Health Fair, Pervian Thanksgiving Plans, and Protest #???



Harlequin for the health fair

We had a visit from the director for Family Search for the five country area. His name is Dulio Delgado and we spent several hours with him and the local Cusco representative. We have been doing very well in this part of our assignment. We take around 5000 photos a week on average. We have submitted several discs now that have not had any books to retake.

We feel good and excited about this.

 

A lot of people know about our project now and they get excited. Rich told an artist he ran into about what we are doing and he got all excited and said he has always wanted to do genealogy but did not know where to start. Rich told him about Family Search and he thought he had to be a member of the church to use it. He told him that it is available to anybody and while some things are exclusive to church members, none of those things will impede his personal family search. He left very excited.

 

We have had some great experiences lately. We have been filming records from the mid-eighties. Most of these folks are alive but the records are still important. We see some social trends reflected in them too. About this time a lot of Western names begin to get used in naming children. Julie photographed a name that was Sherwin Williams Uscca Mayta and Rich had Ronald Harrison Colquehuanca Chancayauri. There are lots of Elvises, Katherines, Elmers, Rebeccas, Julies (spelled Yuly), and Wilburs. Interestingly, the trend of late has been more for traditional Quechua names like Kusikollyor (Happy star), and Kolque (Gold), and a lot of traditional Spanish names.

 

We learned that Institute is over with one class to go. We had never been told how long Rich’s class actually went and so, we are winding up about three books short! Rich talked with the director to see about teaching a class on Isaiah and he got it approved. This will be in the interim between semesters.

 

Signs of approaching Christmas are everywhere. There are bottle-brush Christmas trees in the stores and huge ornaments of dangling bells. One unique Christmas item is Italian Panetone. This is hugely popular and for sale in every grocery store. The Peruvian version is just as good as the Italian. The bacon we buy is better than any bacon we ever bought in the United States and Rich even posted a status avowing his devotion to fried bananas. The fruit that is on right now includes huge stacks of delicious mangos and pepinillos (little striped melony flavored, cucumber textured fruit).

 

We figured out our oven to be able to bake pies and have made two sweet potato pies. We don’t have access to Libby’s canned pumpkin here nor pumpkin pie spice but the sweet potato pies have been just as delicious.

 

On Saturday we searched stuff to be able to cook Thanksgiving dinner. We have invited some Peruvian neighbors and the mission president and his wife. We have invited 11 people to our little bungalow!

 

While we were out, we ran across a health fair in the Plaza San Francisco. The fair seemed mostly focused on dental health. There were dancers doing traditional dances such as one where they whack each other with huge woven slings and one called a baker’s dance. There was a flash mob sort of a thing with girls and boys dancing to a tune about stopping violence towards women. A string of dental vehicles lined up to check people’s teeth. Kids tended booths with various displays of things one can do to stay healthy. A giant guinea pig with a toothbrush wandered among the festivities along with a couple of heroic donkeys and a llama, all critters with big teeth, we suppose. They seemed to be from outside of Cusco, from the farming communities. There were even stilt walking harlequins.

 

We traveled totally, uneventfully to Izcuchaca this morning. Once there Rich got asked to give the last talk in sacrament meeting and Julie got to teach primary for two hours, totally unprepared. She has come a long way in her Spanish confidence and did not freak out at the request. It did get a little hot but we did not travel in the rain, no mud issues, nothing… Once home we had lunch with our downstairs neighbors, the Agüero family. She is Colombian and cooks well. She fixed beans, rice, eggs and avocado. It was great!

 

At home, our family is trapped by the bad weather in New Mexico and Texas, hoping to get together for Thanksgiving.

