keeps getting better!  So we ran back to our neighborhood, where the corrida was conveniently occurring.  It was my very first bullfight, and Ana Maria convinced me it would be g-rated.  We sat two rows up on cement seats and watched as very drunk people let the bulls into the ring while matadors dressed like the animated version of themselves flung pink and red blanked in front of their faces.  Before I knew it, one pompous matador had stabbed the bull with those stick pom-poms and, to the boos of the crowd and Ana Maria shouting, “Don’t kill the bull!  We’re all farmers!” with everyone else, thrust a sword into the neck, and heart, of the bull.  He died right there, and his poor ears and tail were cut off to give to the Spanish matador who did the deed.  We would later eat that bull, but in that moment, amongst tears of children behind me, and boos of the farmers who live in my neighborhood, it was a terrible event to witness.

This type of partying continued on for the next three days.  It never felt like people were going overboard, or had overdone it, or were out of place.  It felt like a genuinely good time.  As I walked through the town at 9:30 in the morning to put more credit on my phone, people would invite me to come drink with them, ask me my name, and then, across town hours later, remember me and say hi.  It was a beautiful time to share with these beautiful people.  As I walked home on my dusty pathway just out of town Monday night, the second to last night of partying, I saw a man by himself in the moonlight, playing the accordion.  He saw me and changed the tune a little as I strode by, guided by moonlight and the glow from the snow on top of Mt. Veronica.  I giggled immensely, my voice tilting and rounding around the idea that I live here now – this is where I live.

Pictures!

Here is the link to more photos. 

Enjoy!

https://picasaweb.google.com/114379609394765551921/PromotoresChoquekillcaAndHealthCampaigns?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCNKM0_H6-5D1IQ&feat=directlink

Choquekillca

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May 20^th, 2013

Choquekillca.  It all started an impossible amount of years ago, in a mysterious place, with a man, his horse, a river, and some beers.  This myth is, of course, according to the nine-year old on the combi ride to the nearby town of Urubamba.  The man, well, the Senor, was drunk.  He was riding his horse around the Sacred Valley and came across a river that had a giant whirlpool whirling around it.  He drunkenly decided to cross the river, using only a few sticks he found to make a bridge.  About midway through the river, right above the whirlpool, the stick bridge broke, the man fell in, and miraculously a cross emerged.  Thus was born the festival of Choqeukillca.  For a more accurate description of the myth behind the 4 days of incessant and belligerent partying, you may want to consult the internet.  Basically, the bare bones of that story still are manifested in present day: beer.  For four days in Ollantaytambo, the town gets wasted.  Old Quechua speaking woman wearing their skirts and beautifully woven capes that carry babies chug beer, toddlers drink chicha (fermented corn beer), teenagers slug back pisco with no regret.  People begin drinking at 4am and don’t stop until 4 am.  The premise is to celebrate El Senor, who on all the t-shirts looks exactly like Jesus.  There are 17 dance troupes that are handpicked and involve about 20 dancers each in incredibly be-jeweled costumes, masks, and whips.  The dances represent everything from the Spanish invasion to the heritage of those living in the high altitude regions.  Each dance troupe has its own party, or cargo, around town.  The party hosts were carefully picked at last year’s celebration, and have spent months planning for a feast – they often hire bands from Cuzco and caterers for this event, and have to cook for hundreds of people, without rest, for four days.  To be invited to a cargo officially, the hosts go around with bread and beer about three months before to each invited family’s home.  The invited person then describes what they will bring as a gift for the host at the cargo.  Typically, the gifts are crates of beer.  My host family hosted a cargo for a dance troupe last year, and my host mom had to deliver gifts to each family that came last year that is now hosting their own cargo. 

