Nunca Falta

1 August, Saturday

Sometimes in the mornings, I feel as though we might be sloths. By the time we have finally peeled ourselves from the sheets, the potatoes are already being boiled,the quaker is being heated, and our family is almost always wide awake. Except Ariana who usually hides under her covers asleep until later. Around 9am, Edwin arrives at the door from his security administration job. At night, the family eats dinner together with the television murmuring in the corner. Afterwards, Edwin has to leave for work and the family entertains his two year old daughter. When Adam is around, she plays with her fingernails and refuses to look him in the eyes or even talk. Otherwise, she is very vocal. Mostly to whine or tell people to get her things. Edwin is supposed to go to teach Karate at the casita around 9am, and we are supposed to go with him so we can be on our way to being black belts. Better to start now since it takes a minimum off 4.5 years to achieve it.

This morning we tried a drink of ground, toasted corn (maize tostado molido). It is totally delicious so we down about three cups each. Que rico, as our abuelita might say. In addition, we down the avocados from the Velarde astoHuawáu family with some bread. Since we are playing the class mostly by ear, depending on what the kids want to do, we are setting up our worksheets day by day. We have a bare skeleton of what we are going to do with fairly detailed assignments, but for the most part we are trying to play off their interests. So this means a lot of going into town to print and make copies for our class.

We were invited to lunch at the Velarde astoHuawáu at noon, so we rush back from La Tinguiña (largest town nearby complete with Internet Cafes and lots of cars). Lunch talk varies. We go from a miracle working child from the mountains, nearby dormant volcanoes, ancient tunnels that go from here to Pisco, and the typical farm work that goes on here. Apparently there is harvest on Monday and Tuesday (combined work of machine and man, sweeping over the fields to gather up the fruits of many months labor). We may attend depending on our schedule. More than anything, we just want to make sure that we aren't taking work from anyone.

We have to go back to Ica to make a final worksheet, find replacement batteries for our students, and hoard some oranges for back home. Tranquilo. The travel back forth will eventually add up so it might be a good idea to start planning out some worksheets for massive paper-sucking progress.

Thirty minutes before our class, we hustle over to Rocío's house to retrieve the television. There's only one outlet in our meeting place so we have to sacrifice light for being able to preview the videos. We set up some office hours, let the kids know that they can always stop by the house to get replacement batteries or jus talk, and inquire about good dates for the final showing of their final film. Then, the juicy part. We show their clips!! It is a very exciting moment to get to know their different styles. Some of them talked with the camera while others strategically set up to capture their daily transaction to purchase bread. More than anything, we got movies of the animals that they share their lives with. Dogs, chickens, canaries, cats, parrots, stuffed rabbits, and even guinea pigs. Some interesting footage arose from when a girl is inside a fairly nice house, says that now we'll go into the living room, and then opens the door. Her living room is no longer there because it collapsed in the earthquake, but there are still a few old sofas that are turned upside, exposed to the open air above. The videos are promising, but we'll see how they do with something more restrained.

Back at home, we encounter Juan who has just come back from fumigated the fields. Señor Lopez has still not returned from the land in Cañete that their daughter is trying to sell. We heat up some soup, rice, chicken, and fish for dinner and gather around the table to set our teeth in yet some more delicious food.

Tomorrow, we are teaching how to story board. Tonight, we have many things to accomplish before we sleep. In the car on the way back from Ica, we drove around the Viña Tacana. The sun was starting to sink behind the mountains, delineating the part where the sky meets the earth. The light made all the things on the ground, near the tires of our cab, seem sharp. Not close to everything, but definitely parts, of the project were illuminated in this moment. Not legible or tangible things, but a better sense surrounding our final product.



31 July, Friday

This morning was particularly cold, with clouds over the sun and frigid air permeating all cracks in any corner. Last night, we passed out early so our plans for today are to give the finishing touches to our curriculum. Adam helps out with breakfast while Brooke cleans up the room. The house has a main concrete floor that extends from the living room and down the hallways, but each individual room is connected straight to the earth. We tenderly call the hole in our ceiling the skylight. Thankfully, it is covered with plastic so that the morning mist doesn’t blanket us as we sleep. How much closer can you be to the free and open air while still sleeping under hand woven covers encompassed by four adobe walls? Our room is always a shelter from the afternoon heat, where the dirt remains cool on our feet. For this, we are thankful.

