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

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Newton's Laws of Motion

Elegant Damsel

Photo Hawkers

School's Out for The Summer!

Nemesio again

The Meat Market

Tamales

Beggar

Not all dogs are Curs, Her name is Sally

Julie Climbing the Amargura Steps

Our friend Yeny Yauli came to see us this week. She, her mom and sisters were some of the very early members of the church in Espinar. We’ve known her since we first came to Peru and she truly is like a daughter to us. She graduated from college a couple of years ago with her elementary teaching degree, but wasn’t real enthused to begin teaching. Finally, she took the teachers exam, similar to the Praxis exams in the USA for all you teacher types, and received a great grade. She chose to work in an area about one hour east of Cusco in a town called Urcos. A teacher has little say in what school they would like to teach, the powers that be in the district of the teacher’s choosing decide that. Yeny was assigned to a little village three hours walking from Urcos! There are no vehicles that go out there; everything is taken in by llama, donkey or foot. She was going to check it out and decide if she really wants to live that far from everything. The public schools are very poor, so basic necessities like desks, chairs, books, paper etc. are hard to come by and are usually very used. It is amazing that there are still places like this in the world, but of course there are and Peru is full of them. It will be interesting to hear of her adventure.

February is “Carnaval” time in Peru. It’s nothing like Carnaval in Rio de Janiero or New Orleans; here it is much tamer, includes clothing! Peru, however, does have its fair share of parades, feasting and fantastical floats. An interesting tradition involves dancing around the yunsa tree (known as the umisha in the jungle and cortamonte on the coast), a symbolic tree laden with gifts. In the Altiplano they bring in a eucalyptus tree that they stand up in the square with the presents hung in the branches. The yunsa activity involves a very large amount of beer or chicha (homemade beer). While dancing around the tree to monotonous music and between drinks, local couples take turns whacking the tree with a dull axe, chopping at it until the final blow sends it crashing to the ground, releasing the gifts to the eagerly waiting crowd who charge in piñata fashion to grab their gifts. Then, of course, there are the water fights. Throughout February, Peruvians love to throw water at each other – buckets, squirt bottles made from pop bottles, and balloons. They also love to throw colored powder at anyone and everyone. In Lima they smear you with shoe polish if they get the chance. Though we have only seen one case of young kids water fighting so far, we still need to keep our guard up for sure!

We traveled in what felt like a rocket sled to and from Curahuasi toady. It had rained all night and we had crystal clear skies and the air smelled of everything green. We caught our taxi to Arcopata and there, somehow wound up taking a bus/van. In all, the bus carried fourteen people and a dog. We wound up in the back seat again and thought we had really gained a new appreciation for Newton’s Three Laws of Motion. However, what awaited us on our return trip, usually a two and a half hour trip, made under something less than two hours, was a revelation in physics. The driver seemed to think he was channeling Al Unser.

When faced with certain situations, we have developed several phrases that reflect that one never fully accepts the surreal effects of culture shock. These phrases include but are not limited to, “Wouldn’t you think...?” “Wouldn’t you try to…?” During today’s white-knuckle adventure these phrases came up most often on blind curves or hurtling into population centers with obvious pedestrians attempting to cross in front of the shock wave generated by this Toyota moving up to ninety miles/hour. We used them equally with reference to the driver himself and to the people attempting to cross.

When we first moved to Peru, we had chauffeurs to begin with and then the company allowed us to begin to drive/fend-for ourselves. That required us to obtain driver’s licenses. On Rich’s first pass through the exam he found himself conflicted over expectations of the Touring Club (Peruvian Department of Motor Vehicles) who administers these exams. The exams seemed to be translations of similar exams from the United States. The questions to be answered could have used any of the following: 1) what do I think the answer should be based upon my experience as a driver for thirty years? 2) What do I think the Touring Club expects? 3) What would I guess the answer to be based upon what I have witnessed to date in Peru? To our total surprise, the answers were all based upon U.S. rules of transit, yet these, in no way, reflect the reality of traffic in Peru.

