Back in time

Thursday morning I got up at 4:30 am to catch a bus from Ollanta to Urubamba, and another bus to Huaran...to start the hike up to Canchacancha, at 4200m. The men and horses from the community came down to Huaran to take the chairs and materials we were donating to the kindergarden up. It takes the locals 3 hours to walk up from Huaran to Canchacancha, 9km and about 1500m up the mountain, right under the glacier. It took me and Erlinda 4 and a half...really, I'm quite proud of myself ;)
Erlinda works in the restaurant in Ollanta and manages the food projects with the communities and it was great to spend the couple days with her because our relationships developed and became much more positive than what it seemed initially.
Canchacancha...is like going back in time 1000 years, or 500 or 200 in the countryside anywhere in Europe--I don't think things ever changed much until the last century and a half.
Stone houes with wood and straw roofs and dirt floors. Only one room, in the house where I stayed they cooked on the right and slept on the left. They sit near the fire at night, but as it is so high there is very little firewood so the fire is made with sheep and llama dung and a few pieces of wood. No electricity but one oil lamp made out of a plastic bottle. No chimney so the entire roof is black with smoke and we breathed lots of smoke all evening and night (for the joy of the friend who let me borrow a sleeping bag and had recommended not to get it smokey...). One wash basin outside each house, cuys, a cat and a dog inside the house. Everybody works in the fields growing potatoes, and I am being literal when I say ALL they eat is potatoes: for breakfast, lunch and dinner. One of the ways to cook them is digging a hole in the ground and burning something in it so the earth gets really hot, then put the potatoes in and cover it up in earth for about 15 minutes. The potatoes are ready. In the valley they use hot stones and cook potatoes the same way. 10 of us spent the night in Justina's house, I slept on the floor on some sheep skins, wearing 5 layers of clothing, including a jaket, in a sleeping bag and with woolen blankets on top, and I was just fine.
(Unfortunately I can't upload pictures right now because my camera is out of battery, but I will soon.)
Yesterday morning we went to the community meeting and even though my Quechua is improving 'cos now I can say pot, man, woman, cat, eye, corn cob and a few other important things...I couldn't understand a word of what was being said. Then I read Living Heart's introductory letter and no one could understand me. Thankfully Erlinda and Justina were there to translate.
After the meeting and after eating some more potatoes Erlinad and I decided to run down the mountain to get back quickly...and we ran for 2 hours down the mountain. Is it surprising I'm sore today, considering there were no horses to carry the stuff on the way down so I was also carrying a sleeping bag and mat? (I'm in Cusco now 'cos I came to pick up Laura, a volunteer, leaving Ollanta at 5 am--I'm making a habit of getting up at 4:30 apparently!--and we got fully body massages today :) ).

Canchacancha is probably the most shocking place I've seen in Peru, but I want to point out something I was talking about with a Canadian volunteer last night: Canchacancha may be poor, it may be rural, but it is by no means remote or isolated. No community in the Sacred Valley or in the highlands is remote, they are all relatively close to very important tourist destinations, they all see tourists (in Canchacancha almost daily, and no one has ever thought of charging them to camp or to sell them trout and potatoes, or wood to make a campfire...), and they are all relatively well-aware of the world outside their community. Remote is the jungle, where you have to take a bus from Cusco for 10 hours and then a boat for 4 more, and then walk 2 more.

I am temporarily settled in a hostel in Ollantaytambo, the town has between 2000 and 2500 inhabitants, depending on where you draw the line. I am beginning to meet teh foreigners who live there and I am surprised to say I REALLY like it. The place is gorgeous, I really like the people I'm meeting, and what is most shocking is that I like living in such a small town (for now) because I like knowing the reality of it in a place where probably 9 out of 10 people are tourists passing by for a day or two.

Happiness, honestly :)

THIS is why I came to Peru. It seems obvious to say it now, or an easy explanation, but THIS is the destiny I must have been following. In only 2 weeks working for Living Heart I have regained all my enthusiasm, energy, faith in development work and in people in general.

