Where are Ron and Ellen?
Latin America, 10 November 2008 - 3 March 2009
Ron and Ellen (and llama) at Machu Picchu, Peru, December 2008
Tipon, Moray and Moras, Peru, December 2008 (plus Steven and Laurie's Sipascancha frustrations)
To see photos from the ruins at Tipon and from C'orao/Purikuq, click on the thumbnail at the left.
Inca ruins, Sipascancha frustrations
To see photos from ruins at Moray and salt pools at Moras, click on the thumbnail at the left.
7 December 2008
Cusco, PeruDear Family and Friends,
Last Wednesday night we had dinner at Laurie and Steven's and listened to them debrief and spout their frustrations over the problems in Sipascancha (see Steven´s message to his list, quoted below -- those who already get his messages can ignore). We are sure many of their problems are similar to those of other individuals and groups working in places where change comes slowly and with difficulty, which is one reason why some projects end up being one shot deals, without the kind of follow-though and learning from mistakes that Laurie and Steven are trying to apply. Despite their feeling that the dismantling of stoves means they were unsuccessful, they have realized that even if people aren't using the stoves, they are still using the chimneys and seem to have incorporated the idea that chimneys are valuable, and so that in itself is a positive step forward.
Thursday we spent quite a while wandering around Cusco, from the narrow streets in the San Blas area, with its concentration of artists and galleries and shops, to the large San Pedro market, where we bought some sugar (for our tea made with our little heating coil) and some yummy local cheese. Thursday night we went to dinner with Steven and Laurie at the home of their friend Rosanna, who runs the language school where Steven studied Spanish in 2007 and with whom Laurie had studied when she first came to Cusco. Rosanna always has several home-stay language students staying at her house (a German woman and a guy from Wyoming who is in the US Air Force), as well as her own two kids, a girl about 12 and a boy who will be taking his university entrance exams next week. Two of Rosanna's friends also joined us, and the conversation was a wild and lively mix of topics in Spanish and English. The food, by the way, was wonderful. Rosanna is starting a tourist destination in the jungle in Manu, with cabins for people to stay and a farm growing various fruits and vegetables, and had just gotten back from over a week there organizing the business. She had brought back a hunk of palm heart that was about a meter long, and, after peeling off the outer layer of a small section, chopped the edible heart into threads and used them to make a chicken and heart of palm salad. That, along with fresh pineapple sices, fried yucca root, and mushrooms in gravy made for a fabulous meal.
Friday afternoon we took an assortment of taxi, combi, and small bus to get to ruins of Tipon, about 30 km from Cusco. It was 4 km up (and up here means seriously up) from the main road on a bumpy dirt road. Steven tells us that it was a summer palace for Inca nobility. It has an extensive series of channels that make waterfalls from one terrace level to another. And, of course, the wonderful views over the entire narrow valley below and the mountain range on the other side.
Yesterday Steven and Laurie came for breakfast at our hotel and then we all set out for a day trip. We went first to C'orao, about 25 minutes by bus from Cusco, where the weaving collective from the villages of Sipascancha, Soncco, and C'orao has a market, and where the first stoves from 2007 were built. We purchased some beautifully woven items (being careful to buy something from each of the three villages). Maria Fernanda (called MaFre), the daughter of one of the four C'orao families with a stove, was working there, and she took us through the village to meet her father, who was working with a number of other men digging ditches (by hand) to lay sewer lines. He said everyone in C'orao was using and happy with their stoves, which Laurie and Steven were happy to hear. They arranged to go back next Sunday morning to do the repeat medical testing on the families there.
We then caught a series of buses to Urubamba, where we had lunch. Urubamba is in a river valley about 900 meters lower than Cusco, so is much warmer, with lush vegetation. Laurie and Steven spent a lovely warm afternoon reading in the main plaza while Ron and I went via taxi to two sites outside of Urubamba. The first, Moray, is a huge series of concentric circular terraces going down perhaps 1500 meters. It was used as an agricultural experimentatal station, with different kinds of plants on different levels, since there can be several degrees difference in temperature between terraces, with it much warmer at the bottom than at the top. Our other stop was at the salt terraces of Maras, where a natural salt spring is diverted into hundreds of terraced pools down the face of the mountain, and salt is produced by evaporation. While these two places were unique and fascinating, we thought the most spectacular part of the trip was the scenery. Urubamba, in the river valley, is at 2875 meters, and then you climb up onto a huge high slightly rolling plain (Moray is at 3575 meters) that is farm and grazing land. You feel like you must be at the absolute top of the world -- until you look up at the jagged snow-covered mountains towering even higher on the other side of the valley. Our taxi driver returned us to the main plaza at Urubamba, where we met Laurie and Steven. We returned to Cusco by bus, and finished the day with a huge dinner of broasted chicken (cooked on a spit over an open fire in something that looks like a gigantic pizza oven) and fried potatoes, what seems to be the quintessential Peruvian meal.
