Cabritada

We slaughtered a goat this afternoon. It was an impressive sight. My friend Aldo sharpened a large kitchen knife and a short, blunt machete. The goat, a black one, lay on its side, its hooves tied together with a dirty, frayed piece of rope. Aldo knelt beside it and the rest of us pinned down various of the goat’s appendages. It struggled and bleated. Its brown tongue protruded from between its teeth. All of this was taking place inside a dirt patio in the house of Maximina, one of the artesanas with whom I work. Aldo’s son brought a small washpan and forced it underneath the goat’s neck. Aldo slit its throat with the kitchen knife and foamy blood from its jugular and larynx shot into the washpan, nearly filling it. Aldo kept sawing away at its neck until he’d cut entirely through the larynx and into the spine. There were puddles of blood and flecks of meat and bone in the dirt and a couple of dogs were lapping up the blood and some pullets were darting around, peeping, and pecking at the bits of bone and meat.

When the goat was completely still Aldo cut through the hide of one of its shanks and forced a short length of plastic tubing under the skin and blew into the tube to loosen the skin along the length of the leg. He did the same with its three other legs. Several other knives were brought out to the patio and sharpened. Aldo, Maximina and Aldo’s son started to skin the goat with the knives. Aldo slid the knife between the belly and the skin quickly, efficiently and expertly without puncturing the hide and without damaging the meat. The blade slipped between the meat and the skin and the skin peeled away leaving large patches of white fat interrupted by reddish gashes of exposed muscle, which continued to twitch along the ribcage, above the heart of the now headless animal.

When they’d skinned the entire carcass Aldo cut open its anus and carved out the rectal area and then split apart the ribs with the machete and pulled out the organs and the huge bloated white sack of its stomach and manhandled them into a washtub. Then he cut off the hooves, threaded a rope between the remaining bones of the two forelegs, and hoisted the carcass into a short, thick, white tree growing in the patio. He washed down the carcass with a bucket of water and meanwhile three women took the washtubful of entrails out into the back yard. First they salvaged the heart, liver, kidneys and some other organs that I was having trouble identifying. Then they unwound the intestines, cut them away from the stomach, and began to chop them into short segments. They squeezed greenish shit out of each segment and then poured water through it to cleanse it. Then they ran a stick through each segment and scoured the interior of the gut by bunching it along the stick, washed it a second time and dropped it into a washpan of fresh water that one of the women had brought from the well. As they cleaned the segments of intestine nearer the stomach the green shit they emptied from the length of intestine began to retain its solidity and texture, that of clumps of grass. Finally they cut open the stomach, which emitted a foul odor of partially digested vegetation, and emptied its copious contents into a ditch that ran behind the house. Someone kicked a dog that had been manuevering about, trying to rob scraps, and the dog yelped and skulked away. They cleaned the stomach, whose lining looked like shaggy wet fleece, and threw it into the washpan with the tripe.

When we went back inside Aldo was hacking up the carcass with the machete. The pullets were underfoot, peeping and pecking at splinters of bone. Some guinea pigs were scurrying around on the floor of a pen made of stacked bricks. In Perú we eat guinea pigs, too. The women had begun to cook the tripe and Edith, another of the artesanas, and María, a woman with several gold front teeth, were washing the hunks of meat that Aldo had hacked apart and cutting them into individual portions. Earlier Aldo had split the carcass in half and had weighed each half with a spring scale and each half had weighed 11 kilos. That meant that the goat had rendered nearly fifty pounds of meat and bone.

The goat will be served tomorrow at a “cabritada”—a fundraising effort for the group of artisans with which I’m working.

Andrea Campos Sánchez

Callanca looks like one of those towns that Clint Eastwood rode into to kill a few people in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Though it isn’t pretty and at times not even hospitable, I’m learning to love it. They tell me that all Peace Corps volunteers eventually develop this inexplicable and unreasonable attraction to their sites. It’s the same desperate state of mind that results in the phenomenon of hostages falling in love with their captors. If someone had offered me the deal I’ve got here in Callanca six months ago, I’d have laughed in their face, told them they were crazy and stayed put in Northampton, Massachusetts. But in light of what I’ve learned to expect and to appreciate since, I’m more than satisfied.