Lastly, the most crazy part.  The replica of El Senor must be protected 24 hours a day by the dancers.  The replica is in the church in the plaza.  Each dance troupe, who has a specialized dance they perform, must protect the Senor for two hour shifts, bringing their cargo, or party, with them, including the crates of beer.  They dance in front of the church, with community members, or without them if no one is there.  A few tidbits to explain: to be a part of a dance troupe you must commit three years of dancing.  You also dance at other celebrations throughout the year.  You must stay in costume throughout Choquekillca, unless you are at home resting.  You must eat and drink whatever is put in front of you.  This part is ridiculous, and on one day, the day where all the dance troupes visit all the other troupe’s cargos, only the captains have to eat everything.  That means the captains have to eat about 16 full meals, including 16 huge beers, shots of Pisco, and some random brown “digestive” liquor that is often poured out of a big water bottle.  And glasses of chicha.  As a dancer, you must attend a certain amount of church ceremonies per year, or you will get whipped.  Which beings me to another interesting point.  If you are late for your dance, or are new to the troupe, or mess up the dance (even after drinking 16 huge beers), you will get whipped.  I witnessed this!  They take it very seriously.  They will whip you with huge whips either on the back (in certain dance troupes they tie people up), or on the ankles.  My host brother was in a dance where all they did was dance around on one foot until someone blew a whistle, then one person would whip another person.  There were children involved in this dance as well.  I saw his legs today, they looked broken from the bruising.  The men wear layers of socks, but the women just ear thin nylons under their dresses.  They even whip the women.  There is no tolerance for being late to dance practice.  This is a basic summary of Choquekillca.  By far, the most drinking I have ever seen in my entire life took place this last weekend.  If I went to a huge university, grabbed all of the fraternity brothers, dropped them in on this weekend, and told them to enjoy the fiestas, they wouldn’t make it past 2 days.   This was serious partying.

Pictures of my first week

Here is a link to pictures of my first week!  Enjoy.  This is way less convenient than Facebook, so thank you for your cooperation.

https://picasaweb.google.com/114379609394765551921/FirstWeekInPeru03?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCP-Y0dTKio3VAw&feat=directlink

A little romance

May 2, 2013

Today was my first day holding hands here and I felt pretty queasy about it.  Margarita was in the kitchen before dinner, preparing something with Aleja (an older woman who doesn’t live with us but who cooks, eats, and hangs out at the house all day), and I asked if I could help.  What are you making, I wondered aloud.  Feet soup, they responded.  It’s good for the stomach.  Ok, how can I help you?  I asked, intrepidly.  Margarita had the raw chicken foot in her hand and was scraping it.  Aleja was dicing vegetables.  I thought that’s what my job would be.  Margarita grabbed another knife and told me to take the yellow parts off the chicken foot with it.  What are the yellow parts?  I asked.  Skin, she replied.  Oh.  I skinned the chicken leg, mindful to dissociate as much as possible. I saw how Margarita was doing it, very aggressively, so I copied her.  The best way to assimilate into a host family, I think, is to copy what they do.  The chicken leg still had its nails. It felt like holding a miniature old persons’ hands with only three fingers and a thumb.  Or was it two fingers a thumb?  How good I am at dissociation!  I hold its hand and rip at the skin, peeling it off slowly, trying to make it more fun for myself by remembering that I love peeling off people’s sunburned skin only that doesn’t feel like I’m holding a severed 97 year old baby’s hand while I’m doing it.  I made conversation.  Is this the same chicken we had for lunch, I asked.  It sure is, says Margarita.  Aleja nods accordingly, dicing her G-rated vegetables.  Keeping her hands clean of all this.  What a delicious chicken that was!  I remarked.  They murmured in agreement.  I can’t wait to eat its feet.  I kept that one to myself.  We sat down for dinner - me, Mama Ana Maria (just home from backbreaking labor making stone streets in our neighborhood), Aleja, and Cesar, Ana Maria’s goddaughter’s older brother from a town a few hours’ walk up the hill.  I tried eating a foot.  Ana Maria was very nice about it.  I had to ask her to put one in my soup for me.  I tried it, and for the first time in my traveling years, I felt vomit immediately in my mouth. I put it aside and laughed.  I couldn’t help myself!  Ana Maria ate it for me – it’s nothing, she said, your stomach still has to get accustomed.   

Work is great too.  There is so much to learn, but I love all of it.  This organization has clearly made an impact in the community - everyone I speak with knows not only the name of the organization, but can name one or more people that work here (there’s only about 6 of us).  There isn’t a lot to say about work yet because I’m feeling very overwhelmed by it.   My host family, their lives, and the comfort I feel here are very reachable for me. 

My life has changed immensely in the past week and it is an incredible shift.

At last!