Marcela jokes that we should start to call her “abuelita” (little grandma) at breakfast where the garlic, onions, and tomatoes soak through our sandwiches. Quaker tops it all off, and our hands are warmed by our mugs by the time we leave breakfast. Between learning how to prepare papas rellena and preparing for our class at 4pm, we were booked. Papas rellenas are very time consuming because it involves boiling, peeling, mashing, rehashing, and then making little balls of mashed potatoes filled with spicy meat filling. Then the balls get dipped in egg and fried up so that they stick together. Of course, we recorded the entire process so that we could create a short film of our host family cooking. Eggs. Peppers. Potatoes. And at the very end, a shot of the finished meal with some commentary by Miss Brooke. “How delicious!” When we premiered it during class, it elicited many smiles. Ariana’s short appearance with her giggle and huge eyes caused the entire room to fall into a sigh of “que linda.” Glad it was a hit.

We dreamt a syllabus that highlighted objectives of our course, expectations from our students, and our proposed schedule and themes. Meanwhile, Adam blogged what might have been the longest continuous blogging session of our time here. It was well deserved considering the topic was our host family. Then, we ate papas rellenas.

Push. Push. Push. Pumping the bicycle to its every last drop up and over gravel roads and dirt speedbumps. Pirata the dog high tailing close behind, trying to keep up with the steady pace towards the printer in town. Since our rural community isn’t much up on its technology (i.e. internet and copy machines etc), we have to go into La Tinguiña to get our worksheets multiplied. Meanwhile, Brooke tranquilly edits the example video. Testing out different paces and angles. iMovie is painfully slow, but it’s the only things we’ve got.

During class, we have a total of ten people. We happen to also have ten flip cameras. Our age group is everything from 12 to 28, with a mix of 7 girls and 3 boys. The class almost lasts an hour, full of introductions, explanations, and questions. We’ve already distributed the cameras and homework for next time. Surprisingly smooth sailing. It seems like only the weekends will work for this group so we are going to look more into seeing how we can make Santa Rosa work into the equation. Pirata and a niña get dangerously close to our camera that is taping the reunion. Our new tripod is holding up well. In fact, it’s holding up the camera mostly.

Onto more serious things. Volleyball. Like, let’s bet on the game sort of volleyball. Like, let’s play so hard we have to sit out sort of volleyball. So we face-off against one another in what might have been the most intense game of my life. Given, I’ve played volleyball about.. 3 times, but still. When we arrived, Team 1 was up by two games in a 3 out of 5 competition. Brooke joined Team 1 who promptly then lost two games in a row. So we had our tie breaking moment, teeth-gritting, finger-crossing, hair-pulling, edge of your seat game. It ended up being 14-14 (trying to get to fifteen). Just as I thought we had lost, something strange and totally normal in volleyball happened. I wish I knew the rules, but apparently the other team celebrated preemptively. Oh, and then Team 1 won.

So then we wined, dined, and winded down.

30 July, Thursday

At 6am, the landscape is lit and there is Luz. The cold is strong, and she is waiting. We are expecting to go out with her to find the Presidenta of Vaso de Leche (a government subsidized program that aims to give milk to poor families with children). Today's mission: find the youthful. Gloria and Luz promise to lead us around today, instead bumbling around blindly by ourselves. However, we find out that this morning the milk was distributed extra early. Like 4am early. So that option is out; instead, we traipse along the streets with her to post around the three pueblitos. Strategically.

Basically, the rest of the day then consisted of translating curriculum, continuing to pasar la voz, learning how to cook guiso de coliflor, eating, eating, eating, and lunch.

Most important of our day was our late night reunion with Gloria and Luz where we knocked on doors, ceaselessly conversing and persuading young people to come to our info session tomorrow at four.

Now for logistics.


PS. Our new mascot, Pirata (an ironically friendly pit bull bulldog mix) went running with us this morning and accompanied us on all of our visits. Pirate cause he has a patch on his eye. Patch of dark hair, that is. Not a real one. Unfortunately. That'd be cool. Demonstrated here..