We go for a long walk through the center every morning before beginning our work in the archives. On Wednesday morning there seemed to be an extreme amount of activity and so we, like lemmings headed off to see what was going on. Marchers filled the Avenida Del Sol all heading towards the center of the city. They carried sticks and clubs and the police paralleled their march. They did not carry banners but chanted anti-Humala (the Peruvian President) slogans. They are unhappy that the government does not step in and fix the oil prices and since virtually everything is driven by that, the cost of living is rising. Of course, they look to the starship, Venezuela for guidance. Venezuela produces oil; Peru barely does and is certainly not in a position to solve the problem. We walked past the march with no incident but it felt a little uncomfortable.

So they chant, “¡Urgente! ¡Urgente! ¡Presidente!” (Urgent! Urgent! A New President). These same chanters were the very same who pushed to get this socialist president into power when the last president did not fix the oil prices and the last time they had elected him, he let terrorism run amok and absconded with millions of soles and the one before him, just ran off with millions of soles and did nothing to stabilize the economy…

 

Of course the few in the march who have an education probably got it at the hands of terrorist sympathizers, so they still stir these things up. Sadly, it is a very old and unproductive tale here. One feels for the poor who struggle to feed themselves and keep a roof over their heads. We, in the U.S. think that we see poverty but in Peru, millions live by subsistence farming, meaning they only live on what they can grow. This means that if they cannot make it, they don’t wear it, if they don’t grow it, they don’t eat it and they raise an animal or two to sell so that they can buy luxury items like rice, tea, yarn and so forth. They don’t have electricity, most send their children to school late because they have to do their chores or they don’t send them at all because they work. Child labor is an unenforced crime here. These children typically eat two or less meals a day and as often as not these meals consist of toasted corn or freeze dried potatoes (chuño), rarely do they get fruit, meat, milk or cheese. Still, things have improved since we were last here, especially near the bigger cities like Cusco, Arequipa, Trujillo, Lima etc.

 

Julie got called, “Mala,” by one of the little children that sell trinkets to tourists because she did not buy one. These kids should be in school and buy supporting their selling, we enable the problem. Still, it kind of eats you up to not help their need.

 

A lot of children do go to school and we see them all the time. Even public school kids wear uniforms. We ran into a group of third graders while we were going into a restaurant for lunch. One of these little boys told his friends that we were gringos. Julie answered them and said, “Why, yes we are!” Their mouths dropped open when they realized that we were not deaf or stupid and that we could speak Spanish. We visited with them for a bit and told them that we are missionaries. They were cute little fellows.


Sling Dance/ Campesino Slam Dancing...

The baker's dance

Giant guinea pig with a toothbrush

Flash Mob dancing to a song protesting violence against women,(part of  the health fair, we  think)



Hey! Nice  tie.

 

 



Nemesio's Dog



Watchdog of Amargura

Guard Dogs

Protestors

Cusco Judicial Building

The March



Begging in the church doors


Hard Rock

School Girls

School Boys

Our first sweet potato pie




Mobile dentistry units doing check-ups



Health fair kiosk(mystery desiccated fox...)

Health fair kiosk, (Note the roasted guinea pig, upper center on the table...)

Churros vendor

Sheep's Head Soup joint

Warning that thieves will be lynched.



Tourist

Our friend Nemesio looking all elegant and spiffed up

Springtime in Cusco and a Scorcher in Curahuasi!



Cusco with a storm

Julie had a rough four days with her food poisoning but she was able to return to work on Thursday and is feeling like herself again. Since we work just up from the university there are always hoards of students around and they congregate at the small food stands all over that sell hot drinks and sandwiches, kind of the Peruvian version of McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches. A popular drink is the “Agua de Manzana” made with hot, sweetened apple juice and quinoa. They also sell Quaker (said cwaa-care) and is a soupy, sweet oatmeal. Then they have Macca the root that they sell dried and powdered and it’s supposed to do all kinds of impossible things for your health. They sell all of them as thick, sweet drinks for breakfast. They also sell rolls with cheese or rolls with “palta” (avocado) but never the two together on one sandwich. They believe that avocado and cheese together will make you deathly ill or kill you. We have never seen anyone with one of each kind of sandwich, it’s an either/or kind of thing.  You honestly cannot buy the two ingredients together in one sandwich. It’s given us some laughs.

