Rambling In The Puna2

Expiry Dates

2009-11-22T20:11:00.000-08:00

Sometimes a little too much time on my hands gets me to pondering over scads of things that we do, eat and mix up; milk products for example. I really love them but have often wondered who first said, “Hey, let’s let the milk sit around until it spoils, separates and then eat the curds.”? Lately, with the rat poison thing, I have been thinking more about this.

In Peru, they make cheese the old way but putting the cow’s stomach’s liquid in the milk to coagulate the milk fat. In some areas they use llama stomach juices too. However, in the north of Peru there is a lizard that they drop into the milk and it produces the same affect. Now having said that, don’t you just wonder about the thought process that got someone to drown a lizard in milk in the first place? Just how many other critters do you suppose they dunked in the milk first or did they just get lucky with that first lizard they tried? Yet on the other hand, maybe a lizard just serendipitously fell in the bucket in the milk shed and started the milk a-clotting. For me this conjured up the image of a soggy little reptile treading milk, I don’t imagine he was built for swimming but probably kept his head above milk, heroically chugging until it started separating it into whey and curds. I imagine that density issues interfered what with curds bobbing in the whey until he finally succumbed to the variable compactness confusion, a poor, drowned, sodden little lizard. I suppose I wax pensive and I am dwelling a bit overly on clotting and curding these days…

Anyway, speaking of thickening milk with bacteria, yogurt fascinates me too. I love Peruvian yogurt better than the Swiss variety. Like most of these things, it comes with an expiration date or sell-by date just like its North American distant cousin. I say distant because the texture and flavor resemblance pales by comparison, a paltry puny relative and nothing more. Still South Americans have a certain obsessive relationship with expiration dates I have noted over the years. They will throw out a case of perfectly good milk because of the arrival of its expiration date. Though just an example, really anything with an expiry date as the Canucks and Britts say goes out of date the day after. Heck, my mother kept every prescription medication that we did not use in a big box in the hall closet for rainy sick days… She knew what they all did and for her; expiration dates served for a mere suggestion. Not in Peru or Chile though. The day after… aspirin has just turned to cyanide. Cough syrup turns to death potion at five minutes beyond the stroke of midnight.

I have had Peruvians tell me that I am risking my health by eating yogurt that has passed its date… Julie likewise asks me if the yogurt in the refrigerator has gone bad??? What does this mean? Just what happens to spoiled milk with more time? Does it get more spoiled? What are the health risks in eating more yogurty yogurt? Some say it goes all moldy… Hello-o-o! What is that green stuff on the Treasure Island, Gorgonzola or Roquefort? How many deaths or terminal illness get attributed each year to Kraft Roka Blue Cheese Dressing for example? “Mrs. Hasler, I regret to inform you that your husband succumbed to a hyper sensitivity to cheese mold…”

Today I went to Costco. They had great huge cheeses from Parma, Italy, aged parmesan cheese… they have dates on aged cheese, use-by or sell-by…all the same to a Peruvian. What does that even mean though? Isn’t the whole idea of aging the cheese that it gets better the longer it sits, or not? I need help here, what happens if you don’t eat the matured cheese by the date that FDA or Costco expiration police say you need to eat it? Does the increasing elderliness of the cheese somehow cause it to go south because the sagacious warehouse store daters say so and so as not to get into dutch with the feds? Phew, now there is a silver lining to health care and even bigger government! Somebody tell Nancy Pelosi! I can see it with roast chickens or putrefying pork chops you refrigerated what with salmonella and all. For me the jury is still out on the brown lettuce that we have thrown out in truckloads. Sometimes stuff just gets science projecty, i.e. really slimy, icky and even smelly like tortillas, celery and raw gizzards with green and often slimy mold, putrescine and cadaverine but aspirin, cheese and yogurt, come on now!

The Cure/Sponge Bath???

2009-11-16T15:11:00.000-08:00

One of the fascinating things about requiring medical attention concerns new skills one has to acquire and new information about medicine. I have now had the learning opportunity of spending the better part of each day this week in the hands of surgeons, technicians and nurses who have told me a lot of things and taught me that yes, though not pretty, I can give myself shots in my stomach fat.

Years ago, after hernia surgery, a matronly Peruvian nurse surprised me early in the morning by announcing that she had come to give me a sponge bath! I laughed, actually thinking she was joking but, no, she was all business and got right to work. Not having had a sponge bath since babyhood, I had no clue how to receive it with dignity. Turns out, there is no way… always the helpful sort, and inherently timid about such things, I did what I thought she required of me. Diligently I strove to cover certain sensitive anatomical regions by shifting sheet and gown about strategically to keep these parts out of sight of the nurse to keep from offending her, as I supposed…, the comical bit here is that I actually thought I helped in my assiduous but deluded efforts.

All went along fine until she needed to work in that the neck of the woods in question, so to speak. My dabbling in the process impeded her professional efforts so at this point, she grasped the sheet firmly, snatched it from my hands and flung it deftly, arching it across the room to fall against the far wall. With this she very competently and clearly informed me that my help in the process was no longer required or welcome, as though it had ever been, and that I should just let her get on with her job. I submitted respectfully and dutifully if with little decorum to the rest of the sponge bath.

It did help me overcome my excessive bashfulness by the way.

In my last blog, I told about the ER but it bears repeating that the health care professionals seem to have considered it their responsibility to scare the you-know-what out of me. Though I don’t panic easily, I have gained respect for my current problem. No one has ever told me this often that I could die if I don’t do…, at least not so frequently.

In part, the strange element here is that the cure can kill me just as dead as the problem if I mess it up. Here is what I know. I have clots in my right leg. The clots can rip loose at any time and hurtle across my body to my heart, lungs or brain and snuff me out in a heart attack, embolism or stroke. I have to lie down with my foot higher than my chest until the clots stabilize and then they supposedly get absorbed back into my system.

Meanwhile, they give me medicine to thin my blood down so this does not happen again. I started off having to shoot myself in the belly twice each day with some stuff to kick start the blood thinning. Now I take daily pills called Coumadin or Warfarin to keep it thinner. According to the doctor, I get to do that for several months at least. Here is the kicker though; the pills are actually rat poison. No joke, it makes rats bleed out internally because of an overdose and I suspect that because of size differentials, my daily dose would dust off a rat. The doctors monitor me each day to tell them if my blood is getting thin enough or too thin. Meanwhile they tell me in each visit, if I have blood in my stools, unexplained blood in your mouth, nose bleeds, blood shot eyes, coughing up blood, chest pains, difficulty breathing and so on, get to the ER immediately. Oh goody, another cultural roller coaster!

Now, I have a little question here. Who, is the guy who decided, “Hey, let’s try rat poison and see if human blood gets thin?” Whatever happened to good old blood letting or did leaches just go out of fashion? But seriously, who thinks up any of this stuff?

Quiet Woman Blues

2009-10-24T17:01:00.003-07:00

I had some requests for the lyrics to this great song... Enjoy, it is much better with the accompaniment... This has reference to my previous blog in case you missed it.

Quiet Woman
By Canned Heat

I got this woman,
Ain’t no lie
Opens her mouth
Makes me cry,
Five foot three,
Five two is shout,
I tell you people
Without a doubt
I got to find a quiet woman
Find a quiet woman,
Gotta find a quiet woman.
The one I got
Is way too loud.

Friends know my troubles,
Neighbors too.
Smoke too much dope,
No money too,
I tell you people
Ain’t no lie,
I’ll be searchin’
Till the day I die
I got to find a quiet woman
Find a quiet woman,
Gotta find a quiet woman.
The one I got
Is way too loud.

Friends say I’m crazy,
Probably true,
Woman’s built for yellin’ man,
Too bad it’s at you,
Search the world over
‘Til the day I die;
Gonna find a quiet woman
Tell you people why.
I got to find a quiet woman
Find a quiet woman,
Gotta find a quiet woman.
The one I got
Is way too loud.

Things You Have To Do When You Don’t Walk Around Enough In An Airplane

2009-10-23T10:43:00.000-07:00

This next blog works out to be an addendum to the head cracked open story in my last blog. In that account, I stopped bleeding very quickly. Just before I left the project on my trip home I noticed that I had a sore spot on the inside of my thigh and that it appeared to have some related swelling. I thought, Oh great! Varicose veins! I got to Lima and called Julie to get me an appointment with a doctor starting a trepidation train that, by the way, was completely justified. Mom’s, ergo, wives spend a good deal of time in this avocation. No exception, Julie does a great bit of her own fretting. Her expressions of concern always begin with, “Now see, that worries me.”

To make this short, I got home to go with Leah to her competition in Indiana but I arrived with a Deep Vein Thrombosis or blood clot in my upper thigh. This is a result in part of too much sedentary travel in airplanes and pickup trucks at very high altitudes and probably some other factors. The good news is that I made it home with out the clot tearing loose and causing me a stroke, heart attack or just simple suffocation. Neat huh?!

Julie had set up the doctor's appointment at 4pm. My Doctor told me that I needed to go to the ER. Her nurse made me sign a form absolving my doc of responsibility should I not go to the ER and die in the plane the next day. Julie and I went down to the hospital and checked into the ER. There began the true odyssey. The packed waiting room had a slice of humanity that truly boggled my mind.

A very large, high-decibel woman with an amazing telephone, accompanied by all of her offspring who spent their time whining and speculating on the potentially fatal foot injury their mother had sustained turned out to have an injured tendon. A guy named Chad had cut his knee with an axe and seemed a no brainer to get in quickly. He managed his pain pretty well and was upright with a compress. However, no one even said, “Stat!” the whole time we were there. We asked the young guy sitting across from us how long he had been there, “Four hours,” he responded. Judging by the little plastic arm band he wore, he had been triaged already. I started my skid into resignation.

To our right another, very large wheelchair bound woman named Inez accompanied her blonde boyfriend in a t-shirt with the sleeves cut away to expose all of his ribcage and the intricate thorn and multi-skull motif tattooed on his right arm. They accompanied an older couple Juan and Lidia. Inez called Lidia mom when asking if she was going to go smoke but said, “Juan,” when she spoke to the elderly man.

Across the room the TV carried a program called TruTV that had a story line about police investigation but either did not hold the interest of or was too close to home for this eclectic crowd. Someone got up and changed it to the Monday Night football game. I am convinced that football won out only because of a paucity of adequate WWF, NASCAR or Monster Truck Pull events on Monday.

At some point they called Juan back and with the disappearance of his colorful clan through the coveted ER door came a hefty sweat suit attired, trio; mother, daughter and daughter’s baby. They seemed to be the caregivers of the baby given the overheard conversation. The mother was complaining that her grandbaby kept surreptitiously “barfing,” and that it, “Smelled gross.” What a stunner, gross as opposed to a yummier smelling barf or what? The daughter blamed the foul smell on antibiotics but I could not extricate the proposed comparison of barfs from my head.

Once back in the ER they sent me to one of those beds surrounded by curtains, next to the telephoning woman from the waiting room. Canned Heat sang described her in “Quiet Woman Blues.” Thankfully someone had collected her children but this did not stifle her loquacity. Though I could not make a single phone call, she had full coverage the entire time and my goodness; I want a battery like hers. I heard every snippet of her telephone conversations. She began to share excessive information about her bodily functions with the doctors and everyone else in telephone range. The sleep patterns of her friends crossed my mind. She called them all night long with her incessant diarrheal blathering. There was a certain irony in this given that so much of the chatter had to do with her own incontinence problem.

At some point she got out and they replaced her with an in obnoxious woman that is the source material for pigeonholing. Pardon my frankness… She made the former resident seem a retiring violet. Bossy, pushy and just insufferable, she had received some medicine at the other facility (not clear at all to me which) and she had chest pains. Her "medical training" indicated to her and she shared ad nauseum with the nurses that this medication was at fault for her current discomfort. When they came to take her blood and asked if she were allergic to latex, she said in a Deep South drawl, “Whaaa, yes ah am and you ain’t goin’ ta give me no iodine, ner betadine ner nothin’ like that neither.” When they started to take her blood she shouted, at volumes exceeding single stroke engines, “Ow, ow, ow, y’alls fixin’ ta keel me!” Julie witnessed that I have not exaggerated. Brashly, she repeated these phrases stridently and abrasively for as long as they attempted to draw her blood. Though I never actually saw her, I am confident that no stereotype of her would be an exaggeration.

Subsequently, they announced that a man was coming in, "not" in custody but who had been firing off a pistol in downtown Albuquerque and they needed to restrain him. I think he actually came in while I was being ultra-sounded but later we heard him cackling high-pitched and raucously, like someone in a Vincent Price horror movie down the hall. He got me to pondering and wondering just what it might take to get oneself arrested in Albuquerque.

In the end I was impressed by the complexity of the ER and the lack of racism, just a spectrum of mankind. Indeed, it was a collection with all of the variety and spice of life, a virtual humanity rainbow to make Jesse Jackson proud. I tried to take note of names of those who floated in and out of my dream, there were LeShaun, Juan, Chad, Jesus, and Pilgrim and I saw more mullets and shaved heads and tattoos than I have seen in ages. There almost seemed a required style in t-shirts, undershirts, ball caps and sweat pants. I came to the conclusion that those ER TV shows are a poor representation of reality since they try to mute the reality for more sensitive viewers. Yet we had an excellent Caucasian doctor, a fine black X-ray technician and an adorable Hispanic nurse named Alicia. She repeatedly apologized and thanked us for our patience. I told her that she has the most interesting job in the world and that she needs to write a book. She said, “It's never really dull here.” her understatement stunned and in the end, I had the distinct impression that I had participated in an episode of,” Dog the Bounty Hunter.”