If you came to visit me now I could show you all the Peru I love--for the first time I would be completely honest in telling you I love it. I could show you why the Sacred Valley is sacred, why one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen is the full moon rising between the mountains as you leave Ollantaytambo at night. I could show you the people in isolated rural communities: the enthusiasm in school children, the courage in women, the dignity in men, I could show you the generosity in so many tourists who walk into Hearts Cafe, and how I was welcomed by the people working there. I could show you the sun drawing a line parallel to the ground in the main square every afternoon at 5 in Ollanta, and the stone houses and and narrow streets. I could show you people who speak only Quechua and tell you the only complete sentence I know: Manan kanchu kolque (keeping in mind the spelling is completely invented, guess what it means? There is no money...).
(Of course, if you'd like, I could also show you the Peru I hate: the lies, the deceptions, people's very Latin way of thinking they're smart and can get around the rules/talk their way through, the constant attempts to rip off gringos no matter how obvious it is you're working for the local communities. Also: the music, and the way you risk your life every time you get on a means of trasportation--actually the constant dilemma between spending the double on a taxi who will drive like crazy risking your life but getting you to destination in a reasonable amount of time, or taking a safer bus but still drivven by someone who thinks overtaking behing bends or driving in the opposite lane ot avoid a hole is completely normal, saving money and wasting lots of time).

I am moving to Ollantaytambo tomorrow, the town is beautiful and I won't have to commute to get back to Urubamba at night. The place where I'll live is also nicer and it's supposedly livelier.
For the first time in months I am really happy, and for the first time since I arrived in Peru I love it and I think I might stay longer than originally planned.

Questions

It's official (because it's happened): I moved to Urubamba and am working for Sonia at Living Heart.

To be perfectly honest I don't know how I feel about any of this. Urubamba is small and not exactly lively. I live in a room with no furniture, no kitchen or cooking places, cold-ish shower...and it looks like 6 or 7 months of this might get quite lonely. I live with 2 Australian girls who are part of a group of 10 18-year-old gap-year students. Their organization seems to be ripping them off worse that Maricarmen's...and they are 18 and I can handle them only in small doses.

The work is interesting, there are lots of opportunities to set up new projects, coordinate with people who want to support us internationally, develop what is already set up, Sonia is very genuine and motivated...but I feel like I might have lost the enthusiasm that brought me to Peru to begin with, I'm demotivated and tired of being ripped off and lied to, partly disillusioned with development work, and partly I am coming to realise that this kind of life, so far away from my family and other points of reference, alianating in a way because I mostly meet people who are about to leave or people I can't relate to, well, this life might not be for me.

Maybe this experience is what I needed to realise it's not how I want to live my life, I am learning and growing and seeing and experiencing and thinking and changing and I will, in the end, probably hopefully maybe, come up with a conclusion about what I want and what I don't and where I want to be and what is important to me. And I am still asking myself the same question I was asking myself 4 months ago before leaving: why can't I be happy living a life like one of my best friends, who never moved from her neighbourhood, is married with two kids and gives me a sense of peace and stability every time I see her?

...now I'm going to Sonia's house to have roast chicken for lunch, and define how I'll be working.

Homage to Salman Rushdie

This is what Salman Rushdie says in his book "Shame":