On this theme, when we have been sick and particularly hospitalized, we have always been a little amazed at the attitude towards cold beverages. In general, cold beverages are thought to be about as dangerous to consume as ground glass. Most people in Peru believe cold drinks will cause anything from pneumonia to sudden death. In the hospital, we used to get a thermos of hot water by our bedside instead of shaved ice. It turns out, that people get well drinking hot water too…

Sometimes we would love to be able to run into a Walmart and get everything we need in one stop. We can find almost everything we need or want here but it takes hours of running around from one store to another. Rich has been looking for a clip-on lamp for his painting easel. So far it is an unheard of thing here, no luck yet. And pie pans, they are nowhere to be found. We did manage to find a tart pan so we’re going to attempt a sweet potato pie (since there is no pumpkin in Peru) for our “First Thanksgiving” here. We’re going to have the Agüero family join us, we need to track down a turkey, a pan, and take it to an “horno” (wood fired oven) to roast. There is one right next door but we’ve heard that it is dirty, so we’ll take it a block over to another one that the Agüeros use. These ovens are all over since most people don’t have an oven in their homes.  And for those that do, it’s much cheaper to use the “horno” than pay for the bottled gas. It will be an adventure to say the least!

We managed a pan of brownies with the new oven. We cooked a pot of beans on the new stove. You can’t cook beans long enough here without the use of a pressure cooker and the counter-top burner just got too hot for our pressure cooker. The oven has no temperatures, just high and low. We may have misgauged the coco in the brownies since neither of us could sleep after we ate them and  watched a movie on the computer...

Rich’s grandmother cooked for CCC and WPA camps during the depression (Read "The Grapes of Wrath" if you don’t know what this is about). Anyway, grandma did it all with a wood-fired stove and had few measuring implements for doing it. She always kept a wood stove and maintained that it was better than that electric monstrosity that her husband bought her late in life… Rich always has maintained that she was the best cook he ever knew. Our respect for her just went up vastly while we fiddled with the oven and jockeyed ingredients to pull this off. Both were delicious, in any event.

The big markets on the weekends are full of every kind of plant and flower, and soil and gardening implements. Spring is in full swing here, it is still hard to wrap our heads around springtime in November! Spring plants, flowers and the smell of fresh cut grass inter-mixed with Christmas decorations and trees just feels wrong somehow! Julie always laughs at the mannequins modeling bikinis in December.

Rich popped off a crown and had to go to the dentist to have it put back on. Fortunately, it came off all in one piece and with the root canal post intact. The dentist repeatedly mentioned that this was a fiberglass post. Then he said, “We use titanium posts. We need a different kind of glue for these.” The result was that we had to go to the dentist supply store first and I had to buy a tube of the special epoxy for fiberglass. I let him keep it so that we can go back to him for any more emergencies. While there he told me that I had a hole in a tooth that needed filling so he fixed it.

We have had rain practically every afternoon. Rich got caught in the downpour twice and came in to the house very “drowned rat-like…”

We had a kind of hair raising trip to Curahuasi. The car we went down in was less than wonderful and the driver was worse. We were both nauseous when we got there. The wind howled though it threatened, we got no rain. In fact, on Sunday it was uncomfortably warm. We waited for two hours to get a ride back.

This concerned us because we had a special devotional in Cusco with Elder Russell M. Nelson, one of the twelve apostles and Elder Rasband of the Seventy. We did make it but it wound up being an exhausting day. When we arrived at the meeting, we found people lined up for blocks. We got in but did not have very good seats. We sat there for a few minutes and then one of the leaders came and asked us to take our seat on the front row. Rich asked, “Are you sure, we are just regular missionaries…” He said he was, and then when we got there we found that we had been included with all of the elderly, crippled and hard of hearing… We had a chuckle about that. They asked us to be a kind of buffer to help limit the hordes trying to shake the dignitaries’ hand. In the end, the folks were very well behaved. The meeting was remarkable, to sit literally at the feet of an apostle and have him look directly into our eyes was an unforgettable experience. There was such a powerful spirit there.