Good night.

29 July, Wednesday

Some of us don’t know the details of the early morning sunrise because they stayed in bed. Others of us crouched over a steaming hot, crackling pan of sweet potatoes on a makeshift stove. Both are sweet destinies. It’s a wood powered makeshift stove that our family uses to cook up oversized portions of food. It consists of a couple of bricks with rebar strategically placed atop, where the pots and pans sit. Underneath, the fire is roaring.

9am appointment with the Gloria Alejo-Escobar family to learn how to cook a typical Peruvian lunch time favorite: Tallarin Rojo con Papas a la Huancaina. Basically spaghetti with red sauce, potatoes reclining on some lettuce drizzled with delicious nacho cheese stuff. We arrive a little late because we end up knee-dip in discussion with our host family, but Gloria tells us that we shouldn’t worry since they are just starting to eat breakfast. She says 10 minutes max, so we go walking to pass time. From morning jogs, portions of the town are already well marked on GPS. There’s a large bodega (wine making place) owned by a large company on a large plot of land near by that seems interesting. To get there, all you need to do is follow the large adobe circumference of a wall. The towering wall has fallen in some areas, but many parts of it are topped off with bits and pieces of broken glass bottles to deter intruders. Where there are piles of adobe instead of wall, the holes have been covered up with barbed wire. In addition to that, there are towers filled with slow moving security guards, situated on the outskirts of the sprawling grape kingdom.

Why such tight barriers? The grape fields were bought from local farmers by a large company who then consolidated all the land for big business. Now the farmers who used to own the land toil as hired-hands. There’s a lot to be said on this topic. Poor farmers? Big bad business? Progress? More efficiency?

So, on an economic level this sort of looks like agricultural industrialization straight out an international development text book. Insert technology or big business, form two sectors. Now there’s a sustenance sector and there’s the capital sector. What used to be individuals on farms turns into a more efficient machine so that all the surplus labor gets sent to the cities. This much is typical. On a more microscopic level, you start to consider the human rights aspect of the wage. The wages are not as high as they could be compared to the wages of the head boss. Can they be making more money in a city? And if they can, why don’t they move there? Maybe it’s the comfort of the countryside, the inertia needed to get away, or something more ingrained… Then you start to think about progress, efficiency, and creative destruction. Is this change better for a larger group of people than just the farmers? Would these questions make more sense of the crop was for food and not for making wines? Finally, if efficiency is at stake, then there are sure to be fertilizers and irrigation involved which makes you sort of think about the environmental impact of homogenized crops. Capitalist take over? The ruin of a small, rural area? These are all surface thoughts though, and we’ve yet to really think the moral implications through.

Needless to say, we returned quite late to Gloria’s house. Brooke got to learn how to cook, scuttling about while trying to discern orders being joyfully shouted in Spanish. “Pelar! Pelar!” Uhhhh. Peel this potato? ¡Sí sí! Ingredients galore while Alex and Adam chatted away with some quality family who was visiting from Lima. The music blasted through the house, wafting along with the smells from stove tops. The ladies joked about how they wanted to have tall, blonde sons like them American boys. It was quite useful to have six-foot-flat Adam for setting up shade shelters to eat underneath. Otherwise, it would just be grandma with a large stick trying to reach up into the rafters to balance the shade. Alex looks overwhelmed by his mountain-sized plate. Before heading out to Lima later today, he’s gotta get his fair fill of home-made Peruvian cooking. And we chat and chat and chat. Even in gossip, we hardly ever heard an ill-word on any one in the neighborhood. The optimism and resilience of the community here is almost tangible.

Afterwards, we say good bye to Alex who is heading North for the waves to take him away. I wish that we could all be California giiiiirls, a la Beach Boys style. Gracías por todo, Alejandro y Lindsay! Oh yeah, before leaving, Alex plays with the guinea pigs. They’re not quite big enough to be eaten yet, but we’re promised Sunday cuy. Woah.