Things Not To Do While Jogging In Lima Because You Have Spare Time

2009-10-06T09:31:00.000-07:00

I am in that category of sporadic bloggers, in case you have not been able to tell. I am reluctant to piffle away the time with miscellaneous stuff that no one cares about but me. However, I have a tale that leads me to a safety tip that may be of use to someone… I went running in Lima the other day and got away later than usual. I try to routinely run before the rush hour gets going. I run a half hour in one direction and then run back to my hotel.

On this morning a fine drizzle fell. It was refreshing but made the sidewalks a little slick. I had run my 30 minutes, turned around and had a concern to get back as quickly as possible because I had interviews to hold. I was not actually in Lima itself; rather a suburb called San Isidro, a nice and well looked after neighborhood. The houses pretty much all have automatic garage doors that lift up and away from the house. They are operated by steel contraptions on the corners of the doors.

Because I had left late, the run became a bit of an obstacle course of people and cars but manageable. When I got to one of these houses where the lady was backing her car out I evaluated the situation. Not wanting to get the door dropped down on me. I decided to go around the front of the car and I sped up to do it. The steel brace was perfectly in my blind spot. I never saw it and propelled myself, plowing directly into it at full speed. The checked inertia nearly knocked me onto my back when I hit it.

I crouched down and put my hand on the point of the collision and said to myself, “Phew, lucky me. I just got a bump and no blood.” This passed in a split second because at that very point blood fairly gushed out of the wound and off of my bald head. I had nothing to control it and it was horrific given the lack of hair and its absorbing capacity.

I needed a little towel or something. A woman came to me and told me to go back to the owner of the house and complain. I asked, “What am I going to complain about? I ran into the bar! Indeed, if you are interested in helping me, tell me where I can get this looked at…” She told me to go to the posta medica about 3 blocks back. This translates to 5 or 6 blocks in my experience. I did head in that direction but realized that that would take time I did not have.

I decided, despite my looking like a character from a cheap horror flick, that I should continue running back to the hotel before it started to hurt and in time to clean myself up for my interviews. I was still 20-25 minutes from the hotel.

The run was full of helpful people asking what happened and offering insights like using kerosene on the wound. The police looked at me in some amazement but only one asked what was going on. Cars with children slowed along side of me with myriad faces pressed against windows to see the funny bleeding man.

I am sure I terrified the receptionist who immediately got me towels and access to the hotel first aid kit. I went to clean up and put some hydrogen peroxide on my wound. Of course I took the commensurate picture. Once at my meetings the ladies there offered helpful suggestions since every so often, the wound would sprout a leak sending a small drizzle down my forehead. We put some vinegar on it and taped it up and by the end of the day, it had scabbed over completely.

The safety tip: Run early in San Isidro and look up, above all in Lilliputianesque countries where the average height is less than 5.5 feet.

No More Odysseys For a While, Please…

2009-08-02T17:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had to get to Lima. This involves leaving the project at four in the morning and driving the six hours to Cusco, catching a plane in the afternoon and flying to Lima by late afternoon or early evening. Sounds simple doesn’t it?

We left the camp at 4:45am, Danny, a driver, a coworker, Juana Aparcana and I. The secretary had booked my flight for 3:45p.m., so I had plenty of time. I put on clean clothes so I would not have to take a bunch of stuff, and after all, I just had to sit in the car and plane for six or eight hours to get to Lima.

Things seemed to be pretty well on track. I had worked until midnight so Danny started off driving, but I could not sleep in any case. I took over at about 6am and we made good time. Along about 7am, I began to notice some issues with the gears and thought I had just gotten clumsy and then, suddenly, the car stopped. The clutch had no effect whatsoever and despite the fact that I could get the stick into the gears, nothing happened when I let off the clutch. We got out and had a look see. Danny looked under the truck and the hood and pulled out a handful of fibers and said, here is the clutch disk… We had seen a cellular signal on a phone a few miles back so I just started walking in the frosty altiplano morning light. Juana and I hiked downhill for a mile or so but found no signal. I wandered off into the ichu grass and saw only a pair of comuneros from the local town Capaccmarca with whom I visited for a few moments to be cordial, nice guys, my age I would guess. We said goodbye and I kept up my cellular signal witching.

The hours whittled away and I had decided that I was not meant to get to Lima that day. When I had just given up hope, we saw a van coming up the road towards us. We flagged it down and it was a passenger “Express” from Challhuahuacho to Cusco. It had left at 6am. We asked the driver if he had space. He did and we loaded into it and left Danny there to keep track of the pickup. “We will call when we get a signal,” I told him.

Off we went and at every town, the driver asked for fuel which gave us a little concern. He had said we would be in Cusco by 1pm but I had begun to doubt that. I quit believing fairy tales many years ago and Peruvian punctuality promises fall into that same category. An hour out of Cusco in Yurisque, we stopped to take on a couple of women and the driver continued his combustible (fuel) quest. The ladies loaded large bundles of corn stalks atop the bus and the older of the two muscled her way to the back and wedged in, smashing me against Juana like another sardine in the can.

In Quechua, she told her daughter that this was Saturday and they don’t sell gasoline in town on Saturday. By now we had a clear idea that the driver knew his van’s gauges and that we were not going to make it. He seemed somewhat frantic going about looking for the owner of the “gas station” a house with barrels of diesel fuel in it. At last the owner came out with a key. What a sigh of relief went through the toasty van. We opened the doors and relaxed while the driver bought one gallon of fuel and poured it into the van with a large metal funnel, shaking in the last drips.

We made the last hour in good time but by the time I rolled into Cusco, it was 2:15pm and I had to be in the airport in a half hour. I made it and made my plane despite all of the shenanigans. Many years ago, I told my son William, “If you go on a trip and everything goes fine, “no clutches blow up, no microbuses pick you up and stop in every hamlet looking for fuel etc.”; you don’t have stories.” I recently read a book that said, “Stories only happen to those who can tell them.” I would be happy to have a few less.

Hysterics on a Plane

2009-07-24T21:27:00.000-07:00

I flew to Lima the night before last, and had a seven hour delay that really only needed to take about two… We flew into Houston by about two in the afternoon and had to board my flight to Lima at three pm. So far, so good, I got to my gate, ready and happy that I only had an hour layover. They called us to board and the plane, packed full due to tourist season combined with Peruvian Independence Day on the 28th.

Anyway, the plane pulled back a few yards from the gate and immediately the pilot noted a problem with a “whatchamacalit” in a motor feeding air into the back of the plane. Back to the gate for the maintenance guys to have a look. They fixed it up and we pulled out again.

Nope, still not working and now, the fuel pump acted up and the problem needed more attention. This time, they got us off the plane and into the terminal because they could not keep the plane temperature down. We hung around for an hour and a half while they sorted out the problem and then they loaded us back into the plane.

As soon as we were back in the plane one of the passengers decided that he felt sick and could not continue his trip to Peru. They offloaded him but here’s the trick, if you have booked into an international flight and get off, your luggage must exit with you so that people don’t leave bombs on board by getting conveniently sick etc. Anyway, we sat while they got the bag off, about an hour. By now we were delayed about four hours. The plane was uncomfortably hot and it turned out that one of the motors needed coaxing from some sort of a cart to start up and they had one that was too small, so said the captain. This produced a sweltering delay in the broiling plane. I admit to discomfort and sweating profusely myself. A number of passengers began to gripe vociferously about vague discomforts and their waning confidence in the plane itself.

About now a couple of women with babies began to be quite vocal that they were feeling bad and the plane was not cool enough and one in particular complained that since she had just had a caesarian three weeks before and her baby was new, she was afraid that the baby would become ill. One might ask why a woman would fly internationally just three weeks after a caesarian. With no warning, others chimed in with sympathy for the caesarian woman and her baby. Suddenly, the airline was going to kill the baby. The baby would die in the heat yet at no moment did the baby cry, whine or look particularly feeble, that I could see. Somehow then, the argument shifted to us and several chimed in that we all might die like so many chickens in a Quonset hut in southern Texas or something. Wait a minute, we were in southern Texas… On top of that, a third year mechanical engineering student, who I think exaggerated her qualifications insisted that, despite all assurances by the jet engine mechanics, our plane had become unfit to fly, further inciting the panic. Pretty quick we had a reasonably significant mutiny and a half dozen or so passengers opted to take the flight on the next date. Naturally, they did not check availability, and I happened to know that these flights were virtual sardine packs of Peruvians and tourists.

You have probably leapt to the conclusion that this reenactment of the Exodus cost us hours more in searching for stupid people’s luggage. In the end it took something on the order of three hours but did get me an upgrade. Instead of arriving in Lima at 10:30 pm, I got in at 5:30am having spent twelve hours on a plane instead of six and all because of a few hysterical and drastic Latinos.

National Strikes/ Bored In Cusco

2009-07-08T18:14:00.000-07:00

Alan Garcia Caricature After The Bagua Killings

Just about a month ago, the natives around the city of Bagua, Peru protested the government policies around water and the protest grew ugly. Between police and native inhabitants, 32 people lost their lives in the violence that erupted there. If you are not connected to Peru, likely the big news items like Iran, Afghanistan, China, North Korea, and the tragic demise of Michael Jackson, the Bagua killings have been little more than a footnote.

Avenida Del Sol... Empty

This social unrest has resulted in big problems for the pretty well failed government of Alan Garcia. Garcia was the president elected back in 1985 who was in power when inflation hit 1300% and the Maoist, Shining Path terrorists got really rolling in Peru. In fact, it all went out of control when Alan was president last time. The best question might have to do with why they ever re-elected him. That truly can be asked in virtually all elections in Latin America but then I suppose we are not immune to bonehead election results in the US now. Without digressing, I am stunned at how short memories get with the rising generation and above all in countries where literacy is an issue both for ability and lack of interest.

The Strike

In the end, he is in and the best choice Lourdes Flores never had a chance… The Garcia government has made so many poor choices that no one can actually track them. They have done things without consulting the communities time and again. As a result, things have gotten kind of rough. The strikes have been carried out by various guilds and unions and this latest one was orchestrated to include most of the important ones. They paralyze parts of the country Tuesday and Wednesday and others on Wednesday and Thursday effectively chocker blocking the whole country for three days.

Civil Construction Workers With Their Clubs

We decided that my presence in the camp could result in my getting kidnapped and held for some demands so I cut out and went to Cusco. Indeed, Cusco carries out nasty and rigid strikes that have a terrible effect because it is the Inca, tourist Mecca. Right now, the whole place is shut down for two days and hardly a tourist in sight. You cannot get in or out of the city and if you try, you are likely to get your windows busted out by thrown rocks. I have to stay here to get my stuff that I left in camp because I was not planning on this and I go home on Saturday. This really whacks the local economy.

I went out to see the strike this morning and the strikers acted in a civilized manner. The strikers behaved themselves but all had their clubs, just in case. They did not throw any rocks or gas at me or anybody else that I saw, but they had their fun. In the end, I was more disturbed by the protest paperwork. This whole platform promises terrible problems for Peru if something does not happen soon. The real problems come from some of the Hugo Chavez related solutions…

A Woman Selling Roasted Bananas and Sweet Potatoes

My mother told me that she loved nothing better than to be caught in a disaster and ride it out. On this and other points I differ. For my account I am nothing but stranded in a decent hotel but bored to tears in Cusco, Peru. This has a certain level of sacrilege to the tourists who come here just to see IT. I have seen it before and it has its charm, but I recognize the stale urine smells and cheap tourist photo ops with the ladies and kids in pseudo native attire, packing lambs or leading around alpacas. I need to be working or going home and have not been able to bring myself to do any of the tourist stuff. Who could imagine being bored in Cusco?

It’s Huatia Time Again

2009-05-24T07:28:00.000-07:00

Sumac Huahacha With Her Cow Pat...

In the fall of the year here in Peru they harvest the potato crop. It is hard to believe another year has passed by since I wrote about the huatia tradition here. I just got back from a huatia where I was invited. The sun is spectacular and though you freeze in the shade, out in the sun, you get wonderfully roasted like the potatoes. They cook the huatia in dirt clod ovens with dried animal dung.

Harvest in Full Process

While there, and I have no idea why I thought to ask this, I asked about Quechua names for dung. It turns out that Ccahua (beginning with a sort of pronounced glottal stopped k, the double c, kh-awa) means cow dung, but only cow dung. Then there is Ucha for horse dung and Chaccha (chak-cha) for sheep or llama dung. I am also not clear why this fascinated me so. Then they told me that if you aren’t happy with how someone is acting you call them Ccahua uma, a dung-head or worse… It is a pretty basic culture as you will suppose.

Juana Sacking Potatoes With Santos' Family

Nevertheless, a lot of words for animal excrement. They also use the generic caca for all of it but when the little girls come to school packing their dried cow pat to cook their lunch, it is, “Ccahuata escualeman apani."

Potatoes Heaped and Ready to Spread Out For Chuño

The Decline of Western Civilization, As We Know It

2009-05-12T15:20:00.000-07:00

I consider that the state of Art in a society is a clue to its level of accomplishment. I have seen the David and mighty works of the greats of the Italian and Dutch Renaissance. I love great poetry and other literature and thrill at the compositions of the masters. I consider, much modern music to be great but at a certain point thought we had reached our low point in the tide of musical times during the eighties with the depressing advent of, “Disco.” The advent hailed such great nasally sounds as, “Stayin’ Alive,” whined so eloquently by the likes of Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees. We got jangled by others like Donna Summer. The period saw the tragic break up of the Jackson family giving rise to such great one-time-hit performers as Jermaine and Tito. Likewise, and though I digress, Michael’s slide into plastic surgery oblivion and whatever else he was up to in Wonderland. The Disco rage also produced the overproduction of mirror balls and a world awash in slitted slinky synthetic styles and shirts with oversized collars and annoying geometric patterns not to mention the plethora of leisure suits. Now, I really thought that this was the low ebb, the bottom until yesterday, I heard a song actually called, “My Life Would Suck Without You…”

Hey There’s A Head In My Soup!