5/1/13

At last!  So many things have happened at last.  Inside the mountains I have found a certain peace, mouth agape, family smiling, joy abound.  I unpack my things in this new home, my temporary placement.  A guinea pig farm, for eating only!  A houseful of mostly women, only one man to speak of, a very timid and adorable man who is in love with his wife and child.  It is here at last!  A walk through dirt roads and cables lining the street, sisters Cati and Ana Margarita dutifully carrying my bags, I see ice-capped mountains in the distance. I have a comfort zone in this incredibly foreign place.  It has not enlightened, nor thrilled, nor exhausted me yet because I have been thrown in and because it is so different.  I just might feel comfortable here soon though, with bugs biting me, walking across a dirt path from my room, adjacent to the room shared by mom, dad, and baby, to get to the dimly lit kitchen where we chat and drink coca leaf tea.  Dogs bark and fight in the distance.  I warily turn lights on, expecting the scurry of creatures.  The kitchen is full of jars and jars of spices and dried leaves, the oven built into a wall, black with soot.  Grandmother Ana Maria tells me she likes to cook everything.  Based on the massive amount of guinea pigs (cuy) she has in the back (piles of them) I’m guessing that’s one of her favorite things to cook.

In the backyard, the cuy murmur in unison.  Under each piece of cardboard box in their pen is another lump of fur!  A “mother with her babies” she would say.  I laugh and laugh (quietly so as not to offend them).  She maybe has 100 of them. By tomorrow it might jump to 150.  I am not yet grossed out by it, but I might be because they are cute, and when Ana Margarita holds one up to me I can’t help but pet it.  Is that how you treat your food?  I don’t know yet.  It is pretty precious, and terrified. Apparently they taste delicious.  The other girls I have met so far tell me they only have it on rare occasion, and in Cuzco it costs about $25 a plate. But not at Ana Maria’s!  I tell them it is my birthday on Friday, and they say they will make something for me, hopefully with a side of cuy.

Musing!

4/15/13

This feels different to me than leaving for Asia.  Then, there was heartbreak, extreme emotions, heat, and a ripping apart of my life in Santa Barbara to create something entirely unique in a foreign place.  This feels complacent.  I am not forcing anything to a stop; things have eased themselves into a natural termination.  This is the beginning that I want, not one I need, or one that I have to construct out of a void.  There is nothing left for me to accomplish here in this moment, the light of this place is flickering to a close. 

My muse - my muse is trouble, she is delinquency and a torturous past, failed relationships and broken hearts and I get the sense that she is not able to fully function right now because I am doing pretty well.  Beauty used to be created for me out of a certain suffering and it will take me a while to re-assess that suffering, tap into it, and re-write it from this stance - to enter into a place in my life where I can engage a transformed muse and where beauty can emerge from a point of positivity and empowerment.  Not all the time though – she does come back uninvited and unexpected to scratch her long nails down the chalkboards of my inactivity.  But for now, her light and airy counterpart will have to find her way into my phonemes, spreading like inkblots and blurring and slurring the darkened syntax.  

Looking back (in preparation)

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August 4, 2005…(taken from one of my recently found journals)

I am overwhelmed by all I want to do, but I can’t stand still.  I need to do something out of the ordinary, need to take a risk, break away from this level of functionality and add a spark to it’s grayness.  Maybe I’m slowly getting ready.  

Presently….

It’s hard to believe – well it’s hard to believe a lot about that last statement, that I wrote it almost 8 years ago, that since then I have done some fairly out of the ordinary things, that I felt this way before leaving for college and that I still feel this way a little bit.  I love these pieces of me that I see over time, I love how they melt together and roughly form the portrait of who I am, and how that portrait will help build the one 8 years from now.  In looking back, there are times when I wish I could hold myself, tell myself that the storm will clear, tell myself to stay or go, tell myself that soon the pain will pass and the beauty will begin.  Tell myself to breathe, breathe through the hard times and gulp the air down when times are good.  I know I will want to tell myself these things as I look back on this phase of my life years from now, so I hope that through this retrospective looking glass I can invert the image and hold steady on me now, continue breathing through the hard times and the good, and love myself throughout this new adventure.

For those of you who are interested, here is a link to the organization I will be working for in Peru:

http://www.sacredvalleyhealth.org/about.html