May Day



2½ in 1 4 Pauline

Checking out the  street

Lounging street dog



Down the "Street" from the chapel,Tarcuyoc

Sunday Morning in Tarcuyoc

Sunday Morning in Tarcuyoc

Sunday Morning in Tarcuyoc

Got there a little early

Sunday Sun...

Greeting the primary

Sunday Morning in Tarcuyoc

Priesthood in Tarcuyoc

Primary  in Tarcuyoc

Exceptionally bad condition book

Rich's Llama drawing

 

Promotion for Peruvian Social Security

Red March

Police Department Safety plan in action

May Day workers

Raquel and Luz Marina at Tipon

 

Raquel and Luz Marina at Tipon

 

Raquel and Luz Marina at Tipon

 

Raquel and Luz Marina at Tipon

 

 

We left about 2pm Saturday for Espinar so that we could attend meetings with the family group in Tarcuyoc on Sunday. Our bus to Sicuani was comfortable and the trip was a peaceful and calm 2 ½hours. When we arrived in Sicuani the bus we caught to Espinar was anything but comfortable. Most of the seats were broken in the laid back position so we had to keep pushing our feet on the foot rests under the seats in front of us so we didn’t slide off of the slippery seat coverings. It made for a very long 2 hour ride, picking up as many as a dozen extra fares along the way. Yet, the views of the Southern Cross, Centaurus, and Hydra made slipping on the bus seats worth it!

The family group in Tarcuyoc (we finally learned the correct spelling) was excited to see us. Rich found out he was speaking when they announced it from the “pulpit.” Julie taught primary out in the drying grass and had a wonderful time teaching the children primary songs. She had a package of suckers to share and the little kids were so excited, they loved that there was chicle (gum) in the centers.

The Hatun Mama (big mama), or grandmother of the clan fixed lunch for us; we sat in the only two chairs in the adobe room with the dirt floor. The two young missionaries serving there sat on a low, blanket covered board and we gratefully ate the sheep’s-head soup, (we got an ear in each of our bowls), then a plate with rice, a fried egg and some cooked beets. Rich of course was able to eat the piece of ear in his soup, and Julie at least managed the broth. Apparently Grandma fixes lunch every Sunday for the missionaries and Brother and Sister Flores who go out from Espinar to provide support. On our next trip we’ll take some groceries to help out since this village has next to nothing. It was a great day and by the time we arrived home at 8:30pm Sunday night we were pooped but happy!

We went to the dentist on Tuesday for a cleaning and checkup. Our dentist is the brother of the Stake President in the Inti Raymi stake. In his early 30’s about the age of our twin sons, he does all his own work, no dental hygienists here! He went on and on about how young we look and that we can’t possibly have seven grandchildren! He didn’t tell us that we were “well-preserved,” which is a very common statement here; nevertheless the morning gave us a good chuckle.

In the evening Rich went to the inauguration ceremony/reception for the new Quechua-Spanish dictionary that the Quechua Preservation Academy has been working on for the past nineteen years. It was all done with a certain pomp and ceremony including the fact that 90 percent of the meeting was spoken in Quechua, a little bit of French, German and a smidgen of Spanish. One fellow dressed up as the Inka, entered with his entourage, and gave a speech about preserving the language to the mayor of Ollantaytambo as a symbolic representative of Quechua speakers. There is a new push to revive Quechua in Peru by making it mandatory in public schools.

On Thursday we did not work, it was May 1st, the world’s largest day off. In memory of the grandest failed political endeavor in world history, workers unite in this “festive” day. It just goes to show you that once you give a day off, no matter for what reason, you can never back out of it. Serving to gob up the works, there was one puny demonstration by the relict local communist party. Under two aging banners of Che Guevara, a couple of hundred people, mostly young kids, marched around chanting slogans. They even had a handful of non-descript little red flags they waved.

When we lived in Tintaya where Rich was the Human Resources manager, the company put on a big parade with music and dancing. The school kids got out and marched, goose stepping around the plaza in their uniforms (Glenn and William loved that …) Always, the union and the mine president made speeches. One year, when they had spent weeks re-negotiating the collective bargaining agreement, Among other aspects, one of the areas the company targeted was the meal break during shifts. Before this, huge cost and effort had to be expended in order to make, transport and deliver each worker a hot “lunch,” then they lost time sitting down in lunch rooms to eat this very large meal. It actually amounted to 1 ½ to 2 hours/day/worker lost by the time they left their truck to go to a lunch room, get served, eat, talk, mess around, get back to the truck and to work. Not to mention the impact on their alertness following such a huge lunch... Company doctors even identified obesity as a health concern.

The company, essentially Rich, made presentations to the workers and in particular the union leadership to explain how much they would benefit, if they could go to a cold lunch with a ½ hour break in their work area for lunch. In particular, he detailed the benefits from the extra production since everybody’s bonus depended upon the company’s production. They voted, and there were a few who did not like it, but the vast majority voted for the new plan, betting on the better bonus potential. The company imported fancy/expensive new Aladdin, wide-mouth, steel thermoses for each worker to have their hot soup with their sandwiches, liter of yogurt per worker, fruit, etc.

Well, it turns out that sandwiches lack the same sense in Peru that they do in North America. Though we sent cooks to Lima, to Subway and other sandwich shacks to buy sandwiches, dissect them and see how to make a real one, the idea did not take off. So, by May 1st, workers had begun dumping their flimsy sandwiches. They mainly fed them to stray dogs who in turn got the word out better than the pooch-network in 101 Dalmatians.

The dogs actually presented the real problem since, in the Altiplano, dogs are rarely cute little sweet poochies that you want to hug and take home. Rather, they are menacing, mistreated vermin that mostly bite and infect you. They filtered into the camp through every conceivable gap in our defenses. Before we knew it, we had forty to fifty mangy, disease-ridden, mostly aggressive, curs roaming the camp in packs. They even had Rwanda-style, distended bellies from the vast volume of poorly made sandwiches. Of course, the union demanded that Rich fix the dog problem but that is for another day…

Anyway, in his speech to the “masses” at the May 1st rally, the union boss called Rich out as menace and an enemy to Peruvian traditions because of the sandwiches… Rich had, "single-handedly" tried to, "subvert" and, "undermine" their most fundamental way of life and honored traditions, and changed their meal schedule and blah, blah, blah… Of course they also always tried to connect management to the Haymarket, Chicago strikers killed in May of 1886, in the talk, not that a single one of the union could point to Chicago on a map.

In the end, we all went to the barbecue together, sat around in the big field and ate too much meat and everybody got their day off and continued throwing away their sandwiches until we  found  a work-around for the problem. Ah, May Day memories…

Since May 1st fell on a Thursday and a tendency to just take Friday off too, we worried that we would not get back into our government building to work. That turned out to be useless fretting and we had a good full day on Friday.

On Saturday, we went back out to Tipon with a couple of young women we know. We rented traditional outfits that the girls wore for photos there. Then in the evening we went to our mission president’s home where we had pizza and watched a movie with them. A busy, fun week.