The one thing I really miss is good coffee. Judith send me a letter with a three-pack of Starbucks instant coffee inside and I almost wept with joy.

One of my friends responded thusly to an e-mail of mine that mentioned I was working in small-business development: “I wonder what you actually do all day to promote business development… “ Excellent question. There actually are some business opportunities here in Callanca. There are 15 or so “restaurants campestres” here and the restaurants need publicity—logos, signs, brochures; menus translated into English. They need training in how to keep hair out of the food and scrawny dogs and cats out of their kitchens. Handwashing 101 wouldn’t hurt, either. “Capacitación” we call that. All the businesses in town—bodegas to zapaterías—need to learn to smile at people and offer something more than every other bodega and zapateria in Perú offers.

My host mom runs a bodega (a general store with a walkup window) and when a customer comes up to the window to ask for something one of the kids screams ¡buscan! (“They want something!) and Margot eventually comes out of the kitchen yelling ¡dime! (Talk to me!) or ¿qué quiere? (What do you want!?). When they run out of a food item in the house they walk into the store and grab it and unwrap it and put it on the table. So basic accounting principles like don’t mix up your personal accounts and your business accounts are lacking. Yet almost everyone in Callanca has a cellphone and plenty of people have computers. So it’s a strange mix of the modern and the stone-age around here. As one of my Peace Corps friends quipped, “There are more flat-screen color TVs in my town than teeth.”

I’m also working with a group of artesans and we’re going to attend an art fair sponsored by the Peace Corps in November in Lima. This has turned out to be a boost for my reputation in town. It makes me look like I’m actually accomplishing something concrete. In order to raise the money for the trip we’re slaughtering a goat and selling tickets to a “cabridita” (that would mean something like “pig roast” except with a goat) for six soles each. My artesan’s group is also less than a mean fighting machine when it comes to business. Most of them are women who embroider items for traditional weddings held here in Callanca. The weddings last two or three days. On the first day the groom invites all the guests to his family’s house for a celebration of food and drink and dance that lasts from the afternoon until dawn the next day. The second day the bride invites the guests to her family’s house for a celebration of food and drink and dance that lasts from the afternoon until dawn the next day. The third day the groom invites all of his family’s friends to his family’s house and the bride invites all of her family’s friends to her family’s house for celebrations of food and drink and dance that last from the afternoon until dawn the next day. At some point in these marathon celebrations the bride’s and groom’s families and the godparents all receive beautifully embroidered alforja’s and paños and other hand-made gifts which they wear on the wedding day and then retain as keepsakes thereafter or sometimes make use of in their homes. The alforjas are hand-woven shoulder bags embroidered with peacocks or chickens or flowers or other traditional designs. The paños are hand-woven towels also embroidered with designs and commemorative details of the wedding—names and dates and good wishes.

The artesans I’m working with have traditionally produced these items on commission for engaged couples and their families but now will be producing them for purchase by the public as well. I designed the logo you see here for them (I photographed some embroidery by one of the artesanas) and am also teaching workshops on budgeting, costs and pricing, marketing, product design and related topics. Those of you who have seen the cigar box in which I kept the receipts for my own small business back in the States, rest assured that Peace Corps is helping out all of the small-business volunteers with these workshops—providing us with materials and advice. Much of the training I received during my first three months in the Peace Corps involved learning how to conduct such workshops.

That having been said, don’t let me mislead you. We’re at a very basic level of business acumen here. The two people I’m taking with me to the artesan’s fair in Lima have never traveled further than two hours from Callanca.

However, we have many positive things going for us. The group of artesans is called Asociación de Artesanas de Callanca Andrea Campos Sánchez, named for an artesana and brewer of chicha and proprietress of the first countryside restaurant (“restaurant campestre”) in Callanca. She was to have been one of the founding members of the group but on the day the group’s founding members met to draw up the papers for forming the association and registering it with the municipality, Andrea didn’t show up. Word reached the group that she’d died the night before. So the rest of the members of the group decided to name the association in her honor. For the art fair I hope to set up a series of pancartas (letter-size stand-up displays) that describes the founding of the group and illustrates how the artesanía has been traditionally used and how it reflects the rural, agricultural and family- and community-oriented nature of Callanca and of callancanos. The community has existed for nearly a thousand years so momentum is on our side.

