Where Are Steven and Laurie?
Peru, 17 November 2008 - 17 March 2009
Steven and Laurie in Peru, 2007
Cusco, Peru, 14 February 2009
14 February 2009
Afton, Virginia, USADear family and friends,
Updates from all three of the travelers today. After his 36-hour bus ride from Belem, Ron is in Brasilia, heading for visits with Brazilians he has met in his travels before returning home from Sao Paulo on 3 March. Steven and Laurie are coming down the home stretch with their project, organizing their final meetings and tying up loose ends before they leave Cusco on 3 March for Lima and leave Lima for home in Oregon on 5 March. Ron flies through Lima on his way home and has several hours there, but his plane out of Lima leaves at 12:20 pm and Laurie and Steven's plane from Cusco doesn't arrive in Lima until 1 pm -- too bad they will miss meeting each other!
Love to all,
Ellen
From Laurie's blog on 13 February 2009We continue on our mission of teaching families the use of their new stove and retention cooker. things are going well! we have such a system down, you would be proud! our latest families have been Betty and Erasmo, Juan Quispe, Geromima and Alejandro, and Lucila. Betty and Erasmo had quite a nice home, very organized and clean given they have dirt floors like all here. The stove lit beautifully and the teaching went smoothly. Juan Quispe was actually working and tomas has offered to do the teaching for us there. we will be visiting him to make sure all is well. Geronima and Alejandro and the parents of Timotea, Tomas's wife. that was an absolute pleasure to do! their home also was clean and organized and what was most striking about working with them was their response to our posters and discussion. ditto for lucila. there we gently suggested she clean up a bit outside. she sadly said the garbage was from her neighbors. one thing that deserves mentioning is tomas. (again!!) he has been simply invaluable. he understands all we are trying to include in our teaching and takes the time with us to be with each family and explain anything less than well understood in quechua. he is amazing and steve and i over and over thank god for our first impression of him. of note, as to the problem previously mentioned where the draft flew through the stove sideways, tomas corrected the problem by adding a damper at the back end of the stove where the chimney enters. (thank you for your input John!) voila! working perfectly now!
today we met someone from the centro de salud at corao and will be hopefully meeting one of the doctors on sunday to discuss our project. our experience both previously in sipascancha and soncco and now mandorani seems to mirror other's experiences of working in these communities. we got a vote again for keeping the projects small! sunday will nearly be our last day there! we'll be taking care of all the money end of things and teaching at least one more family. and on the 21st we hope to have all who have missed their testing to come and do it that day. notices are out.
on a nice note all is well with andres, as far as the stove issues go. he is simply in the middle and that's all. so we are letting him off the hook. we are looking for someone else to do the follow-up also and he is happy about that. he will build his stove. sadly we found out today mafre, his wonderful daughter, will need some type of corneal surgery on her right eye. we are encouraging them to find out how much this will cost as steve and i hope to help pay for it. she is far too young to suffer vision problems and we will do what we can. more on that when i talk more to andres.
so as i jot a few more notes here, i am uploading our latest photos. my health is steadily improving. the weather seems a bit less cold. we await carnavales where for some inexplicable reason locals douse everyone, including themselves with water. we haven't been hit yet! we are both excited about nearly being done, tying up loose ends and getting home. we spent the day in pisaq yesterday where we wandered around and enjoyed no less than yummy cheesecake at a cafe called ulrika's. (we met her one day when she picked us up hitchhiking from mandorani back to cusco!) we have had company a night or two for dinner which is always a pleasure. on monday tomas will come to our house where he will meet the folks from Choco to make the trip there and instruct them in the construction of the stove. and later in the week we will go to ollanta to give a stove to a curandero friend of ours, again with Tomas' help.
geez, i am just running at the "fingers" here. i will close for now and label the photos. enjoy and we love you all!
On 14 February Laurie adds this short note:In regards to a few more details here, today we ran into Nino at the used market steve writes about below. we'll be visiting him and adela to see what we can do to somehow continue the school exchange that both students in North Branch in Virginia (the school where steve's nephews go and where his mom is on the board) and in Sipascancha have so much enjoyed. we will see. i am hoping for the best. Nino mentioned they are headed to Quillabamba soon, where adela's family live. steve and i just may have an opportunity to visit also! we'll be done with our work, with a few extra days and it's practically like the jungle and a new experience for both of us. (and it's not too far!) otherwise in regards to Sipascancha (and Cuyo Grande) i have sent letters out to my god children's families and hope to bring home with me some weavings and artesania to sell on their behalf. we will see about that also! sending "mail" was by way of some young girls from Sipascancha manning the market at Purikuq, and by way of taxi to Cuyo Grande. certainly less dependable than US mail (i suppose.) As always "todo es posible pero nada es seguro..."
