In the mornings I wake up at 4:30 when my host family gets up to do God-knows-what as loudly as possible, put in my earplugs and go back to sleep. At 6:45 I get up for breakfast with my host mom and sisters, which is usually fresh bread and avena with chocolate (A milky oatmeal drink with small grains. If you know me, you know I don't like oatmeal normally, but this is very tasty). If it's Monday or Wednesday, I leave to catch a collectivo to Pachar with Renee for our computer classes. If it's Tuesday or Thursday, I retreat to my room to study before Spanish class, or scrub laundry and hang it in the courtyard in the sun.
Pachar is a tiny pueblo eight kilometers from Ollantaytambo. A woman waits at a tiny gatehouse at the entrance to the town to take down the chain in front of the bridge when cars or people need to cross the river. There are no paved or even cobblestone roads there, so it's always very muddy. Four out of five days there's a bull, donkey, or sheep in the path through the fields of corn and grasses on the way to school. There are probably only six or seven teachers at the school -one for each grade, including Jardin, which starts at age three or four- and they're busy in the schoolyard when we get there, setting up a giant PA system to have the Monday morning assembly on the basketball court/soccer court with all of the students, pulling weeds in the garden, or ushering children from place to place. The assemblies involve a lot of shouting “BUENOS DIAS NINOS” and “BUUUUEEEENOS DIIIAS PROFESSORAAAAAA!” plus singing of patriotic songs.
We have hour and a half-long classes from 8:30 or 9 until 1:30, which is a very long time. Our yes attitudes wane as the morning goes on, and we sometimes have to stress-eat bread and chocolate. The best part of the computer classes is that the kids are really excited to be able to use computers, some of them for the first time. Also, I think they're learning things...we're focusing on the most basic of basics, like using the keyboard, knowing the parts of the computer, and finding and opening/closing programs. Many of them speak mostly Quechua and none of them are very good at spelling: Hola! Minonbre es royer. Bibo in Pachar tengo 11 anos. This was the sentence we had them typing yesterday (spelled correctly, with their own info inserted, of course) and it took most of them at least 10 minutes.
There are two worst parts too. One is that the health and hygiene of the students and facilities is rather poor. Many of the students have to walk for two or three hours to and from school. Many of them smell like they don't wipe when they poop or take showers, which isn't surprising in a place where there's never toilet paper in the bathrooms and many people don't have running water. The bathrooms in the school are pretty disgusting. One day I caught a little girl squatting and peeing on the floor in there, even though all the stalls were empty. WTF Melissa? The other worst part is being way less than fluent in Spanish. I just learned how to use the imperative correctly last week, five weeks into computer classes. Dang. It can be rough. But the kids are surprisingly sweet and forgiving, and it's a good crowd to practice with. We only have one week left with them. Hopefully this program can continue with other volunteers, because I think the kids and teachers are starting to trust and like us. The teachers just started inviting us out for a mid-morning snack that we really don't need (who wants a tuna, onion, and tomato salad plus a boiled potato at 10 am?).
As I said earlier, I'm taking Spanish classes in Urubamba on Tuesdays and Thursdays. My teacher's name is Sylvana, and she's probably my age or a little bit older. She has a cutely shrill laugh and always smells good. I'm learning a lot really fast and am not processing it all, but it's good that she's giving me what I need to get a strong foundation and I can practice during my time here with my host family and the many bored Peruvian men who work in the bars and restaurants in Ollantaytambo and love talking to voluntarias and asking us out for drinks and dancing every day or tell us about Inca myths, even though obviously we have to work tomorrow... I have only met one Peruana who wants to chat and be friends, and that was in an official intercambio set up by Awamaki for Wednesday evenings. Everyone else I meet is a dude: in the combis, on the street, in the ruins when I'm trying to listen to my ipod and get some sun.
I guess most of the women my age who live here are busy taking care of their families. My host mother calls me “hija” even though she's only four years older than me, and she has an eleven-year-old and a five-year-old. Living with the host family is good for the most part, and I'm glad for the experience. But it can be tough sometimes being treated like a baby by a 29 year old. “Abrigate! Come mas! Estas flaca, Anita! Vas a gordar un poco aca, Anita. Un poco, no mas.” No, but really they're super nice and cute, and it's fair that they think I'm a little stupid when I say things in Spanish like, “I was going to you walk to the store eggs” all the time.
Highlights of living with the family: going to the stadium for the women's soccer league games on Saturday and playing a ton of games with like 30 kids, led by my parents, Mirian and Ebert; always having a giant, delicious lunch every day no matter what; killing, plucking and eating the chicken that would always come into my room and poop. They really want me to love them and be part of their family, and I do. I think it will be hard to keep in touch, though, because none of them have email. I tried to get Mirian to come to an internet cafe to set up and account with me, but she kept not being able to, and I think maybe she's intimidated by the whole idea. Probably my best bet is to set up an account for Valeri, the 11 yr old, because she's pretty tech savvy and loves me and will want to be in touch. I think she can use internet at her afterschool center for cheap, too.
