TITTW sleeve goes to Peru

So, this has been the least amount of time we’ve spent in Sipas yet. After my last update, we went up for a day while the market was happening to publicize our stove distribution plan. Laurie already wrote about this on her blog, so I’ll skip that. Tomorrow we are going up for a single-day visit again, hoping that a lot more people signed up on the sheets Laurie left with Adela.

This past weekend we went to one of the private museums that isn’t covered by the official 10-day tourist ticket. It was a truly amazing collection devoted to pre-Columbian art, a lot of it on loan from a Lima museum that has the world’s foremost collection. Many beautiful examples of bottles (carved like cormorants, owls, or realistic likenesses of human heads), strikingly painted plates, and a really stunning wooden staff with a duck head, so simple and so realistic. The Mochila people did the best wood carving, and the Nazca had the most elaborate painted bowls. Also examples of other pre-Inca cultures like the Huari and Chan Chan. As it turns out the Incas were only on the scene for a couple of hundred years – more on that later.

Yesterday Laurie and I took a bus to the town of Urubamba, you go north from Pisac instead of east to Sipas. We passed through the town of Calca, regional pride increases as you travel north and Calca has signs saying (loose translations) “Calca: We Don’t Vend, We Defend” and “To Lie Is To Act Like A Slave”. Urubamba was small, clean, and lazy, with a tiny little Plaza De Armas. We ate lunch at a tourist sofa bar and then continued on by cambi to Ollantaytambo, our destination for the night. Laurie is friends with a family who lives there.

Ollantaytambo is where the royal Incas fled after the Spanish conquest. It has unbelievable ruins that are directly above the town on the mountains, with huge steps that the Spanish couldn’t figure out how to climb (there was a secret back path). After the Spanish dealt with that (it took them a while, it seems) the Prince and the remaining Incas retreated to Patakancha, 1200 meters up into the mountains (higher than Sipas!). Today they are 90% pure descendants, but of course have lost most of their culture and heritage (and I note again that the Incas basically gained a lot of their knowledge through conquering others and were really kind of latecomers compared to the Huari empire). Anyway, Ollantaytambo has that “never really been colonized” feeling bigtime. The streets are pretty much the same as they were pre-Conquest, with gorgeous little canals running all through them. I took a ton of pictures. It felt like being at the edge of the known world.

There’s a new wanna-be conqueror in town though – global capitalism! Since Laurie was there 3 years ago, hostels and cambis have doubled in price. There is an explosion of turisto type places. The family Laurie is friends with owns some property in town where they have a non-profit restaurant setup that feeds local kids for free. Since the last time, they have moved the restaurant to new digs down the street and are now renting out the space to other businesses. Carlos, the lead kid of the family (there are like 5 brothers) said that it is good for the economy, but that some customs are being lost. Interesting to note that there are a lot of cultural pride type measures going on, though – I kept wanting to mention that there’s this whole program in Sipas where the kids get traditional style backpacks instead of whatever hand-me-down 1st World Disney or Nike crap comes their way. That’s just one example – the Calca signs are another.

Last Sunday we also gave away our first stoves in C’Orao! Very exciting. They have to sign an official contract saying they can’t resell the stoves. We are going to post everybody’s picture when they receive their stove. Tomorrow after our visit to Sipas we will see the first ones fully built and installed in people’s actual homes!

I am continually amazed by the hidden courtyards here. A door you never saw open before can suddenly reveal a whole world behind it. That and the narrow stone streets really appeal to my Dungeons & Dragons sensibilities. I bought a map of Cusco and have been studying it, walking around to fill in the gaps of my knowledge.

This coming week Laurie goes to Trujillo (north of Lima on the coast) to visit friends. I will be wandering Cusco solo, perhaps even visit some outlying areas although most have to wait for our ten-day tourist ticket period at the end of June. More news next week…

S

Laurie's blog btw:

http://pencilsforperu.blogspot.com

gonna bump this once more when I get the new flickr photos up

OK, I had a big computer crash at the internet cafe and only posted ten photos, but they are really cool ones - link is above in the thread. More will come tomorrow.

It’s a rainy Wednesday in Peru. Laurie gets back from Trujillo tomorrow! It has been a quiet week, I have had exactly six conversations in English, most of them short. Also have become proficient enough in Spanish to have conversations, which is nice. I keep buying the papers and reading them, looking up words I don’t know over and over. Past tense is still elusive, but whatever. Quechua remains even more elusive, although I can pick out words I know at times I still can’t form sentences more complicated than (e.g.) “don’t touch” (“ama llami”, but different pronunciation than Español). I bought nail clippers from an old guy on the street who was delighted when I thanked him in Quechua, most people here get enthusiastic when I say even my bare minimum of words.

Last Wednesday, we had a successful day at the Sipas market, giving away 16 stoves! Our total is now 20 that are on houses. Soon we will post photos. When we returned to Cusco, there was an email for us from a German guy who is also doing freelance stove projects. He gave us important new info – that the metal rockets don’t last very long in the Inkawasi models and that we should coat them with clay before installing (with the ash layer around that). This results in a fired piece of clay in the shape of the rocket once the metal wears out. So we scrambled around that night to coordinate with Pave about getting a message to the folks we had just given stoves to!

The same guy also told us that they were training ceramicists to make rockets for a tenth of the cost of what we just did. But there is nobody even near Cusco yet who could do it, and we still aren’t sure how they could possibly be transported up the mountains to Sipas! So perhaps next year…

I have been walking a lot, about two weeks ago it was like somebody flipped a switch and there are noticeably more tourists here. New traffic lights keep appearing as well, the latest one right on the street outside our apartment! Yesterday I discovered an entire street devoted to shops with religious wall hangings. Scrounging the few English book exchanges for good books, we have gone through what we came with (me: Ulysses, Laurie: 100 Years Of Solitude).

I have finally managed to stay up late enough to check out some of the bars and clubs, which don’t really get going until 10:30 at the earliest (for bands) and usually midnight (for dancing). Went to Ukuku’s around 1 A.M. on Friday with two friends (Chicho and a Belgian woman named Karen that Laurie and I met in Ollentaytambo) and it was full of dancing and revelry. Last night I discovered a yummy pastry place that serves little savory empanaditas.

Eating breakfast specials in the morning, usually a bowl of fruit/yogurt/granola plus juice and coffee for five bucks, pretty expensive but good fruit is a luxury. I could eat meat and rice down the street for a dollar. And that usually is what I have for lunch, although the lunches are huge and come with soup for about $1.50. I have experimented a little bit with pisco, a clear grape brandy that is Peru’s national drink, but only had one kind that was truly good, very grapey. Mostly I stick with the Cusqueña, brewed locally and quite drinkable.

During breakfast, I can look out a balcony onto the main plaza. There are small armies of cleaning people dressed in blue that totally remind me of Oompah-Loompahs. They sweep the streets and sidewalks. There is another group of people dressed in green – the Garden Gnomes – who tend the flowers and grass of the plaza. Ironically, the dogs are given free reign to run around everywhere including the plaza, while people and even toddlers are chased off the grass. The dogs in the city are totally indifferent to people, often running in groups on some top secret doggy mission. Or else they’re just casually wandering the streets or pissing in the flowerbeds on the plaza. Or sleeping on the sidewalk. This is in great contrast to the dogs of Sipas, who are always scrounging for food during the day and very hostile and territorial at night.

It is moving into winter here, we have learned the meaning of the term “abrigarte!” (“cover yourself”, roughly). Next week we will return to Sipas for three full days and hopefully give away the rest of the stoves for them. Then it’s on to Sonco and one last visit to Sipas before we morph into tourists and then return.

Three weeks left! Last week we had a few extremely busy days in Sipas. Of course, everybody waited until the very last minute so Wednesday was absolute chaos, but when the dust settled we had given away every single stove! Early on Wednesday morning I went with a truck and 34 stoves to drop off in Soncco (alternate spelling is Sonqo, Quechua is one of those indefinite languages like Arabic where there is no exact spelling). We were worried, because that left us short on stoves for Sipas, but unfortunately (or fortunately, depending, since now we don’t have to buy more) we had enough no-shows that it turned out OK. The last three people had to draw straws for the last two stoves. We included a bunch of new people (around a dozen, I think) who we put on a waiting list until 10 A.M. when we decided we had given the slackers enough chances. Most disappointingly, a number of the no-shows were families we had already taken the time to interview. Sipas has a really bad reputation for this kind of behaviour, we will see if Soncco is different next week.

We also took some time on Tuesday to give out all of the pencils that my nephew’s school had donated. The power outlets were hellishly capricious as usual, so I only got around 8 minutes of video, but that included a class of kids singing the Sipascancha theme song! Also lots of photos, I think we’re going to have a Flickr posting marathon this weekend.

Today I went and got fitted for a tailored suit that I am having made. In my search for the Yanapay school (more later) I found a whole street of tailors and decided to take advantage of the hideously unfair exchange rate to get a suit for about $70 US. It’ll be ready next week. After much searching, I finally found a hat to go with it in the San Pedro market today. The look is very classic, like a Bogart movie.

Next week I am going to spend a few afternoons tutoring math at the Yanapay school, a local nonprofit. It should be fun, the kids range from six to twelve. Discussing the current curriculum with their teacher, I had the horrifying realization that I can no longer remember how to derive square roots (or cube roots, etc.) through the long division type process that you use for such things, I need some math books in Español! Since they (of course) don’t have any I will buy them some and do a quick crash review before next Thursday. The following week, we are going back to Sipas to say our goodbyes and then starting on a crash course in tourism at the end of the week.

I thought I’d describe the journey to Sipas in a bit more detail, it is just a little too familiar to me now. We get up at 4:15 A.M. on Mondays. Usually we walk to the Puputi bus station, only about 10 minutes away. We catch a bus to Pisac at 5 A.M. which is invariably packed to capacity. It takes maybe 45 minutes to get there. In Pisac, we fight our way off the bus through pushy crowds of Peruvians vying for seats, and then we immediately go to the panaderia to get fresh hot bread – the best part of the morning! Then we wait with the other teachers for the combi (basically a stripped out VW van type vehicle with seats) and pile in with (not kidding) twenty other people. They usually insist on us sitting, so I’ve only had to stand once so far. It can get really insane.

The combi travels up past Pisac, and the road turns into a dirt one. We drive along the side of a mountain for a while (see earlier picture on Flickr of the view down 1000 feet to the river), and then climb through a number of different communities. One of these is the Parque De La Papa, essentially a bioreserve for potatoes with over 200 varieties cultivated and studied. Then comes Cuyo Grande, then Quello Quello, and there are a few more. All of these places are a little more urban and well-off than Sipas.