On November 5, somewhere, Andrea Campos Sánchez will be knocking back a glass of chicha de jora in our honor and wishing us well in Lima. Assuming that she knows where Lima is.

Chicha de Rabanito

Things are getting exciting in Callanca. I’m already working. I’ve given four presentations before groups of Callancanos ranging from 20 to 100 people. My Spanish is improving daily due to the rigorous formal and informal workouts it’s been receiving. People are starting to recognize me on the street and call me by name. My name here is Carlos. Sometimes Carlitos or Carlucho. I’ve already been to a wedding, a funeral and a birthday party. Here in Perú much cerveza accompanies all such gatherings. The cerveza here comes in 28-oz. bottles so there’s no kidding around. The custom is to use one bottle of beer and one glass and form a drinking circle. This can be a small circle of three or four people or a larger circle—an entire roomful of people. But generally there are many bottles of beer and many small circles and the circles intertwine from time to time so that everyone interacts with everyone else. The rules of the drinking circle are fairly rigid though the rules vary a bit from region to region. Here in Callanca, you accept the bottle and glass from the person to your right, fill the glass half-full, then pass the bottle to the person to your left. Then you drink. Then you dump the dregs and the foam onto the ground, the floor, or sometimes into a plate or onto a pile of napkins or into an abandoned glass, then you pass your empty glass to the person to whom you previously passed the bottle. You can also add a flourish to the act of passing the glass by rolling it between your palms to encourage the foam clinging to the inside of the glass to settle to the bottom before you dump it out. The drinking is serious stuff. I’ve seen groups of twenty people go through 8 cases (12 beers to a case) of 28-oz. bottles in a few hours. Don’t worry, I’m not participating in the entire marathon. Health-related excuses like diabetes work very well if you feel like retiring early from the festivities.

They also serve a home-brewed beer called chicha which is made from corn or grapes or just about any fruit or vegetable grown locally. They bottle it in 2-liter plastic bottles that previously contained Coke or the local favorite Inca Kola. They pass the bottle and the glass as described previously. There are couplets for the various flavors of chicha:

Chica de rabanito

Para que duermas con tu primito.

Radish chicha

It'll make you sleep with your cousin.

The food that accompanies these drinking binges is frequently outstanding. Pork, turkey, chicken, goat or fish—and occassionally the Pueruvian favorite, guinea pig—often smothered in a tantalizing sauce such as ocopa, a spicy peanut sauce. RIce and potatoes always come along for the ride. The food comes in a bowl with a soup spoon, which can be challenging when the meat is on the tough side. However, it isn’t considered bad manners to pick up the meat and gnaw at it like a starved animal. In fact it’s expected. If you’re lucky someone will pass you a roll of toilet paper and you can clean up afterward.

But I think I said I’ve been working, didn’t I? I met with the artesano association’s board of directors and next week the association (15 artesanos) is going to show me what kinds of art its members have been producing and in November we’re hoping to attend an art fair sponsored by the Peace Corps at the U.S. Embassy in Lima. It’s a fair attended solely by associations working with Peace Corps volunteers. The artesans do beautiful embroidery (I saw some at the wedding I attended) as well as weavings, wicker furniture and other artesanía. I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far of their art so far.

I’ve also been working with the community to arrange some basic services such as a police presence. Many families raise livestock and occasionally some rustling occurs. By coincidence, soon after my arrival, the municipality (the district government) assigned two policemen to Callanca. Though I didn’t really have anything to do with it, the fact that I’d been talking to so many people about security problems and promising to try to arrange for police protection made it seem as if the arrival of the police was partly my doing. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. Eventually I’ll be working more directly with farmers and with milk and meat producers in Callanca to analyze and (one would hope) improve their business practices.

Callanca is a small community, 1500 people in the town proper, so I feel that within a reasonable amount of time I can get a grip on the needs and priorities here. However there are no hard facts available in the form of records or statistics, so everything is based on the opinions of individuals and every individual has a different opinion. Estimates of the population, for instance, range from 1500 to 4000 depending upon whom you talk to. Elections are coming up in October and opinions also vary wildly as to who will win the race for the mayorship of the municipality. As I’ve mentioned previously, a former resident of Callanca and one of my counterparts—the Peruvians that help me navigate the complexities of business and government in Perú—is running for mayor. I’ve heard from some people that she’s leading and from others that she has no chance whatsover. So you tell me.