My afternoons vary. Sometimes I work in the Awamaki weaving shop, which can be slow and boring, but at least I get to gaze at beautiful textiles and smell the fragrant Palo Santo wood we sell there. Some Tuesdays I help out another volunteer, Susan, with her afterschool P.E. Class. We had one successful gymnastics lesson, but for the most part the kids are just in it for the futbol and it's impossible to get them to play another game. Other times I go to a cafe or climb up to Pinka Lluna, some of the ruins that overlook the town. Mondays we have Awamaki meetings with project updates and check-ins. It's exciting and inspiring to hear about what everyone is doing with very limited resources. It's a small organization, but it packs a lot of punch. All of the volunteers are nice and enthusiastic. Some evenings we meet up for drinks or have pizza parties and those kinds of things. Since people are coming and going all the time, we have despedidas (going away parties) almost every week, too.
I've traveled in the Sacred Valley area on the weekends a bit, when I'm not working in the shop or spending inordinate amounts of time at birthday parties for one-year-old cousins. The first weekend in April, my friend Dan (we grew up together in Greensboro and Quaked together, he went to Warren Wilson so we see one another regularly in Asheville, too) came to Ollantaytambo. We went to a fiesta for Renee's host brother's birthday (turning 24 I think) on that Thursday night, which was pretty fun. We drank wine, beer, and pisco and salsa-danced. Then Friday-Sunday we went to Machu Picchu. I'm having a hard time thinking of what to say about MP. It was just what I imagined: amazing. We got up at 4:30 to buy our tickets and ensure that we would be at the head end of the crowd. The weather was perfect: cloudy and cool in the morning and hot and sunny by one. We hiked up to Huaynu Picchu in the late morning, a mountain/temple that's way above MP where you can see everything. Almost the entire path was extremely steep stairs. It was painful, but worth it.
In the afternoon we went to Aguas Calientes, the town that is Machu Picchu, with all of the hotels and restaurants and trashy souvenir shops. There are also hot springs there, where pretty much everyone goes after they've been to MP. They were murky hot tubs with sandy bottoms, and they smelled like pee and made my flea bites itch. We could only stand being there for about thirty minutes, and then had to return to our very wet hotel to shower. I guess MP is at the edge of the cloud forest, so it's always humid. The sheets in our beds were damp and there was a centimeter of water on the floor in the bathroom, which was exceptionally disconcerting when I accidentally zapped myself on this outlet with prongs sticking out of it and electric current running through it. Still have no idea what that was for, but the back of my arm has a very strong memory of how it felt. This is where my blog changed it's title. We went to dinner at one of the hundreds of restaurants where people desperately stood outside begging customers to come in. We were the only people there. We ate fajitas and lasagna with noodles made from quinoa, and drank pisco sours and caipirhinas. Not too shabby. We went to bed early and slept forever. Then we took the beautiful Peru Rail Train home to Ollantaytambo, where we had lunch with my family and said our farewells. A good time was had by all.
Last weekend, Renee and I went to Moray and Salineras, which are within an hour of here. We took a collectivo to Urubamba, where we checked out a Bioferia (tailgate market with organic products and hippies by the dozen. So used to that scene...) and had pastries at a wonderful little bakery. Then we caught a bus to Maras and a taxi to Moray. Moray is the site of an ancient Incan agricultural research center. Yeah, that's right. They always planted crops on terraces, in order to manipulate temperature and the types of crops they could grow in one place but at different altitudes. Moray takes this concept to a new level, with concentric circles of terraces that probably sink two or three hundred feet into the ground from the top to bottom. So cool. We walked from Moray to Maras, which took about an hour and a half and was beautifully scenic, with bulls, fields, red mud cliffs, and agave. In the plaza in Maras there was a festival going on, which involved lots of food and chicha and also a bike race, which we caught part of. We rested for a while and then walked for another hour and a half to Salineras, another incredible site of Incan innovation. They realized that the nearby springs were salinated, so they dug out thousands of rectangular shallow pools along the side of the mountain (using gravity and aqueducts to move the water better) where they STILL harvest salt. It was beautiful, and kind of looked like something out of a sci fi movie, because the mud was so red, the salt was so white...it looked like another planet. We walked some more down to the main road (probably walked 15-20 miles that day, no joke) and took a tiny motorcycle taxi to Urubamba, where we ate some snacky bar food, wandered in the market, and I tried chicha, which is probably the reason I've been feeling sick for the past couple of days. But I couldn't leave this part of Peru without trying it. Ghiardia be damned!
I have a week and a half more here. This weekend I'm going up to Patacancha, which is the community where Awamaki works with weavers and buys most of their textiles. It's a traditional high altitude village and almost everyone speaks Quechua. I hear it's beautiful. I'm a bit sad to be leaving Ollantaytambo soon, but am also so excited to be hitting the road and seeing different parts of this country!
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