2009-05-11T09:42:00.000-07:00

I remember when I first saw the soup they call, “Sheep's head soup,” in the Altiplano of Peru, I thought that it was too gross for words. Frankly, it disturbed me. Though never actually a candidate for a vegan lifestyle, the fact that I could see all manner of floaters: eyes, hooves, snouts, brains, freeze dried potatoes and other disgusting gobs bobbing in the grey greasy slurry that looked for all the world like dishwater with body parts, freaked me out. Indeed, a certain quality of pride infused me when I thought, “Well, at least I don’t eat guts…” Time has flown by and my standards have definitely changed (some say, “Lowered,” you can guess who with unquestionable precision).

The Preparation

The Soup

While I still complain that the soup could use an onion or some garlic nowadays, I still eat it with gusto. I have consumed cows’ udder and thought it pretty fine. Liver, kidneys and sweetbreads are delicacies to me. Beef and bison intestines, and saucy stomach slices grilled to crunchy perfection over an open flame are delightful on my tongue; mouth watering tidbits. Speaking of which, I am pretty fond of tongue too; puns plural, completely intended. I am sure that none of these things will keep me breathing for long. It seems that all of the stuff on the inside of the ribcage is bad for you on some level and so I try to bridle my passion for the fatty inner organs of beasts and fowl but, all the while it is coating my arteries, I consider it pretty tasty stuff!

Savoring...

Drunks ‘n’ Sheep Rustlers

2009-04-20T15:25:00.000-07:00

Q: Why doesn’t the sun set on the English empire?

A: Because God knows you can’t trust the English in the dark!

It is now an anachronistic joke that no one under about forty gets… only in terms of trust and the dark does this relate to what I am about to recount. Otherwise its extreme irrelevance only works for those who know about Benjamin Disraeli. Anyway, I have digressed without even beginning my account.

The world is a fascinating and diverse sort of a place. I had an extraordinarily long day yesterday that began at 2:45 am. and ended at something post midnight and was non stop. In fact I only ate once. Completely bushed when I got into bed at 9:30pm, more or less, there came a knock at 10:30pm from one of the guards. I opened the door to see the one they call, “Puma.” He told me that Francisco and Simon were at the gate and needed to be driven to town to the police station to file a complaint.

Wondering why this could not wait until morning, I got out of bed and asked who could take them. But it was after 11:00pm by then. They said Mario could do it and I started to get dressed. I barely trust Mario in the daylight let alone at midnight and in the rain on slick muddy roads. I walked down to the guard shack and found Pancho there kind of wound up. Pancho speaks some Spanish but mixes it up with Quechua. He smelled and sounded of alcohol and coca. This combination reminds me of a movie called Alien Nation from back in the dark ages where aliens who get drunk on sour milk live amongst earthlings.

Anyway, Pancho was, “Huascar (wascar),” (Quechua slang for drunk and also a last name) but reasonably alert. He informed me that they were all gathered up in the common house in the community. He said that they had found about 150 stolen sheep. “C’mon inginiiro (een-heen-yeero (engineer)), le’s go. You have to take us to town to report to the police.” I got the truck ready and loaded up Pancho. We drove up to the community center, a largely finished adobe brick structure in the plaza of the community.

No moon showed and only the starlight illuminated the shadowy figures all about the front door, no lights except a candle inside. When I walked through, my eyes adjusting to the poor light, I met hands of inebriated greetings, “Allillanchu inginiiro? (How are you Engineer?)” I shook the familiar clammy hands and passed answering “Alliallanmi.”

They ushered me into the building filled with garrulous gab of the comuneros. The room reeked of the musky mix of sheep, alcohol and coca with a powerful backdrop of stale dung smoke and the piquant accent of unwashed feet. Everyone picchaba coca and they had been drinking anisado, a strong concoction of cañazo (super distilled cane sugar wine) that they have combined with anis to take on the licorice flavor of the seeds. Smells I once would have called overpowering have been reduced to mere annoyance…

One of those present, an elderly man whom I have never seen drunk named Julian came up to me and said cryptically, “Look, inginiiro,” waving his arms in the direction of the moist sheep, “Sheep…” he said.

“Well, yes they are,” I thought. Not a day passes here that I don’t see many sheep and I could see no real relevance, obvious link or difference between these and the 10,000 sheep outside of the house. This is the Altiplano for crying out loud. They did go on to explain that there were some sixty or more of these wayward ruminants across the valley that they did not have in custody. I looked somewhat vaguely at the evidence and he went on, “What shall we do?”

They presented me one Fabian Huaman declaring that he the rightful owner had come from Ccollyurqui in hot pursuit of the avijeos (rustlers). It was pretty clear that this man had been sipping or possibly gulping all the way from home. I imagine that he had come on horseback. “What shall we do?” they repeated through sloppy, intoxicated lips. I said, “Look man, I am just the driver here, not the judge. You tell me what you want to do and we will do it if it is a reasonable request.”

They conferred in slurred Quechua sometimes with raised drunken voices. Then they told me that we needed to go to the police station in Challhuahuacho to file a report. I agreed and headed for the truck. After another ten minutes of consultation they came to tell me that Simon would not go. Simon told me that he had seen nothing and yada yada yada, Fabian’s friend also decided not to go because he recognized that he was too inebriated. Pay close attention now... I turned to Pancho and Fabian and said, “I don’t care who is not going, but let’s get going. This has taken an hour, get in the car. !Vámonos muchachos!”

They carried on for about five more minutes and Fabian fell down on the ground once. He was not able to remain entirely vertical or walk in a single direction under his own power. Pancho and I finally loaded him in the car and buckled him in while he thanked us profusely and called us his brothers, very lovey dovey stuff. I drove them into town overhearing the familiar clicking, booze-accentuated, glottal stops that characterize their language but with the added slurring of blotto campesinos.

Once in town, I dropped them at the door of the police station and went to turn the truck around and came back and slept in the car seat while they talked to the police. Pancho came out and told me that their friend needed to stay and make his declaration in an improved condition in the morning and then the police would come out to evaluate the situation.

I said, “Good, get in and we will go home.”

“Not yet, we have to get Fabian to his hotel, he is not in a condition to find his way.” Duh!

Somewhat poetically, just when he said this, I saw Fabian fall flat on his backside in the street outside of the truck, completely unable to get to his feet. I rolled my eyes up and nodded. I said, “Ok then, get him in the truck and let’s go!”

So we loaded Fabian into the truck and drove around to one of the hostels in the town. The two of them stumbled into it and I waited. Pancho came back and got in. “Le’s go Inge.” We drove back through the night and confusion. I took Pancho home and dropped him at his door. “Pacarincama,”(See you tomorrow) he said.

“Tupanacama Pancho, allin tuta.” (See you later, good night)He tottered off to his door and I made my way back to my bed. By now, the clock read, 1:00 am. Sleep had pretty much fled and so I worked for a half hour until it returned. Counting sheep never seemed like much of an option to drop off however…

The Old Loogie Hocking Ploy

2009-04-14T21:48:00.000-07:00

I went shopping with my driver, Marti and nurse, Rosa in a not very frequently visited by gringos neighborhood in Cusco. They tried to tell me to stay out but were a little too tactful in their suggestion. I am not very good at picking up the hints.

We walked a ways into the market and a woman came up to Rosa and whispered in her ear, “Get your friend out of here. They are coming after him.” She was in this process suggesting that I needed to look at something at the edge of the market. I followed her and she was somewhat nervous and kept looking after me. I did not really get it still.

As I walked down the way passing under the little tarps, I felt something on the back of my ear. I thought it was a string. However, the sensation did not go away. I put my hand up to it and it was wet and when I looked at it, it was spit.

I know this trick. They spit on you or throw water on you and then while nice women help you clean up, they pick your pockets. I told Rosa, “Keep moving, they are trying to rob me here.” Just then I heard a woman behind me say, “Oh! Look they have soiled you!”

I just bustled on out of there. It did make me want to rip someone’s nose off. Nevertheless, I just got my hankie out and wiped off my ear while I walked out, frustrating their nefarious desires.

The Fangs of the Serpent

2009-02-14T21:23:00.000-08:00

The Haquira Prison of the Holy Inquisition

Entrance to the Judicial Chambers

Exactly what to call this I am not sure. I passed through the town of Haquira, Peru the other day. I was accompanied by four people with whom I work and we decided to stop and have a look at the prison that had been constructed in the large, columnar-jointed, welded-tuff massif in the middle of the town. It probably started as an Inca prison, but that would have only been a holding tank until they got around to executing them. They did not spend a lot of time on prisons since lying, stealing and laziness were all capital crimes in their world, let alone bigger stuff. Peruvians like to blame stuff on the Inca that should more likely be laid at the feet of the Spanish and the Holy Inquisition.

The Smallest Cell of the Men's Prison

This prison consists of two cave-like rooms carved into the living rock. One cave/prison cell set was built for the women and the other for the men. The men’s prison consists of three cells separated by a tiny door that I had to crawl through and openings into increasingly smaller spaces the deeper you go. The final space was impossible to stand in, even for the shorter Peruvians in my group. There was no light even with the doors open. On the women’s side, these deeper reaches have been covered over by the massive stone door that slipped into place in an earthquake some years back and no one can figure out how to get it back up.

The deep recesses were reserved for those who had committed the worst crimes. Those guilty of simple errors were able to walk out into the light of day from time to time. The place was dank, cold and humid but has not been inhabited for over a hundred years so there is no presence of human body odor now.

For as horrible as this was, there still awaited the purely Spanish touch up the stairs to the judgment chamber that says, “Holy Inquisition Tribunal of Justice.” It is a typical courtroom with benches carved into the stone on either side where judges and lawyers sat along with the accused. In the front is a judge’s seat where the tribunal president sat and a balustrade across, in front of his seat.

The Judicial Chamber

The one departure from the typical court room is a large hole, about the size of a basket ball in the ceiling above the left side of this balustrade. In this there is a hole that runs through the rock to the surface outside. Through this hole they passed a noose, anchored to the outside. Those who simply would not recant were hanged by placing their head up in the hole and having the noose tightened around their neck and a small stool kicked out from under their feet.

The place is maintained and tidy now with a gate keeper who charges s/.5 to get in and some little children serve as guides having been steeped in the history. Some will say that it is just history after all... In a way, it is kind of a beautiful monument to the brutality and horror that was waged against humanity by the Papacy in those years, not all that different from what the Nazis did though it lasted much, much longer. Still, should anyone ever doubt the doctrine of the Great Apostasy, he only needs to spend a little time in a place like this where the long gloomy night of the dark ages caused such massive human suffering. In the words of Bruce R. McConkie in his great talk on the restoration of the Gospel,

“It was a long, dark night. There were jackals in the shadows, wolves in the forests, coyotes everywhere. Lions roared and the fangs of the serpent sank again and again into human flesh. The black plague swept Europe. Wars were everywhere. Morality and decency had few supporters. The terrors of the night were real and the night was long—long and dark and black.”

Indeed!

A Little Twist on What keeps the Doctor Away

2009-02-11T18:47:00.000-08:00

Just when I think I have heard about everything, as John Hiatt says, “The bearded lady comes and does a double back flip…” my life here in Peru just has a way of getting more and more fascinating.

The other night one of our nurses came to me and said, “Geronimo is lying on his floor unconscious and foaming at the mouth, may I go and see him.” Of course I said, “Yes!” Geronimo is one of our workers. She filled me in on the rest as we were traveling to Espinar for a field trip with the compesinos the next day.

When she got to Geronimo’s house, he was indeed unconscious and reeking of some hideous alcoholic concoction. His family was all around him crying and carrying on telling her to not let him die. When she discerned that he was in a state of alcoholic intoxication, she turned to the crowd of sobbing relatives and said, “Would you shut up! He is not going to die, get over here and help me or he will!”

She taught them to massage him to get the blood flowing and to get him conscious and once he finally came around; she made him stand up and urinate in a bottle. Then she filled a cup with the urine and made him drink it! He perked up a bit, made a sort of clicking noise in the back of his throat and twitched and gulped while she refilled the cup and made him drink it again. This time he quivered and sat up straighter. This served to clear his head and then she made them give him some caffeine.

When she told me this, I shuddered and made my big GAACCCKKK! face and then she said, “I learned about the urine trick from my grandmother who made my grandfather drink his own urine to get him out of a similar condition.” I said, “Well, I bet the other men there think twice about drinking themselves blind next time…”

My Little Brother Is Turning 51 Today

2009-01-13T07:06:00.001-08:00

When I think of my relationship with my brother Steve there are far too many experiences and adventures to tell about but a few do stand out in my mind. One of my earliest memories of Steve took place when we were really little. We shared a bed and
as I would be trying to fall asleep Steve would rub my eyes to help himself go to sleep. This strange habit persisted until he was about 11 and mom moved me out. Needless to say at fourteen, I was less than tolerant…

I recall our trips over the pretty terrifying Loveland pass in Colorado. Steve would sit on his side of the car and pray ceaselessly that we would make it. I owe my life to Steve as do the rest of the passengers, including Becky who always occupied the middle position. On one of our trips over the pass, the highway was overcrowded with cars in full rush-hour from the ski slopes. We knew that if we stopped we would never get home. Steve had to urinate with a vengeance and was practically crying about it. Actually, I think he was crying about it and I am sure Becky was crying about it and he begged mom until she said, “You are going to have to go in this coke bottle.”

