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.