Anniversary in Lahuani… Carbon Monoxide Dancing

Characteristic, native dress in Peru is a pretty constant factor. I am in a remote part of Peru called Apurimac where not much has changed in the way people dress in hundreds of years. They also speak Quechua, I am sure I have made mention of this in the past. Some of the names of clothing are recognizable quechuizations of the original Spanish like; chilico from chaleco for jacket, but many are original Quechua terms.

Here, the men wear a sort of home spun outfit of reversible beige and black pedal pusher/Capri length pants called wara, a light internal long john called fundillo (fundil-yo) and a shirt, arnilla (arneel-ya), of the same material as the pants. The pants also button at the bottom. They wear a sort of a black waistcoat with bright colored, decorative buttons, some functional others just as adornment in the front and at the cuffs called a chilico (Cheell-eeko). The more brightly colored and abundant buttons are used by the courting aged men. They sometimes wear tennis shoes, boots or oxfords but have traditionally worn ojotas (o-hotas) (rubber tire sandals). They wear an ornately crocheted cap a chullo (Chool-yo) with an ornate tassel called a huaytilla (waytee-l-ya). I have taken to wearing one of these to keep my bald head warm. They top the cap with a bell shaped hat, adorned with black girly ribbons sewed in place with red thread. The colors never vary. The caps of available men young have more ornate tassels including a little tiny cap in the tassel, meaning that they are looking for someone with whom to fill the little baby hat. They also wear an ornately woven belt called a chumpi (Choo-mpee) Both men and women wear this but those of the women are much wider than what the men wear. Over the jacket, they tie a woven huaraca (waraca) or sling, indicating readiness to defend their honor. The men also wear a rolled up poncho around their waist unless it is raining when they wear it as a poncho and if it is cold they wear a scarf around their neck.

The women dress in a black home spun woolen dresses polleras (pol-yeras) with a red woolen blouse underneath called an almilla (almeel-ya). They wear red skirts if they are single but this is not so rigorous. The dress consists of a wrap around skirt with at least three layers and the border is embroidered along the base of the skirt. The top is a jacket like the men’s embroidered at the cuffs with more colorful buttons than the men use and is called a jubon (hubon). They wear the chumpi too in a way that shows it off more than the men because they want to show off their fine weaving. Women rarely wear shoes other than ojotas, usually with a little plastic flower on the straps, and often go barefoot but not to fiestas. They wear a llicllia (lyeeck-lyee-ya) that would hold a baby if they have one but they all wear it slung over their shoulders and tied in front. Instead of a cap, they place a woven black, rectangular cloth with an embroidered edge called a huayticllia (way-tic-leeya) o phullu (ful-yu) on their head under their bell shaped hat. The hats can be white or brown in either case.

When I asked one of our young workers to make me an outfit, she blushed and said she could not, that it was not permitted and that men make clothes for men and women for women, some sort of a taboo related to this. Anyway, even men crochet, braid and spin wool continually, something not really common around Peru. But I have probably mentioned that before.

I had an invitation to a community anniversary get together in one of our communities called Lahuani. The poorest of the communities in which we work, Lahuani boasts about 40 families. We provided all of their prizes for their sporting activities and rather than the cash that they had requested we gave them rice, sugar and noodles that they could divvy up for each of the prizes. They felt good about that. We also loaned them an electrical generator that they had requested. It turned out that they also wanted us to provide music and we could not meet that.

When we arrived at the party, rain fell steadily and they had decided to hold the activity in the big school room. They crammed all of the community that could fit in the building dressed to the nines. They had brought in a TV and DVD and had gathered around to watch Peruvian comedy sketches. The fumes from the generator wafted into the room until I moved the generator but they seemed not to notice either way. They finally got around to dancing and, while not a very gregarious group considering other Peruvian bashes I have attended, they danced with great reserve despite the music. The girls did not want to dance with the gringo and acted very timid but did so nonetheless. This is kind of an expected part of the whole activity.

In the end, glad I moved the generator because I still got a headache from it, I could not help reflecting on the whole image of the eerie blue TV light and the music videos and dancing amid all of the traditionally dressed people. It seemed positively surreal, once again…

Cancacho...No Meal Larger Than My Head II

Years ago, I a doctor diagnosed me with ulcers and I discovered that my largest problem derived from overeating hence, I have long striven to avoid eating any meal larger than my head. This has not always proven feasible, especially in Peru. An elderly woman named Susana invited me as part of a large group to eat cancacho yesterday in celebration of her granddaughter’s baptism.