Finally we come to the last pueblo and the road continues to climb through grazeland until it starts a series of switchbacks that take us over the mountain pass into the next valley – the District De Colquepata. Sipas is just over the mountain, down another set of switchbacks. The combi lets us off up above the pueblo because the road is too rough for anything except big trucks (although some hardcore Peruanos do drive their cars down it on market day). Then it continues on to Soncco, which we will also do next week. The trip from Pisac takes about two hours. It can be very bumpy, some combis are worse than others. Finally, we hike down the hill to the clinic, usually arriving around 8:30 or 9 A.M.

Yesterday, as usual, we walked unsuspectingly down the street towards our fave breakfast spot and were confronted with a massive hoo-ha (word coined by my friend Rachel, means a big party essentially). It was El Dia De La Corpus Christi! The cathedral had a huge amplified mass out on the front steps. Everybody eats a traditional meal on this day called chiriuchu, which we had for dinner at Eggo’s. It consists of indigenous food – cuy, chicken, toasted corn kernels, seaweed, fish eggs, dried and reconstituted mutton (salty, like a lunch meat), and sausage (which they were out of). Also, everybody eats coconuts and sugar cane. It was the biggest fiesta I’d seen yet, at 2:30 I tried to go to the Yanapay school and literally could not get into the plaza. Around 4 in the afternoon it started clearing out a bit and Laurie and I walked around some. I made field recordings of the numerous different brass bands competing with each other, and we drank a bottle of beer with two older Peruano men who turned out to be artists. One was the director of the Museum of Popular Art in Cusco, and he gave us free tickets! We talked to them for a while, it was fun to converse with intellectual left-leaning atheistic Peruvians. Definitely a different perspective. We asked them what they thought of Bush and they said they thought he was a dry drunk who beat his wife. We also talked about the U.S. treatment of indigenas and as usual I had to apologize for my fucked up country, which they really sincerely appreciated. EVERYBODY was drinking in public, it is one of the few days where that is tolerated. Corpus Christi is not, apparently, an official Catholic holiday, this is another example of syncretism.

Next week we will report back from Soncco, and then we start to say goodbye and wrap things up!

Love to all,

S

Wow, they must have extended the text limit for posts! Thanks!

will bump for photos this weekend when they are up.

First of all, you folks who aren’t on Laurie’s email list should read her last two posts about Soncco, she says a lot more (and a lot better) than I could this time around for sure.

http://pencilsforperu.blogspot.com

We have been back in Cusco since Wednesday afternoon. As Laurie says, the Soncco giveaway was a big success, 34 families in one day. We had so much basic interviewing to do that I started doing my first solo ones, getting a crash course in Quechua at the same time. I learned like 5 new words, fortunately I have a more extensive Spanish-to-Quechua dictionary than my English-to-Quechua phrasebook.

Nonstop fiestas seem to be the order of the day, both today and yesterday were holidays. I spent the afternoons at the Yanapay School, but they were slow days and I only helped one little girl with triple-digit multiplication. Yanapay is really an afterschool program for kids (many of them orphans) with nowhere else to go. Lots of volunteers, usually there are more kids. Thursday afternoon we watched Shrek in Español! English subtitles helped a lot. I had never seen it before! What a great flick.

We have spent the last two days cleaning up, preparing for our thank-you party tomorrow night that we are having for all the people who have helped us here. Next week we will spend one morning in Sipas saying goodbye (and giving out our last seven LED lights to the teachers, some of them got defective ones). Then on Tuesday we are going back to Quiquihana (where the nun’s pirate radio was, site of our first two stoves) to go up into the mountains and check out a village called Usi, where we are tentatively planning to do a stove project next year. Laurie is thinking about forming a 501(c)3! Wednesday we start our real vacation, we will head out for Machu Picchu but haven’t formulated a definite travel agenda yet (except to be back in Cusco for Inti Raymi on the 24th).

We took some fantastic photos today, we should get them up by this weekend.

More next week!

What a week. Many things to write, best to go day by day…

Last Saturday we had a little party for all the people who had helped us here. Attendance was kinda low, but it was fun. We stayed up pretty late talking to Pave and her sister Sefora about all kinds of stuff. And we had leftover guacamole and bread and soda!

The next day, Sunday, we went out to C’Orao where there was a little goodbye party for us in the Purikuq weaving market. Most of the families came, and a couple of other ones showed up to present us with a very official (stamps and all) request for 14 more stoves. Apparently they are all part of some neighborhood association along with the 4 stove recipients (who actually got theirs for helping with Purikuq as I understand it). Unfortunately we are too broke right now, and we need to research the ceramic rockets. We told them we’d get back to them. There is a very sweet 13-year-old girl (named MaFre, for Maria Fernanda) who has adored Laurie since L made a special trip back to C’Orao with pain meds for her when she had a bad tooth. They walked around arm in arm the whole time and she made Laurie a special deep-fried cuy that was much yummier than the usual oven-baked version (which I got, along with one for Laurie, giving her two cuy). With Pave’s guidance Laurie cut the heads off and gave them to the little kids, who sucked happily on the brains.

Later that afternoon we went to a chicken dinner fundraiser for an artists’ collective that Chicho joined recently, basically a way for some of the more creative types to legalize their street vending. It was the first time that everything clicked socially and I actually knew more than one or two people. There were lots of different performers with an MC and a PA and a beautiful view over the city. People played music, told stories, read poems, juggled, did a little play, it was a lot like some talent show night at Sam Bond’s in Eugene. We bought lots of beer and shared it with people. Then we took Chicho out for an extravagant dinner at Perro’s.

The next day we went to Sipascancha for our goodbyes. Took a few more photos and bought some really nice weaving. For a bunch of reasons Laurie outlined last time, we felt kind of bittersweet about leaving, definitely mixed feelings about the experience there. On the way back down the mountain range we stopped in Cuyo Grande for lunch with another one of Laurie’s godchildren, little Jose Anderson and his parents Quintin and Paulina. Jose’s adorable 4-year-old cousin was also there, can’t remember her name. I pleaded vegetarianism, having tired somewhat of cuy the day before. Ours came without heads this time, and I tore the little legs off for the kids.

FRUIT INTERLUDE: While we were there we tried yet another new fruit, the tumba. Kind of like a very sour, orange pomegranate with more fruit on the seeds. Looks more like a cucumber though. We have also tried:

Lucuma – very sweet and avocado-like.
Starfruit – crunchy and super tart, more of a garnish fruit.
Chirimoya – luscious, more melon-like, need to try again.
Pepino – super delicious pear-sized cantaloupe-ish yumminess.
Granadia – another melon-like thing, but you suck the pulp and seeds out of a harder shell.

There is also maracuya which I have not yet tried.

On Tuesday we took the Sicuani bus to Quiquihana to say goodbye to Hermana Nellie and the pirate radio nuns. We also went to check out a potential project for next time, the village of Usi. Nellie lent us her car and found us a driver and we went up a ridiculous road (4WD necessary). Sister Luz Marie accompanied us and said an elaborate prayer as we began our steep climb. When we arrived in the village we found the presidente and talked to him and a few other guys. We learned they have village meetings on the 30th of each month and decided to try and get Pave to go to one in the next few months. The scenery was even more beautiful and mindboggling than usual, and the village also seemed much more compact (houses closer together, little tiny streets, etc.). They have a tiny little school with maybe one teacher and a health person visits once a month. That’s absolutely it. They also have water, but no electricity. The poles have been laid on the road going up, but it will probably be a few years before lines get added to them and fully installed. All the roofs are straw, they have no access to the clay tejas that more populated areas use. We got a good vibe from the place.

After inspecting the initial rockets (one of which works great, the other of which does not have enough space around the edge of the pot for the heat to rise up the sides and needs either a chisel or a skinnier pot), we headed back and turned in early. Wednesday we got straight back on the bus and headed to Ollantaytambo, but we took a different route that was a bit shorter than last time and through different country. After arriving in Ollantaytambo we hooked up with Laurie’s friend and local dude Carlos, and we got a ride up to a tiny village about 10 minutes away. There Carlos recruited a local kid and we set off on a trail up to a pampa (grassy, shrubby plain) that overlooks the valley and city. The entire valley has been laid out as a solar calendar, and the light does very specific things on the dawn of the solstices and equinoxes. We ran kind of late and ended up hiking the last 20 minutes or so in the dark, but had plenty of light to set up our tent. Carlos and the boy (13-year-old Isaac) went scrounging for wood and we built a fire, ate food, and had a bit of rum (except for Isaac). We didn’t really sleep much, but we were warmer than we expected to be (Ollantaytamba is about 500 meters below Cusco). The light in the morning was predictably amazing, but I don’t think we’ll have flickr pictures up until this next Thursday or Friday. Sorry.

We spent the next day and night in Ollantaytambo. Having bought our ten-day tourist tickets the day before we were now authorized to enter the ruins. So we spent the afternoon hiking around the last true Inca stronghold before the Spanish took over, marveling at the engineering and general scale of things. On Friday morning we took a combi to Urubamba and hired a taxi to take us to two famous places nearby – the 1000-year old salt mines of Salinas and the Inca agricultural laboratory of Moray.

As we approached the salt mines I was totally flabbergasted yet again, even more than any mindblowing mountain scene so far. The scale is huge, the construction is intricate, and this giant complex grows out of a tiny little stream only a bit bigger than Cougar Hot Springs. Plus, it is at least 1000 years old, people have built successive layers of pools and gathered salt there for a really long time. Now it belongs to the nearby village of Maras.