We ran into a very dear, old friend at the devotional, he is now the stake president of Sicuani. That was wonderful. Julie got to see a family from Espinar that she had missed seeing last week. It was really great.

 



The quail egg dealer

Cheese

The olive, cheese, nuts and spices lady

Ben Hur grocery store

Papas ala Huancayna breakfast of champions

The Flan lady outside of a grade school

The Shoe Shiner

Mana, Fluffy sugary, large-kernel popcorn.

Rancid Rice and Espinar Homecoming

Rich taught Institute class on Tuesday night and a man named Palma attends most of  the  time. Though elderly, no one opposes his attending and he provides some interesting comments. This week we discovered that he walks home by a similar route to us. When he smiles you can count all of his teeth and you don’t have to have CIA training to do it. He gave us the rundown on his theory as to what happened to the choppers. He explained that the Cusqueño brewery is very near where he used to live. He said that the smoke that the brewery belches out is responsible for the loss of his teeth. So, who knew? Rich grew up in the shadow of the Coors Brewery and drove past it on the way to church for eighteen years. He never knew the latent danger it presented, all that brewery smoke, threatening his dental hygiene!

 

As we  walked home, the old gentleman discussed his plans to be gone from Cusco for some time. He has a line on Buddist meditation classes in Caracas, Venezuela and he plans to attend. He said that he wants to take the three weeks course. Then he wants to travel to visit family in Virginia and Ontario… he does not seem to have two Peruvian Nuevo Soles to rub together never mind pennies. We just found the whole discussion, well, just a little surreal!

 

We had a strike this week, now that was a surprise! However, we did find stores that sell items necessary for baking and bought pans and supplies to attempt sweet potato pies. We have had friends who have asked us to have them over for Thanksgiving which seems a good idea since we could never consume a turkey by our lonesome. At work we managed to photograph about six thousand images, though part of that included two books that were rejected by the auditors.

 

All week we have been anticipating our trip to Espinar to visit our old friends where we lived for so many years. Our mission president and his wife had promised to take us and we had become very excited about the prospect. On Saturday, we ran all of our errands and got in all of our walking and we were ready to go. Saturday night, we ran out to  have one of our favorite meals, Pollo ala brasa. This is charcoal broiled chicken with French fried potatoes (They probably ought to be called Inca Fries since they originated here but that is another story). Anyway, here in Cusco, they often serve this food with stir-fried rice…

 

We came home from dinner, excited to watch Leah play her last soccer game at BYU Idaho and we got started watching it. Just when it was beginning, Julie began to complain of a stomach ache. She had food poisoning. We spent much of the night awake and by moring she was still very ill. Since we were expected and Rich did not get sick, he got up and ready and met with the Harbertsons and they drove to Espinar. So much for our bragging rights about not getting sick this go around…

 

Our neighbor’s the Agüero family looked after Julie. They brought her dieta de pollo, chicken noodle soup, Peruvian style. They also brought her other treats and looked in on her several more times and provided fascinating, local diagnoses and recommendations for a speedy recovery. She was mostly recovered by the time Rich returned.

 

Rich felt guilty for having such a sublime trip. He caught a cab to the Harbertson’s, to save time, then  they blasted off for Espinar about six am. The trip has been reduced to a three and a half hour drive up the mountains. While Cusco sits at eleven thousand feet, Espinar is just under fourteen thousand feet. The trip used to take us five and a half hours and was nearly all rough dirt track for the last three and a half hours. Most of this trip is now paved. That was amazing in itself.