The efficacy of life with my host family can be equally difficult to ascertain. Margot, my host mother, complains endlessly about anything and everything. She’s bossy yet passive-aggressive—if that’s possible. She received a payment-overdue notice for tuition at the kids’ school and posted it on the wall in the dining room so that the rich gringo would be sure to see it. She sighs a lot. One of her main complaints is money. There’s never enough. In this she’s not unlike your average American mom. But unlike June Cleaver, she offers up picturesque tales of family financial disasters—robbery, car theft, extortion, fraud. Her exaggerations are laughable. Chicken costs 8 soles ($2.80) a kilo when in fact I know that it costs 6.50 soles. Fish costs 15 soles a kilo when in fact it goes for 8–13. The blanket on my bed cost 100 soles whereas I’ve seen them in Chiclayo for 40. So it’s hard to know where the truth stops and life according to Margot begins. However, she has raised four relatively charming (and two of them quite intelligent) kids. So she must not be all bad. My host dad, César, drives a mototaxi and according to Margot is the cause of all the family’s financial difficulties. I, on the other hand, appear to be the solution. However, so far I’ve turned down a request for a loan and have ignored all other subtle hints for financial assistance or rescue—the late notice posted above the dining-room table for instance.

I’ve discussed all this with the Peace Corps’ regional coordinator and she quickly authorized me to move. But I’ve decided to attempt to hang in there since the only real drawback to living with the family is Margot’s sour disposition.

Conditions are rugged in the house but certainly not unbearable. They fixed the toilet (see previous posting for the gory details) and it turns out that they have a septic system after all. Margot had told me that they did not. She probably thought that it had been stolen. So not only do we have a toilet but a toilet that flushes—which represents the heights of luxury in Callanca.

Living with a Peruvian host family is a bit like The Beverly Hillbillies in reverse. So I guess that would make it like Green Acres, wouldn’t it? (The above for those of you old enough to remember those two series.) The food situation is a complete mystery. For instance yesterday for breakfast we each had a fairly large plateful of chunks of pork, rice and raw onions. Today for breakfast we each had one cup of canned milk blended with strawberries and two pieces of bread. Most of the lunches consist of half a plate of white rice and something else. Maybe a couple of ounces of chicken or fish. Maybe some lentils or some cucumbers or tomatos in lime juice. The suppers generally arrive late, eight o’clock or so, and don’t consist of much. Last night we each had a bowl of soup. Milton, the 13-year-old, brought me a spoon from the kitchen and before he handed it to me dried it with his shirt-tail.

But I haven’t gotten sick yet. So it would seem that hygeine in the U.S. is ’way overrated.

The aforementioned is not intended to trash any aspect of my living situation, neither my life in the community nor my life with Margot, César, Milton, Pamela and Nicole. The only things that frustrate me are things that seem possible to change given a modest amount of effort. And according to the Peace Corps that’s what I’m here for—to encourage the modest amount of effort that change requires.

Of course as much of the change has to come from me as from Callanca. I would be the first to admit that to the Campos Figueroa I must surely seem eccentric if not insane. I prefer to drink beer from my own personal bottle. And most often I prefer to drink but one beer. I prefer fruit and vegetables to huge heaps of white rice. I eat with a fork and not a tablespoon. I like to spend maybe an hour a day alone. (Please.) When free food is available, like at a wedding or a birthday celebration, I don’t eat five platefuls and also squirrel away a sixth to take home with me to eat tomorrow for breakfast. I like to shower with warm water. I have developed the spendthrift habit of flushing every time I use the toilet. (I’m getting over that one.) I shave my head. I have a beard. I wear a cap. I floss my teeth. I use shaving cream. And deodorant. I drink water and tea with my meals instead of eating my meal and then drinking water or tea afterward. I drink whatever I please with my meal, be it hot or be it cold, whereas everyone knows that some foods are hot foods and that some foods are cold foods (regardless of their temperature or spiciness—it’s like ying and yang) and that you don’t drink hot drinks after you eat hot foods nor cold drinks after you eat cold foods or you will get very, very sick.