About 8 kilometers down the road from Maras is a restored agricultural site that the Incas built that looks kind of like an amphitheater, except the successive lower levels are all terraces. Here they experimented with different plants at different altitudes (at least, that’s what most of the folks who studied it think). It is also huge and amazing, with an irrigation system and clever little stairs made of long flat rocks that stick out of the walls at intervals. We returned to Urubamba, had lunch, and then made our way to the nearby town of Yucay in order to discuss an impending baptism with a priest friend of Laurie’s. Laurie is probably writing more about it, but we are arranging a baptism (in Cusco, by request of the family of Pedro, Juanita, Laurita the godchild, and the other two sisters). It takes place the day before we leave. Knowing no priests in Cusco proper, we were very lucky that Laurie knew this guy (Father Rene) from before. He is the pastor for the oldest church in the whole Sacred Valley, dating to the year 1600. We didn't look inside but the grounds were quite beautiful with lots of peach trees, although it is definitely a fixer-upper and one whole living quarters building is unusable without a lot of work. He arranged everything for us, got us a priest and a church and a time, and generally saved our asses. Some of the family has never been to Cusco before, and I’m sure none of them have ever been in a Cusco church (well, maybe Pedro since he went to school here). We had this vision of the hopeful family arriving on Sunday morning and us having nowhere to take them! So after breathing a big sigh of relief, we headed back to Cusco and arrived around 7 last night. Sometime during this week we discovered we had miscalculated our budget a bit, so now we are going to go just a bit into the red for our last week (don't feel sorry for us, we have been more extravagant than planned). On Monday we are going to do Machu Picchu, and then we have more ruins and museums to visit than we probably have time for until Friday evening, when our tickets expire.

Today is the day before Inti Raymi, the traditional festival of the Sun/Solstice, and the whole week in Cusco has been nothing but parades, 7 A.M. firework explosions, and huge-scale events in the main plaza. Last night there was a full on rock concert, right now there is another parade and announcers. Tomorrow is the big day... Inti Raymi was banned for almost 400 years, the Catholic church only relented in the 50's (we think).

Another busy week…

After I wrote the last email the parades just kept going, all of Saturday night. I was stupid (not used to carrying the money) and took some cash down into the crowd where I was promptly pickpocketed in the crush of people. No ID or cards, just cash and my goddamn 70-sole tourist ticket which I had to buy again.

Sunday we got up early for the festival of Inti Raymi (Quechua for “Sun Festival”), which brings in some hideous number of tourists (like 80,000). The day begins at the ancient Inca temple of Qorikancha with a 10 A.M. ritual. We skipped that and decided to head up the hill to the Inca fortress of Saqsaywaman to try and get an early seat for the main ritual. Got there around noon, thinking that it started at 3, fortunately it started at 2. We were some of the last people to get decent seats (which was nothing but a steep hillside, the “real” seats cost $80 US). At 2, elaborately costumed actors began the performance of this ancient solstice ritual, which involves over 600 costumed participants arranged in groups all over the different levels of the fortress. Very impressive, although the entire thing was narrated in Quechua and therefore difficult to understand.

That night I went out to Perro’s and the owner got me sick-drunk on too much free pisco, which he kept pouring into my glass. I met a cool older guy from Montreal and took him to Ukuku’s to see Amaru Puma Kuntur one last time. Fortunately I got sick later that night instead of in the morning, because we had big plans for Monday.

On Monday afternoon we took a bus back to Ollantaytambo, had dinner, and caught the famous train to Machu Picchu at 8 P.M. – the only way to get there. We arrived in the Pueblo Machu Picchu (until very recently named Aguas Calientes after the hot baths there) at 10 P.M. and got a hostal room (El Tumi, very nice, cheap, and recommended). In the morning we arose, got a ridiculously expensive breakfast, and got our bus tickets to go up the road to the site.

Nothing I have seen here previously could possibly have prepared me. The scale is immense, the scenery is more amazing than anything I have ever seen, and the sound was also just unbelievable – you can hear everything from the valleys down below rising up the mountain chasms along with the songs of dozens of bird species. These days, scholars think the site was a summer resort for the Inca royals, not primarily a ritual site as had previously been thought. It was also possibly a retreat/refuge, which I can believe due to its ridiculous inaccessibility and the fact that it is totally hidden from below. We spent all day there, but were unable to make the climb to the adjacent (and higher) peak Waynu Picchu due to it being an unusually busy tourist day. Still, there were many times when we were totally alone. We also took a short hike to an ancient Inca bridge that you can view from a distance, however the rest of the trail to it is in ruins. Really, words fail me, I promise to have Flickr pictures up this weekend.

Spent a leisurely night in the Pueblo before catching the 5:45 A.M. train back to Ollantaytambo, where we had breakfast and continued on by bus to Pisac. There we presented our tourist tickets and hiked the Pisac ruins, some of which are pre-Inca. They have a pretty amazing volcanic rock sundial thing as the centrepiece, which of course is totally invisible from the valley floor. It was a long hike and we took an even longer pathway down a side canyon instead of the terrifying stairs that are the main access. It seemed to me, like Ollantaytambo, to be an almost impenetrable fortress and I can’t imagine how the Spanish dealt with it.

Today we tried to get maximum use of our tickets (since Laurie’s expires tomorrow) and went to Qorikancha (the Temple Of The Sun where the morning Inti Raymi ritual is performed), the Santa Catalina Monastery Museum (tons of hideously gruesome Christian death-worship, even more than usual, along with a lot of really cool stuff like wall frescoes and this amazing “trunk of the Story Of Christ” that folded out into a 300-piece diorama of staggering intricacy and detail depicting various biblical scenes), and the Regional Museum of Cusco (more pre-Columbian stuff and some later Christian paintings and furniture). Tomorrow we visit Tipon (an aqueduct site) and some pre-Inca ruins in between here and Pisac. Then our tickets expire, although we still have personal invites to the Museum of Popular Art that we plan to use on Saturday. Sunday is our baptism, on Monday we leave!

I’ll write one more update after we return discussing this last weekend. Friday the 6th slideshow is still a go as far as I know. And, of course, I’ll let y’all know when I get the pictures up.

you're fighting the good fight, right on.

bump for new photos, update to follow in an hour or two along w/more photos.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stovesforperu

So yeah, lots of even newer photos just went up on Flickr, check it out.

Well, here we are in the internet café. On Friday we went to the ruins of Tipon, a massive terrace and aqueduct site about 10 miles from Cusco. That night we went over to Humberto and Maribel’s house for dinner, it was nice and relaxed and we compared cultures and lives. Saturday morning I went by myself to the ruins of Q’enqo (“labyrinth” in Quechua) where there is an amazing underground grotto with seats and windows carved into it, plus a giant amphitheatre with 19 carved seats. That afternoon we had lunch with Pave at a ceviche place, and that night we had planned on checking out a 10-band punk show! We did go to the show, but a band was setting up at the time. While we were waiting, I had some kind of massive allergic reaction (probably to a previously uneaten species of shellfish in the ceviche) and we had to go home where Laurie dosed me with Benadril.

Today we got up at 7, and were at the bus station at 8 to meet Pedro’s family – who had gotten up at 3 A.M. and walked to Pisac to catch a bus. We went to the church and the padre that was Rene’s friend was doing mass (there were two, a smaller later one that was mostly for kids and the big early one). After everybody cleared out, he did a simple baptism in Quechua (Laurita the 3-year-old only speaks Quechua so that was cool) and we were done. Laurie went off with them for lunch and I went home for a nap, still suffering from post-allergy effects. The thing about baptisms in this country is that it is like a legal document or birth certificate, and Laurita will benefit from having those records as an adult, I'm not exactly sure how but it is a privilege that not many campesinos get. I'm not a godfather (I was more of a photographer), but they gave me gifts anyway.

For the rest of the day, people came by and gave us gifts, and we gave them stuff in return. First Pedro and Martin showed up, then Pave, then Chicho and his visiting Trujillo friend Vanessa – we’re going out to hear music with them later.

Tomorrow we’re spending seven hours in the Lima airport before our redeye flight. We have books and a blanket. I’ll write later this week with some loose ends and post-journey thoughts…

Great thread. I'll be in Peru the first week of April and will undoubtedly be taking some of your recommendations. I'm flying to Arequipa to meet my girlfriend, who will be there on business. We're probably going to do some hiking around there before heading up to Machu Picchu and then I'll fly home from Cusco. Airfare was pretty expensive, but I am hoping the trip will be worth it.

cool man! I don't know Arequipa but that is close to Colca Canyon, the condor refuge. I recommend getting up early for Machu Picchu since it easily takes a full day.

Good restaurants in Cuzco: Los Perros for dinner and Tratamundo's for breakfast/lunch (go for their breakfast combos, fruit & yogurt is muy delicioso). They are both either on or close to the Plaza de Armas. My fave club for night stuff was Ukuku's, and if you get a chance to check out that Amaru Puma Kuntur band I totally recommend it.

also if you feel adventurous you can take a bus to Ollantaytambo, check out Inca ruins, spend the night, and take a shorter and cheaper train to Machu Picchu than from Cuzco. That's how we did it, leaving Ollantaytambo in the evening, getting a room in Machu Picchu Pueblo, doing the ruins the next day, and going back to Ollantaytambo the following morning.

Sounds great, thanks! Yeah, we've talked about doing Colca Canyon, but I honestly haven't done much reading up yet. Are there any travel guides you'd recommend?

I'll ask my girlfriend and get back to you via this thread. Lonely Planet is pretty good as usual, especially with the general historical overview. If you learn even a few words of Quechua you will also be a big hit. 'thank you" = sulpayki (pronounced sool-pai-kee).

Also, our plans are still on for another stove building project in late 2008 as mentioned above.

bump

hey jaymc, how are your travel plans shaping up?

Laurie and I have now been sponsored by the same organization as before for another trip, making it official. We leave in late November, tentatively.

Good! It looks like things are breaking down like this: I get into Arequipa on Sunday, March 30 (Krista will have been there for a few days already), we'll do Colca Canyon on Monday and Tuesday, more Arequipa on Wednesday, then (hopefully) an overnight bus to Cuzco, from which we'll try to do Sacred Valley on Thursday, Machu Picchu on Friday, Cuzco on Saturday, and then I leave on Sunday. Kind of a lot to pack into a week, but I think it's doable.

Pics.

(My girlfriend stayed an extra week, so that's why you don't see any more photos of me past the first half.)

Trip was fantastic, btw, and everything went pretty much as planned.

Returning to Peru for four months...

Laurie has a comprehensive writeup of our fundraisers, thank yous, et cetera over at her blog:

http://www.pencilsforperu.blogspot.com

The main initial focus of our return trip is to do the same health tests and interviews that we did last time for the people of Sipascancha. In the intervening 18 months, we have learned that there is very little medical data on high altitude respiratory systems. Allegedly we have accumulated one of the largest bodies of data in the world! We probably interviewed 150 people. This time, we will be hoping that the new stoves have improved their numbers. If we can show objective indicators of improved health it would be very useful for future grants.

We also have a small control group, consisting of those people who we interviewed that did not come and get their stoves. We will have to track all of them down as well.

So for our first month we will be spending a lot of time in Sipascancha. Looking forward to seeing it again. I found this amazing book of Quechua folk tales called She-Calf, and the best thing is that it has the English and Quechua side by side. So I can read stories to the kids in Quechua! Very exciting.