Love to all,
Ellen and Ron
Steven´s comments on their time and frustrations in Sipascancha:Well, I fear I may fall victim to melodrama here. That was probably the hardest three days we have spent in Sipascancha. We feel like we are still processing some of the things that happened.
As before, we got up at 4:30 and took a taxi to the Puputi station. From there, we met Nino and Adela (with their new baby on Adela´s back) and we rode the bus to Pisac. There, we waited for at least half an hour, probably more, while the teachers all ate breakfast. We got sweet tamales in the street and realized that there was no good reason to have gotten up so early. After breakfast, we all crammed into a combi (around 25 people, no room to move) and rode the 2 hours up to Sipas.
Once we got there we met up with Alberto, who showed us the room we could stay in. We looked at the clinic and it was trashed, filthy, and depressing. Hardly anybody had been in there since we had left 18 months ago. Laurie's signs and learning aids were still on the walls, dusty and neglected. We decided to stay in Alberto's room. It was on the second floor, up a wood ladder with a tiny balcony made of rough boards, but it had a wood floor, plastic over the windows, and a good roof. Alberto's wife Ricardina made us a traditional lunch with cuy, potatoes, and an egg. Oh boy, here we go again. Every single middle class person and/or doctor in Cusco says "whatever you do, DON¨T EAT THE FOOD UP THERE." But we watched Ricardina cook it and she made sure everything was well done. Little Cynthia, their youngest daughter and one of Laurie´s god-children, watched us with a big smile.
During lunch we discovered that Ricardina was 8 months pregnant (she's 39). They told us that the district doesn't have money for a doctor to visit the outlying communities anymore, so every Sunday she has to walk three hours each way to the clinic for a checkup. A week before her due date, they have to take a taxi (50 soles, a month's income more or less) to the clinic. She has to stay there until she gives birth, supply her own food, and have her own caregivers because there are no nurses. This is all part of the government's plan to force the campesinos to have national ID numbers. If for some (any) reason they don’t make it to the clinic before she gives birth, there is a 200 sole fine (4 months income). Then they have to pay an additional 250 soles for the ID number (5 months... oh, you get the idea). Completely fucked up.
After lunch (brunch?) the burnout hit and I lay down for a while. Alberto furiously nailed up more supports for the ladder and balcony. When he finally showed us the finished room, Cynthia was practically bursting with pride.
Once I got back up, I went over to the teachers' offices and started to go through our interview sheets. The names are so goddamn confusing. Not only is the spelling hard to standardize, every person has a different combination of names (the kids take one name each from the parents, but whether it's the middle or last name can vary). I wasn't really ready for such a mindbending challenge and got totally pissed off and frustrated, which was not the best thing to do at the time. Laurie gave up and left me alone and I finally came up with a list of all the kids we had interviewed previously so that Adela could pull them out of school the next day. After I had finished that, Laurie showed up with Cristobal (from the neighboring village of Soncco, he was our liason there). He had some bad news ("I don’t want to lie," he said). All of the metal rockets had broken after about 8 months of use. The people there had tried to replace them with clay but they weren’t working as well because the dimensions varied.
We spent the rest of the afternoon in various stages of despair, anger, and attempting to reassure one another that our project wasn't a total failure. Finally we crashed, miserable, in our tiny bed. I was relieved to discover that it wasn't quite as freezing cold at night, I even took a layer off.
The next morning we gathered up our tattered spirits and went to the office. Adela started bringing in kids and we started to do the repeat interviews. By lunchtime we had done 15 kids, raising our spirits considerably. As far as improvements, well... the blood oxygen levels were uniformly lower, but that may be because we're using a different pulse oxymeter to test them. The lung expiration volumes seemed higher, which is what we were really looking for. So that is promising.
After a quick lunch we made our way over to the school building complex, to watch the videos that North Branch School had made for the exchange program. We had a brief moment of total fear when the first disc failed to work in front of a 100-kid audience, but thankfully the second one worked fine. We had two showings, one for the older kids and one for the younger kids. They were greatly amused by the American kids' stumbling attempts at basic Spanish.