We have a short meeting with the community to do some final fact-checking. What age group is going to be best? What time will our introduction meeting be? Gloria, Luz, Alison, and Pamela all give us a consultation in their area of expertise: the pueblito. Immediately after, we have to run off to dinner which our host mom made for us: beans, rice, and chicken. It is exceptionally delicious, and we are jealous of Edwin and Jose for getting to eat like this everyday. So we tell them how lucky they are, but instead of saying “oh yes, we know,” they just giggle as men oftentimes giggle. This is how we discovered that Edwin had actually made dinner tonight. In fact, everyone in the family cooks. Apparently, most Peruvians start to hang on their mother’s skirts in the kitchen by age 12. From there, they learn all the invaluable secrets of cooking trade that makes us grovel and salivate.

After a few jokes and trying to soften up Adriana (age 2), we retire to the cave to complete our daily tasks. Which, pleasantly includes drawing posters to post around the community. Our resident artist does that, of course. And he’s darn good at it.

28 July, Tuesday

After drawing some church exteriors in Ica, whilst waiting for Alex R. to arrive on the scene, we return to our new humble abode by bike. We get comfortable, chat with the family (which seems to grow larger every time we turn around. There are daughters from Lima, visitors, etc), and then do the momentous task of LAUNDRY.

More food. More chatting with families, but this time next door. And all topped off by walking around to know the place. The end.

27 July, Monday

We were adopted today. Official integrantes of the familia Lopez.

But that was later in the day.

This morning we had arranged to come over in the afternoon. Till then we tried our best to make good use of our time in San Clemente. Sara is/was/will forever be precisely that. She is the presidenta of the Cruz Roja/Arquitectos de la Emergencia Vivienda construction project in Santa Rosa.

She is very sad that we have decided to use Nueva Esperanza as our main site for work, and we discuss the possibilities of doing work in both towns. We make it clear that the only way this could have a chance of working is if there exist at least a couple very ambitious and responsible people within the community who have the time to basically run the class in Santa Rosa and would actually be coming to see our first couple classes in Nueva Esperanza to see how they might start something in Santa Rosa, and we would come by when we could to help out with the class.

Though this idea seems interesting to us off the bat, it intuitively seems to be very difficult simply because of real life. It would be interesting to have people from multiple communities working together on the project together and having the classes taught as much as possible by locals, but the whole transport thing back and forth and lack of direct accountability established if we were to leave cameras behind in both places, etc seems a bit overwhelming. Not to mention, we hope to spend some time getting to know the community we are staying in and that is much more difficult to do if you are bouncing back and forth with a 1.5 hour commute one way.

But its possible, and two 20 year old girls show us around a bit. They claim to be very willing to make the project work and be those interested teachers. That makes solid ruling-out of the two community option for the time being so we agree to play it by ear a little bit.

Sara seems to be happier – I hope we are not giving them false hopes because we would really prefer to not leave enemies behind even if it is due to such a small miscommunication.

After this we packed all our stuff up and headed for the bus pick-up spot. Time to meet our family in Manco Cápac, a caserío of La Tinguiña, a suburb of Ica. Manco Cápac is one of three caseríos in which we will be working. Three clusters of homes very close to each other that they are seeminlgy the same pueblo. Kinda intriguing how that separation has developed rather than a single community, maybe we can learn more about that over the span of the next month.

Our new place is approximately 30 mins by car outside of Ica. We veer off the paved road to follow some dirt paths through vast farmlands full of at least corn, grapes, potatoes, and sweet yams. Gloria, a serious leader from the same caserío escorts us to our new home that is placed conveiently near where we will be holding our classes – La Casa de Las Sonrisas, “the house of smiles” which is a multipurpose community gathering center.

Outside of our new house we find Juan. He is feeding the dogs with what looks like the scraps from lunch preparation. He is also tossing out the dishwater into the dry channel outside their front door. This channel is a man-reinforced, dry riverbed called la Achirana. Juan greets us warmly. “Mamá, ven! Ya vinieron los nuevos integrantes de la familia!” (Mama, come! The new family members are here!)

Mama is named Marcela and she came from the sierra highlands of Huancavélica. They have lived in their current location for around 50 years. Juan is 39. Marcela speaks spanish with a cadence of a native Quechua speaker – a native tongue.