After we re-interview as many people as we can, we will head south to the village of Usi, near the town of Quiquihana, where we will spend the remaining three months on a new stove project. Supposedly Pave has found us a room there, we will see. That whole project is more up in the air than Sipas was last time, but we know we'll get at least something done. Our goal is to build 100 more stoves.

Our flight leaves Seattle for Lima at 7 A.M. Monday morning, we will be in Cuzco Tuesday afternoon. Regular updates to follow!

Very cool -- looking forward to these again!

Well, here we are! All flights were smooth, no delays although the LAX
airport can go die with their ridiculous sprawl setup. We barely made it
to our plane with a 90 minute layover. Once we arrived in Lima everything
was very smooth, we got into Cusco around 1 PM. Pave met us at the
airport and we went to our hostal. The patio (that´s what our apartment
is called) wasn´t ready, they were still working on the kitchen. We
rested for a while and then went out with Pave and a Spanish friend of
hers named Juana to Los Perros for our favorite pumpkin curry soup. We
had coca tea as well, hoping that we wouldn´t have a repeat of Laurie´s
sickness this time.

Oh well, so much for that! Around 10 PM, after we got home, she started projectile vomiting and continued until 6 A.M., at which point we went to the clinic. Clinica
Pardo was full so they sent her to a new hospital, Clinica San Jose. They
put her on an IV drip and ran some tests. Finally, at 4 PM, they let her
go with inconclusive results. They thought it was food poisoning, we
think that is dubious at best and are leaning towards altitude sickness
a.k.a. siroche. At any rate, she is mostly recovered today, but we lost
all of yesterday hence the late email.

While she was in the clinic, I went out to try and get some basics to set
our apartment up. It was at this point that I really noticed how much
more capable I am of getting around than last time. San Pedro market? No
problem! Haggle in Spanish? Sure! I even managed to recover from giving
a taxi driver wrong directions on my way back to the clinic (having
confused it with Clinica San Juan where Laurie used to volunteer). So I
returned to our patio victorious, bearing an hervidor (electric water
boiler), a couple of cups, some ramen, some coca leaves, and a bulb of
garlic. Several people complimented me on my Spanish, but I really need a
few complete Quechua sentences because that was always asked next, like a
challenge - well, you might speak Spanish OK, but what about Quechua?

Last night I fed Laurie ramen and we went to bed at like 7 PM. The time
is really confusing here, I remember only being an hour off the West Coast
last time but now we are THREE (?!?!?) hours off and it gets dark MUCH
earlier, like 5:30. Climate is hot, but it can easily drop 5-10 degrees
when the sun goes behind clouds. Yesterday out the clinic window we saw a
terrifying rain front several miles away that completely failed to
materialize. By the time we were headed home it was gone.

Cusco has a lot of familiar smells - wood smoke, eucalyptus smoke, car
exhaust, that incense wood they burn (Paulo Santo), dust. It is really a
relief to feel familiar with my surroundings this time, last time I was
totally dependent on Laurie for the first six weeks.

Pave informs us that she has found a source for blocks of pumice, and she
also found a guy with some kind of table saw that can cut it into the
pieces we want. A promising start. When we go to Usi in late December we
will apparently be staying in Hermana Nellie´s convent. Our favorite nun,
Hermana Luz Marie, succumbed to dementia after doing an unbelievable feat
of heroics. Somehow she came upon a guy from the village who had tried to
kill himself and she carried him on her back all the way to the hospital
and saved his life, but she never recovered physically or mentally from
the effort. Like something out of a Garcia Marquez story, I swear...

Today we are at our fave breakfast spot Trotamundo´s. Now we head out to
acquire more essentials for our patio. Next week on Monday or Tuesday we
will head up to Sipascancha and start trying to track out people down to
re-interview them.

Wow, that story of the nun. Amazing stuff. Hope Laurie continues to recuperate, and keep us posted!

Day 6 here in Peru... After I sent the other message we talked to Pave and it turned out she had also gotten really sick from Los Perros. It must have been the coca tea because that´s what we all had in common. Big disappointment because we´ve eaten there dozens of times before with no problems. We´ll still go back but we might not have tea. We know and trust the owner and are sure he does what he can to avoid such problems, it´s bad for business.

Pave brought a bunch of exciting news about the stoves. This time, we will be building them with a layer of pumice as insulation around the rocket form. The rocket itself will be formed out of bent 1/4" rebar, using a lot less metal. The pumice pieces will then be formed around the rocket shape with clay as a glue. This means the only piece of pumice we actually have to cut is the piece that makes up the "floor" of the rocket chamber. As before, the rocket is a burn chamber in an "L" shape, wood is fed in at the righthand base of the "L" and the pot goes at the top. The pumice comes from a local mine near Quiquihana called Wayracancha ("wind place" in Quechua).

The 12,000 foot altitude is kicking our asses this time around. We realized that the last time we came we just stayed at Pave´s for a week doing nothing. This time, we had to run around and get a bunch of kitchen stuff and other essentials before we were really acclimated. It felt like we were doing OK but we really weren´t. Laurie got a really bad headache again yesterday and we finally broke down and went to a Botica (drugstore) and bought medicine for siroche (altitude sickness) along with some half-strength Valium (which is still quasi-legal here over the counter). Last night we slept for 13 hours and we are much better now. But we are plan to do almost nothing today except lie in bed, our blood oxygen levels are 92-93 which is still kinda low (I can hear the gasps of the medical folks on this list now).

My mom & stepfather got here last night, they are going to be here for three weeks. We´ve done alot of the tourist stuff locally so we´ll pass on most of it, but I would like to go see the amazing museum of Pre-Columbian art again. Ron is pretty sick with epiglottitis (!!) but has all the proper meds. They will probably need a day or two to recover.

On Wednesday we plan on going up to Sipaschancha (the village we built 100 rocket stoves in last time) just to say hi and remind people that we need to interview them again and do health testing. Once we get as many of those people interviewed as we can, we will shift over to Quiquihana where we will start the pumice stove project. Pave tells us that we can stay with Hermana Nellie in the conveny and maybe even use her 4x4 truck (which I have dubbed the Nelliemobile) to go up to Usi. Sounds a lot easier than what we did last time!

Well, here we are again. The time has been a blur but it has been about a week. On Wednesday we met my folks at 6 AM and went to the Puputi bus station. From there we retraced our route from last year, taking a bus to Pisac and getting fresh warm bread at the Pisac bakery. Then we found our taxista friend from last time, Fredy, and he gave us all a ride up to Sipascancha. We were there by 8:30, which is fast. On the way up we noticed a lot more houses built, especially in Cuyo Grande. In the last village befote the upper grazelands that border the ridgeline, we saw a restaurant! We asked Fredy if anyone ever went and he said it was run by the people from the potato research park (Parque De La Papa) which is further down the mountains outside of Pisac.

Then it was onwards over the pass and down to Sipaschancha. We met Adela and the school and there were tons of obvious improvements. The courtyard where the kids play had been paved and was no longer a sea of mud, there were flush toilet bathrooms for the kids, and they were in the process of building a guest house for visitors. All very encouraging. Adela made us tea with fresh mint (bizarrely, there is absolutely no mint tea available in Cuzco anymore, everyone we asked just shrugged their shoulders and said “si, poco.” Bummer cause we drank it a lot last time). We met the other preschool teacher, who we all really liked, but I didn´t get her name. I practiced my Quechua with the kids, asking them questions that they would shyly giggle the answers to. I suceded in impressing a couple of 8-year-old boys which I guess counts for somethibng. They asked me to talk in English and I put on my best folksy Virginia drawl, which they found hilarious. One kid, when I complimented him on his woven bag, pulled out a freaking laptop!!! It looked like a Fisher-Price toy. "It has games", he said proudly. All of the elementary school students have them now. Ron and I wanted to check out the specs but didn´t have a chance. The older students use real computers (towers) in groups of 4 or 5.

We had come up with the school exchange materials from North Branch (school in Virginia where my nephews go) and we gave all of it to Adela. Her and the other teacher then organized the primary students (3 to 6, I think) into a group and they all showered us with confetti as a thank you. Then the teachers led them in these unbelievably cute songs and dances that they did for us. You haven´t lived until you´ve seen a group of 30 tiny kids doing the ukuku (man-bear) dance and singing “ukuku, ukuku.” Muy adorable. I recorded some and Ron even has video.

After that we set up in a market stall and spread out all of our medical testing staff. Laurie and Pedro announced that we were looking for people who had gotten the new stoves, but nobody was interested until they figured out that we had a booklet with pictures of them in it! Suddenly there was a crowd of 15 people thumbing through it. We did five interviews, I think. All of the people we talked to were happy with their stoves and said they were using less wood. One woman said she burned herself much less. So that was a promising start.

We also made a brief visit to Alberto´s house, where he proudly showed us his second store that he had built himself, complete with chimney. Not quite a rocket , but still a big improvement. He also showed us another house that he was building with the money from weavings of his that we had sold during the past year and a half. Pretty inspiring to actually see the effects of our little fair trade enterprise. He said we could stay there, and we just might do that.

We headed down the mountain and back to Cusco, I think then I took a nap. In the last two days we have gone to some museums that we didn´t see last time. We explored the Q’orikancha, the center temple of the whole Inca empire, which I recommend you look up on wikipedia or something cause it was a fascinating example of syncretism, Dominican Spanish construction on top of or around original Inca buildings. Today we went to another museum, the Museum of the Inca, which was a much more comprehensive look at Andean culture going back to 12,000 BC. They had these super fancy plumb lines made on carved stone that looked like animal heads. We also saw impressive pottery, figurines, and a mind-boggling exhibit of an Inca tomb, complete with mummies and ítems for the afterlife. Once we got in to the Colonial era we saw the fanciest furniture I have ever seen, with ultra-detailed mother-of-pearl inlays.

During the last week we have been having serious conversations with Nino and Pave about what to do with the people who didn´t pay for their stoves. Only 18 out of 100 paid the 20 soles that we had intended to be used for sustainable resource projects. We considered giving them one more chance and then repossessing them, but decided that was too much bad karma. Instead, we decided to reward the people who did pay with baby pigs. We would have done chickens but Pave tells us it is too cold for them to live up there. We´re going to walk away from the rest and not worry about it any more, but next time in Usi we are going to demand the money up front.