The Tub

Essentially cancacho consists in an whole, oven-roasted lamb, open-fire-roasted cuy (guinea pigs), boiled or baked potatoes, and give or take, rice, noodles and cooked vegetables. In this case Susana filled washtubs with food for the god father and mother, on either side of me.

I broke my rule. I ate half a cuy and a quarter of a lamb...

Bracketed by The Godfathers

Roasted Cuy...

Luisa of the Remarkable Attitude

Regarding my last couple of blogs I was fairly judged as having become cynical and rather than getting all defensive and stirred up over my bruised ego, I accept the possibility that the years have jaded me somewhat. I won’t be retracting any of my comments just contributing a less curmudgeonly sort of blurb this go around. Maybe I will even do two…

I am not the tender sort I used to be in many respects, that is for certain. I get irritated with the banal and insipid and am more suspicious of people’s motives after years of being seen as the potential source of the solution. Hence when I come upon the remarkable I tend to be more than impressed. I truly do have wonderful experiences in my rumblings and ramblings albeit, something out of a novel sometimes. I never take what I do for granted. I realize that I have been privileged to work where few will ever go and to make friends of people who know and respect me for the care and concern that I have for them far beyond what I need from them. I will miss all of this one of these days.

A while ago I met a wonderful little girl that I truly fell in love with the first day I met her. Her name is Luisa and she is truly a spark. A charming young woman, she is a couple of years older than my daughters and just amazes me. She teaches sewing to some of our campesinos. She also told me that she had worked cleaning houses, had been a hair dresser, a manicurist, knows how to break horses… the list was impressive.

I had just met her and knew that she was from a little burg called Velille on the way up here to our project. She is pretty and smart but I could tell that she was just a kid so I asked, “How old are you?”

To which she replied, “I am going to turn 20 next month!”

I then asked her when she started to work and she told me when she was 7 and her older sister took her to Lima. The sister convinced their parents to let her take Luisa to Lima where she left her in a park. Luisa sat there for two hours or so, until a kindly woman asked what was going on and Luisa told her that her sister had left her there.

She went to live with the woman, wrote her parent’s names and where she came from down so she would not forget. The kindly woman did not have wherewithal to care for her so Luisa had to work and do her part. I have not asked her level of education but she told me, “¡Nada malo mi sucedió y mi vida ha estado linda!” indicating that despite her terrible story she considers her life to have been a charmed one. I consider that remarkable given all that she told me. Having denied an adoption attempt at ten by some kindly North Americans just so that she could go and look for her parents, she found them at fifteen and lives with them now in Arequipa.

I asked about her sister the abandoner and she told me that she helps her with her finances. She said, “She has problems.” I was goggle eyed. Luisa is an example of a positive attitude that I cannot imagine. She asked me to be padrino in her baptism and I could not tell her no. It has been a remarkable experience to know Luisa.

The Magic Knife With Apologies to Mozart and Louis Armstrong

I woke up laughing this morning because of something our nurse told me last night.

I am involved in many day to day activities with people who work with animals and whose level of superstition and ignorance in general sometimes astounds me. About two months ago when a big fiesta was planned in the local province sized town named Challhuahuacho, I was invited to slaughter a bull. This is an insanely macho culture that does a lot of bull fighting and the like. Men ride while women follow: they beat their wives and so on. It is mostly pretty ugly when you talk about family relations.

Well, I had an inkling that I might get asked to participate in this fashion and have little doubt that I would have been asked to participate in the bullfight if I had been here. Anyway, I asked about their method for such a slaughter and it turned out to be primitive. Just down by the river on a grassy spot, they roped up the bull’s feet and tripped him. Then a gang of us held the bull down and tied the feet as tight as they would go.

Their trick was to put a big knife tip at the base of the skull and give a sharp strike and knock the bull out. I saw this as fiddling with disaster. I had my little Benchmade sharp enough to skin a fish and I pulled it out and before they knew what was happening, I made quick work of cutting the big boy’s throat. They were all pretty astounded at the time, that a gringo knew how to do it and that I did it with a little pocket knife.

Well, the story has grown with time. Two months have passed and now the bull was a giant. Everyone knows my name and knows about the bull. So, last night the girls put up a bulletin board that includes a picture of me in another opportunity holding a bull’s horns while a vet administered the anti parasite medicine. One of the ladies from one of the communities came up and looked at the picture and asked, “Is that Mister Hasler?”

Rosa, the nurse said, “Yes that is.”

Campesina lady; “I heard that he slaughtered a huge bull with a knife. Is that true?”

Rosa said, “Yes and it was a little bitty knife!”

The campesina studied the photo for a second then turned a sidelong glance to Rosa and said knowingly, “He must have a trick…”

And that made me laugh myself awake this morning.