Nonplussed, he unzipped and peed until the bottle was full. These were bottles without screw caps and so mom had to open the door and dump it out into the traffic. I’m sure some drivers were mystified about the sudden yellow spray that hit their windshields!

However, the thing I remember best about Steve has always been his love of animals, be they dogs, goats, rabbits or hamsters. When he was about twelve, he decided to raise rabbits with the 4-H or something. When it came time to slaughter the rabbits, he said that he did not think he could do it. I said that I would help him out with it and got slaughter lessons from the lady who sold him the bunnies. I came home and made things ready. Though he lacked heart to kill them he insisted on observing. When I did a bad job on my first victim and it woke up hung up by its Achilles tendons and began to scream, Steve also started screaming hysterically “It’s not dead, it’s not dead!”

My best effort at an answer was to assure him, “It’s just nerves Stevie, it’s just nerves!” The next year he raised Lops because they were just for show… In other words, “Rich would not get to kill the rabbits.” I don’t think he believed me and the next year he opted for show only rabbits.

When Steve was much older he wept when he had to kill his favorite pig and never mind the other pigs, some of whom caused him some pain when had to do some surgery on them. But I won’t go into that now… On one of my visits to his home in Lehi, he asked me if I wanted some goat meat. I was always grateful for meat and he told me it was in the freezer downstairs. I went to check it out and found a black garbage full of two tiny goat carcasses frozen inseparably together. I went upstairs and asked, “What gives with the goats?”

He went on to tell me that the goats had been given to him by a neighbor who raised nanny goats for milking and that their children refused to eat the male goats because they became too attached to them. Not understanding how that had anything to do with the frozen carcasses, I asked him to explain why he had not butchered the goats and at least separated them into packets. He said, “Listen, they were so damned cute that when I got done slaughtering them, I felt so bad that I didn’t want anything more to do with them. They’re yours if you want them!”

These are a few of my many memories. I tell stories to all of my friends in Peru; the stories are just a part of me. When I was talking with friends in Peru, Juana, (a good friend) reminded me of many of the stories I had told her about Steve and it made me think that, although years and distance have stretched between us, most of my best stories involve him and now he is known from the Altiplano of Peru, to Chile, to Argentina, to Colombia and selected areas of Australia!

I think that what impresses me most about Steve is how much he is like Dad. He has the same laugh and has the same endearing qualities that our father had. He has a gentleness that I find enviable. He adores his family and would do anything for them. Now that he is fifty-one I cannot believe it. How the years have flown and here we are, the age of our dad when we were young men. That seems impossible. And so, Steve, on this your 51st birthday, I just want to say that I love you and miss you and wish you a Happy Birthday and many, many more.

Christmas and New Year 2008 - 2009

2009-01-08T13:28:00.000-08:00

A Tower of Offspring

I am always a little horrified when Christmas and New Year’s pass away and we are really in a new year and sliding towards the next Christmas and ultimately, death. Our Christmas was wonderful and we had a slew or a passel of people in the house, fourteen to be exact. People slept in rafters and on floors. We may never actually know the food costs. There were objects from dog toys, blocks, dolls, babies and pooches to trip or step on at every turn. What a joy! I enjoyed all of them. I cannot put a price on my family and the true joy that they bring to me.

The Hasler Clan

Glenn, Jenae and Olivia arrived before I got home from Peru and Olivia made regular runs down the hall calling, “Papa” and looking for the funny bald man. She greeted me with fantastic joy practically every morning. When William and Lacey arrived, Ben looked over the airport and 11:30 a day before Christmas Eve. Spotting me, he ran to my arms and hugged me and said, “I finded you Papa.” They also brought our newest grandchild addition, Clara Lynn and what a soothing bundle of chunky healthy joy that little girl is. It was our first Christmas with Isaac and we had a great time getting to know him and playing Guitar Hero. He and Maria brought their dog Greta who does not let anyone very near and gets really tense if you snuggle her but she lets me. Julie’s dad came to spend his first Christmas without mom and so worked on his adjustment in this maelstrom of progeny.

Clara Lynn

We had the usual excessive Christmas and ate too much and exercised too little, got and gave guns and bows and arrows plus assorted kitchen items and so on and so forth but this Christmas was really about family time together. We really spent little time watching movies but spent time listening to music, playing games, talking, shooting bows and arrows and so forth. Though it may sound boring, it was wonderful.

Olivia

Most of all it was the babies. I could not have ever imagined that a stage of life could have surpassed parenthood in terms of real fun but nothing prepared me for grandparenthood. What a gas!

Ben

Lightning in a Camera

2008-12-27T05:40:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-26T15:04:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-16T05:26:00.000-08:00

Chacrakuy

2008-12-14T08:02:00.000-08:00

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.

Anniversary in Lahuani… Carbon Monoxide Dancing

2008-10-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-13T03:14:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-10T14:20:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-05T19:29:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-02T06:52:00.000-07:00

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!

Please Don't Vex The Dog

2008-08-01T03:49:00.000-07:00

Stop Vexing The DogThe truly great part of my life is not living in Peru nor is it working in my work-a-day job. It has been raising five children, each of whom have taught me more than I ever learned in school and brought me more joy than all of the other experiences of my life. perhaps obvious; but this all goes hand in hand with having married the perfect woman for me who I am told frequently by others, that I don’t deserve. I do agree with that but, she got the short end of the stick and life has it’s defects.

The other night, my daughter was plucking her eyebrows and I was hassling her via the dog that I molested into joggling my daughter’s aim. She became more and more harassed and told me to stop. When I feigned innocence she said, “Alright, but you are vexing the dog.” I am not kidding, she said, “…vexing.” She said it with such ease that it made me decide I need to steer her off of the current Jane Austin, Emily Bronte etc. reading kick. But it made us all laugh at her improved vocabulary and I must say, made me appreciate the varied literary tastes of my offspring.

SPECIAL NEEDS

2008-07-28T16:08:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-25T04:59:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-24T05:29:00.000-07:00

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”

2008-07-09T04:56:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-07-01T06:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Bullfight & Drunks

2008-06-27T19:29:00.000-07:00

I love the lyrics to in the Grateful Dead song Truckin’:

Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me;
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me,
What a long, strange trip it's been.

The other day I had one of my more spectacular series of experiences since coming to Peru. I had arranged with a group of nurses to go and see a project to improve living conditions of the campesinos.

To start with I am in the middle of nowhere 12 hours from Arequipa, 6-8 hours from Cusco and 7 hours from Abancay. Near the town of Challhuahuacho we have been working for three years on a mineral exploration project. I work primarily with the native population trying to gain and maintain social license to do our work.

About a half hour away from our spot is the town of Tambulla a scenic burg of about 1000 inhabitants with its own medical post on very rough roads.

Beyond Tambulla the roads are worse to impossible, parts only accessible in 4X4 Low Range. I got to Tambulla at 4pm as arranged with Savi, the head nurse and picked her up with two assistants, Linda and Teofilo. We happened to have chosen the day of a bullfight in Tambulla and by 4pm many people were feeling little pain except for the woman who got gored by one of the bulls. Most having consumed inhuman quantities of a licorice smelling concoction of anise and pure ethyl alcohol from the pharmacy had become pretty tottery.

As we passed by slowly every possible person attempted to catch up to hitch a ride with us but we had no room. We made it past the ring full of bulls and the hills were covered with people in the most spectacular dress imaginable.

As we made it past the teaming masses a handful of folks had begun their trek home. Obviously they stuck out their thumbs for my consideration to get them to their homes. I was full and had to decline but one elderly man kindly exclaimed “Hunta” (we are full) and kicked the truck as I passed. I slowed thinking something else had happened but my passengers urged me to keep moving saying “Esta borracho. Así es esa gente.” As I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw that the old man had picked up a rock and I sped up as he hurled it with deadly accuracy in my direction. Had I not accelerated, it would have landed in the bed of the truck at least.

We went on to the village we wanted to visit, hiking 45 minutes over a hill about 1,000 feet above the village and down into the valley. The view from above really defies description because adjectives like breathtaking even fall short.

Our motive for traveling to Kuchuhuachu was to see this project that involves low-cost, improved homes and kitchens using local materials, adobe bricks and so forth. I went to this town a year ago and they told me that I was the first non Peruvian to ever visit it. It lies at 14,000 feet above sea level, 9 hours by truck and foot from the closest major city and is truly unspoiled.

Very proud of their accomplishments Anita and Delfina showed us their homes and kitchens.

They have changed everything from their homes before,

To their new homes.

Rightfully proud of their accomplishment since the area has no clay and all of the adobes had to be carried in on horse and human back, they happily showed us their modernized condition. Really, the change since a year ago left me amazed.

Winter has arrived here and so by the time we headed back up the hill, we had begun to lose daylight and the temperature really had begun to drop. Resting at the top of the hill we shared cheap soda pop that tasted like ambrosia, our small repast lit by the yawning view of the eternal firmament. Time was when the view of the Big Dipper on end and the Southern Cross in the sky kind of disoriented me but no more.

We had to move on before catching a chill and we had to pass through a village with a pack of savage dogs in total darkness. Lighting our way by the light in our cell phones, I would like to say that I pondered the incredible contrast to the dark huts of the other village but I actually spent the whole time hucking rocks at the constantly circling and obviously dangerous curs. I did think of Xenophon on his way back to Greece through hostile Persia. Just to let you know what a geek I really am. Afterwards, we headed back to Tambulla and thence home through the night.

I worried about the drunks but figured that the dark had driven them home by now. The very clear thought crossed my mind that I might run over a passed-out drunk in the road but I dismissed it. Nevertheless, I did my best to move through the dark cautiously.

Bouncing over the road we came upon an abandoned bicycle and speculated on its owner. A little farther along we came upon an inebriated woman who held up her plastic bottle of anise scented rubbing alcohol in a kind of barroom salute. A little farther along we came upon a saddled rider less horse and the women in the car began to speculate on whose was whose. They decided that the woman was on her way to a secret meeting with the bicycle’s owner and that she had fallen from the horse. They commented on the strangeness of the whole thing saying, “Bicycle without owner, horse without owner… married woman without owner,” and all laughed.

We had gone about half the distance to Tambulla where there is a rough patch of road. A detour has been made around it. As I turned into the cutoff, we saw a figure lying in the road, just as I had imagined before. I could have actually run over him had I not been going the speed I was going. The nurses asked me to stop and check him out and they speculated that he had been thrown from the horse. I turned around to put my headlights on him and we got out to check on him. He was just sleeping or passed out but had sustained no damage averring that he had not been bucked from his mount but had been on foot. I doubt he really knew. We moved him off of the road while Savi said that he would react to the cold but no one would run over him there.

We left them in the Puesta de Salud in Tambulla and headed back to camp. On our way we came upon a wasted horseman who we followed as he strove to urge his mount to higher velocity. With each effort to whip his charger he nearly fell from the horse. Sonia, our nurse filmed the hysterical antics of the jinete and I asked if she thought he would fall if I passed. “Que caiga, pue!” (Let him fall, man!) and she laughed. We got home in time to eat the last bits of food in the lunch room.

Repenting And Catching Up

2008-06-24T06:07:00.000-07:00

You know that, "Live fast/die young; leave a good looking corpse..." saying? I am working on the first bit but too late for the latter.

I am always thinking about other opportunities and think I would like to
start an NGO or a tour company.

NGOs are Non Government Organizations: Sierra Club, Green Peace But some do good work: Habitat for Humanity, Care, Unicef etc.

There are bzillions of them and I have thoughts around things that improve lifestyle for campesinos, education for children and so forth. People get sucked into giving so much money to bad/useless causes and there are so many folks in my neck of the woods with too much money that I think I could reach with my information and winning smile that I think it is worth a shot for something I am confident is a meaningful cause. There are hundreds of Peruvians that would work with me in something like this.

My other thought is to put together a company that gives tours of Peru. I know a lot about it now that I have lived here for twelve years. Imagine that! I have at least one great possible employee here who works for me now who would follow me to hell, I think. Anyway, I am thinking about targeting LDS church members who are interested in possible Book of Mormon sites and other stuff. I know something about eco tourism here too. The deepest and darkest Amazon forest is here just out of Cusco, lots of backpacking venues etc.

I am just cogitating at the moment.

My eldest daughter is getting married in Louisville Kentucky because she and her pretended are living in Bloomington, Indiana and Louisville is the closest LDS temple. She is a definite vagabond. She finished at BYU and went to live in Boston for two years but decided to get a Masters in Spanish linguistics and that led into a PhD. And meeting him...

He is a bit younger than she and is studying Mechanical Engineering in Indianapolis. I have talked to him on the phone and on SKYPE about three times. My wife is back there as I write this from the Peruvain altiplano and has seen and approved but I won't meet him until the wedding. My daughter will be 30 this November so don't know how much of a vote I have anyway. Seems like a great guy. She has a self portrait with him in her blog, she is a much more faithful blogger than I as you can see, if you want to take a look @ http://misshass.typepad.com/.

One son is finishing up a MS in geology but with a petroleum bent in DFW at
Texas Christian University. He has a son, is married and has a two year old son who calls me papa and loves my masks on my wall and my dogs and the rest of life. His wife is expecting a baby girl in five or six months.

My other son has finished his BA in Arabic Linguistics at BYU and is going to start law
school in August at Lubbock, Texas Tech. He got accepted to 7 law schools
so took the one he liked the best. He is also married and has an adorable one year old baby girl.

