Off The Plateau; Rich and Julie’s Peruvian Chronicles Part Two: October 2014

Elderly woman asking the time

Beggar

Waiting woman

Sicuani Hotel

Sicuani Hotel Restaurant with the Harbertsons and the Assistants

Sicuani Hotel Restaurant with the missionary Assistants, Elders Bentzen and Samaniego

The Kankacho lady

Ayaviri cathedral

What happened to your hair?

Members having lunch

Sister Harbertson with some of the women in the branch

Julie with Sister Harbertson and a member woman

Not one day in the past four weeks has played out as we planned or anticipated that it would. What a busy, crazy time! Our photo taking has been somewhat impacted by Rich’s new calling, but we are trying our best to keep up and move along.

Tuesday night, one of the young men in our institute class was in a car accident. He was with his father in a taxi that was hit from behind by another car running a red light. Rich got the call Wednesday morning and went to give him a blessing. Alexander is the only member in his family, and he’s been a member of the church for about 2 years. Fortunately, with the blessing, he was able to return to work as a lawyer on Thursday. We are grateful that he is healing well.

Julie taught her English classes and Rich taught his Isaiah and Book of Mormon classes. Rich’s glasses finally broke and he had to go to a Peruvian ophthalmologist who was, to his surprise, very good. He will get his new glasses next week. They turn out to be about as expensive as anywhere else in the world…

We left Friday afternoon with President and Sister Harbertson to travel to Sicuani. We had a district conference on Saturday and Sunday in Ayaviri, another 2 ½ from Sicuani. We were so surprised at the wonderful hotel in Sicuani! When we lived here before and had to travel to Sicuani for conferences, it was always with dread because of the pestholes we had to stay in. The hostal was the “best” that Sicuani had at the time and it was AWFUL. It had broken windows, broken beds, was always dirty and so cold. We were so stunned and happy this time because the hotel was GREAT. It is quite new, very clean and very comfortable, with a great restaurant. Sicuani will no longer make Julie shudder and cuss.

From Sicuani we passed through La Raya, a range of mountains well over 18,000 feet high. It is an austere and beautiful glacially carved terrain. No trees grow there at all and it spills you into the department of Puno, real altiplano stuff there. Aya means dead, as in a cadaver in Quechua but that may not actually be the reason of its name.There is some confusion about it.

We left at 7am and drove to Ayaviri where we spent the morning. While the mission president was interviewing missionaries, Rich helped with training the Elders and Julie went with the sister missionaries and Sister Harbertson. It was a great morning and we really enjoyed getting better acquainted with the young missionaries.

Ayiviri is famous for its Kankacho (slow roasted lamb) and it is delicious. They roast a whole lamb and then they hack off pieces and serve it with roasted potatoes. We got ours “to go” which they put in individual plastic bags. We had to hurry to Choquehuanca about 45 minutes away for the 2pm Priesthood Meeting and the 4pm adult meeting. We devoured our lamb in the car, and had a great time.

The meetings went well; we were better prepared this time with materials for training and talks. After the adult session ended they served hot chocolate and bread. The bread is kind of a cross between flat bread and a big roll. The chocolate was spiced with cinnamon and cloves and was wonderful after sitting in cold rooms all day. We arrived back in Sicuani about 8:30pm, and had a delicious dinner of “lomo saltado.” This is a typical dish of strips of beef sautéed with red peppers and onions, served with rice and French fries. The meat was extremely tender, very rare for Peru! We were all exhausted so bed felt like heaven.

On Sunday we drove to Ayiviri again for the 10am general district meeting. The chapel was filled and we had a wonderful two hours with the members there. The members are so humble and sweet and so appreciative that we come to visit them. This is one of the areas that Rich is assigned to oversee, so we’ll be making more trips.

Rich interviewed young woman for a mission and a man for the Melchizedek priesthood. Later he visited with a woman saddened by her loss of a son who took his own life. These things are always a challenge but in the end he helped her to feel like there was hope for the boy. A surprising number of people end their own lives here. Because it is cheap, they often use rat poison and the death is excruciating. It was the second such discussion this week. There are no easy answers and nobody knows what someone is thinking when they do that. Rich told her that we don’t judge people in those circumstances. We recognize that they could not have been in their right mind and, while we grieve for them, it is not our place judge or criticize them. Only Christ can make that call.

On a much lighter note, before the meeting a little boy came up to Rich and said, “You don’t have any hair!”

Rich said, “No, I don’t.”

Then the little boy asked, “Were you born that way?”

Rich laughed and just said, “No, it just all fell out.” That seemed to be enough.