And, on 14 February Steven writes (with a subject line of "Three Families Left"):Friday we returned and went to Lucila's house. As Laurie noted, there was a lot of trash in the yard. When she asked Lucila about it Lucila said that it was her neighbors! Please note that these neighbors are the same problem family that I talked about before who had the kids without shoes and the separate kitchens that they would not share. A good example of how bad apples can impact the whole community. I was pretty pissed off and we decided to come back with empty bags and gloves, clean it all up, sort and separate, and give it back to the offending family with instructions to knock it the fuck off. As Laurie mentioned, Tomas has been very helpful and he agreed to take our notices of a follow-up meeting for health testing (Saturday the 21st) to some of the further-away houses. We checked in on the stove that had given us problems on Wednesday with the excessive draft, and Tomas had installed a damper in it which had solved the problem. We also talked to Andres and worked everything out with him, he is in the middle of the village politics but he will build a new stove when he has time. As we did the interviews, we discovered that MaFre (the older daughter) has some major problem with her cornea and needs an expensive operation, the diagnosis alone was 150 soles. We are going to help them out as much as we can.
Last night we were supposed to have dinner at Rosanna's. I failed to mention this story before, but back in late November or early December her business partner was robbed at gunpoint of $14,000 (!!!). He was taking it to pay a lot of people somewhere in the jungle where there are no banks, if you are wondering (like I was) why the hell he would carry that much around. Anyway, she needed to make a loan payment and borrowed $2K from us. We have had some problems getting her to pay it back, her not returning calls, etc. We were getting kind of worried (although she only owed us like $400 by this point) and so Laurie went to the school to talk to her. We learned that she had been taking care of two German students who had arrived at the school with Dengue Fever and malaria, respectively! Yikes! Also, she has set up an entirely new business which is inspired by our discussion about welfare and the Juntos program, she will be teaching single mothers how to teach English. We are going to see her new office on Monday. (Note from Laurie here: the program is called SecondChance.org and what really had originally inspired her was my tale of woe from years ago when a single mom trying to finish nursing school while on welfare. After our discussion about the similarities between Juntos and Welfare back then, (ie., the interest to keep people "down" rather than empower them) she took the idea and ran, as rosanna does. She has asked me to be the sort of madrina of this and on Monday we'll visit.)
Anyway, Rosanna got stuck in Urubamba last night and had to cancel dinner. On a whim, we decided to spend money and went to Cicciolina's, probably the best restaurant in town. We had one of the most unbelievable dinners I have had in years. We started with tapas -- an amazing lomo saltado skewer (beef sauteed with onions in a kind of soy-based sauce), hummus and grilled zucchini, a smoked trout and wild mushroom and red pepper thing on bread pieces, a dizzyingly delicious skewer of fried prawn with sweet potato and a wasabi sauce, and then their mouth-watering fried calamari with a hot/sweet sauce and more hummus on bread. We each had a red wine from Argentina called Trilogie, a blend. Then we got two more of the prawn skewers and an antipasto plate that was also exquisite. Dessert was an incredibly perfect little glass of espresso and Bailey's with a dollop of vanilla ice cream on top. Just a little side note there for the foodies amongst us. Our total bill was slightly over $20 apiece with tip.
Today we went back to Calle Huayruropata where I bought my rubber boots, since I discovered that the reason the right one was hurting was because it was a quarter inch narrower than the right! [Note from Ellen: there are too many right feet here -- one of the boots must be a left one!] The woman remembered me and very graciously agreed to let me trade them in for a bigger pair, it is so much better. We also bought rubber gloves for our cleanup plan. In the afternoon we went to the used market in Santiago for several reasons. We wanted to find a new Swiss Army knife for Laurie, since hers was stolen by a scumbag taxi driver about a week ago. Nino and Adela have a booth there and they sell knives, plus we wanted to talk to them concerning several items of business (school exchange stuff, visiting, etc.) As we wandered around waiting for them, I encountered a booth full of vinyl records! My eyes bugged out when looked through them and I realized that the woman had run a store in Cuzco, probably 25 years ago. The 12" LPs were beat up garbage, but she had two or three hundred 45s that were totally unplayed mint Peruvian pressings of stuff from 1977-1982. B-52s, Go-Gos, Fleetwood Mac, disco stuff, oh my goodness. I ended up buying about 25 of them for a little under four bucks. Then later on we found ANOTHER stall selling all-Peruvian records, I got an LP of solo guitar by various artists and another LP of ceremonial dances and songs. Needless to say, I was very pleased.
We have three families left out of 15, only one of them has a completed stove because the other two have not paid their 30 soles yet. We will be doing his house tomorrow. Monday we need to spend a big chunk of the day extending our visas. I was off by one day about our return, we get back in the afternoon on Thursday March 5th. At this point we are counting the days and trying to make sure our to-do list includes everything. On Monday we are also transferring our 5 extra stoves over to Choco. Somehow we ended up with three extra baskets for retention cooking, not sure what we'll do with those yet.
Only seventeen days left until we leave Cuzco, probably two or three more updates.
Love to all,
S
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Last updated: 15 February 2009