My wife, My twin daughters are bringing a friend of the girls and My wife's
brother, wife and three kids to Peru in July. This was planned before the wedding entered the picture, actually weddings. My wife and I will be padrinos for a dear friend here in Arequipa while they are here. It gives me rights to threaten bodily harm to macho little Peruvian men who might not be sufficiently attentive to the women in question. The culture shock for the other gringos might be fairly extreme in the fiesta. None of them recognize Salsa, Huayno, or Saya, let alone know how to dance to them. It should be entertaining.

Our girls will be juniors this year largely due to the whole Peru thing.
They get straight A's and my youngest (technically because they are twins) takes voice and sings beautifully, the 45 minutes older daughter writes stories and poems and they both read a lot. The latter asked for "Caesar's Conquest of Gaul" and a copy of Thucydides for her birthday you can guess who she takes after... the first has a thing for boring British literature. Go figure. The older kids are voracious readers as well. Peru was responsible for that in all but the eldest. We had terribly dull TV and for 6 months none at all when we got here. They became victims of my library and worse yet, they have no sense of modern music, just 60's - 80's blues, and rock and really old music. They actually recognize and like the blues and know who BB King and John Hyatt are. Weirdos!

In regards to my blogging it is not that I have quit but life just got a little bit ahead of me. I have also gone a fair bit into writing a book that is suspended at the moment. I am not sure if I am repenting and getting back into it but perhaps, just with smaller bits after this one. Goad me and fill my head with flattery and I would probably start again...

Regarding my book, interest in writing has mostly to do with places and people I have known. A great friend gives me a push now and again. He and I have nearly identical interest in the literature area...Well I like some reasonably weird stuff from the reading end and I read more than he does but what he likes to read, I like to write about. I have been reading lots of historical stuff, Herodotus, Xenophon, Shelby Foote and so forth, mostly military stuff of late. Of course I always read The Book of Mormon.

I have actually never left Peru. I go back and forth from New Mexico and feel like air travel is something that Dante left out of his circles of Hell. Still I love it here. I have thought of retiring here but it is a little troubled because of the whole security thing and with the resurgence of the Shining Path etc...

I am working more than I ever. It is cold down here now. I have spent less than two months at home so far this year. I do love Peru after these 12 years here but feel a tremendous disconnect with family and the states. I often think of Charles Boyer throwing away his little bag of French soil in the movie about Jean Lafitte.

Chavezland - Not The Magic Kingdom

2008-01-28T10:01:00.000-08:00

I had the opportunity to make a little trip to Venezuela and went very near its border with Guyana to look at a project that a big Canadian companyhas there in the jungle. They have some challenges similar to ours in Peru and some that are very different. I flew into Puerto Ordaz, and the community’s manager picked me up. We drove about five hours south of the city. I think I could write a book just about my adventure there. I had been there before, but it has changed.

A budding socialist state with a megalomaniac for a leader and a place of vast confusion, on the one hand, practically every care is on the high end of modern but there are still twenty year old Pontiacs rolling around. Lest I miss my guess, I think that a good seventy percent of the women there have undergone some sort of plastic surgery. Pretty much everything is modern but there is no sugar, chicken eggs, milk, toilet paper and apparently, even coffee is in short supply. We crossed one bridge that had collapsed and they had routed around it. The driver told me that the entire highway was in the same danger.

Anyway, we wandered down to the camp and had a look around. The property I went to see is pretty responsibly managed in terms of environment and community relations. Right next door is another gold project and it is a nightmare. They are surrounded by the worst sort of environmental abuses and indeed, right their on their land.

The boundary with Guyana is a veritable no man’s land, full of outlaws and informal miners who sluice nuggets away from the jungle and screw up the environment with mercury and just silting up the rivers. They live in tin and scrap wood shanty towns in hideous conditions that you see on the Learning Channel programs about evil miners. They merit the distinction. The streets are clogged with filthy men lugging gold pans and shovels on their backs. Prostitutes stand in ramshackle doorways, beckoning the men in. Surely drugs abound and alcohol is very in the open. Everything is red from the lateritic mud, slung by passing trucks in the rainy season. We passed one group of men burning off mercury in a spoon to reduce their find to a few gold nuggets. I asked my guide, “Are we alright here?”

“I think so…” he said. That made me feel really confident.

We stopped in other villages for me to see the company’s social programs that have been very successful. They have a good relationship with these people. Their situation is not so dire as in our projects. The mix is Creole and Indigenous with the Creole being a mix of the Indigenous, Spanish and African extractions, pretty exotic looking mixes. All are Spanish speaking as far as I could tell. Closer to Guyana, they speak more and more English.

The next two days consisted of work more related to Environmental concerns. The project lies near the Cuyuni River. It houses an area that the agency that designates this stuff has designated it a World Heritage site. As a matter of fact the mining company has partnered with the group Conservation International to study the area and preserve it.

I went down the river two hours in launches to check out the study camp and then got to tramp all over on jungle roads and check stuff out. I love the jungle and, at the risk of sounding like some lame Hollywood or Rock ‘n’ Roll do-gooder, am quite mesmerized and captivated by its beauty and majesty. It rained very little in my two days at the site and on the third it began to rain when we drove out. It rained and cleared, anywhere from flooding the road out and running red muddy rivulets to cloudless skies. We rose up out of the jungle and through the savannah and dropped back down to the River where Puerto Ordaz sits.

A dictator runs this state and he wants to replace Castro, his mentor. There can be no doubt about it. He wants to be king of South America and is in power thanks to the ridiculously poor in this land of plenty. Gas is virtually given away at their pumps but they can’t get it together enough to keep sugar stocked on their shelves.

Of late he has rattled sabers against Colombia calling Uribe a Bush puppet and putting troops along their border. He has called for the removal of the FARC from the list of terrorists. The king of Spain told him to, “Shut up,” in Chile the other day and now there are telephone ring tones with the regent of Spain saying, “¿por que no te callas?...¿por que no te callas?” (Why don’t you shut up)? Pretty funny but alarming to hear a king lose his cool that way. Chavez is also rumored to have had catholic priests killed.

The military is in your face at every turn. Traveling to the project there were no less than five checkpoints with fully armed teenage boys strutting around in brand spanking new uniforms. I say fully armed but their expensive, unworn FN-FALs did not have clips in them but still… They stop you and superciliously ask who you are and where you are headed, then wave you on. I had the distinct sense at that this thing could run off the rails badly at any point.

I once heard Chavez say that if Christ were to come now he would whip the catholic cardinals… Now, I am certainly not a fan of theirs but what a way to win friends and influence people in Latin America. His minister of the interior is a bus driver from Caracas. His latest trick has been to revalue their money calling them Bolivares Fuertes and it cost him millions of this funny money to do it. He just printed all new bills with three less zeros. Nothing else, oh, except that to see the pictures on the bills you have to hold them vertically… It has made inflation scream. The other thing is that you cannot even talk about dollars or the exchange rate. That supposedly will get you sent to jail. I had to exchange on the black market to pay for my airplane ticket. Say what you will about Castro but he can read and he has moderated with his 80 years. If the Venezuelan Secret Police get a look at this before I get out of here…I probably won’t get out of here.

There is much to love about Venezuela. Its people are handsome. Food is a lot like Colombian fare but with a little more zing to it. They have a malt based soft drink that is sweet and tasty. They have great chocolate.

Now I said that the Venezuelans are good looking and I think that is true. It must be but you cannot really tell. Unless I miss my guess, but I usually err on the side of stupid slobbering males everywhere when I say, “you really think those are fake?” I think that there are vast numbers of boob jobs in Venezuela.

You would like to think that chest compressions can do that but you would only think that if you were a stupid slobbering male. But then the fact is that you don’t even really care… There is an impossible preponderance of nearly perfect figures, faces etc. in Venezuela. Even women in military uniforms cut a very foxy figure sort of like a butch sort of swat team swagger, but, well you get the drift.

Faces too… Droopy turkey chins, Zero. There are no Cher lips that I saw either.

Now I have been thinking a bit about this and its effect on the whole population and the breeding issues involved, natural selection and so forth. Suppose you are a natty looking young Venezuelan couple both have been doctored up to look like JaLo and Antonio Banderas. The attraction is, of course kicked off by first looks at the perfect eyes, noses, ears, lips, boobs and butts.

Now, the attraction matures and all of the rest progresses. You fall in love, get married, maybe… Months pass, and along come the little ones. Will they look like a mix of the two new faces, like you? Recalling the whole natural selection thing and the effects of DNA, rest assured they will be different and if you had more than minor tucks and snips here and there, this could be a genetic train wreck. You are set up for kids who look as bad as the post re-construction Joan Rivers or even a Michael Jackson look alike. They could have tiny flat chests, gigantic bulbous noses and Dumbo ears to the point that paternity gets called into question.

Huacunacuy, Killing Games

2008-01-25T15:49:00.000-08:00

While I was up at our project site we got to talking about traditions because this is the beginning of Carnaval in this part of the world. Really it is all of the fun stuff that precedes Carnaval. Carnaval is a bacchanalian sort of a deal here and all of the babies born nine months later in November are automatically legitimate and at that time of year, they sell little breads with plastic baby faces glued on them. It is a time when the dances and all of the activities have a sexual connotation. Kids chase each other around and flirt like crazy and play (jugar) which means throw water, colored talcum powder, spray colored foam and or string at each other… All in good fun and not just the kids. A lot of adults do it too. When we lived here, we got invited to a barbecue at the lake. They dunked the girls three times each and really wrecked our clothing. Luckily, we knew what to expect.

Well, that is not all; there is a certain tendency to violence in all of it. Over in the town of Mara, near our project they have a tradition. One of our summer students from there told us about it. It is called the Huacunacuy which is loosely translated, cry baby. The men from the village meet up in a valley and there they hurl rocks at each other with slings. They do this on the two Thursdays before the beginning of Carnaval. The young women help by passing rocks to the fighters in this mock battle.

Well, he told us that last year, one of the boys from his town, Mara, got mixed up and lost in the fog. When it cleared, he was surrounded by boys from the other village and they attacked him. They beat him severely enough that he died. They beat him to death!

All of this stuff is about fertility and the like. It is really ghastly that this sort of stuff happens today. That is my Peru though.

Grisly Dreamscape

2008-01-10T13:13:00.000-08:00

This is a blog I posted about this whole dream thing back on the 22nd of July 2006:

I had a strange and disturbing dream the other night that just begs an interpretation I think.

I dreamed that I had a big house in a very lush and verdant place and that because of the abundance I had a herd of cattle in the yard and many Holstein calves. I also had a big swimming pool that kind of ran along the side of the house and bent around the edge of the house to the deep end of the pool. dreams

I was walking in the yard and saw a little black calf that went through the gate and down to the water, where she promptly fell in. I hustled down to rescue her and bent down and grabbed her hind foot and pulled her to safety. After I pulled her out, she shook, coughed a bit and trundled up the steps and out the gate into the yard.

Then I stood up and looked around and to my shock, as I looked into the deep end, it was full of drowned calves. The water was murky with their excrement from their death throes. I could see the nearest ones and the deeper the pool the harder they were to see but there were upwards of 20 dead calves. They were all in the same posture, noses down one hind hoof higher than the other and at different levels in watery space; a kind of macabre, murky mobile.

I began to dash about attempting to find the valve to let out the water. When I found it, I woke from my dream.

Psychotic Episodes and Dream Sequences

2008-01-03T21:44:00.000-08:00

The nightmare account prompted some reveries about past nocturnal intermissions. My whole life has been plagued by exquisitely vivid dreams. My loving wife has been pretty much the victim here, awakened countless times in our thirty-some years of marriage by anything from deep throated growls, to blood curdling screams, to guffaws of incontrollable laughter. She usually has to remind me or ask what has happened to produce these reactions. I often provide sober explanations but as often as not, my responses have been quite incoherent as the dream continues vivid into my waking moments.

One night in Ruth, I awoke her by switching on the light and yanking books off the shelf next to my side of the bed. This one was accompanied by the growls of a man with a mission. When she asked me what provoked this sudden urge to house clean, I responded, “That raccoon is tearing up my books…” then in response to her further query, I explained that a raccoon had taken up residence in the book shelves and had begun to damage the precious volumes. I was furious and then fell back to sleep.

On another night, I hurled myself out of bed and turned on the overhead lights and then began to search beneath the large modern art painting that hung above our bed. I responded to her query by telling her that I had discovered a nest of black widows beneath the painting and was going to clean them out. Of course, she pointed out lucidly that the lights had been out. How could I have spotted the venomous arachnids with no light. “Ah, I responded, just a dream,” and lulled myself back to sleep. My beloved, lay in the dark haunted by the irrational, “What if?”

Some of my dreams have no explanation whatever and include hysterical loud screams and I only recall that someone was pursuing me. In one of these, my shout was so vociferous that it harmed my vocal chords and they hurt for several days after. These always freak out my sweetheart and she winds up attempting to calm my troubled soul.

One night, I sat up bolt right and began to thrash through the covers. She got up and asked what I was doing. Realizing that I had been awakened from a nightmare, I simply responded, “Aw nothing, just snakes.”

Book of Mormon Blog

2008-01-01T10:49:00.000-08:00

I have decided to create a separate Blog and dedicate the space to my thoughts on the Book of Mormon this year. I have spent quite a bit of time on pretty meaningless stuff in 2007and while that has been fun. I feel the need to express my ideas and cogitations on a much more serious matter. I do this frequently in a personal, hand-written journal but I want to do this also in this format. It is in my links but I am including it here just to be complete.

