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Chinchero is a sprawling village, 3800m above sea level, about 15 miles from Cusco. Most of the people have a small patch of land, divided into tiny fields where thay grow maize, rye, oats and potatoes, and keep a few pigs, sheep or cows. The crops are harvested by hand; one person will harvest a field of grain with a reap hook, over several days, but a few people might work together to dig potatoes. Most of the women are weavers and are often to be seen spinning yarn with a drop spindle while walking in the streets or fields. They sell their work to tourists at the local market and in tiny shops up steep cobbled streets. The villagers are very friendly, especially the older women, who say, "Buenas dias" as if they really want you to have a good day. Several school children have stopped to talk to me, and a tiny grubby girl flung her arms round my knees and shouted, "Gringa! Gringa!". Her puppy chewed my fingers and her father introduced her and himself and wanted to know where I was from.
The scenery here is incredibly beautiful and quite varied and I´ve gone out every morning exploring tracks among the fields and along avenues of eucalyptus trees. These trees are everywhere and smell wonderful. At night the sky is full of stars and you can see the Milky Way. The Incas believed Chinchero to be the birthplace of the rainbow, but I won´t get to see one as it won´t rain here until September although it´s sometimes quite cloudy. It´s also very cold as soon as the sun goes down at about 5.30, and in the mornings there is usually a ground frost. Not much fun when the shower room is several yards from the house and unnecessarily well ventilated!
I´m staying with a weaver, Roxanna, and her family - 11 year old son Rivaldo and husband Roberto, who is away most of the time working as a chauffeur. Roxanna is unusually ambitious for a Peruvian woman, especially in a small village. While Roberto was away for a long time, she lived with her parents, working in Cusco during the day and weaving in the evenings in order to save enough money to build the grandest house in Chinchero. The house has a lot of rooms, but little furniture and none of it is comfortable. Roxanna cooks on a two-burner gas hob in a tiny kitchen area. She washes up in cold water and washes clothes and bedlinen outside in a bowl of cold water. She asked me if it´s true that in England people have machines that wash the dishes. Like many Andean people, Roxanna cooks mainly starchy foods, especially potatoes, which are often served with rice. On five days out of six, we had potatoes twice. I´ve been craving protein and got through my stash of nuts in a couple of days. Yesterday I wolfed a tin of tuna in my room.
I´ve had a couple of interesting mornings. One time I went to watch adobe blocks being made, a process that involves paddling around to mix earth and water thoroughly, then treading in chopped straw. The end product is moulded into blocks in a wooden form. The blocks are left to dry in the sun for 12 to 15 days. It looked very hard work. The two men I was watching worked a patch about 10 feet square, and would make about 300 blocks.
Another time I helped to make chuño. Small potatoes (about an inch in diameter) are left spread on the ground for two years, exposed to sun and frost. After this they smell nasty, ooze brown liquid and sometimes froth like cuckoo spit. Roxanna, her sister and I spent a couple of hours gathering thousands of potatoes into small mounds, which Marleni then trod on to break the potatoes up a bit. They were to be left overnight to dry, then Marleni was to take them home to cook. I very much hope that I´m not invited to the feast!
I also had a weaving lesson. In two hours, I produced (with a lot of help) about one and a half inches of belt. Roxanna was getting quite impatient with me in the end; I´m not very dextrous and kept forgetting how to change which colour was on top. I was making a complicated pattern; it was a bit like following a jaquard design the first time you try to knit.
I´ve been very taken with the terracotta bulls on top of the roof on most of the houses round here. Sometimes they are with a cross and a ladder, or with a pair of vessels. They are supposed to ensure abundance, love and hard work. Apparently the pottery disintegrates after 9 or 10 years; I don´t know whether they are replaced. I´ve uploaded 3 photos of them, but haven´t worked out how to group them together.