This afternoon we met out friend Carlos from Ollantaytambo for lunch at Ego´s (thankfully we have moved beyond tourist food and back to our normal fare). He is going to work in Australia in two weeks and we won´t see him again, but we plan on hooking up with some of his younger brothers for the solstice and possibly the ruined city of Choquechirao in March, a 4-day journey away (3 by bus, 1 hiking).

Last night we went to a benefit dance for an organization called Bruce Peru, although I gather there are Bruce chapters worldwide. With every drink the bar donated two soles for the kids. We had red wine and watched seriously talented salsa dancers show off until the bar became too full and they started kicking down the hiphop, reggaeton, and super pitched down versions of 70´s disco songs. We are still easily out of breath and could only dance for half a song at a time.

Tomorrow we are going to head out to Quiquihana in the Nelliemobile, spend the night in the convent, and visit the pumice mine in the morning. There is a Sunday market that people from Usi Hill be at so we can talk to them there. We´ll head back here midday for dinner with Carlos. On Monday we go back up to Sipascancha where we Hill dive into followup health interviews with all of our energy, we have 3 days a week in December to interview around 75-100 people.

wow Ned, Laurie and I would both like to thank you for your kind words and links on your blog.

we head back to Sipas tomorrow at 5 AM, new update probably Thursday.

OK, I´m going to cheat here and c&p my mom´s account of going to Quiquihana, because she pretty much said everything I would have said. A couple of other notes, though… We were very happy to make friends with the woman who runs the store across from the convent, because we will no doubt be going there a lot. I´ve already forgotten her name though. In the market they were showing videos of huaynos songs, very elaborate productions with passionate singers lip-synching among various ruin sites. Over to you mom!

Saturday afternoon we met Laurie and Steven at their apartment, then all took a taxi
to another part of Cusco to meet Hermana (Sister) Nellie, the nun Laurie and Steven
knew from work in Sipascancha in 2007. It was at her children´s shelter in
Quiquijana, a bit over 2 hours from Cusco, that they build one of their first two
model stoves in 2007. Hermana Nellie had come into Cusco to bring another nun for
an eye doctor appointment, and the four of us rode back to Quiquijana with them,
squashed into the back seat of Hermana Nellie´s 4 wheel drive Toyota pickup truck.

The children´s shelter has dormitory space for 100 children, although at the moment
they only have resources (food, support, etc) for 50. As we understand it, most of
the children are there only during the week, living there and going to school. They
walk multiple hours to/from their villages to be at home helping families on the
weekend. Some, maybe 15, are there full time, either because their villages are too
far away or for other reasons. Parents come to the sisters to ask for their kids to
be there, and pay in various ways, either 20 soles per month, or the equivalent of
20 soles per month in food (potatoes, meat, etc). There is also a government
program that we are a bit uncertain about, but as we understand it, families get 100
soles per month, of which they pay 20 for the child to be at the shelter and the
rest is used for some other project (like starting a store), but somehow there are
strings attached that we aren´t sure of. Anyway, the smaller group of children who
were there over the weekend were engaging and enthusiastic, and seem happy and
healthy and well cared for. There seems to be a fairly steady stream of volunteers
living there and helping with the children, currently two young people and a family
from Germany. The children help with the cooking (we helped unload 50 kilo sacks of
flour and sugar and beans from the back of the truck, as well as large quantities of
apples, pumpkin, and other foods) and they also bake bread.

We had tea and bread and excellent local cheese at the shelter, then went to the
convent several blocks away where we would be spending the night (Steven, Laurie,
Ron, and Ellen in a room with two sets of bunk beds). Pave arrived a bit later via
the bus from Cusco, and we got some eggs and fruit from a little shop across the
street and had bread and eggs and fruit salad for supper, with lots of discussion
(in Spanish, with us following varying amounts) about buildng stoves in Usi, a
village about 40 minutes by truck from Quiquijana, the site of Pave and Steven and
Laurie´s work beginning in January. They will be staying at the convent during the
several days per week that they are working in Usi, driving to/from the village in
Hermana Nellie´s truck.

Sunday morning we had planned to get up in time to leave at 7 for a visit to a
pumice mine where Laurie and Steven and Pave hope to get pumice to use instead of
metal as the rocket part of the stoves this time (the rocket is the right angle part
where the fuel goes in the front and the heat comes out the top). We were up in
plenty of time, blasted awake at 4:50 am by the live broadcasting of music from the
convent´s pirate micropower radio station!

Hermana Nellie drove us to the mine, about 40 minutes further from Cusco on the main
road. The mine was closed because it was Sunday, but we walked in past the log
blocking the road so Laurie and Steven could see it (Pave had been there).
Different grades of pumice (for different purposes) are pulled out of the side of
the mountain in different spots. No machinery, just picks to free the pumice before
lifting it into trucks. Laurie and Steven and Pave each carried back an armload of
the grade they hope to use, and will experiment with cutting it. Steven and Laurie
brought special hacksaw blades with them from home!

Then we all piled into the truck again and went back to Quiquijana where the Sunday
market was in full swing. Aside from the visit to the pumice mine, the market was
the main point of this trip, since folks from Usi come to the market, and Laurie and
Steven wanted to make initial contact with them. They had talked with the village
president last year about the stoves, and wanted to let people know that they had
actually come back, and hoped to start work in Usi after Christmas.

We asked around the market, but were told that the people from Usi had to walk and
weren´t there yet. Pave got the man running the music to make an announcement that
we were looking for people from Usi and they should come to the (tiny) main plaza at
the edge of the market to talk. We sat and waited, and eventually the
vice-president of the village appeared and he and Laurie and Pave and Steven had a
long discussion, with Hermana Nellie arriving and participating at the end. There
is a new president/vice-president from a year and a half ago, but Laurie and Steven
think this will not be an issue. The plan they worked out is that Laurie and Steven
and Pave will come for the children´s Christmas party at the shelter on the Saturday
before Christmas, and then on Sunday morning the Usi peope will come for market and
a meeting at the shelter about the stoves. They can see the model stove at the
shelter and even cook on it.

Just as we were getting our packs and leaving the convent, several more Usi people
appeared, and there was more talk about stoves. Then we all took a taxi to Urcos, a
larger town nearby, and from there we took a bus back to Cusco.

Well, I fear I may fall victim to melodrama here. That was probably the hardest three days we have spent in Sipascancha. We feel like we are still processing some of the things that happened.

As before, we got up at 4:30 and took a taxi to the Puputi station. From there, we met Nino and Adela (with their new baby on Adela´s back) and we rode the bus to Pisac. There, we waited for at least half an hour, probably more, while the teachers all ate breakfast. We got sweet tamales in the street and realized that there was no good reason to have gotten up so early. After breakfast, we all crammed into a combi (around 25 people, no room to move) and rode the 2 hours up to Sipas.

Once we got there we met up with Alberto, who showed us the room we could stay in. We looked at the clinic and it was trashed, filthy, and depressing. Hardly anybody had been in there since we had left 18 months ago. Laurie´s signs and learning aids were still on the walls, dusty and neglected. We decided to stay in Alberto´s room. It was on the second floor, up a wood ladder with a tiny balcony made of rough boards, but it had a wood floor, plastic over the windows, and a good roof. Alberto´s wife Ricardina made us a traditional lunch with cuy, potatoes, and an egg. Oh boy, here we go again. Every single middle class person and/or doctor in Cusco says “whatever you do, DON¨T EAT THE FOOD UP THERE.” But we watched Ricardina cook it and she made sure everything was well done. Little Cynthia, their youngest daughter and one of Laurie´s god-children, watched us with a big smile.

During lunch we discovered that Ricardina was 8 months pregnant (she’s 39). They told us that the district doesn’t have money for a doctor to visit the outlying communities anymore, so every Sunday she has to walk three hours each way to the clinic for a checkup. A week before her due date, they have to take a taxi (50 soles, a month’s income more or less) to the clinic. She has to stay there until she gives birth, supply her own food, and have her own caregivers because there are no nurses. This is all part of the government’s plan to force the campesinos to have national ID numbers. If for some (any) reason they don’t make it to the clinic before she gives birth, there is a 200 sole fine (4 months income). Then they have to pay an additional 250 soles for the ID number (5 months… oh, you get the idea). Completely fucked up.

After lunch (brunch?) the burnout hit and I lay down for a while. Alberto furiously nailed up more supports for the ladder and balcony. When he finally showed us the finished room, Cynthia was practically bursting with pride.

Once I got back up, I went over to the teachers’ offices and started to go through our interview sheets. The names are so goddamn confusing. Not only is the spelling hard to standardize, every person has a different combination of names (the kids take one name each from the parents, but whether it’s the middle or last name can vary). I wasn’t really ready for such a mindbending challenge and got totally pissed off and frustrated, which was not the best thing to do at the time. Laurie gave up and left me alone and I finally came up with a list of all the kids we had interviewed previously so that Adela could pull them out of school the next day. After I had finished that, Laurie showed up with Cristobal (from the neighboring village of Soncco, he was our liason there). He had some bad news (“I don’t want to lie”, he said). All of the metal rockets had broken after about 8 months of use. The people there had tried to replace them with clay but they weren’t working as well because the dimensions varied.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in various stages of despair, anger, and attempting to reassure one another that our project wasn’t a total failure. Finally we crashed, miserable, in our tiny bed. I was relieved to discover that it wasn’t quite as freezing cold at night, I even took a layer off.

The next morning we gathered up our tattered spirits and went to the office. Adela started bringing in kids and we started to do the repeat interviews. By lunchtime we had done 15 kids, raising our spirits considerably. As far as improvements, well… the blood oxygen levels were uniformly lower, but that may be because we’re using a different pulse oxymeter to test them. The lung expiration volumes seemed higher, which is what we were really looking for. So that is promising.

After a quick lunch we made our way over to the school building complex, to watch the videos that North Branch School had made for the exchange program. We had a brief moment of total fear when the first disc failed to work in front of a 100-kid audience, but thankfully the second one worked fine. We had two showings, one for the older kids and one for the younger kids. They were greatly amused by the American kids’ stumbling attempts at basic Spanish.

After a bit of research, the teachers figured out that the other disc was in a Windows Media format (WHY???) and so they hooked up a computer and a video projector for the second feature. Once again it was older kids first, younger kids second, and this time the sound was really low so Laurie and I did a lot of explanation en Español. After the younger kids watched it, the teachers put in more huaynos videos like what we had seen in the Quiquihana market. It was interesting at first, with lots of different places in Peru as stages for the videos, but after 20 minutes or so we were wondering what the point was. The kids started getting restless and talkative and the teachers started whacking them with a bamboo stick (hmm, guess we won’t tell North Branch about that). After half an hour we bailed, saying that Adela had made us lunch and not wanting to get the kids into more trouble.

