quechua, cows, and trees

Time has been flying!

Last week I passed the “two month at site” mark, having a week previously passed “five months in Peru”. Things are going well here in Huashcao. Sorry for the delay on this update! This past month has been scattered by new experiences, rain, meetings, cows, and other awesome happenings that can’t be captured by words.

Like Christmas, I stayed in site for New Years. I spent New Years Eve reading and then trying to sleep while listening to live huayno music until about 3 am. I didn’t have the “party” in me like I normally do. No harm though, the following day my fellow Peru 14-ers in my valley (Kaitlyn and Alex) came up to my site for a quick hike. We followed my younger siblings as they guided us up to the National Park of Huascaran. It took us about 15 minutes to get to the park and then we had a good time wandering around inside through various forests and little rivers. It was a beautiful start to the new year and we even got to pick some wild “fruit”. This wild fruit, known as shaka-shaka in Quechua, tasted like a watery tulip bulb…dirt and all. Not the best snack that nature could have given us, but I am sure Bear Gryls would have eaten them if they featured the sierra of Ancash on a “Man vs. Wild” episode. We spent the rest of the day playing cards and eating potatoes…this has become my new favorite afternoon pastime. Cards and potatoes. Good stuff. That sums up my bringing-in of the new year.

Another highlight of this month was we finally finished the cobertizo, or covered corral, we had been building for a while. It is a pretty big area enclosed by a stone and adobe wall, half of which is covered with a roof. The funding all came from a Peruvian governmental agency known as Agrorural. As the name implies this agency helps out with rural agricultural development. It wasn’t at all my project but it was fun to get out and work with my dad, brother, and a bunch of other guys in the community. Integration is key to this job. Sweating, carrying around adobe bricks, and drinking afterwards are all part of integration. So that was a fun project and now our cows can live happily in a covered, walled-in area. Happy cows make happy Peace Corps volunteers…or at least that’s what I have heard.

Another great new experience that came with the month of January was my first trip to the market. Not a trip that consisted of buying a pen and some bananas at noon. No no, this was the real campesino (farmer) trip to the market. It started at 7 am on Saturday morning when we started to harvest a small field of potatoes [they were the “yungay” variety for all those reading that know your Peruvian potatoes]. We harvested most of the day and then loaded up 14 72-kilo sacks of potatoes into a neighbor’s big steak bed truck. I went home, grubbed on some boiled potatoes (I can’t eat enough of them!), and then went to bed around 7:30. I set the alarm clock for 11:45 that same night and dragged myself out of bed at about midnight. I left with my mom and little host sister at 1 am when the same truck rolled by the house and gave us the courteous 1 am honk. We hopped in the back of the truck and made ourselves comfortable on top of the sacks of potatoes we harvested that day along with those of other neighbors all heading down to the market. I would say we had around 50 72-kilo sacks in there with us. They make for a really comfortable seat…. Anywho, we rattled on down the mountain stopping every so often to pick up another group of people heading into the market as well as their goods. We reached the marketplace in Carhauz a quick 3 hours later with 16 Peruvians, 1 gringo, thousands of pounds of potatoes, herbs, lettuce, and other market goodies in the back of the truck. The potato sellers (that’s us) got dropped off last on what can only be described as Potato Street. Each side of the street was lined and stacked high with the huge sacks of potatoes. We weren’t the only people with the bright idea to sell that day. Different trucks of all shapes and sizes came sputtering into the street and dropped off their load of people and potatoes before leaving. The next step is to stand by your bags of potatoes and wait for someone to come buy them. There are groups of bigger buyers that come by and offer to buy your crop. These guys buy in bulk. They send the potatoes all over Peru: Lima, Huaraz, the coast, etc. By 4:30 am we had made the deal and sold our harvest to one of these big guys. It was a “decent” price for us down here in Peru, but only amounted to about $12 for each sack of first-rate potatoes. That’s about 160lbs of potatoes for $12. I doubt you get that price at a Kroger’s. After we sold we waited for another 3 hours or so to get back our sacks that the potatoes came in. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Good thing my family already knows of this little practice. Or at the least they don’t want to pay for new sacks. I’m going to go ahead and think they are just really into recycling and saving the environment. We finally got our sacks back and then headed down the street into the market to buy what we needed. The market is incredible. Every Sunday and Wednesday the streets of Carhauz are turned into the biggest open-air market I have seen. You can find everything from fruits and vegetables, soap, Tupperware, shoes, batteries, and livestock. My mom is a very efficient shopper and we had what we needed within 30 minutes. We then sat down for a quick bit to eat. I changed things up and got some potatoes and a hard boiled egg. The egg was a nice addition. Then we headed to find a car going back up to Huashcao. We hopped in the back of another truck and two hours later I found myself back home. We came back with some onions, tomatoes, soap, two spoons, mangos, fertilizer, and a live chicken. It was an exhausting but awesome trip from start to finish. I got an inside look into the real life of my family and how the farmers here make their living. Two thumbs up in my book.

Those have been some of the day-to-day highlights from this past month. Great cultural experiences if you will. On the other side of things my “work” has been progressing….slowly, but nonetheless progressing. During this month I have had various different meetings with an NGO known as World Vision. They are planning small 3-day workshops for kids and their parents during this summer vacation. All of us Peace Corps folk in this area are going to help out when they visit our sites. World Vision has the capital to do a lot of projects and has a very good reputation in these parts, so this should be a good alliance to have. These workshops are taking place in my area in the middle of February, which will give me some stuff to work on during the following month. We also had our regional monthly meeting with all the Ancash volunteers a few weeks back in Huaraz. It was good to see everyone in the city and the meeting went well also. Finally, I have been meeting with a representative from the Agrorural (see above) agency about various reforestation and soil conservation projects in my site. He’s a cool guy that shows up on a motorcycle and wants to work with trees…an awesome combo for a environment volunteer. Hopefully all these meetings can lead to some bigger projects and cool opportunities in the future. The English classes continue and I am working on some interviews that will give me some more info for my diagnostic. So like I said, this month has been fairly productive on the “work” front. This weekend we are also starting our Quechua classes in Huaraz, so hopefully I can start sneaking some cool phrases into conversations to impress the locals.

Well, that’s all for now! Thanks for making it through this long and perhaps dry rambling of my January. I hope all you guys are doing well wherever you may be. I’ve included a few pics for your enjoyment. Keep me posted on things when you get a chance!

Cheers,
Pete

p.s. the pics are coming shortly in a following post!