 

They got there in plenty of time to be on time for the meetings. The attendance was low, unfortunately, not really sure why. However, fully seventy percent of those who came were members when we lived here before. It was wonderful to see them, children grown and growing. There were tons of hugs and of course Rich humiliated himself by blubbering uncontrollably at various points in the day. They stayed there for about four hours and then made the trip home. The trip home involved a lot of traffic since a lot of people travel on the weekend. Many were headed home to Cusco.

 

The Harbertsons are wonderful people and have become quite great friends. Rich had a great time travelling with them and enjoying their company. They all missed Julie in their travels and Rich was delighted to get home and find her a lot better. Sadly, she is still not one hundred percent better. She’ll be hanging out at home on Monday.

Just another strike...

Saw this adorable little backpacked girl with an elegant hat on, that's all.

Ornamental Vegetation Market

Bonsai Stand

Beverage Stand everything from Quinoa-Apple drink to  Fermented corn beer (Chicha,)

Frog Market, used in folk medicine related frogs and beer frappes...

A Basket Full of Cow Snouts (The liquid in the bottles is NOT Inca Kola but we have no idea what it might be, associated with extraneous beef bits)

Chickens in the Sun



Julie purchasing baking supplies



Marco Antonio, Rosa Luz and their baby Eliza




El Barrio Espinar the The Flores, Puma, Pezo, and Velazco families...

Halloween-Day of the Dead Cusco Style

We walked our usual 4.5 miles early Monday morning; it had rained all night Sunday so it was beautiful and fresh as we walked. It still amazes us that we walk every morning in Cusco, Peru! There is such a history here and incredible remains of Inca ingenuity at every turn. While Julie walked to work she pulled something in her foot so that impacted her walks for the rest of the week. She was frustrated to say the least.

We brought bags of dried New Mexico chilies with us so finally found the right corn, more or less, and he made a pot of Posole.  It wasn’t quite the same as he makes at home, but it was DELICIOUS never-the-less and Peru now has tortillas in the stores! We have been happy enjoying a “close taste of home” this week.

On Wednesday the young couple from upstairs came down and Julie taught Kati how to make “No Bake Cookies.” Kati’s husband Paul had a North American companion who made them on his mission and Paul has wanted some ever since. We had a fun evening with them and their 1 year old baby Matías. The baby sure makes us miss our adorable grandchildren!

Julie is happy because we finally got a stove with an oven. We haven’t tried the oven yet because we have no oven pans. We’ll have to go shopping this coming week. The stove had been in the church and used very little. It required some cleaning but looks great now. The funny thing is the oven control has markings for “Min and Max!” No numbers of any kind. Julie will have to do some experimenting and we’re sure it’s not at all efficient. We’ll see what happens with it.

We saw a few stores this week with some plastic Halloween pumpkins for sale, Peru really doesn’t do Halloween …or so we thought! On the morning of the 31st Julie saw a costume parade of the preschool just up the street from us. Many of the stores had orange and black balloons and “spider webs” in the windows and the employees were dressed in costumes. In the Tupac Amaru Plaza up from our apartment, the place was full of vendors selling costumes, plastic trick or treat pumpkins and other Halloween paraphernalia. Suddenly, overnight and in true Peruvian fashion, it was Halloween everywhere!

Later that evening Rich went to the center and it had become packed. Thousands upon thousands of trick-or-treaters jammed the whole center. They do not generally go from house to house; rather, they hit up the various store owners. Cars could not circulate there and it teamed with kids in Spiderman costumes and the knife-through-the-head motif came in a close second and seemed particularly popular. Some were truly creative, check out the little ladybug in the pictures. The tradition was virtually unheard of six or seven years ago, now it has gone nuts.