Climate Change...The Feeding Frenzy

I have had several things to write but have not taken time of late…I wrote this on a tablet of paper that was not recycled. I did it to keep myself awake in a meeting on Climate Change…Let me explain.

I allowed myself to be sucked into attending the meeting in Lima because we felt that one of us should be there. I have to admit a certain perverse hope and a perceived opportunity to subvert, hassle and mock some of the true believers in this modern global fantasy. In truth, I am not a very nice guy when I get a whiff of idiots…

I cannot say that I was completely disappointed. Dubbed “Global Forum on Climate Change and Ecoefficient (newly invented word) Companies,” the event lacked planning, organization and execution. The presenters were pretty much mostly the boring droner types that get that white sticky phlegm in the corners of the mouth,. I found it somewhat challenging to get a good ridicule going because of the narcotic nature of the presentations. What happens to these people anyway? Some of their stuff was potentially interesting but they somehow turned it into virtual chloroform. One guy, next to me actually had his head cocked back and snored during one particularly exhilarating presentation.

Outside the hall, the Conservation International NGO exhibited a gallery of truly spectacular photos. They had great shots of native people in traditional dress. There were commensurate shots of billowing flames from cane fields and polar bears swimming for their lives with no place to get out of the water except of drippy ice flows, deforested Amazon soya fields and so forth. About 30% of the photos had a message directly related to the global warming boogey man. O woe is me!

There were two big photos of mud cracks and one has a little boy flying his kite from the cracked mud as though standing on dry cracky ground were a particular hardship. These are the same pictures that National Geographic has carried for the last 50 years, at least, but now they have become virtual symbols of global warming…

Let’s see if we can try to explain this. Shallow, dry desert lakes, called playa get rained on when big fluffy clouds rise up from evaporation and get heavy with moisture. Then the clouds bump together and make really big, noisy sparks and water, called r-r-rai-i-n falls out of them. That makes the playas soggy and even fill up to some depth with water. Then the big yellow object comes out and dries out and cracks the sticky stuff, forming mud cracks.

This information, though somewhat embellished is stuff I got on a grade school field trip on the back of the bus with Jerry Kelley and a couple of other big boys. I am not sure if it was meteorology on that trip or where puppies come from but in any case the diagrams were not all that different from the other and left much, to be desired and to the imagination.

The news here is that…this is not news or new. It happened in the Pleistocene, in the Jurassic and in the Permian. It has gone on in all of geologic history and since God made it rain on dry lake beds! Yikes! I mixed creationism with geology. Is that bad? I can think of people on both sides who will take exception to my offense. But I can’t ever remember what I am supposed to say and Julie gets mad at me in bookstores when i scoff loudly at books by say,,, Al Gore. But mud cracks happen and you don’t have to summon up the insipid specter of climate change to explain them.

Another of these photos and the most galling showed a Green Turtle (chelonian mydas) decomposing on the beach in Lambayeque, Peru. The little caption under the photo of the rotting reptile goes something like this, “The temperature of the oceans changes and marine species are very sensitive…” What??? Excuse me… Where is the connection in this photo between water temperature and the death of this magnificent animal? What evidence have we of this poor creature’s cause of death? The only thing I could rule out was a shark attack because it did not look like a forgotten mallowmar in a rest home with a chunk bitten out of it,.

How do we know that it died of warm water and not say that he/she was really full of turtle cancer? Maybe he just ran his wheels off and was 299 years old and died of old age. He could have been promiscuous and died bitter and angry of turtle STDs. Do we have any reason to think that he died of tepidity or indeed that it is harmful to turtles. I myself enjoy a nice warm soak now and again. Are we sure that the turtle was knocked off by a balmy bath. Maybe he just died in sheer ecstasy in the ½ degree increase in pacific water temperature off the coast of Lambayeque.

Now don’t misinterpret my position. I love nature and not just because it tastes good. I really want to see cool turtles (no pun intended) chugging along in the ocean and not convulsing and seething in the scalding waters off Northern Peru or any other coast for that matter. I like dolphins and even supposedly endangered owls and rhinos and gorillas. I like to go out into the woods and think the Amazon is quite something. I despise irresponsible miners and drug cultivators and so forth. I have a strong sense of social responsibility. But what galls me more than anything else is uninformed, pseudoscientific, inflammatory piffle-mongering. What is wrong with considering the evidence? Yet the promoters of this frenzy, couple pieces of information, misrepresent them and link them as science. Then they do their little Chicken Little dance; blame car exhaust, illegal miners and cow farts for turtles dropping dead and bobbing ashore in Lambayeque…Oh, yeah and hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico too and mining causes malaria… I almost forgot. Pllllleeeaaasssse!