They immediately shoo us iinto the house and drop everything to help us get our stuff into the nice room they have set up for us. The room has a dirt floor and adobe walls painted white. Two large beds are nicely made up, and even yet the room has space for a small desk, two chairs, and room to set our things down.

The walls are covered in homemade art – a classic pencil sketch of fruit and pot, a roaring robot lion with an oversized 4-pack, a landscape painted scene with really nice evergreen trees, a butcher advertisement, a ad for a workshop on the Applied Sciences of Sport, an ad for a workshop on Metaphysical Philosophy, Two 8.5 x 11 sheets with hand copied bible verses, a calendar from the Alps, a yellow plastic clock that is either 1 hour fast or 23 hours slow, a hand-drawn DragonBall Z character with bright yellow hair and tattoos, and a Good Year 2000 calendar rocking a blue Lamborghini. Someone´s an artist around here.

After getting settled in they bring out a bowl of dried plums. Thirty minutes later into the converstation and a son-in-law arrives with a hat, glasses, little girl, and pecans. Edwin se llama. His daughter of 2 years is named Ariana. She is very shy and serious around strangers. Maricela took the bag of pecans into the kitchen. 30 seconds later a bowl of pecans was in front of us. Along with bananas.

The rest of the day is going to be a matter of us simply being around to get to know our new family. Hang out with them. Chill. Help out wherever we can. Play with the kids. (1 of Juan´s 8 siblings lives nearby and showed up with his wife and two boys: Osmar (4) and Jairen (2)). Adam pulls out a notebook to attempt a sketch of a particularly cracked portion of the adobe walls, and the kids are fascinated. Getting the hint, we pull out some pens, some markers and some sketch notebooks and hand them to the kids. Jairen prefers to eat and run around – preferring to explore his own world. Osmar and Ariana on the other hand immediately begin to cover the pages with pictures. Osmar draws a niña and colors her purple. Next he tries his hand at drawing a page full of different animals. Then he tries to copy the character on the cover of a book sitting on the table. He really likes to draw heads and torsos with legs originating from awkward places. On each page he signs his name in large cursive letters. Ariana prefers the scribble-on-each-page-for-as-many-pages-as-possible technique.

Their house is one of the very few homes made of adobe that stayed in tact through the earthquake. Without prompting on our part, they began to describe their experience with the earthquake and how each of them had reacted. Through the collaborative recounting of the event we received a very good idea for the different personalities in the family. Juan is a very religious evangelical as of 7 years ago after a radical conversion. Juan believes God miraculously saved the house from falling onto his family who was inside a the time. The rest of the family is Catholic. The father did very well for the family for sometime working on their farm. Then the big businesses created a market for agriculture that smaller farmers could no longer compete with. The farm was sold, and he slowly wasted the money trying to find something to soothe his loss of profession. He would come home drunk and beat Marcela while she was pregnant.

After years of this, the older siblings decided Marcela should separate from him. Señor Lopez as the family calls him still has a bed and a small room in the back where he sleeps. In fact, he walks in later that night. He has white hair, one droopy eye, two droopy shoulders and a loud voice. He also welcomes us very warmly to his home, the home he designed. He believes the home lasted the earthquake because he watched the construction workers carefully to ensure that the job was well done. He also thinks God kept the house in tact so that he could receive us as visitors in his home.

What a great family. After helping clean up after a dinner of small brown beans, rice and fried fish we head off to bed with our heads spinning; intoxicated with warm conversation, children sounds, and homecooked food. We offer to help with breakfast prep the next morning and they seem to be more than pleased to open us up to their daily activities. 6 am they start the fire and quaker for breakfast and by 6:30 they will start frying the sweet yams. We are very glad that our family cooks on an open fire (they also have a gas stove they use) and makes quaker in the mornings. And they raise cuyes (guinea pigs), and ducks, for themselves and to sell. Before the large dairy farmers moved in they had 8 cows, 48 goats, and a few pigs. They now use that pen space for a home garden with vegetables and the cuy-fattening alfalfa. Below is a picture of our soon to be DINNER!!