The new blog has the following address: http://richsbom.blogspot.com/2007/12/book-of-mormon-intro.html

B. B. King for Christmas

2007-12-31T17:35:00.001-08:00

For a Christmas present this year, Julie presented me tickets for the B.B. King concert at the Route 66 Casino, three days after Christmas day. I have never been so excited for a concert and without a doubt it was the best present I had ever received. I love his music like my dad did Louis Armstrong.

We got to the night and Julie got directions off of that paragon of accuracy, MapQuest. It said in essence, go west on I-40 to exit 149, get off, go across the interstate and continue west to the casino on the frontage road. Never mind the fact that we saw a sign that said the casino was at exit 140, we blindly followed the instructions and indeed there was a frontage road. However, instead of a 4 mile jaunt to the casino, the frontage road was more like ten miles long. It first became a two lane dirt road with some warnings about the prison nearby. Then it petered down into a one lane dirt track that dead ended, plunging into the Rio Puerco, chasm!

Another driver had evidently used the same tool and was lost with us. He said, “There is an, ‘underpass,’ back up the road about a half mile…” We decided to give that a try and so we headed back. The underpass, turned out to be a large concrete culvert that did indeed allow our passage and lo, and behold on the other side we found Route 66. We managed to get to the concert to hear B.B. King’s amazing orchestra for a couple of songs and then he came out.

The concert was amazing and I could not get over the sounds that came for that 82 year old man! He had to sit but he is the consummate showman. I am grateful to have heard him even at this stage of life. I am even more grateful that we did not wind up at the bottom of the Rio Puerco…

Flight Terrors

2007-12-31T16:17:00.000-08:00

I managed to get an upgrade on the flight from Buenos Aires to Dallas and I got settled in, next to a poor and relatively young sap from BA on his way to the US for business. I had the opportunity to pick a movie that I would not see under other circumstances because of its, "R" rating. On the American Airlines movies the more offensive parts have been edited.

This movie was one of the new movies made on a Stephen King short story and I have forgotten the name of it already. It had something to do with a room number. A horror movie about an evil hotel room, they certainly seemed to keep the most terrifying bits… At least it was very scary. Really, beyond that, I have little more to say about the film itself.

The film ended and this plane had the seats that recline into beds and I went to sleep, unscathed by the flick…or so I thought. At some point in the night, I was awakened by a nightmare, apparently thanks to the film. I sat forward fully intending on one of my howling screams but thankfully, only came out with a very breathy; “WHOOOOHHFFF!” repeated a couple or three times.

My pretty much unacquainted voyage mate was apparently startled out of his tranquil rest or reverie by my gasping lunge forward. He patted me on the back with Argentine reassurances and soothing words of, “Está bien, está bien, tranquilo…” I vividly recall, looking at him with foggy, dead dolls eyes and then I lay back down and drifted back to sleep.

I forgot all of this upon our arrival, what with all of the activity of getting through immigrations and customs. I did not recall my unfortunate travel companion’s comforting efforts. When I did, I could not but pity the poor fellow and laugh at his doubtless discomfort after his night next to a terrified and probably, terrifying gringo. I told Julie I figured he would be pretty well scarred for life, haunted with his own true night terrors on his memorable flight from Buenos Aires.

Dante Missed One

2007-10-24T05:35:00.000-07:00

In his Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri described himself along with the pope and other notable figures of history in the various circles of Hell as he viewed them. Of late, I have begun to think that Dante failed to identify a certain element, indeed an entire circle of Hell reserved for victims of air travel. Since early May I have been on around 50 flights. Now, there are the pilots and stewardesses whose job it is to shuttle us around but the rest of us are the mere victims in my way of looking at this. Standing in lines awaiting the scrutiny of the horned TSA minions with their snarling, gnashing teeth and switching their forked tails, moving us along, poking and prodding us through scanning machines wanding and frisking us, pitchforks at the ready. On the other end we get scrutinized by hostile immigration and customs agents whose job it is to decide which will be our next level of Hell...I take a certain perverse satisfaction in recognizing that Dante missed one!

Fanciful Translations II

2007-10-01T14:35:00.000-07:00

Just finishing up a ten day stint in Argentina, I have run across a couple more offerings. The best places for these seem to be restaurants and I am just at a loss to understand how it works that these people don’t get the picture that your computer’s Babylon translation software lacks the depth of subtle nuances to adequately translate say, a strong box as I mentioned last time. Suffice it to say that they simply don’t. In the case of restaurants, this seems to me to be almost fatal.

Consider, if you will, the following. Starving for a dose of really juicy and savory Argentine beef, you go to a place called Lady Salta, reported to serve the best salteña (said, “Saltaynya”) empanadas and the overall best traditional fare in the greater downtown Salta. You go in and the waiters, all dressed in gaucho duds flat topped, wearing wide brimmed hats with the front turned up, boots, vest and baggy pants, the whole nine meters (we are in Argentina remember) comes and hands you the menu. You scan the menu and it all carries a translation to English.

It describes the elements of the barbecue, some of which we don’t eat north of the Rio Grande but even that is okay:
The, “Parilla,” is correctly translated as, “Barbecue”
“Chorizos,” really are “Meaty Sausages,” it just makes me chuckle expressed that way, the, “Asado de tira,” is okay as, “Grilled short ribs,”
“Riñones,” does fine as, “Kidneys,”
“Mollejas,” they nail as sweetbreats
“Pechuga de pollo,” has been translated perfectly as, “Chicken breast,”
But---
Are you ready?
“Tripas,” have been translated as, “Beef guts.”

Now, I am not sure about anyone who has not hunted or worked around animals but in my case, guts, only conjures up the image of a gurgling, steaming pile of entrails on the ground. Right away, this impacts my appetite with images summoned from a not inaccurate word but one where something more subtle might have been used.

Hazards abound. In the Princess Bride by Mandy Potemkin says, “I don’t think that means what you think that means…” A friend of mine assumed that, “Menu,” a good Latin word means what we think it means. He asked the waiter for the menu in his broken Spanish and was presented with a bowl of soup, followed by a gigantic mound of rice, chicken, some almonds and yellow gravy. The plate of the day was soup followed by aji de gallina all very delicious but my friend kept wondering when they would bring him the carta.

Sometimes, these translations just leave a body befuddled. Speaking of menus, while in the international airport in Buenos Aires, I read the chicken sandwich part of the menu. The Spanish description of the sandwich in question read, “Pollo especial,” (my translation, special chicken). The English translation had chicken with eggplant. Curious, I ask the waitress about the sandwich. “How do you prepare the chicken?”

“Boiled,” she says.

“So what do you do with the eggplant?”

“Oh, that has been badly translated. The sandwich has lettuce, tomatoes and cheese… no eggplant.”

Kind of bummed because I thought it sounded interesting with the eggplant, but still hungry, I order the sandwich. I eat half of the sandwich wondering how anyone could mistakenly put eggplant instead of lettuce, tomatoes and cheese. Then it dawns on me and I nearly snort out a tomato slice. They also have slices of hard boiled eggs. Their dependable Babylon translation software, combined with the cooks precision to render, “Chicken with eggplant,” for what, I can only surmise they meant to read, “Chicken with eggs and plants,” special chicken indeed!

Fanciful Translations

2007-08-31T03:33:00.001-07:00

I have a fascination with languages and the process of learning them, how the affect culture and how cultures affect them. I also appreciate very much the humor element of mistakes in it. Years ago a friend of mine was trying to learn to speak Spanish. He was also accountable for safety in our Human Resources group and, in that spirit, he wrote me a note that said, “Have a caja fuerte Christmas.” Caja fuerte means safe but in the sense of a vault or strong box. It took me a minute to figure out what he meant to say and I have not ceased laughing at this for five years. The following offering comes from the Holiday Inn in Santiago. I have kept faithfully duplicated the spelling from the little card:

KEEP IT IN MIND!
HERE ARE SOME FOLLOWING USEFUL ADVICES.

Our city is very safe, however we care of yourself and want you to remind some aspects for your own security.

1. Once you have entered into your room, you may check that the main door has been completely closed and locked up. The same way, everytime you have to go out from your room, be sure main door has been quite closed.
2. If you are carrying worthly objects or jewels, we suggest you to keep them into the safe box provided in your room. For further instructions of use, please ask to front desk.
3. If somebody knocks the door of your room and you have not asked for any room service, we recommend you not to open the door. Instead of it, you may call to front desk, dialing “0”.
4. Our property has given special instructions to Front Desk personnel in order not to allow people non registered as guests in any room in the property. Therefore, guests may receive their visitors in the lobby of the hotel.
5. According to international standards for Holiday Inn hotels chain, every person must be registered at front desk before entering to any guest room.
6. Parking access will stay blocked between 24:00 hrs. PM and 6:00 hrs, AM. ?To enter there, please ask for it to be opened calling to the front desk through one of the housephones placed to one side of the entry door. Doors will be opened only after a previous check through video cameras and the confirmation of registered passengers by front desk personnel.
7. Do not let papers or documents anywhere in which you could have written down your current account, your security key, your safe box key or any other important data.
8. We remind you that our property is not responsible for loosings or thefts. Do not forget your personal belongings in the cafeteria, lobby, business center, swimming pool or another common area.
9. If you wish to have a rest or need to work without any kind of disturb, you may hold “Do not disturb – No molestar” card in the outside of the main door.

Travel Fun And Tectonic Cataclysm

2007-08-23T15:15:00.000-07:00

Back home in the States now, but in two short weeks prior to coming home, I experienced two spectacular events, one manmade and the other an act of God .

When I made my reservations to travel to Peru this last time, the only option open to me was to route through Dallas to LA and to Lima. Out of the ordinary routine, I was quizzical but, if the internet tells you to do it… I am feeling slightly Homer Simpsonish at this point, relating all of this. Anyway, I accepted the information and went on my way.

I left Albuquerque with what seemed ample time and made my connection in Dallas with no hitches. They announced a tiny mechanical glitch that would need to be handled to get us on our way to LA but still, I was reasonably nonplussed. However, the “little part” took forever to get to us from the American Airlines shop. Turning into a late departure, it resulted in my arriving in LA with just about 1 hour before my Lima flight was to depart. I ran like the very wind (a sort of sweaty and balding Zephyr flapping down the escalator) only to discover that LAN, the sister airline had closed the flight before I even started to sprint… Of course, the problem belonged to American and you might already be guessing it was my lot to fall in with a ticket agent that exhibited all of the wit and intellectual acumen that one expects from large root vegetables. I know, you think me callous and brutal to speak so harshly of the plant kingdom but I have more regard for rocks than that. She simply told me that she could not begin to figure this out and so, told me to go to someone who could and she passed me off to her supervisor.

Incidentally, the ticked supervisor wanted to know which of her subordinates said that she could not figure it out and … I said that I had no particular interest in getting into a labor dispute at the AA counter and just wanted her help. A little later, the hapless dolt wandered into our activities and asked if I was getting taken care of… The supervisor wheeled around and asked, “Were you the one…?” It took an hour and a half to get it all taken care of and I remained quite patiently looking on as Veronica, helped me out of my crisis. She spoke in awe that I did not snap at her but the LAN plane had pulled out and she represented my only salvation.

Thankfully, this woman knew how to run the computer and found the only possible solution that involved my flying to Miami and then on to Lima but with two ten hour plus layovers. Of course it did not end there since the flight out of Miami had a three hour delay. By the time I missed all of my meetings and got into a bed again, my 17 hour trip evolved insidiously into a 47 hour from-one-bed-to-the-next odyssey, qualifying as my worst on record! Julie marveled that I still laughed while in the Miami airport with its multiple levels of dysfunctionality… arguably, the worst airport in Latin America!

My time in Peru went by with reasonable lack of drama until two days before I left. I managed to schedule my trip over the Arequipa anniversary celebration. I got invited to a rock concert the night of the 14th and it turned out to be a Rock, followed by a Merengue, followed by a Salsa… concert that should have gone on until four in the morning. We bailed out a 1am and went home, thankfully. I truly enjoyed myself to be truthful though.

The next day I attended the parade festivities with one Saya group followed by a Morenada group after another… It is just about as interesting to watch as it is to read about but I had never done that before. I went with my friends Marti and Tere and their family members. When we got back from the parade, we met a reasonably hysterical younger sister who said that we had just had an earth tremor. Peruvians distinguish between tremors and earthquakes because of their frequency. I had the sense to call Julie directly and tell her that I had just heard that there had been a tremor and that it could be something bigger somewhere else and that she should know that I was ok.

Within about 30 minutes I could not make another phone call. This was August 15th and the earthquake had struck just West of Pisco, Peru. It turned out to be an 8+ on the Richter scale. First reports were of two earthquakes but it seems that there was only one massive jolt for about a minute. The chaos that ensued resulted in somewhere around 500 dead, 1500 injured and a total collapse of the phone and other systems. They announced on TV that the airline flights were cancelled and that meant problems for me getting out of the country. The president declared a national state of emergency. I am patient about such things and decided it was better to just sit tight and wait it out.

However, the next day they reestablished the flights and I made mine to Lima. In the course of the day, I heard that looting had begun in Chincha and Ica because the store owners had begun gouging and charging 3x the normal price for commodities and there simply was no food.

While in Lima I experienced four aftershocks that I recognized as such (They said that by the time I left the seismometers had registered more than 200). My flights left on time despite the earthquake and in contrast to the previous travel, all went off saspenuviously like my friend Joe used to say. Back at home I practically started planning immediately for the next trip, leaving on Tuesday, paying for sins of a previous life I believe...

Family Reunion

2007-08-02T17:59:00.000-07:00

I had a wonderful week spent it with most of my children and with my two grandchildren. I don't think it gets much better than this. I am hugely blessed to have the remarkable children I do let alone the grandchildren I have. What a rare treat! Ben has learned to sign many things and most importantly does Papa which consists of his thumb placed on his forehead and his five fingers extended up in a kind of salute.