I´m supposed to be in Chinchero as a volunteer, but apart from a daily two-hour after school English class, my placements had not been set up in advance. The secondary school already had volunteers to help with English, so I offered to help with biology or environmental studies. The first day the lessons were cancelled without notice, and the second day I had to sit through an hour and a half of chalk and talk plus reading aloud from the textbook, with nothing to do. There is a possibility of working in a badly understaffed junior school, showing the children how to use the computers because the teachers don´t know how they work. I suggested that it would be more useful to teach the teachers, but Roxanna said they are too busy. The after school classes consist of Roxanna´s son, nephew and niece and two other children. They all learn English at school and don´t really want to spend another two hours in a classroom and then go home to do their school homework. I try to make it fun with lots of games. They know quite a lot of vocabulary but it´s almost impossible to get them to speak a word of English. Roxanna is so ambitious for her son that she sets him work herself, that he has to do at the weekend. She is also spearheading the buidling of a weaving workshop/exhibition centre/shop for tourists on the road from Cucso to Chinchero, and 12 Australian volunteers are coming over for 5 weeks to com,plete the construction. I am seriously questioning the value of my voluntary work here.
I´m also struggling a bit with the altitude, getting breathless quite often, especially during the night. So all in all I´m thinking of packing it in and going back to Cusco, where I can have some more Spamnish lessons with Hilda (who could use the money) and maybe find some voluntary work there for 3 or 4 weeks before I go to the rainforest.
This weekend I´m having a couple of days R&R at El Huerto Paraiso, where at one point I was hoping to WWOOF, but the owner is inundated with applications. It´s an "agrotourism" hotel on the outskirts of the unattractive town of Urubamba in the Sacred Valley, and it´s beautiful. The staff are all incredibly friendly and smily. There were no other visitors here when I arrived this morning, and they cooked a delicious lunch especially for me - 3 courses and freshly made juice, finishing with a homemade fruit liqueur. I´ve just had dinner, which was also just for me, and the chef kept me company - good practice for my Spanish. The chef, Juan, (who´s about 20) is also the tour guide, and is very knowledgeable (told me the medicinal uses of lots of plants as we walked around). He took me to see a potter, who explained how the clay is prepared from local rocks - red, black and white. The pots are glazed inside, but the outside is burnished with pebbles from the river and painted with nautural colours before firing, then waxed. Then I went to see a chocolate maker, who uses cacao grown in the valley. The beans are dried in the sun, then roasted in small quantities and peeled by hand. They are then ground in a small machine like an old-fashioned mincer, with or without sugar. Unless the beans are warm, this is really hard work. The resulting paste is put in moulds and left in the sun while it melts to fill the moulds. The chocolate is rich and delicious, nothing like we have in England.
I also went to an Inca ruin, where ceremonies were hed to ensure a good harvest and healthy animals. One of the buildings is aligned with the morning sun at the autumn equinox.
Just as guinea pigs are an important food in the Andes, chicha is an important drink. It´s made from sprouted, fermented maize and some wheat, and is a cloudy, frothy liquid that looks like very bad wheat beer (which is what it tastes like). I´d seen it on sale in the street in Cusco, where it´s really unhygienic. The vendors ladle it out of buckets into huge glasses, and the glasses are washed in the same bucket of cold water all day. I´ve also read that some of the makers spit in it to start the fermentation. Today I was obliged to try it, and I could only manage 2 sips. Juan finished my pint and said when he drinks chicha he feels strong. It contains very little, if any, alcohol (like ginger beer, I suppose) and it´s given to children. It might contain some B vitamins. Chicha is made in a lot of houses in the villages, and they put out a sign when it´s ready - a red plastic bag at the top of a bamboo pole, sometimes with flowers (I must ask what they used before plastic bags came along!)
We were also supposed to visit a bee-keeper - "We´ll go in just a minute" - but Juan came back an hour later, after dark, and said we´d go tomorrow. Typical Peruvian! There is also a fiesta going on in Urubamba this weekend, and tomorrow is the big day. On my way here this morning my mototaxi was stopped by a procession of children in various traditional costumes, like the Cuisco fiesta but on a much smaller scale.
The mototaxi was an experience in itself, very noisy and very bumpy on the rough roads. The driver said he knew where the hotel was, but stopped several times to ask the way. Once he had to turn round - switched the engine off, got out and manhandled it into the opposite direction, then switched on again!
It´s lovely to have your messages, through the blog and via email - keep them coming! I´ll probably be in Cusco next weekend, and will write from there. Apologies if there are lots of typos in this instalment - I´ve had a lot of trouble saving the text and had to retype most of it three times, so I´m a bit cross-eyed now!
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