Clearly I have a lot to learn. Fortunately, I have two years to get it done.

Todos mis retos vienen de por dentro

I visited Callanca, my permanent site, the week of August 9. It’s a dusty, rural, mainly agricultural town of 1500 a half-hour from Chiclayo, the capital of the departamento of Lambayeque. It’s a community of basic block and brick houses most of which line the one paved road that runs the length of the town. It seems extremely impoverished; however, because many people are able to grow their own food, there’s probably less dire poverty than one would think. It will take some time for me to determine how much less.

It’s hardly a picturesque community so I think that during my two years there I will need look for sources of inspiration other than natural beauty. A river, the River Reque, runs to the north of town. It’s a short walk from my house and the river provides the only tranquil spot for leisurely contemplation that I’ve found so far. It seems that my host family will provide many of those other sources of inspiration that I mentioned above. The father, César, is a mototaxista. He drives one of the taxis, a hybrid of a motorcycle and a carriage, that transport Callancanos from the town to the Interamericana, the highway to Chiclayo, about two kilometers away. Margot, the mother, runs a bodega or general store from the house. The kids are Milton (13) and Pamela (7) and Nicole (5). A third daughter ran off to Lima with her boyfriend and thus there’s an empty room upstairs for me. It’s the nicest room in the house by far, with a ceramic tile floor and a large window that overlooks the town’s main street.

Things are quite basic, even rustic in the house. There’s a bathroom, however there’s no desagua (public sewer system) and no septic system either, so exactly where the effluent ends up is anybody’s guess. The toilet currently flushes by means of a bucket filled with water that one empties into the toilet after each use. The float mechanism in the tank is broken and the float is tied to a towel rack to maintain it in a position that (usually) prevents water from filling and overflowing the tank. The overhead light in the bathroom doesn’t work. Because of the aforementioned emission of effluent the drinking water in the house is contaminated with e coli and so we boil all the water for drinking and cooking. The whole family, all five of them, sleeps in one medium-sized bedroom downstairs.

In short, we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

It would appear that there are ample opportunities for me to do work in Callanca. Many of the farmers maintain restaurantes campestres, country restaurants, and use their own produce and meat to feed visitors from Lima who come to Callanca to dine on the weekends. The restaurants are quite pleasant with a lot of outdoor seating and views of the fields and a general summer-camp atmosphere. They serve cebiche, arroz con pato (duck and rice), cabrito (young goat) and many other local specialties. I sampled cabrito and it’s tender and quite tasty. One of my jobs as a small–business development volunteer will be to assist the restaurant owners in improving sanitation standards, client service, bookkeeping methods, publicity, etc.

There’s also a school, Fundación James D. Turner–Enrique Pisfil Villalobos, founded by an American and a Peruvian, with extremely modern facilities, including computers and internet, and I’ll be able to conduct classes and workshops for members of the community at the school and make use of the computers and internet for my work. The director of the school, Rita Ayasta de Díaz, is running for mayor of the district so if she wins I’ll have frineds in high places. She’s currently leading in the polls or according to whatever means that they determine candidates’ prospects in Perú. She was mayor once before so I think her chances are good.

Sometime next week I’ll be shopping for a mattress and bed, strapping them to the roof rack of a taxi, then a combi, and moving them to Callanca to furnish my room. Unlike in America, where locatng one’s business implies placing it someplace where no other such services exist, in Perú businesses cluster. So if you want a bed you go to Calle Cuglieván in Chiclayo and there are 5 or 10 furniture stores located one after another on the side of the street opposite the public market. So you can go from one store to the next and compare prices and haggle and get the best price without having to travel all over town.