We actually had a great set of meetings in Curahuasi and we took over 6000 images this week. We felt good about all of that.

Random Tourists

Herbal Tea Street Vendor

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Altiplano Summertime... Rain, Rain, Rain!

The Peruvian beaches are filled with summer vacationers and here in Cusco summertime means rain and that it is almost as cold as it is in the dry wintertime. The children are out of regular school, but most kids attend “vacaciones de utiles,” “useful classes” such as English, computers, swimming, dancing, chess, public speaking, storytelling, hula-hooping, etc. The classes start early in the day and the kids seem excited to attend. They don’t have to wear uniforms, so the hordes of students are really colorful. Many have breakfast on the street, a cheese or avocado sandwich and some warm quinoa apple drink, or “papas ala huancaina” sliced boiled potatoes with a sliced boiled egg and a yummy pea nutty chili sauce all over the top. The corners of every street are nearly impossible to negotiate because of the “breakfast clubs.”

Of course not everyone attends summer school (it is not free) so many parents have their kids with them while they sell in the markets or on the streets or drive their taxis around. We walk through a market every day and it’s so fun to see the kids’ creativity, playing while their parents work. Pieces of cardboard for a shield and empty water bottles with a hole poked in the lid to squirt water through seem to keep them happy for hours, the plots and scenarios change, but kids are kids the world over and we love their enthusiasm and joy.

We’re always finding new names that make us smile. The little store where we buy our latex gloves and masks for work is called simply, “Melvyn.” Rich worked with a man several years ago named “Praxides Choquetico.” Choquetico is of Quechua origin, so when Rich got the nerve to ask him where his parents got the name Praxides, Praxides told Rich was, “he’s a character from the Peloponnesian Wars.” Neither of us remembers that name from reading the Peloponnesian Wars, but Praxides said his parents were big fans of the story. Go figure!

Some names we came across this past week caught our interest, Dick Rogier, Alfonso Esprayndert, Lissbeet Sthepani, Ivosk’a Ingrid, Step Angel, and Miluvska Jhakelinne. These make Praxides sound positively pedestrian! In spite of taking time to marvel at the names we see, we were able to take nearly 7000 images. The names keep our work interesting.

We have been working on a body of death records. Julie came home and announced that she was no longer reading the records but just taking pictures. This was during the winter in the 60s and the records were filled with infant mortality after infant mortality. They all seemed to have died of bronchial pneumonia. Some adults even died of it. It gets a little overwhelming and it really is not necessary for us to read them. We take all of them regardless.

We attended the Inti Raymi Stake Conference Saturday and Sunday and heard wonderful talks. The choir sang one of our church hymns “We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet,” in Quechua, it was awesome, and they did a great job. We were actually home by 1pm, that hasn’t happened in months because we are usually coming back from Curahuasi or Izcuchaca.

Because of the rains, there has been more flooding. President Harbertson told us that two little branches of the church have been completely flooded and lost in Puerto Maldonado because the Madre de Dios River has over run its banks. People living there said that this type of flooding typically occurred about 3 times every 100 years, however, this has happened 3 times now, in the last 5 years. The government gave them high-ground land and money to rebuild the last time this happened. They did this for everyone on the river but most of them opted to sell the free land and stay down by the water.

We continue to enjoy our mission and we keep very busy with a lot of different activities. We cannot imagine much that we would rather be doing just now. Of course we miss our family but feel greatly supported by them and we visit with them every week.

Heavily laden

Colorful tourist market #1

Colorful tourist market #2

Woman from Chincheros in typical dress

A woman selling her habas (roasted fava beans)

Nuns coming from Mass

Bread sellers under the window of the telephone company

Random man

Woman preparing a tuna (cactus fruit) for us

Habas seller

Street vendor outside our work

Tuna Vendor

A cool Lliqlla (backpack, but not really)

Elderly blind woman we pass often

Little sisters sharing an ice cream cone

The gang

Little girls playing in the market

The roof cat

Random dog #1

Random dogs #2 &3

Random dog #4

Random dog #5 (He works at the gas station)

Random dogs #6 &7

Random dog #8

Random dog #9 (Rolling in the garbage)

Random dog # 10 &11 (The little dog refuses to play with the bald dog, Rich really felt for the bald dog's rejection...)