Olivia is simply adorable and loves to talk to whomever loves her and chats with her. She has a beautiful smile that truly captivates you. It makes me want to spend all of my time there and I miss the two of them.

The Peruvians call this Chocho... I certainly am!

Immigration Hijinks

2007-07-17T16:27:00.000-07:00

In an attempt to save money, I booked all of my travel in round trip segments, thinking myself pretty sly and that I would get into Buenos Aires in time to have a little asado. I planned my trip to catch my flight back to the states from BA by coordinating a round trip, BA—Lima—BA. I would get into BA with about 5 hours to spare plenty of time to go into town, eat and get back to the airport.

It all seemed to be going swimmingly and then the radicals in Peru decided to put on a transportation strike but that just meant that I had to go to Lima a few days extra to be there in time to take my flight to BA. The strikes did not affect Lima. They are still going on, by the way.

I did need to be back by Saturday to give my High Council talk in Albuquerque. Not a problem the way things looked. I froze in Lima because of the humid cold about like San Francisco in February. I just bundled up and wore my long johns the whole time I was there.

On Friday morning, the 13th, when I had scheduled the beginning of my odyssey, I went to the airport, with plenty of time to catch my flight. I don’t place any stock in bad or good luck stuff and never think about it, but perhaps my thoughts have changed.

I had no problem with the airline, LAN and got my boarding pass. Then I paid my airport tax and wandered up to the immigration/security area. Full of confidence, because I had all of my papers in order, I made my way in and stood in line. I looked around and the place was practically empty and then I got to the counter. Now, nothing says officious bureaucratic nonsense like Peruvian Immigrations. The agent said, "You have not paid your foreign residence tax.”

Now there is a lengthy explanation to make about this. Peru has no work visa only a residence visa that says I am a Peruvian resident who can work (No matter that I don’t live there, it works that way) and every year we have to pay about $400US to keep that visa up. We also have to pay my work taxes in Peru and show documentation that I am up to date on that payment every time I leave Peru in order to get out.

The payment of airport taxes in Peru has to do with the inherent schizophrenic lack of trust that the government has developed thanks to years of internal corruption and everyone’s attitude about it. The government doesn’t trust the airlines to collect the taxes and pass them up the line like they do in the states so they make you stand in another line to get a little sticker that two people check on your way through security to make sure that you paid the tax to get the little sticker. Back to my problem, this foreigner’s visa tax is one that costs $20US and is due before the end of March but no one had mentioned it to me including our lawyers who pay the taxes for us.

The immigration personnel including the boss insisted that I could not leave. They said it was impossible that I didn’t know. I responded that it was impossible that no one ever said a thing until then, this was my third time to leave since March. In short, they were your basic knot heads and despite my talking like a Peruvian uncle, I could not change their attitude. They told me that I would have to pay the tax before I could leave and that the bank where I would have to pay it would not open for three more hours, meaning that I would miss the flight. I gathered my things and left. I withdrew myself from the flight and found the American agents to get them to re-schedule me which they kindly did. Then I went back to my hotel who had not given away my room! Then I napped until the bank opened. This is one of those public banks and I called the lawyer first. She averted me to the fact that there would likely be a fine of $40US because of late payment. Then she said, paying the bank is only half way, you have to go to immigration to get the little sticker that goes on the back of the visa… More little stickers!

The Spanish word for this is, “Engorroso,”…I love that word because it just is such an onomatopoeia, like the big tolling bells and the little tinkling ones in the Poe poem. You can put so much feeling into saying, “¡Puchaaaa! ¡Ayyyy, queee Engorrrrossso!” and it feels just as good as swearing and you didn’t have to say anything bad.

In the end, it took all day and then I called the airline to verify that I could get out and they told me that for changing the route, it was going to cost me $1,900US! I asked him if it made sense to him that a $20 tax should result in a change fee that was more than the original round trip ticket… and he responded, “Yes sir, it makes perfect sense to me. I do these kinds of things all day long…” He kind of reminded me of John Candy in Planes Trains and Automobiles, "Yes officer, I really do..." when he gets pulled over in the burned out car so I let it ride. Yet another innocent soul who got in my face but I chose to wait and talk to a real person in the airport… I had some concern but in the end the agent at the counter had much more on the ball than the chap on the phone and I didn't pay the change fee. I don’t know how to explain this but when male telephone agents with the airlines help you…well, they don’t really help you... It is a kind of reverse sexism I guess but the women always seem to know what they are doing, inspire confidence etc. and the menrarely do.

Anyway, my new little sticker worked and I managed to escape the grasping clutches of the little Latino pencil pushers with their petty adherence to bureaucratic nonsense. I managed to get home to the lovely dry heat of New Mexico and the tastes of green chili and the comforts of my home…

More of the Aerolineas Argentinas – The Cattle Car Company

2007-07-10T10:36:00.000-07:00

On this trip, I had yet another opportunity to observe this paragon of Argentine efficiency. Belonging to the Argentine state, a thinly veiled version of Italian disorganization, they have previously destroyed, not scratched, dented or marred, two of my indestructible bags. They have made me miss international connections, resulting in my sleeping on the airport benches, stuffing myself with Argentine asado and generally suffering abuse, some self inflicted but unnecessary and all resulting from the company’s ineptitude… The list is actually impressive, but I am synopsizing.

Nothing in the following account actually surprised me but it seemed charmingly anecdotal in a retrospective way that bore relating here. From Salta, I had to fly to Buenos Aires to take my flight to Lima and suspecting that something might run afoul, I took precautions to fly the night before and stay in a hotel in BA. While working in the office the secretary came to me and said, “Your flight will be thirty minutes late or early…” Since early could mean I might miss it, I bustled to the airport.

She had booked me on a flight that came from B A and returned directly…supposedly. The day before there had been a strike and so things were in a typical state of disorder. Now it takes 2 hours to fly from Buenos Aires to Salta so when I got to the airport, supposedly with no more time than an hour to check in, imagine my surprise when the AA agent told me that the flight was delayed 2 hours! This meant that the plane had still not taken off from BA yet and certainly had not when they told Zulema that I had to hustle to the airport. It takes less than 30 minutes to get to the airport from the office. Still, no problem, I would be in BA by eight pm, in time to eat dinner and get to the hotel, I thought.

The flight landed at 5:30 pm, 2½ hours late and the passengers left the plane. We stood there looking out at the tarmac. No one moved… Then, stevedores appeared and began to remove more luggage from the plane. Suddenly another group of passengers emerged inexplicably onto the tarmac. They began to mill about among the luggage, apparently indicating their own. Then mysteriously, the stevedores loaded the luggage back into the plane and the passengers re-embarked.

Recall, that the plane was to be a simple return flight to BA now because here things get a little strange. At no point did an agent appear to tell us what might be going on. Left to speculate, all manner of theories uttered forth from my newly acquainted travel companions. We stood in awe and wonder, mostly wonder honestly.

Once all of this ended, they herded us with smiles and without a single word of explanation. Told to hurry and get stuff put away we settled in among the mystery passengers. Once situated, the purser came on the intercom, “Welcome ladies and germs. The travel time to Jujuy will be 25 minutes…” I had never been to Jujuy and would have liked to go to say I have been there but this added a full hour and a half to my flight. One of the exiting passengers told me that he had started trying to get home to Jujuy from Mendoza that morning at 6am! Gads Zooks! You can drive it in that much time.

Numb All Over...Again!

2007-07-10T07:48:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, when I first discussed moving to Peru a friend told me that she could never do something like that because she hated “Mexican food…” At a later date a family member told me that her sister lived in Costa Rica but it wasn’t all that bad because she spent time mostly with Americans and did not deal much with the “Mexicans.” I wanted to tell her, that is probably because they are Costa Ricans and not Mexicans, but bit my tongue. These two commentaries have set the stage for my perception about the failure of North American schools to impart an understanding of geography and a world vision to the rising generation. Indeed, both of these people are grown adults with college educations and so forth.

Anyway, I imagine that much of North America is unaware that this is winter in South America and that it is not all Mariachis and Salsa bands playing on sunny beaches. It is cold here and I am freezing. It is not the tyrannical, mind numbing cold that turns the landscape white with snow and frost like in the Midwest of the United States. But it is cold. When I first went to Tintaya the cold seemed quite supportable, coming from the -40degrees of Ely, Nevada. However, I have adapted to the change and now, when it is 25 degrees, I feel it. Well, I have thinned down so I don’t have the protective layers I had before and I am not really safe when I go home due to my need to adjust to my wife’s attempts at getting the temperatures in our car or house below the point where all molecular motions ceases but still…

A freak snowfall in the project area has ruined the chuñu were (freeze dried potatoes) that the campesinos had laid out in their fields. They live on this all year round, us it in soups and just eat it boiled. Since chuñu constitutes their absolute mainstay, you can imagine the disaster.

What happens here, that makes the cold unbearable has to do with a strange thing. No one heats anything here. Houses, no matter where you go have no heat. In the Altiplano where people actually succumb to the cold and die of exposure, they just bundle up, run around in rubber sandals and snuggle. And then, the attitudes come into play… If you go from a warm building to the cold, you will die. If you drink cold drinks or eat ice cream in the winter, ni hablar! When we spent time in the hospitals here you never got ice chips. They would put a thermos with warm water by your bed and caution you about intake of anything other than puke warm water. I got to where I would kill for a frosty coke.

Hence, when I came from the chilly regions of the Altiplano this time, riding with a group of Peruvians, I paid attention. They ardently resisted turning on the heater in the truck in order to avoid the impact of getting out of a warm truck into the freezing cold or maybe they are so freaked out by possible dust that this prompts them to close all vents which of course doesn’t work because dust never sleeps. It invades everywhere so you get to be cold and dusty! I mean, they outfit trucks heaters to heat for crying out loud! Peruvians battle breath frost with scrapers and rags rather than turn on the defrost button. It is like a “Who’s toughest,” (“Quien es mas macho,”) competition everywhere you go in Peru. They have a fascination with the cold and their relationship to it like puritans with abstinence or something. On the way, the other driver, when I wasn’t looking he would turn down the heat and when he looked away, I kicked it back on. It was positively maddening. I have gone to Lima to get out of the way of the strikes that are starting tomorrow and threatened to keep me from making my flights home. Here it is that penetrating cold you get next to the ocean and I go around just as bundled up as in the Sierra, all this while it is 128degrees in Baker, California!

Technical Incompetence

2007-07-06T16:18:00.000-07:00

I got an e-mail from a person I was unsure about having met but kind of thought I recognized the name. It consisted of an invitation to join a web page thingy. curious about the message, I opened it and began to poke about and tried to find out about the person who sent me the original message.

I don’t know how much you know about these things but you wind up having to sign up to see what it is all about. Anyway, I signed up and since I never read all of the instructions and just try stuff out. I ignored a very important part of the message. Apparently, and I am still unsure how the question is posed, and I can’t even use the excuse that it was in Spanish since it asked what for my mother tongue. At some point in all of this it apparently asked me if I wanted to send a message to all of the addresses in my Gmail address book. I swear to you that I had no idea that this little stupid act could have such vast repercussions. Nor was I aware that I committed the tiny, insignificant act. Nor did I have a clue that I have 806 addresses in my address book.

Yes my friends, I sent an invitation to all of the 806 addresses out there. I have spent much of the past few days explaining to people I have not spoken to in fifteen years why they got an e-mail from me out of the blue with no message other than the invitation. Not many technophobes out there can compete with this one I would wager!
Now, there is an upside. A lot of those addresses have languished and I have not had contact with many people I care about and have been gone ten long years from many associations I once held dear. A lot of those people have written to ask, “What happened?” That has resulted in some more lengthy notes.

One comical response was a friend who told me that she was, “Technically incompetent,” and she deleted my message from her spam by accident. Irony has always tickled me. Happy for her, her technical incompetence saved her from my level of ineptitude. I had to laugh. What else are you going to do?

~450 BC

2007-06-29T12:22:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading the account that Herodotus wrote of the Persian Wars called, cleverly enough, “The Persian Wars.” Three hundred pages into the book, I am finding the title a little bit misleading. Loaded with genealogies that you have to fiddle around with on a spreadsheet to figure out, twisted stories about demented, incestuous Greeks, Persians, Egyptians and sundry and assorted other Asiatics, running around the Mediterranean, building stuff, digging up stuff, eating each other, on purpose or by accident or simply tricked into eating their children, marrying very near family members, stealing, drinking, raping, murdering, and once in a while going to war, it has changed my perceptions of mankind a little bit. Short of gunpowder, the printing press and dynamite it impresses me that we don’t get much credit for originality.

Hatred murder and sexual perversion have been around for as long as mankind and you know all of that stuff about Babylon…well we aren’t exactly reinventing the wheel here. One story just seems to sum most of it up pretty well. Cyrus’ son Cambyses ventured away from home with a Greek traitor for a guide to invade Egypt. An epileptic Persian who married his two sisters and then killed one of them at dinner because he didn’t like her lettuce analogy; Psychotic really is the only adequate adjective that comes to mind. He wound up getting supplanted by a look alike for his brother Smerdis whom Cambyses had sent his henchman to kill but this Smerdis fooled everybody including Cambyses and the real Smerdis' sister whom he married when Cambyses died...