The rest of the afternoon is a blur, I think we spent it with the teachers. Nino came back from Soncco (where he teaches) around 4:30 and we got geared up to visit some houses. It was beyond grim. Everything was just as dirty and hopeless as we remembered. None of the houses we visited had kept their word. Not only had most of them not paid, ALL of them had taken the stoves apart and kept only the chimneys. Basically, they didn’t want to learn a new method of preparing the wood (in smaller pieces) and decided to go back to the old lazy method of stuffing whole pieces of brush into a burning fire. The rockets were nowhere to be seen, except in one house where it was sitting neglected in a corner. When we asked if we could have it back, the woman said oh no, we’re saving it for our second house (which I find doubtful). In one house, it was the father’s birthday and he and a friend were sitting there almost too drunk to talk. We did a couple of followup interviews. The mother, before she put her hand in the pulse oxymeter, said that she wanted to wash her hands, so she rinsed them off in a pail of BLACK water (they have a faucet of semi-clean chlorinated water right outside their house, for fuck’s sake). Nobody had a good answer for why they had dismantled the stoves except for saying that it was slower to cook (because they weren’t preparing the wood properly and feeding the rocket properly, of course). The third or fourth house we went to had a kid who was showing us his laptop (Linux system, 256 MB memory) while the house was filled with smoke. When we went to the president’s house, we saw a huge television antenna and satellite dish with the donor’s name on it (Vicente). Why Vincente thought shitty Peruvian corporate TV would be a good thing to give people who don’t have clean water or much of anything else, I have no fucking idea.

We walked back to the teachers’ office in the gathering rain, our spirits pretty much crushed. We went to bed and half-slept through the most intense rain I have ever experienced, seven solid hours of Midwest thunderstorm level gushing sheets. After the rain let up the wind kicked in, literally howling like a banshee. We were very grateful to Alberto when we made it through the night dry and warm.

The next morning was market day. We had breakfast with the teachers (Adela and Elwira) and asked them about the whole pregnancy thing. They told us that EIGHTY PERCENT of the women in the village were pregnant, due to the federal welfare program my mom talked about in the last update. It is called Juntos, “Together.” The families receive 100 soles a month for every child they have under nine. It doesn’t take much intelligence to realize that this is a really bad idea. Adela told us that the government is only applying the program in the poor highland areas like Sipascancha, not in places like her jungle home “where the people work hard and demand more.” She said it was to keep them lazy and poor. Elwira agreed. It certainly gave us more insight into why Alberto and Ricardina are having another kid after seven years. While in the office, we noticed a huge chest freezer just sitting there with this Vicente guy’s name on it. Of course, since the village has no reliable electricity, a freezer is useless. Why would Vicente do this? Oh yeah, so that his NGO can dump a bunch of unwanted secondhand stuff into the third world, get their tax credits, keep all their people on payroll, and walk away patting themselves on the back. Fuck you, Vicente and your Grupo ST of Spain. Put up the funding for a goddamn doctor instead of TV reception and a useless hunk of metal.

During the market Pedro and Cristobal kept dragging people in for followup interviews. By the time we left in Isidro’s truck we had completed 23, slightly ahead of our projections. Not a single one of them were using the rockets. Back home in Cusco, we slept all afternoon and made a spaghetti dinner for my folks as we told them our tales of woe. The next morning Laurie went to the clinic again and was diagnosed with giardia and a bacterial stomach thing. We learned that all fruits and vegetables have to be soaked in a bleach solution for ten minutes and then rinsed before doing anything else with them, an important piece of information we had somehow failed to learn previously. The tourist restaurants all do this (we learned later), so the problem probably came from food we bought at the market and “only” poured boiling water over.

Last night Pave came over for more discussion. Unexpectedly, a young man from Sipascancha who was studying in Cusco also came over with his sister and a friend. His name is Placido and he helped Laurie in the clinic five years ago, when he was twelve. We all sat around and talked about how frustrating Sipascancha was. Pave asked Placido straight up what he thought and without a pause he said it was because nobody there wanted to work. Laurie and I decided to use him as our translator in Usi, he is one of those guys like Pedro and Cristobal who bucks the trends and has a lot of potential. It was kind of amazing to see him and his sister all dressed up like modern Peruanos and to know where they came from. Inspiring, also.

After that impromptu meeting we went with my folks to have dinner at our friend Rosanna´s. She runs a Spanish school here in Cusco and is what you would consider upper middle class. As usual there were other interesting people living there and I found myself caught between two very interesting conversations, one between Laurie and three Peruvians about the Juntos program (their opinions were the same as the teachers, with the added opinion that the middle class were the people who really needed the help in Peru) and one between my parents and an Air Force guy from Wyoming who was headed to Afghanistan on Sunday. I sure am glad there are people in the military as open minded as him, lemme tell ya.

This weekend we plan on taking it slow and easy, Laurie and I will visit Urubamba with my parents but we plan on doing absolutely nothing while they go off to look at Maras and Moray in a tourist taxi. We return to Sipascancha for more interviews on Monday. Wish us luck.

Aw man. So sorry to hear that, sleeve. My best for you all.

thanx man, and once again we appreciate your kind words. Laurie is doing much better today and I seem to have escaped the giardia this time around.

That was a long week.

Sunday night Laurie and I were feeling pretty awful still, so we decided to go to Ukuku’s Bar and have a drink and maybe catch some music. It is the only place in town that has Pampero Aniversario rum (for the uninitiated, the best rum available in OLCC stores), and we are slowly working our way through their single bottle. To our delight, the band that night was our old favorites Amaru Pumac Kuntur, who I raved about last time we were here. They did the exact same set, but who cares? It really helped pick up our mood. After the gig, we asked where they were playing next and we are gonna drag Ron to see them tonight at a place called Illapa (“Lightning” in Quechua). For some reason we couldn’t quite figure out, the guy wrote “Wirakocha” on the paper as well, a very close relative to the Wayracocha pumice mine (Synchronicity #1). We will ask him what it means when we see them later.

Over the weekend, Laurie wrote an apology to Vicente, and he responded in kind. We learned that he had given other, more useful things (a pair of cuy and chickens to every family as well as building the schoolyard patio) as well as some less useful things (medicine and food which is now all gone). The more I learned, the more my anger turned to pity. He isn’t an NGO, just like us, and he just blundered into that place and got his heart tugged on by those kids. I doubt he has had much experience in this field, which explains why he gave them that insane TV system instead of a trout farm or a water filtration system (both of which would have cost less). Of course, he is the godfather of one of the President’s kids, and of course the TV antenna is at the President’s house.

Monday was a teacher’s holiday so we decided to go to Sipas on Tuesday, feeling like we needed a break from the nonstop filthy horror and apathy of that place. A friend of mine from this list suggested to me that we were dealing with the aftereffects of the Colonial mentality, but the more I learn the more I think we are dealing with something else that is newer and related to the way clueless NGO’s come in here and just throw money around without any underlying ideology of sustainability or accountability. The result is that you have villages accustomed to handouts, who just sit there waiting for the next temporary short-term handout.

For lunch on Monday we decided to have chicharone, deep fried pork with corn, potatoes, mint, and onions. It was really good at the time, but then later Laurie got pretty sick (from fat combined with stress ulcer, not food poisoning). She skipped a dinner with our new Swiss friend Erika. I went down to Trotamundo’s to meet her and ended up meeting two of the directors of the small NGO she is working with. Jorge is from Cuzco, Danielle from DC. We had a really interesting conversation touching on many of the same “aren’t these big NGOs just fucking everything up” themes. Jorge told us how an NGO had come into the barrio he works in and built bathrooms for everybody. Then, just like in Sipas, they left without educating people. Not only is the percentage of people using them low, all the bathrooms drain into a big pit about six feet from the river. I told Jorge “if these people would just live in the village for a week before starting these projects, they would have a much better idea of what the people really need.” He emphatically agreed. I told him about the TV antenna and he rolled his eyes. I mentioned that we were already looking forwards to our next project in Usi and his eyes lit up. Turns out he worked at the Health Center (Centro De Salud) in Quiquihana, met his wife there, and they kissed for the first time in Usi (Synchronicity #2). A much needed morale boost, again.

Tuesday we spoiled ourselves once more with a taxi ride (thanks to a donation from my mom’s yoga teacher) and arrived around 3 PM. When we got there it turned out that Adela was there, which we had not expected. It also turned out that Mr. Vicente had CALLED HER FROM SPAIN to complain about what horrible people we were, how dare we criticize him, blah blah. Laurie, in tears, delivered an impassioned speech about how the people of Sipas had basically shit on us, broken their word, broken their legal contracts with us and the nuns, and in general refused to do anything resembling their part. She then added that if we had showed up like Vicente, in a big fancy truck with tons of gifts, not spending the night there, and not living with the people, that folks would just be crawling all over us with adoration. Instead they ignore us except when asking for more gifts. Adela responded with a combination of blank over-her-head looks and hiding-her-head-in-the-sand denial about the total unsustainability of most of the things they asked Vicente for (worm medicine ain’t much good when the kids live in shit). More disturbing was the fact that the other teacher, Elwira, totally got what we were saying, making it all the more obvious that Adela simply didn’t want to hear it.

Once again we gathered our tattered morale and did a few interviews. One of the guys we interviewed last time, a 27-year-old with a wife and three kids, had committed suicide in the last year. Lovely. We gathered up our stuff and waited for Isidro to leave. As we were waiting, we ran into a woman who is the traveling doctor for the region (whether Alberto lied to us in order to gain our sympathy and money, or whether she just hasn’t been able to visit him, we don’t know). Her name is Doris, and she is focused on visiting all of the women who are pregnant (once again, that number is 80% because of this idiotic Juntos welfare plan). When one of those women has a stove of ours, she is lecturing them on how they need to be using it and how bad the smoke is for them. An angel of health! Knowing that she is doing this boosted our morale considerably, again.

As we rode down to Pisac with Isidro, we lightly grilled him about why Sipas gets so much aid and why the people are so apathetic. His response was basically to say that they had been dealt a really good hand, but they just sit there waiting for more instead of working with what they have already been given. He also said that there are lots of villages in the area “that don’t even have a glass of water”, and that Sipas gets aid because it is considered a future center on the Pisac-Colquepata highway.

