Lightning in a Camera

In a village called Challachalla we prepared one of the chocolatadas and we built a fire of dried dung to heat the water for the hot chocolate. Despite the local expertise, the process met with middling success. The biggest limiting factor affecting our frustration came in the form of the rain that fell, first in a drizzle and then in a fair steady downpour. The downpour cooled our slowly warming pot. To call this day dreary would be a complete and utter understatement and misuse of the term. Soaked to the bone, with inadequate rain gear we huddled under tarps and borrowed woolen skirts and even though we had promised cake and hot chocolate, even the campesinos stayed their homes.

At last the family nearest our project invited us into their humble abode and offered to let us cook in there. It was quaint inside the thatched hut/cottage with a couple of cooking pits, one low to the ground and suitable to our pot. The upper, day-use pit was still warm from the morning meal but no live coals and the kittens drowsed there in the ashes. I could hear the squeaking sounds of the cuyes in their little warren behind that stove but the house was dark, dingy and reeked of stale dung smoke that was so thick on the thatch and rafters that it fell on us while we sat there.

In a ceramic bowl, I brought in live dung coals from the fuming project outside and gave them to the señora to fire the dry fuel she had inside. Almost immediately the house filled with smoke, thicker than, well, it still wasn’t heaven but at least we were out of the rain, choking… but out of the rain.

The lady of the house had me bring in the tube I had used outside to blow the fire. Expert in her craft, she bent to the task of blowing the coals and in the murky interior I saw the makings of a National Geographic photo. Snatching my camera from its pouch before the coals could catch, with smoke pouring from the ceramic stove; I set my camera to flash and fired the photo. Serendipitously timed in near perfect sync with one of her exhales, the flash fired and in one fluid motion she threw down the tube, stood bolt-upright, dashed clear across the house and shouted “Walaaaaaaa!” Apparently, walaaaaaaa! is quechua for holy crap! or something.


When she realized that it wasn’t some sort of biblical freak flash of consuming flame in the dung stove, or a bolt of lightning, (see the last blog) she started to laugh and prattle on about her start. Pretty soon the house, full of her sisters and other women from the community, filled with laughter and quechua prattle about the funny gringo and his camera flash.

Reasons to be Grateful

After spending a couple of weeks in the Altiplano, the joy of returning to creature comforts and the bosom of my family really knows no parallel. I was exhausted, plain and simple. I also came down with a nasty cold, not having gotten my flu shot, yada, yada, yada…

While there, I visited a woman whose husband got really depressed because of his desperate financial situation and drank a bunch of chicha with a thallium/arsenic chaser. He left her with three children at home, two of them under eight. It is hard to judge someone who has committed suicide but it was tragic to see this poor woman with no more than her weavings to sustain her. I bought a bunch of stuff to assuage my conscience. I left feeling reasonably useless and helpless.

On that same day I took the nurse to meet with a woman who had been struck by lightning while cooking in her home. She was severely burned on her face, left arm and hip. Truly fortunate to be alive in an area where many die each year from lightning strikes, she had two little babies one just a few months old and the other about two years. Both of them had received lighter burns and all appeared well but uncomfortable while recovering.

Both sobering cases of suffering in the altiplano left me pretty grateful for the truly bountiful life I lead. They gave me reason for shame when I complain and gripe.

The Planting Hymn

Chacrakuy

Sometimes the immensity of the gap in cultures that I live in astounds me. The rains have begun again as we finish our year’s end activities in Peru. The most important and the one that takes the most planning has to do with presents for children in our communities and a party that includes the adults. We also give panetone (Italian fruit cake, very popular in Peru) and spiced hot chocolate and call this fiesta a chocolatada. There are a host of complications the main one being that this is the planting time. This is a part of the world that depends upon potatoes and that is their only real crop. They raise scrawny sheep, gaunt cattle and stunted, jug-headed horses but this is the potato planting season. They do all of the planting with a tool called a chaquetaquea that is made from a bent wooden tree branch to which is fastened a sharpened truck spring with rawhide.


This year we bought cake and chocolate for 6,300 and toys for children from 0 to 12 and went to about 18 communities to deliver the parties. It has been exhausting but quite rewarding since these are communities that have never had such an experience. They have been reasonably grateful but some have been a little less than receptive and demanding. We have spoiled some of them and many individuals in these communities have not really fully grown up. I have a friend who began his life with his girlfriend when they were eleven years old. They have six children today.

I have spent the better part of two weeks in the project doing this stuff and in the process have had some unique experiences. A week ago, we had been out and busy all morning when we came back for lunch. They saw us coming and sent emissaries to tell us not to eat but to come and join with the potato planters to see how they plant their potatoes. However when we got there they told us that we were to sit down and participate in what turned out to be something that felt about as ancient as anything I have ever seen or been a part of. They call it the chacrakuy, their very ceremonial lunch. It involved such things as eating cool sheep’s head soup from a communal bowl. This is only its name because aside from the head, it includes all of the feet and pretty much all of entrails of the sheep. They also have the ubiquitous freeze dried potatoes called chuñu and parched corn. I like the chuñu and corn but find the soup a little challenging. In this trip I also ate spicy lung, potato and hominy soup in a rough part of Lima but that is for another tale.

The people all dress in their traditional clothing for the communal work called, “faena,” and after the meal, the men all sit like little kids playing choo choo train on two of the potato rows.

One man is designated the server called servicio. He is really a master of ceremonies of sorts with a twist. He is charged with serving chicha brewed from the chuñu, a disgusting, sour-mash, grayish brown soupy looking drink. It is quite alcoholic and each man is delivered two ancient and well worn cows’ horns-full.

He is supposed to call a woman over to receive one and then each down the drink. There is a not too subtle courtship element to all of this because the women, old and young have to pass between the rows to get their horn-full of chicha. You are supposed to do everything that the servicio says, sort of a two hour simon says in Quechua. The men have to ask their women to sing while all of this is going on. If at any point you misbehave or don’t do what you are told or take too long to drink your horn-full of hooch or the woman you call takes too long, or takes too long to sing, (these were the main things I figured out), the servicio comes to you with a tightly wound, coarse, horse-hair rope that he runs down your back bone and then delivers a sound whack on the back. In most instances the whole row gets pounded for an infraction. If he is especially upset, all in jest of course, he rasps your face with the coarse cord. Of course my unwillingness to drink got me whacked every time. I was allowed to call two different women over to take my drinks but I still got whacked.

People go to specific faenas because of the servicio that day. They are especially popular, the funnier they are. It is all done with a lot of joking, clowning around and gets more and more animated the more chichi they drink.

When the women did sing, I was positively blown away. I have heard much music here but that sounded like something out of a Hopi burial ceremony or something. They cover their face and chant a tune that sounds very North American Indian in tone. I truly felt like I participated in something very much from the deepest ancestors of these people.