"I, too, know something about this immigrant business [...]. And I have a theory that the resentments we mohajirs engender have something to do ith our conquest of the force of gravity. We have performed an act of which all men anciently dream, the thing for which they envy the birds; that is to say we have flown.
I am comparing gravity with belonging. Both phenomena observably exist [... b]ut neither is understood. We know the force of gravity, but not its origins; and to explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growth sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometime think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places. [...]
What is the best thing about migrant people and seceded nations? I think it is their hopefulness [...]. And what is the worst thing? It is the emptiness of one's luggage. I'm speaking of nvisible suitcases, not the physical, perhaps cardboard, variety containing a few meaning-drained mementoes: we have come unstuck from more than land. We have floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time. [...]
As for me: I, too, like all migrants, am a fantasist. I build imaginary countries and try to impose them on the ones that exist. I, too, face the problem of history: what to retain, what to dump, how to hold on to what memory insists on relinquishing, how to deal with change. And to come back to the 'roots' idea, I should say that I haven't managed to shake myself free of it completely. Sometimes I do see myself as a tree, even, rather grandly, as the ash Yggdrasil, the mythical world-tree of Norse legend."

So how to explain the sense of not-belonging to someone who's never experienced it?

Today I move into a new house in a new town: Urubamba and being ripped off by my landlady as a gringa charged 50% more than the proper price.

Living Heart

After a period in which it looked like I'd just made the greatest mistake in coming to Peru blindly, to work for an unknown organization, and I was questioning if I really wanted to do development work, really believed in any of it at all, when I thought I was just wasting time and money, and was thinking about moving back (to?)...now things are falling into place.

I bumped into a job with Living Heart (click to open website), an NGO run by an English woman, Sonia. She has a cafe (click to open website) in Ollantaytambo which is entirely non-profit and through which she finances nutrition, education, health and conservation projects. She seems very serious and professional and geniuinely dedicated, and the work looks a lot like the type of work I would have liked to do in the first place--except the project is a lot more solid as it doesn't depend on volunteers. I'd gone to talk to Sonia to see if she could receive volunteers from the Nick (the English organization who had originally sent Cristina from Bolivia to see Comunidades Unidas' project). When I told Nick I quit the job, he offered me to work for him and find another organization who could receive volunteers. So I talked to Sonia about this and she offered me to work for her as well, coordinating her projects and working in the cafe one or 2 days a week (which is gonna be really cool 'cos she has the best--western--food and coffee I've had in Peru, and lots of interesting people walk in and I'll wait tables and talk to them about the project and about life)...

I'll have to move to Urubamba, the capital of the Sacred Valley district. It's about an hour from Cusco, but I found a room with no kitchen and not-really-hot water, with 2 Australian girls who are teaching English and seem to know other foreigners in Urubamba (which is of course indispensable for survival :) ).

Changing direction

It's been a long time since the last time I wrote, lots of things have happened and I don't know where to begin to tell the story, or even if it's a story worth telling. I travelled to Puno, Lake Titicaca, La Paz and Arequipa with Simone, I quit my job, I'm about to start a new one--or if all goes well two new ones.

It took me over a month to begin to realise that Maricarmen had set up the volunteer project as a business, and about another month to realise I wasn't gonna change her or the way she ran things. It took me 2 days since I got back to Cusco from Bolivia to move out of her house (she told me to leave via email while I was travelling, and delighted my travel with daily rude emails), find a flat I'll share with 4 other people, and find 2 other paid jobs in Cusco.

I left the job because Maricarmen kept lying to me about the budget and the expenses. The final straw was after Crisitna came from Bolivia to see our project, and her boss Nick in London decided they'd send us volunteers but they wanted to see monthly budget report, and Maricarmen said this organization is not giving us any gifts and there is no reason why we should show them anything. I could go on and on abuot how manipulative she is, how she told me she knows I'm having a relationship with Simone and she is just waiting for proof to fire me, bacause it is completely unprofessional and (this is the best part!) I should ask my mother if it's professional to have a relationship with someone you work with (my parents met at work)...also, the quality of my work is very low considering I have a masters degree (absolutely true: how could I accept to work for someone who refused to show me a project description or a budget report and never gave me a contract). And here comes my favourite part...I came here to teach and not to learn, with the typical superiority of Europeans, while if she went to Europe she'd know how to work because she's travelled there, but she knows she'd be looked down upon like all Latinos in Europe (DEJA VU!!! I think I've heard something like that before!).