We found a collective taxi going to Cuzco and spent a very enjoyable ride trying out our limited Quechua skills with two market women (who ride up to Sipas from freaking CUZCO to sell at the market, I can’t imagine their profit margin is very high). They were very entertained by my fumbling attempts at conversation, and tried to teach us some more basics while a teacher next to us translated.

Over the last two days I have been dinking around Cuzco with my folks taking care of errands. Wednesday we got a further morale boost by eating an excellent tapas dinner. Turns out I got the same giardia Laurie had, but now they have these great pills that you only have to take for two nights (last tiem it was 10 days of double-dose Flagyl). You can even drink on them! I took our landlord’s broken guitar in to be fixed, so that I can practice and play. They were a bit taken aback when I asked for “only the higher four strings”, but that’s how we roll in my band. I don’t think I could adapt my chord forms now even if I tried.

Last night, Pave came over for dinner. We planned a budget session for Usi, and there was general venting. She said that despite seven years of her working there, people never thanked her for anything (in fact, they are now trying to blame the lack of tourists at the C’Orao market on her, which is absurd). Eventually she gave up, and totally understands our frustration. We noted that Adela is trying to create a better life for the kids during the half day that they aren’t in their houses, but we agreed that in her passion and goodheartedness (not a real word, I know) she seems to be grabbing at any short term solution she can get without thinking about the long term consequences.

We have decided, with Pave’s advice, to simply keep the small amount of money that 10% of the Sipas people actually paid. Partly this is to refund our $45-per-stove costs, and partly it is because we have decided not to expend one more iota of logistical energy on behalf of these people. Laurie is beside me right now composing a very polite kissoff letter to the president, telling him we will never return after this next/last week, and why. As per our earlier experiences, we look forward to a much easier time in Soncco, after the Navidad holiday. There are about 8 people in Soncco that paid for their stoves (out of 25, three times the percentage of Sipas), but since they are all still actually using them we plan on giving those 8 families replacement pumice rockets in March.

Thanks to everybody who responded with encouraging (or challenging) words last time, I apologize for my bitter compassion-fatigued rants. We are really excited about working with Soncco and Usi, and are ready to move forward.

oh, now that the post got justifiably deleted I should note that in between my two long updates there Mr. Vicente wrote Laurie a very angry letter taking her to task for my harsh words.

A catchup post here, noting things I forgot and some new stuff.

Sometime last week, I now forget when, Laurie and I and Ron and Ellen had dinner with Jorge and Erika of the Hampy NGO, since Laurie had been sick the last time. We found out a lot more about Jorge’s work in the barrio of Choco, his organization has been there for five years and he says that now they are finally making some progress. He is experimenting with water purification using sunlight, it seems that if you put water in clear containers and leave it in the sun for 6-8 hours, the UV and IR rays kill everything bacterial and/or parasitical. Erika has decided to move on, Cuzco is not for her what with the altitude and the constant paranoia about food-borne diseases. While she was here, she was making these amazing crocheted purses and shoulderbags out of recycled plastic bags. She cuts them into strips, ties the strips together, and uses it just like yarn, with knitting needles. She also invented these cool billfold/wallet things made out of aseptic containers (like for soymilk). Most impressive!

Jorge told us more horror stories about NGOs here. He said that once he had two Dutch girls in his office who were literally in tears because they had paid $5000 each for TWO MONTHS to some lameass organization that just told them “oh, just think up something to do with these kids” and gave them no further guidance or help. They had come to him to say “um, is this normal?” It seems they confronted the NGO when they returned to Holland and got the typical “administrative overhead” BS along with the “well, you signed our contract” BS. I have yet to see an NGO from outside this country that has done even 10% of the good they claim to have done.

In a similar vein, I forgot to mention our day trip to Ollantaytambo. Laurie got to hang out with her friend Carlos some more. He said that the entire Sacred Valley has been ruined by the NGOs, and that his organization (Corazon Del Mundo) is looking further afield for places to help out.

Partly because of increasing consciousness about these negative effects, and partly due to our own dissatisfaction with the results of our project, we are engaged in a comprehensive reevaluation of our next steps. A business-oriented friend of mine said that our high failure-to-adopt rate reflects a failure to meet needs of the population that we hadn’t perceived. This may well be true, but I think it also reflects a failure on our part to see just how much reeducation is needed for people to be able to use the stoves properly. In other words, their needs are perceived needs, but not necessary ones if the rockets are used properly. In all three of our villages with stoves, exactly one person has fully understood the rocket principles and run with it. But we noticed that he was also doing other things like trying to separate the animals from his kids, and having his kids wash their hands in hot water from a third burner that he had put in himself.

So, in light of all this, we have decided to scale down. We think a large part of our previous failure is because we didn’t spend enough time with each family, and there is no way we could spend enough time with 100 more families. So we have decided to try and focus on a smaller group, 20 families at most, and spend an entire day or two with them and our assistants, cooking, translating, and talking about other holistic health aspects such as hygiene and animals. At most in our 2 ½ months, we could spend 2 days with each of 20 families. We will be spending more of the project money on assistants, teachers, and translators, as well as a small hygiene kit for each family (nail clippers, bleach, etc). We will also be introducing retention cookers (insulated hotboxes that continue to cook pots after they are removed from the stove, minimizing wood use even further) along with the stoves this time, and we will need to source and buy those supplies.

Back here in Cuzco for a few days, we are planning on taking some language classes from Rosanna’s school. I need a bit more Spanish (especially past tense) and we both want a few days of basic introduction to Quechua. I have torn through a couple of good books (highly recommended: Alexandra Fuller’s “Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight” and Geraldine Brooks’ “Foreign Correspondence”, both autobiographies). I am also continuing to slowly plow through Gravity’s Rainbow for the second time, man that thing is dense.

We dragged Ron and Ellen out for a late night to see the band Amaru Pumac Kuntur, they were very impressed and bought three copies of their CD for friends. They played in this ridiculously tiny bar (Illapa, Quechua for lightning) upstairs. The place was packed and I think everyone except me was worried about the floor. At one point I poured a glass from a fresh liter of beer and decided I had better put it on the ground next to me so that someone didn’t knock it off the table. Of course, it slipped out of my hand. This unbelievable geyser of beer shot up, totally drenching Laurie’s left side from butt to boot. When it settled down ¾ of the liter was gone. Must be the altitude, I thought to myself as I apologized profusely.

We are honing our comebacks to the street sellers, most of whom probably don’t recognize us (all us blancos look the same, after all). Restaurant? No, I cook in my house. Shoeshine? No, I clean my shoes in my house. Massage? No, I have her/him. Tourist information? We’re not tourists (that last one is a pretty good all purpose reply, it seems to get people off our backs right away). Sometimes it feels like being the only two people in a mosquito-infested swamp, the tourist season is pretty much over now until late April.

Oh yeah, and the exchange rate went up! We now get 3.05 soles per dollar instead of 3. Every little bit helps…

Next week we will have more info about our plans for Usi, with our new approach taken into account.

OK, here we go again.

A week and a half ago we went to C’orao to do followup interviews and updates, as I mentioned before. I also mentioned that we had checked out the stove of a guy named Tomas, and that he had done some interesting things like include a third burner to heat water for his kids to wash their hands. Javier the taxi driver was with us and was equally enthusiastic about the stove. It was clear that Tomas was one of the only people we had revisited who was qualified to teach others.

After we looked at Tomas’ stove, we walked back to the weaving market (Purikuq) with Timoteo (Tomas’ wife) and Anna (his sister). Our mood was better, since we were seeing better stoves than in Sipascancha. We were excited about the possibility of using Tomas as our trainer in Usi, and we had told him that we would talk to Pave about it. He said that was fine.

When we approached the market, Pave was there. We began to tell her about our plans. Angrily, she cut us off and began to badmouth Tomas, saying really rude things about him right in front of his wife and sister. They turned bright red. Our collective jaws dropped open. We really couldn’t believe how she was acting, it was very irrational and clearly had nothing to do with our project. Our good mood disappeared like a popped balloon.

We walked away from the market and back to Honorata’s house. We apologized profusely to the women. “Ella esta MAL”, said Timotea bitterly. With Javier translating, we learned that some of the conflicts in the market had to do with Pave demanding that Tomas and Timotea produce more stuff, more rapidly, while they didn’t see the point since the stuff that was already there wasn’t selling. Again, all this was translated through three languages, so whatever.

Laurie wanted to just leave without talking to Pave, but I thought I would try to say a few things. Calmly and carefully I told her that we didn’t want to talk right now, that we weren’t coming to visit her house later that day with Ellen and Ron as planned (because all we would have done was argue about what had happened), that we didn’t believe her bad words, that they were without excuse, and that we could talk at our meeting in Quiquihana next week. Pave then ran past me out to the street and began yelling at Laurie. I gave up and sat in the taxi with Javier. When it became obvious that Pave was going to continue to argue and not listen to Laurie, I urged L to get in the car and go. Eventually she did, and we left, but not before Pave threatened “it’s him or me.”

Back in Cusco, miserable and confused, we sat and talked with E&R for like five hours, and they helped us draft a letter to Hermana Nellie. In it, we said that we had run into differences of opinion with Pave that made it potentially impossible to continue the Usi project, and would she please mediate since we all respected her. We emailed it to Hermana Nellie, and dropped off a copy of the letter at Pave’s the next day since she never reads her email.

Well, this past Saturday we went to Quiquihana. We had not heard a word from either Pave or Nellie, but we went anyway. After a while we got to sit down and talk to Nellie. She had not seen the email. She had been to Cusco the other day, at which point Pave had given her our Xmas presents for the kids, given back the 40 soles we had sent her to buy food for our planned Usi demonstration, and given back the pumice-cutting saw blade that was a gift to her – in other words, given everything back. She said she would not do the project, and said that everything was my fault because I had closed the car door (???, we think it made her angry that I told Laurie to give up and go, again this is translated through Nellie), and left. Basically she has deserted the entire project, as well as Laurie, her friend of five years. We talked a lot more to Nellie who offered no judgments, but she did say that she felt it was a bad time to try and work in Usi because of the rain, that the road was not safe. We decided that in light of that and all the other stuff, she was right.