After a bit of research, the teachers figured out that the other disc was in a Windows Media format (WHY???) and so they hooked up a computer and a video projector for the second feature. Once again it was older kids first, younger kids second, and this time the sound was really low so Laurie and I did a lot of explanation en Español. After the younger kids watched it, the teachers put in more huaynos [music] videos like what we had seen in the Quiquihana market. It was interesting at first, with lots of different places in Peru as stages for the videos, but after 20 minutes or so we were wondering what the point was. The kids started getting restless and talkative and the teachers started whacking them with a bamboo stick (hmm, guess we won't tell North Branch about that). After half an hour we bailed, saying that Adela had made us lunch and not wanting to get the kids into more trouble.
The rest of the afternoon is a blur, I think we spent it with the teachers. Nino came back from Soncco (where he teaches) around 4:30 and we got geared up to visit some houses. It was beyond grim. Everything was just as dirty and hopeless as we remembered. None of the houses we visited had kept their word. Not only had most of them not paid, ALL of them had taken the stoves apart and kept only the chimneys. Basically, they didn’t want to learn a new method of preparing the wood (in smaller pieces) and decided to go back to the old lazy method of stuffing whole pieces of brush into a burning fire. The rockets were nowhere to be seen, except in one house where it was sitting neglected in a corner. When we asked if we could have it back, the woman said oh no, we’re saving it for our second house (which I find doubtful). In one house, it was the father's birthday and he and a friend were sitting there almost too drunk to talk. We did a couple of followup interviews. The mother, before she put her hand in the pulse oxymeter, said that she wanted to wash her hands, so she rinsed them off in a pail of BLACK water (they have a faucet of semi-clean chlorinated water right outside their house, for fuck's sake). Nobody had a good answer for why they had dismantled the stoves except for saying that it was slower to cook (because they weren’t preparing the wood properly and feeding the rocket properly, of course). The third or fourth house we went to had a kid who was showing us his laptop (Linux system, 256 MB memory) while the house was filled with smoke. When we went to the president's house, we saw a huge television antenna and satellite dish with the donor's name on it. Why the donor thought shitty Peruvian corporate TV would be a good thing to give people who don't have clean water or much of anything else, I have no fucking idea.
We walked back to the teachers' office in the gathering rain, our spirits pretty much crushed. We went to bed and half-slept through the most intense rain I have ever experienced, seven solid hours of Midwest thunderstorm level gushing sheets. After the rain let up the wind kicked in, literally howling like a banshee. We were very grateful to Alberto when we made it through the night dry and warm.
The next morning was market day. We had breakfast with the teachers (Adela and Elwira) and asked them about the whole pregnancy thing. They told us that EIGHTY PERCENT of the women in the village were pregnant, due to the federal welfare program my mom talked about in the last update. It is called Juntos, "Together." The families receive 100 soles a month for every child they have under nine. It doesn't take much intelligence to realize that this is a really bad idea. Adela told us that the government is only applying the program in the poor highland areas like Sipascancha, not in places like her jungle home "where the people work hard and demand more." She said it was to keep them lazy and poor. Elwira agreed. It certainly gave us more insight into why Alberto and Ricardina are having another kid after seven years. While in the office, we noticed a huge chest freezer just sitting there with the same donor's name on it. Of course, since the village has no reliable electricity, a freezer is useless. Why would the donor do this? Oh yeah, so that his NGO can dump a bunch of unwanted secondhand stuff into the third world, get their tax credits, keep all their people on payroll, and walk away patting themselves on the back. Put up the funding for a goddamn doctor instead of TV reception and a useless hunk of metal.
During the market Pedro and Cristobal kept dragging people in for followup interviews. By the time we left in Isidro's truck we had completed 23, slightly ahead of our projections. Not a single one of them were using the rockets. Back home in Cusco, we slept all afternoon and made a spaghetti dinner for my folks as we told them our tales of woe. The next morning Laurie went to the clinic again and was diagnosed with giardia and a bacterial stomach thing. We learned that all fruits and vegetables have to be soaked in a bleach solution for ten minutes and then rinsed before doing anything else with them, an important piece of information we had somehow failed to learn previously. The tourist restaurants all do this (we learned later), so the problem probably came from food we bought at the market and "only" poured boiling water over.
Last night Pave came over for more discussion. Unexpectedly, a young man from Sipascancha who was studying in Cusco also came over with his sister and a friend. His name is Placido and he helped Laurie in the clinic five years ago, when he was twelve. We all sat around and talked about how frustrating Sipascancha was. Pave asked Placido straight up what he thought and without a pause he said it was because nobody there wanted to work. Laurie and I decided to use him as our translator in Usi, he is one of those guys like Pedro and Cristobal who bucks the trends and has a lot of potential. It was kind of amazing to see him and his sister all dressed up like modern Peruanos and to know where they came from. Inspiring, also.
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Last updated: 2 January 2009