The public market is a masterpiece. You can buy anything there, from running shoes and luggage to a sheep’s head or a chicken or a python skin with which to place a curse on the guy who sold you a lumpy mattress in the furniture store across the street. The market is a traditional bazaar as you’d picture existing in Turkey or Saudi Arabia. It’s a crowded labyrinth of individual stalls and narrow passageways that provides more exotic smells, chaotic activity and indeterminate noises in two or three square blocks than most of the five boroughs of New York. There are sections with stalls offering books and stationery products, vegetables, meat, fruit, shoes, jackets, pots and pans, locks and hardware, jeans, t-shirts, breakfast and lunch, and a special section offering herbs and medicinal plants and all the essentials of witchcraft and sorcery, including dried buzzard heads, crow’s wings, the claws, teeth and feet of animals associated with powerful healing or hexing properties, and brews like ayahuasca, an hallucinogenic elixir made from the boiled bark of a vine from the rainforest. Two hundred milliliters (6 oz. or so) costs 30 soles or about $10. Don’t worry, I didn’t partake.

It’s difficult to convey what it’s like coming from the U.S. to a third-world country and learning to conduct one’s everyday activities all over again from the ground up, plus do it all in a language with which one has until now been expected to use to only to check into a hotel or ask directions to the toilet. “Living at the level of the local population” as Peace Corps’ mission mandates often means waking up in the morning and finding sewage all over the floor of the bathroom (if you have a bathroom), wondering if whoever cleans up the sewage (if it isn’t you) will wash his or her hands before fixing breakfast for the family with which you’re living and dealing with the gastrointestinal consequences if that person did not and thereafter making your own immediate and urgent contributions to beginning the aforementioned unglamorous cycle all over again. Although people are intrigued by you nobody really understands you. You’re from Mars. You know the generic names for things you want and need but frequently not the specific local term for the item so you end up pantomiming and describing in convoluted language objects that you’re attempting to purchase—let’s say a two-pronged adapter for plugging in an electrical device with a three-pronged plug—and getting, instead of the adapter you wanted, the plastic cover for a wall outlet. I’ve made a lot of friends at the training center here in Chaclacayo and as we go out separately into all of Perú to seek our individual fortunes we’re beginning to say our good-byes. As I said to a group of friends last night as we sat around a table in the restaurant run by my host mother: “It’s been fun, guys. But I’m trading all of you in for intestinal parasites.”

I’ll be moving permanently to my site, Callanca, on August 23. It remains to be seen how reliable or fast or frequent my internet access will prove to be. But at the very least I should be able to post an occasional update from Chiclayo. I’m moving from Chaclacayo to Chiclayo. From the sound of it you’d think it won’t be so difficult an adjustment.

Callanca

Callanca, Lambayeque, Perú will be my permanent site. Callanca is the community, Lambayeque the department (state). It’s located about 12 hours north of Lima near Chiclayo, the capital of Lambayeque. The population is 1,500.

It will be hot and dry there. For instance this time of year (winter down here) it’s around 80–85 in the daytime, 60–65 at night. I’m near the coast, about half an hour from the beach.

I’ll be working with restaurants, farmers and, believe it or not, ducks. They raise and slaughter and serve a lot of ducks in Callanca. The food is said to be spectacular and pato con arroz, duck over rice, is a specialty as are ceviche (raw fish “cooked” in lime juice) and all varieties of seafood. The waters off the coast of Perú and Ecuador are some of the best fishing grounds in the world.

I’m visiting the site this week with four other volunteers who’ll be working in other parts of Lambayeque. We’ll stay a week and get to know our host families (all volunteers live with Peruvian families) and our work counterparts, Peruvians who’ll be introducing us to local officials and keeping us from making total fools of ourselves (we hope).

However, the Peace Corps has managed to make my placement a bit more remarkable than it otherwise would have been. On Friday they booted one of the volunteers that would’ve been working with me in Lambayeque for being “immature, culturally insensitive and a behavioral risk.” They sent him home. And to make matters worse, he had a girlfriend with whom he’d hooked up here in Perú and in protest she has decided to leave as well. She was supposed to have served in Monsefú, a community about 10 kilometers from my site. Like me, she was a small–business development volunteer and so we likely would have been working quite closely on multiple projects.

So now it’s hard to say whether I’ll be asked to take over her site, work in both sites or continue working only in Callanca. Monsfú is the municipalidad of the district and a city of 30,000 people so clearly my work would be cut out for me were Monsefú to be included in my area of responsibility. It’s also possible that they’ll move a volunteer from one of the other departments to Monsefú or that they’ll decide not to assign Monsefú a volunteer and wait for the next group of small-business volunteers to be trained next summer and then assign a volunteer to Monsefú.

