Six months in Peru

February has arrived and along with it the torrential rains that mark Summer here. I think we were going on 27 straight days of rain when finally the sun came out for a few precious days. Along with the rain, our power and phone service has been intermittent as well as our ability to travel out of La Jalca as mudslides blocked most of the roads and the Utcubamba River overflowed its banks. People here are saying it’s the worst rain they’ve seen in years. They are also saying March is much worse! 

Losing a boot in the mud

On the bright side…our Environmental Club is awesome. We went to the museum in Leymebamba last week and because the electricity was out all over the region, we were the only visitors that day and got VIP treatment. We got to go inside a climate controlled room where archaeologists are doing research on 300 mummies unearthed from the Laguna de los Condors nearby. The mummies were buried with their possessions inside large statues carved into the cliff sides. It’s one of the most abundant, intact archaeological finds in this region so far which remains largely unexplored. Afterwards we visited a native tree reforestation area and a fish farm. So that was pretty cool for us and the students.  Another week we made popcorn and showed the Planet Earth Fresh Water movie with Spanish subtitles and the community authorities came and watched.  This week, the students wrote letters to kids in the States and it was so much fun. Translating their letters before sending off was illuminating. Every single student wrote about their dreams, what they want to be when they ‘grow up’: Doctor, policewoman, astronaut, lawyer, agro-industrial engineer, civil engineer. Now is their summer vacation but every one of them goes to their families chacra’s (farms) at the crack of dawn to work in the fields. They all said they didn’t like it because it was back breaking work but it was a way to help their parents, who are all subsistence farmers, and a motivator to study hard and do well in school. I hope they all get the chance to go to University after they finish high school.  One student wrote about how much she loves books. She said “Books are my life”. It’s a real challenge to find books in Spanish here and they are unbelievably expensive. There’s no library in this region, which has gotten me thinking about another future project…

Brian and I with some of the Environment Club in Leymebamba

Our plans over the next few weeks are to finish up our community diagnostics to present to our Directors and the community and to do some traveling over the Semana Santa holiday at the beginning of March. I’ve been collecting hundreds of seeds and saplings for the tree nursery and we’re planning a community seed gathering day for March. Hopefully we can really get the nursery up and running soon. Brian is doing his thing and charming, ahem, educating, the whole town into wanting to chlorinate their water. Poco a poco, or little by little, good things are ahead.

Thank you to everyone sending notes, emails and care packages our way. We can’t tell you how much we appreciate reading news from home and all the tasty treats. 

With our host family at Danny's 16th birthday party

Feliz Año Nuevo

It’s a new year and the beginning of mango season here. We’ve been spending our free time getting to know the hiking paths around La Jalca, visiting the spectacular ruins in the area and on Sundays we usually head to the weekend market in Yerbabuena. It’s a couple hour trek down the mountain out of the “eyebrow of the jungle”, the name for the cloud forest climate region where we live.  At the bottom, in the village of Ubilon, we hike along the Utcubamba River for another hour or so and arrive to the bustling market where we stock up on spices, meat, mangos and avocados and then hop on the truck for a butt numbing ride back up the mountain to La Jalca. We bought beef at the market for the first time and it was rather amusing. We picked the most crowded of the vendors in the row of meat stalls and pointed at the part of the skinned cow we wanted that we thought most resembled a filet. The petite señora slapped the carcass down on the wood stump, pulled out an axe and in a few bone crushing hacks we had about 3 lbs of meat from which we made a steak dinner and fantastic stew the next day. At the spice stall we found dried truffles for about $1 and they were a perfect accompaniment.

The amount of biodiversity here is incredible. On a hike with one of the community officials I asked about medicinal plants and within minutes she had plucked an armful of different leaves that are used for everything from soap to curing malaria. There is a lot of discussion at meetings we’ve attended to make this region a natural protected area in order to preserve the biodiversity, which is exciting for us to be a part of.

The holidays here were quite a different experience. It feels like we’ve stepped back in time. There were masses and processions through town and celebrations of the Saints with music, dancing and eating.  In the days leading up to Christmas, we attended our first celebration in the community complete with a candlelit procession to the 500 year old cemetery. The band played traditional folk music and men carried a beautifully decorated float of San Roce on their shoulders while women and children followed behind with lanterns. The stone church in the cemetery was filled with candles and calla lilies and we were unexpectedly welcomed by the priest at the mass and introduced to the congregation. Afterwards, a feast was held with more live music and dancing well into the night. 

For Christmas we found a small synthetic pine tree in the store, decorated it with some lights and played our Ella Fitzgerald Christmas songs playlist way too many times. Thanks to our wonderful family and friends in the states we had cards and gifts under our tree to open Christmas morning and a mini ‘Nacimiento’ or Koresh. It was a quiet holiday but we were happy to have each other to share it with.

Our year in review - a family tradition.

On New Years we visited Kuelap, an ancient, sprawling mountaintop ruin that rivals Machu Picchu in size. It was spectacular. 

Our first week

It’s hard to believe we’ve been here in La Jalca for over a week. And what a week it’s been. We spent our first couple days ‘decorating’ our one room home and making it more comfortable to live for the next couple years. We had a carpenter make us a bigger bed frame and bought a straw and cotton mattress that sort of fits the frame. We splurged on nice sheets and heavy wool blankets.  We made a kitchenette with a desk, a two burner gas stove, new pots and pans and added some tacky yet charming Christmas lights shaped like grapes for ambiance. Since installation we’ve been cooking some tasty Peruvian-American fusion meals with ingredients like quinoa, lentils, ají, saffron and queso fresco. 

We’ve both had great meetings with the community leaders and are really excited to start on projects here. Brian has a lot of community support for improvements to the water system and I have plans to start a native tree reforestation project with the fledgling nursery here. Right now they only have Eucalyptus and Pine seedlings, both invasive. We had a chance meeting with the national and regional directors of Agrorural, a government land management program, the Director of the Inter-American Bank, and other NGO’s in the region and it went great. Everyone was really supportive of a native tree nursery and reforestation project. We are feeling like our arrival here is welcome and needed.  

Our plans over the next couple weeks are to build on the momentum we’ve got, start planning projects with the community and hopefully take some time to go exploring and see the fantastic ruins that dot the landscape around our town. We discovered a book in the municipality that was written in 2003 by a German Anthropologist with hand drawn trekking maps of the region dotted with ruins, caves and tons of information on the history of the area.