On the way there that day, Laurie had come up with an excellent alternative plan (we had a few kicking around our heads). She suggested that we return to C’orao since there were 20 other families in this neighborhood association (in addition to the four we had already worked with last time) who all wanted improved stoves as well. Last time we were here, they sent us a very polite and well written letter asking us to help them out (which came as a total surprise to us, since Pave had neglected to mention them and had basically appeared to play favorites within the group). It seemed like an obvious choice – C’orao is much easier to get to (20 minutes from Cusco), and the people had already demonstrated motivation. We talked to Nellie about it and she agreed it was a good idea. She also agreed with our “less families, more education” approach. After Laurie filled out a little nutritional primer for the nuns, we went downstairs to watch the kids open presents (and also to play with the most adorable basset hound puppy in all the world, Pipo, who was a new arrival to the shelter – see Flickr site).

We are still confused and hurt by Pave’s actions, but we are writing her an apologetic Xmas card in the hopes that she will at least resume contact with us.

So today, we went back to C’orao to do some tests on Tomas’ stove versus the rocket in Andres’ and Honorata’s house (the ones with daughter MaFre and the three cute boys we took pictures of last time). We used the same amount of water, the same pot, and the same amount of fuel. The time it took to boil the water was essentially equal (approx. 27 minutes from a cold start for 2.5 liters), even though Tomas’ stove is not a traditional rocket design. We talked business with Tomas and Andres, how much they could work to help us, how much the families could pay, how much they wanted to be paid, etc. They also talked a lot about design, and we have tentatively decided to use Tomas’ stove with a few modifications to be more like Andres’ – slightly lower holes for the pots, slightly more space around them, and a burn chamber made out of a clay/hair/cactus juice mixture. In the spectrum of rocket design, we are leaning towards less wood efficiency and more smoke removal, since “it cooks too slow” was one of the consistent complaints we heard in the other villages.

On the 25th, we are going to go to a meeting of the whole association starting at 10 AM. It looks like we will be moving forward on this project, and we are excited that we can find most or all of the necessary supplies in C’orao (they have a welder there, we just need to find baskets, bags and straw for the retention cookers). It has been a long tough road this last month, but it looks like we have a new (old) project to work on now. As if to underscore our decision, we were almost immediately picked up while hitching back to Cusco, by a German woman who has lived in Pisac running a restaurant for the last 14 years. She was headed directly past our house and dropped us off there. We promised to come and try her cheesecake next Monday, after we have our last meeting in Paucartambo province at the village of Soncco.

Here in Cusco, the campesinos are descending on the city in hordes, with visions of free chocolate dancing in their heads. The municipal workers are setting up portapotties in the plaza right now. I need to go to the market and get a shave, when I finally found an adaptor for my electric razor I must have plugged it into the wrong polarity (there’s no ground here so you can’t tell which way is which) and it blew up in my hand. We are also going to go to Rosanna’s tomorrow night for an Xmas eve dinner.

Last time I mentioned that the campesinos were descending on the city. Well, when we got up on the morning of the 24th the entire plaza was packed full of stalls selling every kind of gift or knick-knack one could imagine. It was like a super jam packed version of Saturday Market. Laurie and I wandered around and I bought a few gifts for people. Later we went up to our internet café of choice and I discovered that yes, once again I had been an idiot and not kept the camera bag in front of me at all times. As usual, some lameass piece of weasel shit had taken advantage. The camera was, of course, gone. So the pictures of Pipo The Most Adorable Basset Hound Puppy Ever have been lost for all time. Sorry. It completely ruined my day, I was a lot less upset last time we were here when I got my pocket picked for around $125 in cash. Somehow, losing all the pictures made it worse.

There were a lot of campesinos selling plants for people’s crèches, apparently anybody who is anybody in Cusco must have a crèche for Xmas. We ran into someone from Sipascancha who we bought some things from, and one of our Stove Project people from C’orao who we bought some pine cones and a crazy looking plant from (bright red, yellow, and green, when we get another camera I’ll take a shot of it).

On Xmas day we went out to C’orao for our first meeting with the Mandorani group (Mandorani is a neighborhood in C’orao). Laurie wrote about it on her blog and I will now c&p:

“so today we spent christmas morning in the village of mandorani meeting with the 20 families of our new (and improved) stove project. we met at the home of victor, the secretary of the village and were joined by children, women and men, not to mention chickens, pigs, puppies and dogs. what was very cool is to see and feel the difference of a community actually motivated and ready for a project such as this! we all discussed all facets of the project including, the type of stove, (previously discussed when we did the testing of the stoves as to how long each type took to boil water, fuel used, etc.), what we wanted to do (the exams, the education, home visits), what we will provide (the stoves parts, the education, the retention cooker and the people to build the stove) and what their part is (to meet with us 1-2 days, to allow exams on all family members, to use the stove correctly, to have their adobe, clay and 30 soles.) so we had alot of participation, great questions and comments, and plenty of applause! we go back the 8th of january to get the list of names and the money and then we begin the process of buying materials. it was a very merry christmas for all.”

So yeah, it was an inspiring visit. The secretary told us that he thought there would be a few families who wouldn’t be interested, but we are going to go ahead and make 20 stoves since we always run into other people who want one. We also told them that when we come back (we’re thinking 2 ½ years cause this rainy season shit sucks) we will give them their 30 soles back plus another 5 in interest.

That night Laurie started having some kind of problem in her hip, we still aren’t sure what it is but she was bedridden and in a lot of pain for the last two days, unable to walk. This morning it was better although still stiff and painful, and she has managed to walk down here to the internet. So we are hoping that continues to improve. We get another day of rest tomorrow, and then we are planning to go to Soncco on Monday, our last visit to Paucartambo province for the foreseeable future. From then on, we will be xeroxing teaching aids and pricing stuff (baskets for retention cooking) here in Cusco until our meeting on the 8th. After that, we will be going to C’orao every weekday to spend time with the families.

Some trivia about Cusco I keep forgetting to mention: It is one of the five worst cities in all of Latin America in terms of air pollution. The worst offenders, interestingly, are the fancy expensive tourist buses which constantly belch horrible clouds of toxic black smoke. The regular inter-city combis and taxis are better, although we also read in the paper that 99% of them are over 12 years old and that 25 of the 40 bus lines are essentially operating without licenses. Ironic that as we try to clean up the air in the rural houses, the city dwellers are maybe getting it even worse.

Police repression of a protest of working class people against price rises in Peru... under the new 'socialist' president... we need a revolution, not just new masks for the domination of capital! https://t.co/KulTOlXAKH

— AngryWorkers (@WorkersAngry) April 3, 2022

Peru is a never-ending heartache for me. I lived there in the early- to mid-90s. Sad to say, stability is more the exception than the rule.

agreed

I'm really enjoying reading your emails, sleeve. They bring back memories. We lived there during the Fujimori years, the "dictablanda" as our Peruvian friends called it. Odd how he ended up in prison and his predecessor, Garcia, who had fled the country, was re-elected. This despite every Peruvian we knew being truly traumatized by the hyperinflation of the Garcia years. There was never a dull moment.

thank you. we are still in touch with numerous people from that era of our lives, we even do video calls these days

also, I miss eating lucuma

"But Ramos Salinas is not entirely without hope. “There can be joy in unlikely circumstances,” he says. “In Callao, during the recent protests, young people who’ve never had access to swimming pools blocked the road with inflatable pools, these cheap ones made in China. And they had the best time.”"

I wrote about the latest crisis in Peru! https://t.co/zhykoRT274

— Valeria CK (@valeria_wants) May 9, 2022

waht

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazilian-stripper-interrupts-peruvian-presidents-online-corruption-hearing-2022-06-16/

Well, it gets worse

oh great, what now

oh I see. here's what one of my oldest Peruvian friends has to say:

THE RICH AND CORRUPT WON.
It's sad to see that in our country since those times of the gamonales the poor, the provincial, the people will always be marginalized, discriminated, humiliated, trampled and mocked. Many of us have lived when we came to the capital to study, there were always these hits and now these times this discrimination is maximized Is it a crime to be poor? Is it a crime to come to power being a provincial? Is it a crime to come from a people? How sad and unfortunate that our corrupt congressmen set a bad example for our children, teens and young people. Perhaps at school we always promote and ask that: when someone has problems we must support, when someone fails we must motivate to improve, when someone is going through difficult times we must give a hand, teach also not judge, be empathetic, active and now what will we say to our CHILDREN ABOUT LOYALTY. But now all we're going to see is hypocrisy, how can there be mediocre people laughing at other people's pain adding that they won. Of course he won power, corruption, mafia, wealthy, ambition. I also once heard that a teacher will always be another teacher's enemy oh how true it had been. But there is a lesson learned THAT SHOULD NOT TRUST ANYONE I believe in moments of sadness, bad luck even our shadows betray us. But if you will happily stay as an example THE LOYALTY OF A MAN TESTED as Doctor Anibal who teaches us that loyalty to someone must be until the end. Now what is the use of the elections if months pass again say VACATION, VACATION, if the rich and corrupt do not give their taste join all the mafiosos of the jam and capitalist press and so they lay it down because they will never leave their m woodpecker, their nests of gold, as it will always be. These are the consequences of no longer educating in values, lack of identity, which are all rights, rights and there are no duties, we are influenced with the external or ideal but does not exist and RESPONSIBLE for all that happens but defend n others have a name, Mrs Keyko who for dignity and record loving Peru should not run as a candidate, so the fate of our country can be different. Not to mention "JUSTICE" everything is taken over by the groups of power, who do and undo what they want in Peru. I better not even talk about congressmen...... Neither will we stay quiet in front of so much mockery and hypocrisy, always for the rich rotten class and the people will be an obstacle, But yes, I feel proud that although short time that the son of the people ruled in a country of rich, Thanks Mr. President. I just ask God to guide everyone. It's my personal opinion. Long live all the peoples of Peru and down with the corrupt and discriminators!

Did laugh at a random tweet which said that Peru's political culture is what's coming to many countries.

another update:

The real issue in Peru is that Pedro Castillo wanted to change the mining contracts to ensure more community support from the profits. Obviously those companies dont want this. Contracts have no end date but have to be renewed every 5 years. According to government info, these are the contracts that would be up for renewal in 2023. No doubt the bastards who ousted Castillo will sign them as they are and get a substantial backhander. There is only economics in politics these days. The ownership of these companies is international, not Peruvian, with most liked to US / Canada.

and of course

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/12/14/the-us-egged-on-the-coup-in-peru/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/20/we-feel-betrayed-peruvians-on-anti-government-protests

state of emergency in Lima and three other provinces as of Friday

our conservative friend unfriended me on FB, we assume b/c I commented "follow the money" on a post. she's still friends w/ my wife.

our other adult friend on FB is a teacher and she is very, very angry right now