So the suspense isn’t over. I’m still not altogether sure where I’ll be working or what I’ll be doing. But at least for the next week my site is Callanca and I’m giving my full attention to ducks and restaurants specializing in duck.

Here’s a link to a YouTube video about Lambayeque.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sOmQSCxxlo

I’ll be finding out where my permanent site will be this coming Tuesday. Meanwhile, I have three more weeks of training to go. Training has started to resemble more and more the actual work I’ll be doing at my site, which suits me just fine. Two weeks ago we visited the department (the equivalent of a state in the U.S.) of Arequipa and taught business principles for a week in Chivay, a small town in the mountains located at an altitude of 13,000 feet. It was cold at night and in the early mornings but bright, absolutely clear and warm during the days.

Arequipa is an area where descendents of the Inca predominate and much Quechua is still spoken in Arequipa. Generally people speak both languages, Spanish and Quechua, but occasionally you’ll run into older persons who speak only Quechua. The area where we were staying is called Colca Canyon and Colca is a Quechua word meaning silo or a place where grain is stored. To store grain to be used in periods of drought or times of war the Inca made use of cylindrical cavities carved into the sheer walls of cliffs. The picture above shows a wide portion of El Cañon Colca near Chivay before it begins to narrow and deepen. The canyon is debatably the deepest in the world. Scientiests are doing measurements as we speak.

The day after we finished our teaching stint we hired a combi (small bus that holds twelve people but carries twenty people) which took us to La Cruce del Cóndor (Condor Crossing) in the canyon. We saw some magnificent condors with wingspans of up to three meters floating in the updrafts from Colca Canyon aad hunting as the day warmed. The condor remains the symbol of the Inca people and on Peruvian Independence Day (July 28) in some mountain communities they still capture condors and tie them to the backs of bulls (the symbol of Spain) and parade the bulls through the streets. the condors pecking at their hides and tearing them with their claws. It’s a symbolic demonstration of the fact that although the Spanish may have conquered the Inca they have never truly dominated the Inca.

The teaching gig in Chivay was grueling. If the kids were the condors then I was the bull. But in retrospect it was a useful and even entertaining experience. Three of us taught a class of 16 kids about accounting, the principles of entreprenership, how to draw up a business plan and how to do a market feasibility study. Groups of students formed their own temporary businesses and attempted to operate the businesses for one day in Chivay. Our groups opened a ceviche stand, screened a movie and set up a Casa de Terror (House of Horror). We managed to keep all of our students for the entire week—no small accomplishment since one class went from 25 to 11 as the week wore on—and all three of our groups showed a profit or broke even.

The food was beyond great in Chivay. They eat a lot of alpaca there. The alpaca is a smaller version the llama. I generally ate in the Market and Doneria, my favorite among the vendors, cooked caldo—soup with yucca, potatoes, vegetables, cilantro and, yes, alpaca—and segundos, main dishes, of rocoto relleno, a hot pepper stuffed with raisins, onions, shredded vegetables, spices and, naturally, alpaca. Mate, a tea made from coca leaves, is the drink of choice instead of coffee. Peace Corps volunteers are not allowed to drink it because if one were to do so and if for some reason the medical staff decided to screen that person for drug use he or she would test positive for cocaine. However, the tea really isn’t that strong and just between you and me the evidence disappears from you blood and urine after 48 hours.

There were only nine of us working in Chivay so it very soon became clear who the slackers were. All of us are hoping that next week when we’re placed in our permanent sights the two designated stooges won’t be placed anywhere near us so that we won’t be obliged to work with either of them on projects. As far as I can tell no one has accused me of being the third stooge. Although I would hardly place myself in that category everyone seems to consider me to be one of the more commendable recruits. Evidently only I know my dirty little secrets.

You’ll be among the first to hear when I find out where my site will be. So watch this space. And don’t be disappointed if the place they send me is nowhere to be found in your Michelin Guide to Peru.