Monday morning we attended a missionary zone meeting. It began at 8 am and usually runs about two hours. Julie had taken her clothes to change into so she could go to work in the archives after the meeting. We were asked to talk about the Savior’s time in the Garden of Gethsemane, The Atonement, and what an incredible blessing it is in our lives. We were at the end of the meeting and felt pretty satisfied with our contribution. However, the end of the meeting was at 1 pm! It was a great meeting, but we were all wiped out by the end. We decided to go to our favorite hamburger place, Papacho’s to have lunch, and by the time lunch was over, we made the decision to forget work and go home. We were pooped. We both felt like we were getting the flu on Tuesday, we were achy and nauseated. We took it easy, slept a lot and by Wednesday we felt great. Just weird!

As we we walked on Wednesday morning we came across a “mancha de perros” (literally, a stain of dogs.)We counted 17 in the group with more coming in. We finally figured out that there were two obviously very attractive females in the pack. It was quite the sight and only one minor scrabble broke out while we stopped to take some pictures. The dog situation, in Peru in general, is out of control. Very few have the money or are willing to have their dogs spayed or neutered. Most of the dogs in Cusco are so used to people that they rarely bother anyone, but we always carry our homemade “pepper spray” because we just never know. Our two dogs that we did spray once continue to run from us, hackles up and barking their heads off. We always have a good laugh at their terror.

Surprisingly, the combination of disproportionate dog populations and bad driving rarely actually clashes. However on Saturday we saw a driver run down a pedestrian canine, not killing it outright. Not a pleasant experience!

On top of missing a couple of days of work, we had some very difficult books to photograph so our numbers were down. We’re not too worried because we already met our annual goal at the end of September, so the images until the end of the year are “extra.” We’re just about finished with the big room of books and will soon move into the smaller room.

The archives have "prepared" another room in the basement for more documents of some sort. Workers have been making all kinds of racket putting old metal shelves back together. Marta, the woman in charge and her assistants have a huge job to put some type of organization to the heaps of papers stacked all around. We very happy that we just have to take pictures in the next room!

Saturday morning we met the first counselor in the Mission Presidency, where the cars leave for Quillabamba. We traveled to a district conference there. He had asked us to be there to leave at 7am and did not show up until 7:30. We paid to have just the three of us ride in the car instead of the usual four. It is crowded and uncomfortable with three adults squished in the backseat of a Corolla type car.

The trip to Quillabamba was spectacular. We went over the mountains out of Cusco, then down in the Sacred Valley, through Urubamba and Ollyantaytambo. After leaving the Sacred Valley the road begins to climb up 5,000 feet with amazing switchbacks and vistas to the Abra Malaga Pass. This pass sits at 14,500 feet above sea level and at the foot of the massive glacier, Veronica (17,500 feet.) This is the Continental Divide of South America, from here heading east, the road drops nearly 20,000 feet down to the Amazon jungle basin. It is absolutely incredible. A good part of the trip is above the tree line, so all we could see was nothing but ichu grass and snow on the nevados (mountain peaks that have snow and ice year round.) When we crested the pass and began our decent down the other side in just a few miles everything changed. We didn’t need our jackets, we rolled down the windows and the lush, sometimes flowery and humid smell of the jungle permeated our car. We saw palm plantations, spectacular flowers and blooming trees of every kind. There were mango trees everywhere; “they grow like weeds” we were told. The limbs already had large albeit green mangoes everywhere. It looked like banana plants grow like weeds too. This area where Quillabamba sits is called the “ceja de la selva,” (the eyebrow of the jungle.) It was plenty humid but fortunately for us, there was a nice breeze blowing, so outside was pretty comfortable. Peru is well known for having the largest number of microclimates in the world, from arctic glacial to tropical jungle. The internet, that we always know tells the truth and never lies, says that Peru has 28 of the 32 world climates and we have heard numbers as high as 120 microclimates. We saw that in spades!

The human gene pool varies as well and one sees radical differences among congregations in the jungle, coast, and Altiplano areas. Peruvian variety is truly amazing.

About an hour out of Quillabamba President Patino informed Julie that she would take any of the women who showed up at 4pm, into a separate training meeting! She thought she would be able to take it easy in the hotel until the 7pm adult meeting. Wow! We arrived for the 4pm meeting and there was a good attendance. The meeting started and then the women were excused to have training with Julie for “45 minutes.” The 45 minutes actually became an hour and a half, but Julie managed to use her background and experiences and in the end had a great meeting with about 15 sisters. We had a break, a sandwich and a purple chicha drink then the 7pm meeting started. Julie played the piano for the meeting and after the opening song as she sat down on the stand; the district president asked if she would give a talk on the Book of Mormon, because the person who was assigned to give it didn’t come. Thank goodness for inspiration and the gift of tongues! We are both believers, because Rich had several times when he had to rely on pure inspiration too and in three separate meetings was asked to take up 40 minutes! For the Sunday meeting, Julie again played the piano but we were both ready with talks for this occasion. What an exhausting weekend. We get to do it all over again next weekend with the Ayaviri District, but we will for sure be better prepared!

Coming back up the mountain, the fog was thick, thankfully we had a careful driver and we arrived home safely about 7:30pm. We were both so wiped out that we were in bed by 8:30pm and sound asleep. What a crazy weekend!