well, here i sit drinking a coca-cola as the locals say it´s the best thing for giardia. i am also taking some wonder-medicine that requires only two doses after visiting my very nice Dr Pinedo yesterday. i had thought my colitis was acting up but it turned out to be the nasty giardia thing and some bacterial infection. i feel fortunate to have him nearly at my beck-on-call. now i know all fruits and vegies we buy at the open market in san pedro need to be soaked first in a mild bleach solution for ten minutes and to ask at my fav restaurants if they are doing the same thing! so, my sweetie is next to me pecking away. below, our experience in quiquihana and following that, i will paste sleeve´s rather bitter but honest entry of our experience in sipascancha. forgive us both (the language) but it´s the grim reality.
First our trip to quiquihana: we rode with hermana nelly and another nun, i´ve forgotten her name in the nelly-mobile about 1 and 1/2 hours south of here. we went directly to the albergue, or in english, shelter that was completed since we had last been there. they have one of our first stoves set up to cook for lots of children at the shelter. not many kids were there as it was the weekend and apparently the ones who live within a five hour walk go home for the weekend to work with their family. other children there are abandoned, and others are there at the request of the families to be in a better position to receive their education. some pay 20 soles a month, some parents bring food and i imagine the abandoned kids are there courtesy of hermana nelly and the other columbian nuns. its really quite the set up. i asked her how it was for the campesino kids to adjust to all of it. she said even to get used to sitting on a toilet required them first using the squat type toilet and then graduating to the sit down kind we first-worlders know. because they all sleep inpractically a nest, to sleep in a big spacious room decked out with new bunkbeds is quite scary. betsy, alberto´s daughter, 9 years old (from Sipascancha) seemd quite adjusted, even smiling without too much hesitation. they have a variety of volunteers who circulate through, most from germany. the volunteers sleep in the shelter near the children and another family from germany stay at the nuns´ home to keep some semblance of normality for their own children. they have bathrooms with rows of kid sized sinks and toilets. outside there is a playground to play soccer, a panaderia (bakery). and a kitchen. all the kids help cook and bake. they go to school in quiquihana. a library at the shelter affords them additional books and places to study. all quite impressive. we left there and headed to where the nuns´live. across town they have a two stroy place where once we arrive there for our USI project, we´ll be able to cook and eat. upstairs are extra bedrooms and bathrooms. we all slept together, in two bunk beds, ron, ellen , sleeve and i. we awoke at 4:50 AM to huaynos music blaring from i thought outside. (we are told it´s the happy way to wake up!) well, it actually was coming from the pirate radio station of the nuns on the first floor! so, i guess when we begin our work there i will have to get accustomed to waking up "the happy way"! we headed out early to the mine to view this pumice rock i have heard so much about. it was about 40 minutes south of quiquihana. sleeve and i rode in the back of the pick-up enjoying the spectacular scenery. because it was sunday we had to park and walk in. all levels of pumice are there and apparently no heavy equipment is used to remove it. the townsfolk of the mine (Wyracocha?) work the mine and receive the money for whatever they remove and load up into trucks. roads are cut through out it, where apparently people await customers. rocks are excavated for a variety of purposes. so, we finally arrived to the site of the lightest rock, all burnt orange in color. we grabbed some pieces to experiment with and headed out. once the time comes to go with our hired truck, pave will handle the business. she said everytime she goes she hears a different price! none-the-less it will be cheaper material for us to work with, let alone a vast improvement on our metal rockets of our first project. so the visit ended with parking ourselves at the market awaiting people from usi. we all meandered through. while trying to buy some mint leaves for sleeve´s favorite tea i was fiercely yelled at by a woman in quechua for buying from someone else than her. i was actually scared for the first time ever in a market! finally we met with the vice president and a few others to discuss the stove project. a meeting is set up for the 21st of december to show them the model at the albergue and to discuss the finer points. we´ve invited a sipascanchér to speak on our behalf, alberto, as he is picking up his daughter after the christmas celebration. and we too will join in that celebration bringing the 50 some present i brought from the states.
And now the grim reality per sleeve: 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).
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 damn 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 upset 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 8-10 months of use. The people there had tried to replace them with clay and they are still using them but are unhappy at the holes that developed in the rockets.
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 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 the people we visited 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 their method of stuffing whole pieces of brush into a burning fire. perhaps it´s simply warmer? 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 oximeter, 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, go figure). 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.) 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.
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 to realize that this seemsa 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.
During the market Pedro and Cristobal kept bringing 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, but were using the chimneys. 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 our experience in 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.