Greetings from Perú

Greetings from Perú. It hasn’t been easy getting situated especially as regards the internet so that’s why it’s taken so long to post this first entry. Peace Corps hasn’t made any arrangements for us to have internet access during our training so the best I’ve been able to do so far has been to go to a locutorio (a business that sells internet time and phonecalls) and shoot a few e-mails to Judith. However, wireless exists even in Yanacoto, Perú, and this morning I found that if I stand on a chair and set my laptop on top of the armario (tall cabinet for hanging garments) I can get one bar of reception at pepe2yanacoto. So thanks, Pepe.

Training has been brutal. It’s like going back to college. We have Spanish classes, business classes (I’ll be working in Small Business Development) and classes on the culture and history and geography of Perú from 8.00 to 5.00 daily. We also have presentations to deliver in schools and at businesses and to each other (for practice) every week, all In Spanish of course. So I’m keeping busy to say the least. You haven’t lived until you’ve delivered a two-hour presentation on accounting principles and market feasibility in Spanish.

One big surprise has been how well I’ve been accepted by a group of volunteers whose average age is half my own. I needn’t have worried about that. I’m living with a host family in Yanacoto, a 10-minute combi ride from the training center and my “host mom” Benedicta owns a restaurant. So I’m eating well and volunteers stop by every night to gossip and eat alitas, fried chicken wings, and papas fritas and to drink a couple of Inca Kolas. I think the economic collapse in the U.S. resulted in a better than average group of trainees. They didn’t have a lot of job opportunities in investment banking. They’re a pretty sharp bunch. It’s been fun for me. Like getting to go back to high school and this time doing everything right that you screwed up when you were an awkward, anxious, hormone-drunk adolescent.

I made it into the advanced Spanish class so I’m finding it challenging. It’s me and six mejicanos, all native speakers, and one gringo whose father is Bolivian. The only other gringa in our class dropped out after the first week and asked to be moved to intermediate. Wish me luck.

I live with a Peruvian family in the dusty, hilly town of Yanacoto about 30 minutes north of Lima, the capital. It’s generally sunny here because the entire coast of Perú is desert (the Humboldt Current flowing up from Anarctica keeps the breezes offshore and so it rarely rains. There’s not much vegetation or scenery. Even less greenery than in Arizona, though nowhere near as hot.

Living with my host family has been a great experience. My host father Doroteo is a teacher and was mayor of the town up until a few years ago. My host brother Carlos is also a teacher and my other brother Hernán drives a mototaxi, a tiny 3-wheeled vehicle about the size of a golf cart except with a fully enclosed cab. They’re capable of carrying two passengers but always carrying three. Two sobrinas (nieces) also live here while they’re going to school in nearby Chosica. Yanina is studying to be a nurse and Ana María a teacher. Other reatives sleep here from time to time as well. We’ve been as many as 10 on a few nights. It’s cozy. However, I have my own room (though I feel guilty about it on nights when there are 9 other people in the hose) and the Ronseros have made sure it’s the best room in the house.

In Yanacoto since my arrival there has been an attempted assault on the current mayor—a mob broke into his office and tried to pummel him. He’s accused of embezzling funds from the community coffers. And my sobrina Anita was robbed in Chosica—they took her money, took her schoolbooks and even took her shoes. It’s the wild west here. Lima is even worse. When I go to Lima I empty my pockets entirely except for my insulin, a syringe and a folded-up 10-soles note.

The food in Perú is carbs and more carbs. Potatoes and white rice pretty much every meal along with a small amount of meat, a soup, and ají, a terrifically potent hot sauce a bit like habanero salsa. There are some tasty garlic and peanut sauces with which to smother the rice and potatoes. We also eat cuy here. Guinea pig. The guinea pig has been raised as a food source since Inca times. It’s an important food item but also has a place in the folklore. Curanderos y brujeros will cut open a guinea pig for you and will claim to be able to read your future in the entrails. When you’re sick, someone might pásate el huevo—crack an egg into a cup and pass it over you in order to draw the ailment from your body.

I’ll be posted to my permanent site about five weeks from now—the place where I’ll serve for the next two years. It will likely be on the coast but in an area perhaps slightly less austere and barren than Yanacoto. At least that’s what my guinea-pig guts are telling me.

I’ll try to keep you better informed from now on. However, a lot of that depends on Pepe and whether or not I keep getting that one bar of signal. I’m passing the huevo over my keyboard as we speak.