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.