SPECIAL NEEDS

Do you know how in whatever language and country they announce the initial boarding for the airplane? They give time for children, the aged and any needing special assistance or just a little more time in the jet way to board the plane first. Well, the other day, I was boarding the plane in Arequipa for a flight to Lima. I got up to be ready to board when the initial boarding was over but they had not announced the flight just yet. But there are signs.

I was in my little space contemplating the flight when the young woman working for LAN announced the boarding of the infants, infirm, invalid and so forth, when to my surprise, a teaming mass of tourists in full Edie Bauer and European travel-weenie attire, mixed with an array of cheap alpaca sweaters, caps and satchels surged out of their seats and forced their way to the front of the line. I bit against the desire to call them dolts but I thought very clearly, “Who are these knot heads. Can they all need special assistance, are they children, deficient or simply stupid? Are they all deaf or just cannot follow directions?” I actually got pretty heated for a moment and thought of speaking harsh words to these 25 or so dimwits.

However, just when I edged towards danger of stooping to their level, I heard one of them speak to the group. He had that smooth guttural, Charles Boyer sound to his voice. It had a strangely calming and soothing power and smoothed out my emotional wrinkles for me. It was a moment of crystal clear incisive insight. I realized that these folks really did need special help. They were French.

NEWS FLASH! Dateline… Atlanta

CNN has apparently gone on record, saying that irresponsible and informal gold mining in the Amazon has caused an outbreak of Malaria… Who’d a thunk?

Blasting all hope of responsible journalism, an oxymoron if there ever was one, they detonated a thirty second incendiary, promotional device urging you to watch their diatribe. It served to remind me why I so rarely turn the TV on and find it unbearable when I do. Clearly they plan a fair and objective treatment of all mining…like good reporters do. They featured a truly rabid woman interviewing a Latin government lackey about the “fact” that CNN had travelled to the jungle with the air force and “found an illegal mining operation.” She then asked, in that cheerful and objective tone that inspires cooperation, what this government toady had done about it…

I won’t even pretend to guess how they intend making the malaria point… But goodness, how stupid do they think we are? And where were they in microbiology class in their sophomore year of High School? And I mean, it’s not like these illegal miners are hiding out in the jungle with Butch Cassidy’s ghost and no one knows where they are, and it takes a genius from Harvard to go find them there. Come on! I once heard that these kinds of news outputs are geared to an average eighth grade level, but I had no idea how uninformed and well, dull, average eighth graders are if such is the case. My only real guess is that since news anchors are literary by nature, they jumped to the alliteration of malaria and mining and drew hasty conclusions that mining causes malaria with no regard for the lack of coherence in the argument.

I don’t like informal mining either for it’s impact, not only on the environment but also on mining’s image in general. Yet, for this woman to declare her personal, earthshaking discovery of the presence of illegal miners and demand to know what action some sub-vice-lieutenant-governor’s minister of the interior of some banana republic’s jungle state, or whatever, has done about it only demonstrates her ignorance and ineptitude. If you want to help with the problem, and there is no denying that there exists a bad situation, one needs to attack it with the facts before defaulting to figures of speech.

Still, the good news is that she gets to air this as a groundbreaking splash across the panorama of big network programming. Oh goody! Don’t you just bet the do-gooders will turn this to their global warming uses and call it “fact”? Were it not so sad it would inspire laughter. Watch out all of you Hollywood moguls and political activists, you JuliaRobertses, GeorgeClooneys, BarbaraStriesands. And dare I invoke the sacred name of Gore? Watch out guys, biases and lies are even more inconvenient than the truth…

ELIANA

Our camp sits between the towns of Record and the larger town of Challhuahuacho (pronounced Chal-you-a-wacho but all smooshed together). Challhua, for short is the local big town. Record has a small Puesto Medico or clinic but with a medical technician who has very little in the way of resources. Challhua has what is basically a small hospital.

The second to the last night I was up at the project, I had to give some doctors a ride to our camp at the end of a health campaign that they are doing at our behest. At the medical clinic a woman begged me for a ride to our camp. Actually they were three women and a little five year old girl, Eliana. full with the doctors headed to our camp, my truck had no room to give the women a ride but she asked me to take her five year old daughter to her husband in the camp.

Little Eliana rode in the back with the doctors all of the way back and chattered. I did not pay a lot of attention but for the fact that she spoke Spanish quite well. I arrived at the camp and the guards told us that her dad, Ciprian had already left for Challhua.

I decided to go back after the women walking towards the camp from Record. I dropped the doctors off and told them to put Eliana in the front seat to go back with me and I just hoped she would not freak out. Not only did she not freak out but chattered away with me ceaselessly about her, “Nueva ropa típica… mi mama me la compró.” She was really proud of her new set of traditional clothes and wanted me to be very clear that her mother had bought her a set of her own. I was duly impressed and asked her if she would let me see it the next day. She assured me that she would show it to me the next day, being Sunday.