Halloween Cusco Style

At the same time that we saw the Halloween paraphernalia in the plaza, bread vendors had set up dozens of stands to sell the traditional t’antawawa a very stylized sweet, bread loaf, shaped sort of like a papoose with a sugary baby’s face on the top. T’anta is Quechua for bread and wawa means baby. They also have a class of these bread loaves that are shaped like a horse with a horse’s head incorporated. They sell thousands of these loaves between October 31 and November 1, Day of the Dead. A national holiday, Day of the Dead is celebrated by taking food to the cemetery where a plate is laid at the front of the tomb of the departed and the family sits around and enjoys a picnic with the Spirits there. They also take advantage of being in the cemetery to tidy up graves and nichos and even paint a bit should the tomb in question be of the painted variety. The bread goes to the cemetery and is part of the meal there.



T'antawawa, Day of the Dead Bread


Ordinary, Daily Bread Dealer





Typical Baby T'antawawa


 

 


An interesting little linguistic detail here has to do with the difference between, “t’anta,” “ tanta,” and “thanta.” The a’s are all soft. “T’anta,” means bread and is pronounced with a distinct stop with the toungue, almost like a d behind the upper teeth before saying the, “anta.” “Tanta,” spoken with an English t means old and with the word for cloth means a rag and is used as a derogatory word for a useless person. “Thanta,” spoken with a very soft t, means, greasy filth.

Anyway, the story behind baby bread is fascinating. We have heard three possible parts:

1) When we first lived here we were told that the bread making activity falls 9 months after Carnaval and represents a sort of validation of the babies conceived during that bacchanalian month.
2) Now we are told that they represent babies who have died and that does seem to fit with the Day of the Dead activities.
3) Finally, those with the candy horses heads, represent the horses that transfer the souls of the dead to alaq'spacha (where the sun, moon and stars hang out in indigenous mythology)…

 

Horsey T'antawawa

Also on the Day of the Dead, Cusco tradition has everyone eating roasted suckling pig. In the parks, they have stalls dedicated entirely to pork. Now this roast pork smells decadently divine and irresistible. They also eat tamales that are nothing like Southwest tamales except for the masa and the corn husks. They make them with a tiny portion of pork and they make varieties that are sweet flavored. Not divine, they are just very good! The pork is divine and the closest thing to good Southwest barbecue that we have found. We are pretty sure that this will offend someone somewhere but, “them’s the breaks.”

 



Roast Pig Festival



A Heap of Slow Cooked Pork



Traditional Day of the Dead fare: pork...and more pork
 



Day of the Dead beverages


We went to Curahuasi, that we are pretty sure is  spelled wrong now that Rich has been taking his Quechua classes… Because it fell on a holiday, cars were scarce when we got to the “terminal.” We wound up taking a microbus, called a combi. It takes one back to the sixties, although these do have seats in them and not just a mattress and there are no peace signs or flowers painted on the sides of them. They crammed thirteen people into the combi and we got in the very back seat. The driver was responsible and drove well despite rain the entire way.

Upon our arrival in Curahuasi, in a pouring rain, we found the town completely closed up for the holiday. With a little panic seizing our hearts, we made our way to the hostel, past every shuttered building. How relieved we felt when the door to the hostel opened and there was room at the inn! Indeed, by 7pm businesses began to open up and we even got our charbroiled chicken and fries!

Rich has decided that no such thing as male pattern or any other pattern baldness has ever happened in Apurimac. Nearly everyone in the polleria gaped and pointed at the bald, white devil while they ate. In the morning, he was accosted by a recovering drunk who wanted to know, in Quechua, what a bald man had any business doing walking up the streets in Curahuasi. In fairness, he was drunk.
At church we taught a lesson on genealogical research and we returned to Cusco in a good and comfortable car, without event.

Wheel Barrows of Pineapple

Kindergarteners On a Field Trip

Not in School but very cute.

Puno Hat - Black, Cusco - top hat

Jungle Visitors for Day of the  Dead

Structural Integrity???



Chupe de Camarones (in Peru Crawfish = Camarones  )