Union meeting

Monday, January 27, 2014

Tunas and Terabytes

The rains have been hitting us pretty hard and steady all week. Reminiscent of the downpours when we first came to Peru in 1998, it can sometimes be hard to think and or talk over the din of some of these heavy downpours. When we came to Peru, the news ran one story of disaster after the next. While not that severe, we see many reports of flooding and landslides. Some have compromised highways and just yesterday, we saw where a railroad had been destroyed by a river undercutting the tracks in Huancavelica. Hard to build anything and have it last in one of the steepest terrain’s in the world, the heavy rains exacerbate the problem and crews scramble to keep up. Well, “scramble,” may be a little generous.

They do work on this situation and we see many road crews out and manual labor is king. We drove past a crew with guys busting big rocks into small rocks using an array of jury rigged sledgehammers, with no eye or foot protection that we could tell. They break big rocks into little rocks to put them in the gabion baskets, big wire-mesh, cubic cages that they set in place to shore up the hillside before it all comes down. This is an effective technique that our engineers used to build bridges from Tintaya to highway. When we first came to Tintaya, we had to ford six good sized rivers to get to the city from our mining camp. These were often impassable and we could not get out for weeks at a time.

The upside of torrential rains is that everything is becoming so green and lush that the hillsides look like Scotland, well, a really steep Scotland.

We had a lovely dinner and movie at the mission home Monday night. We enjoyed visiting with President and Sister Harbertson and swapping missionary stories and adventures. We laughed and marveled at our experiences here in Peru, what a great time this is.

We were able to attend the Cusco Zone Conference on Tuesday with all the young missionaries that are serving in this area. It’s always a treat to feel so welcome and loved by the elders and sisters. We share advice, encouragement and lots of laughs together. There is always a wonderful spirit at these meetings.

There is a new director of the archives, Umberto Apaza Quispe. He visited us on Wednesday to learn more about what we are doing and how Family Search works. He was very interested in the image taking process and the churches interest in genealogy. We were invited to the archive meeting on Thursday afternoon at the University where we presented the Archives with our first full hard disk of our approved and passed images. A full Terabyte, several thousand images, it was pretty exciting.
Julie’s brother and family are coming to visit in March. We’re excited about that and visited a funky bed and breakfast to see if it was livable. The house is built around a big tree and has parts of the tree in some of the rooms. It really is a kind of tree house in the old part of Cusco. It will be an adventure for sure!

A different aspect of the rains and our proximity to the rainforest is that we get to choose from an unimaginable wealth of fruit. Right now, the mangoes and tuna are on. Now, one might be tempted to seek a tuna sandwich, in which case, he/she might be disappointed. The tuna are cactus fruit/ prickly pear and they are juicy and tasty. This is one of the things we love about life here and one of the things we miss about it when we are gone. One of Rich’s favorite soda pops is made from the guarana fruit, famous in Brazil.

On a fruity note, Julie hit upon an idea of such deliciousness that it pretty much defies description. Maracuya is a very sour passion fruit, about as strong a flavor as a lime. They sell them in heaps, most of the year. She decided that it would make a great cheese cake to add its juice instead of lemon to the cream cheese and then make a thick sauce of maracuya to pour over the cheese cake. Pretty sure this has to be bad for you because it is positively decadent.

Things are getting back to normal after the holidays. Rich is back in his Quechua classes and Julie back on track with her Spanish lessons.

We had a great Sunday in Izcuchaca with about 35 in attendance. Julie taught primary and she’s teaching them songs for the 2014 Primary Program. The children love to sing and “Do as I’m Doing” in English, is always the first request. It’s lots of fun. Rich taught Priesthood and had a great time. We are so grateful to be serving a mission together. It is challenging and difficult at times but mostly it is a grand spiritual adventure. We love the people we serve and work with, we love being together and we love serving the Lord.