By the next day, I had forgotten the whole ropa típica saga until I walked down by the gate and there outside stood little Eliana. She had come in her Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes just for me to see. I implored her to let me take her picture and she gladly accepted.

Eliana in her ropa típica:

“Go Up Thou Bald Head”

I get a tremendous amount of visual and even verbal insubordination in my role as a gringo amongst the indigenous population where we work. Add to that the freakish nature of my baldness (The Phantom of the Opera has noting on me, were I to let this grow out…) it pretty much goes non-stop. Naturally, the best most can do is say, “Uuuu you’re bald, in Quechua of course,” and that usually comes from school kids.

It makes me feel a bit like Elisha, hence the title but there are exceeding few she bears to tear them in pieces. There are dogs, but they routinely just bark at and bite me, not the rowdy kids. I usually come back with a definitive, “Well_Duh!!!” in Spanish of course or in Quechua depending upon my audience. I smile of course at their simple insult and think of my many mockeries as a teenager that I thought would just send me to Hell at the time. Then think what timely and just comeuppance.

But occasionally, I get ridiculed by a more noteworthy than usual character who derides me with a flare. The other day, a campesino named Teofilo neared me where I was conversing on the lawn with others of his community. He began asking me lugubriously what was wrong with my head. I might add that I have never seen this particular man sober in the three years that I have been here. He must be about 30 and his liver has to be getting pretty solid by now. Sadly he has about four children who will probably be without a father and will likely follow his example… Such is the case of life here in the altiplano.

Anyway, Teofilo continued non stop in the way of the heavily lubricated. He put his hand on my head and said, “The back of your head is too big… ¿Porqquuuee?” he slurred.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, my inebriated friend but there is little I can do at this point in my life.”

He continued, “The back of your head is very big…It is very bad (¡muy malo pue!). Then he launched into a discussion in slurry Quechua about how beautiful his head would be if I would shave it. “Will you shave it for me, just like yours?” he asked me. I laughed and told him I would be happy to, “But only when you are sober,” so that he could not say I did it to him while he was drunk. He looked at me through rheumy eyes and said, “Esshhta muuuuyyyy bien aaaamiggggho. Voy aaa esssshperarrrlo, pue.” Teofilo tottered off to the meeting for which we had all been waiting. There, the crowd ignored him but I let him speak his mind just to get a pulse on the community. They are smarter than one might imagine. I think they too would like to see him shorn but that would be unkind I fear. I also doubt that he would recall who dunnit.

¡Huatia, papitas a lo macho, pué!

In the altiplano of Peru an established tradition at the time of the potato harvest includes a worthwhile activity called la Huatia, pronounced Wateeya, and it takes the form of a potato barbecue, more or less. The women in the field build an edifice like a dirt clod igloo that they fill with straw and dried animal dung. This, they light with a match and allow it to burn furiously until the dung is completely consumed and the inside of the little beehive has become a miniature oven. Into the little kiln they stuff a quarter bushel of small potatoes. They then collapse the whole affair onto them and wait for about an hour.

They take a break from whatever activity they have going, from harvest itself to road repair. The women smile at you, their sun and soil blackened faces get ruts like a bad road with no one to fill the chuckholes by the time they are 30. They freely and unabashedly nurse their babies while they eat. Quantity of teeth is inversely proportional to age as one might expect. Their blackened hands show the years of toil and their feet, shod only by hojotas, tire rubber sandals, are universally cracked and callused.

If you happen by, they always invite you to come and eat the potatoes, and you sit on the ground while they uncover the turd baked potatoes. If you have been invited, campesino etiquette dictates that you bring along a wheel of homemade cheese or a couple of liters of pop or that you buy one off of them in one of their little home/stores. Likewise, if you hope to be invited again, you eat what you are offered from their poverty showing no sign of disdain.

Charred and dusty, they take the potatoes out of the ground at last and pour them out on a rice sack or right onto the stubbly turf. You scrub the potato against the short brushy grass to clean it up. You then peel off the skin with your fingernails and clean out any wormy bits before eating it, at least I do. Everyone says that potatoes that have had one worm at least have a sweeter flavor. I am not sure I discern yet since they all manifest evidence of at least one. I have a pretty clear sense that I have eaten worms a time or two. Still, the huatia tradition is a delight.

The women cluck their Quecha and chortle heartily. They gently chide, “Yau, chai gringota manan intindinichu. Curu papata micuskani.” (This gringo doesn’t understand us. He just ate a potato with a worm in it). And they laugh again thinking I didn’t understand them. Sometimes I get things all twisted around and think I came here for the money but life is about much more than that.

You sit there under the early winter sun, eating the smoky potatoes, chewing slowly and savoring them with a lump of salty white cholo cheese that shows your sooty fingerprints. The potatoes are sweet and sometimes you eat a worm. Indeed they eat no meat with this except for the worms but in the end you usually only note, the slightly sweeter savor… Then you pass around a cheap plastic cup, taking turns, filling it with some iridescent, pseudo-mango-peach flavored, corn syrup charged pop for the next person. There you have it, that is what it is all about.