Herodotus talks at length about the guys who lived around them (the Greeks) and I have been fascinated by his accounts of the Scythians who have to have been about the most savage race to inhabit the planet, scalping their victims and making coats of the scalps when they got enough. They made quivers with their right arm skins and left the fingers on, dangling down for good measure. They used skull caps of enemies for drinking vessels that they lined with leather on the outside and gold on the inside if they had the money. They cannibalized their loved ones at death and would pull out their skulls each year thereafter to have a drink around the table and remember them. They came from the land to the north of the Black Sea and well, these are the same guys that have brought us centuries of genocide today but in the old context they come off sounding like they come right out of a Frank Frazetta painting.

There is this account of capital punishment of false prophets among them that sounds like the original biker gangs at work. They took their criminal and tied him up, hands and feet and filled a wagon with brushwood hitched to a couple of oxen. They would thrust the victim into the wood and then set the whole affair alight. He understates the oxen’s hysterical state dragging a flaming wagon full of shrieking and howling visionaries in the process of becoming charcoal. So he says, “…And the oxen, being startled, are made to rush off with the wagon. It often happens that the oxen and the soothsayers are both consumed together, but sometimes the pole of the wagon is burnt through, and the oxen escape with a scorching.” I don’t know, these are somebody’s ancestors… This all reminds me of the Viking “Blood Eagle,” “Brain Ball” and the like.

At the same time Herodotus has these amazing insights that you just wonder how he got there with the information of the world of his time and I cannot help but wonder about him writing all of this stuff down. He would have had huge heaps of papyrus and tanks of ink and quills and perpetually dirty, ink stained fingers… The image is astounding to me somehow. I just cannot put the book down.

I am somewhat concerned because I found the book in Tucson in a used book store I used to frequent. It was old then and has deteriorated and I fear it won’t last much longer. I need to find a book binder, but reading is not high on the list of many folks around here. I looked to replace the book in Barnes and Noble in Albuquerque and got told that it is a book I could get “Back East where they sell like hotcakes but around here…no chance.” I was a little bit surprised. Admitted, it has no pictures but, oh well. Now, tattered and dogeared, I have put all of my marking and notes in this one so I want to do something with it. Guess what, I can’t find a book binder either. Now, that one may be more general since books seem to lose ground to computers and Blackberries more and more with each passing day. Sad comment on the state of our times.

The Argentine Puna

2007-06-22T18:01:00.000-07:00

I have made another trip to Argentina and am currently sitting in a camp at 3,800 meters up in the Puna of Argentina. “Puna,” that’s what they call the place where nothing but the shortest plants grow. Subjected to Mother Nature’s most ferocious of effects and winnowed by horrific, howling winds that have left nothing but rocks to big to carry off, I find it strangely beautiful and alluring. As far as my dimming eyesight can see, the hills composed of nothing but mottled browns reds and yellows have undergone a rounding and smoothing effect that I have not seen anywhere else. I am kind of in awe of the vastness and bye austere magnificence that this place offers. Beneath our camp in the salt flat known as Arita, the grey and brown Arita Cone juts, horn-like out of the brilliant white salt like. They have mined Borax and other sulfates from these flats for generations. Vicuñas roam the hills feeding on, well anybody’s guess but the only feed comes in the form of stubby little yellow grasses. Anyway, I have not a ton to say but wanted to share a few photos of the place is all…

I have come there to tell our employees that we have approved raises and bonuses for the long-time employees and so it is a pretty happy trip for most of them. I have not written much about the beauty of Argentina other than its steaks which I still maintain an important feature of the land here. But Arita and Salta in general has truly won me as a place of rare and fascinating beauty.

Finding The Lost Lamb!

2007-04-24T15:46:00.000-07:00

After my diatribe about the journal when last I wrote, I have to report that I left it on the airplane from Dallas to Buenos Aires. I cannot describe the feeling of loss and sickness to have a nearly finished journal disappear. I first tore up my hotel room and then realized that I must have left it on the plane. I have lost four and, in one strange case, burned one up. The others did not have nearly the same effect on me. I do not know exactly why. What a bummer!

I was pretty sure that I had left it one the plane to BA but had a doubt and then yesterday morning a broken English e-mail came from an employee of American Airlines who told me that she had found it and my address was in the front. She said that she thought it would be important and wrote me to find me and deliver it to me. I cannot describe the joy, sense of relief and appreciation that I had for this kind and thoughtless act. What a restoration of my faith in humanity this was. I don’t have it yet but should have it on Thursday.

Too Much Information!

2007-04-12T17:25:00.000-07:00

For the past 35 years I have kept a journal. I have missed a few days and for one brief stint a few critical months while I was courting my wife. Other things took precedence. I admit that it smacks of an obsessive compulsive thing… While sitting in a doctor’s office lobby, I had a bit of free time the other day and got to mulling this over. I had a look at the journal I am currently working on, volume 45. I have not used the same format and this one falls among the smaller format journals I have used. So, I made an estimate of the word count of this little book. I estimated 250 words/ page and 230 pages because I have traditionally stuck photographs in my journals therefore I have filled 10-12 pages with photos. Simple math results that, I have written ~57,500 words in this smaller journal. One larger journal I estimate at 130,000 words. (I did not count that old concept that 1 picture equals 1000 words so could have inflated this if I had desired.) Hence, I surmise conservatively that I have written just under 3 million words and could write another 20 – 25 volumes before I croak. What a nightmare for anyone who should get the urge to prowl through these tomes… I considered that I might start writing on more throw away types of books but I actually use these things. Maybe when I am really old, I should plan a big bonfire for all of the crap I have produced, journals, paintings…

K'uchuhuachu and the Hiking Doctors of the Altiplano

2007-04-08T13:22:00.000-07:00

I approach 11 years working and wandering about South America and I cannot help reflecting... It all started as a one month visit back then and then a three year assignment and here I am, still a virtual or not so peripatetic, aimless... Jack Kerouac has nothing on me. Most of that time, I have spent in Peru. I have gasped for air on peaks well over 5000 meters (16,500 feet) above sea level. I have slipped and slid down into the valleys on rutted, nasty roads that have no par in the world. I have walked over many kilometres of Peruvian landscape. I have frozen in cold that helped me understand cryogenics; I have been blasted by winds and will probably die one day from the severe scorching by the searing altiplano sun. I have been host to numerous creatures that my body has welcomed, hosted and not easily let go of. At the same time, I have eaten things that I considered inedible before coming here: sheep’s head soup, Chicken’s feet in soup, cooked cow's udders, braised bull's testicles, guinea pig, freeze dried potatoes worked over by barefooted women and cooked into a soup with sheep intestines, to name a few. To name a few more I have also eaten a few true delicacies: roasted lamb with the hide on, alpaca loins and ostrich haunches served still cooking on red hot rocks, quinoa, papas ala Huancayna, Pollo ala brasa, chupe de camarones, ceviche de pescado, mixto and de mariscos and rocoto relleno not to mention a vast variety of fruit and vegetables not found anywhere else.

This is a time of change in the Altiplano. God makes a big swap in his palette and starts to get rid of the verdants for duns. Not just yet, but it is coming on. The rains have slowed down although they had a funeral on Sunday, the day I arrived in Challhuahuacho, for a teacher who got swept away by torrential rains that raised the river just three weeks ago. They found him three hours away in the Apurimac River.

The frost has not fallen, kicking off real winter. However, the wheat fields that I drove by two weeks ago have swapped green for gold and the subtle effects are everywhere. Fall here, does not have colored leaves but the grasses change in browns, ochre and umbers in a way that really takes my breath away. I love autumn and winter colors in the Altiplano. I can honestly do without the cold. I am changing out my sleeping bag for the next trip. My summer bag was just barely warm enough this time.

This trip, I went to a place called Tambulla (Tambulya), one of the communities that we indirectly affect and I went there to speak with the medical outpost. These remote pueblos have doctors and nurses that depend upon the nearest hospitals and who are kind of paying their dues, living in the middle of nowhere working with the locals to ease their suffering. The thing is, as remote as these places are; there are villages even farther out. They have special houses where expectant mothers come at about eight months to await delivery so as not to have to travel so far.

When we went to Tambulla we did not find the regular doctor but members of a group that are called AISPED. These doctors and nurses come from Abancay, the provincial capital and they provide a direct support in the more remote parts of these already remote areas. In my life, I have met few heroes, maybe none until now. This is a group of fit, young people who get taken to these remote areas for 21 days and from there, they backpack to the super-remote areas with names like K’uchuhuachu, and Anta Anta to provide direct support to people who cannot walk on their own to the posta. They truly awed me.

The group consists of one male GP, a female dentist, a female obstetrician and two nurses. It was fascinating to hear their tales and all about their experiences and challenges. They told me that this place is considered the most remote of Abancay and Abancay is next only to Huancavelica as the most remote in Peru. No one comes here. They asked us for some help and I was glad to respond.

The Docs Getting Ready To Hike

The story is that they spend a day getting from one place to the next and they sometimes have to hike over those 5,000 meters+ high mountain crests. One of them told me that she was afraid she would faint and that she was spitting blood from her tonsils as she went. She said that she just wanted to lie down and die up there. I knew just how she felt. I have been there and done that and known that exact feeling of knowing you can’t go another step but knowing that I had no choice and I might be spitting blood and feel like my eyes would pop out of my splitting head but to lie there would only prolong the agony. Anyway, once get to they village where they are headed, they have one day to do their medical work. Thanks to things being a little slower during the last couple of weeks, we have been able to support with a truck that was kind of free to jockey them around and gain them a full half to three quarters of a day when they got to the villages in question.
They get to spend their time in the school house that becomes their bunkhouse and clinic. They cook their own food with materials that the locals provide them, including cooking over dried-dung fires. As you can see from the photo, they are good looking vibrant young people who sacrifice greatly for this hellish duty. They told me that they get one day off between their 21 days and then it is back out again. Not that Abancay would present a spectacular social life, but at least a lot more than Tambulla!

They had to go to K’uchuhuachu (kkhuchuwachu) the same day that we did so I went along with them to this little place that they described as the rear end of Peru. We drove as far as we could and then we went on foot for about two miles along a beautiful lake in the bottom of a 4,000m high valley. We walked along looking up at 5,200m crest lines that jut nearly straight up fantastically as craggy slopes with water cascades at every turn. Clouds boiled up and we got caught in a downpour and I had forgotten my raingear. They had an extra poncho to loan me.

The K'uchuhuachu Valley

The place was spectacular and the doctors told me how the inhabitants have built their mud houses in a bog. The houses just wick up the water until they fall apart. Their floors are constantly damp to even standing water.

Our purpose in going was to present the school with some notebooks and other educational donations, pencils, pens, erasers, rulers etc. Once there, the doctors were so grateful for all of our logistical support that they insisted upon fixing us dinner and we stayed to eat with them and the comuneros provided four nice sized trout from the lake. We had quite a feed of fresh new potatoes, chuño, potato and chicken soup and fried trout. It was tasty to be sure after the long hike.

Giving Out Books In K'uchuhuachu

Tiny K'uchuhuachu Students

One of the most remarkable things about the visit for me came when it occurred to me to ask the locals if any gringos had ever been in their village before. To a man or woman, they did not even look for corroboration from the rest, “Manan” (No), they all said. I was the first white person to have ever made it to their village. I got back to our camp puffing from the altitude, wrote in my journal, ate dinner and slept the whole night through, something I almost never do. It seemed a fitting end for my blog this go around, to have arrived to the most remote part of Peru and been the first non Peruvian to have ever been there. Cool!

Cultural Cross-Over Student

Worlds Apart

2007-02-19T17:47:00.000-08:00

Worlds Apart

After looking at the photos from my last trip south, and realizing that I had not included any from the wedding, I started looking at the photos and realized something. The contrast between the wedding photos in this blog and those from the Altiplano in the previous blog really say about all anyone needs to say about the vast difference between cultures within Peru. Many years ago, a friend of mine from a distant remote mining town in the high desert of Nevada said that she could never live in Peru because she hated Mexican Food. Now, while that level of ignorance is shocking, I think it even more striking that the people of Peru often show the same level of unawareness of their own people and cultures. When I showed these contrasting photos to people, I asked if they imagined that they could be from the same country… Of course they said, “No.” As a joke, the Arequipeños claim to be from the Republic of Arequipa and not a part of Peru and while they would love to secede from Peru, the facts are that they are 100% Peruvian. So here they are in full ball gowns and all.

Fifty-Two in Peru

2007-02-14T09:05:00.000-08:00

I have just turned 52 while on a nightmare trip to Peru. I need to count how many times I use the word NIGHTMARE in a given trip to Latin America and then weigh that against economic interests and so on and so forth. It has been months since I have posted a blog but fear not, I am not going to try and catch up. Suffice it to say that in November and December I was on planes that left the ground thirty-two times and visited three countries and I am getting a little tired of it all.

It was wonderful to be with family and friends during Christmas, and I brought my wife back to Peru with me in January to participate as godparents (padrinos), for a wedding. The wedding padrinos are something particular in Latin America and constitute a mix of witnesses and kind of co-parents to the couple. As a padrino one has the right to advise, scold stupid grooms and in Peruvian society, even knock them around if they behave as bad husbands... In my experience 99.99% of bad marriage behavior in Peru gets carried out by husbands. If women behave badly, it can usually be blamed on the husband starting it.

We got turned down by the Catholic priests as padrinos for the baptism of a friend's daughter for which we felt honest relief since there had been definite conflicts of conscience over the whole issue. At one point, I told the mom, “You do understand that we love Sofi but if you die or for some reason we are called upon to raise her, we don't know the first thing about Catholicism and we would raise her as a Mormon” "O! Si si, no hay problema! Es lo que hemos discutido desde el principio," her response.

The Priests had no problem having us as padrinos for the wedding but would not allow us to be godparents for the baby. We have been padrinos for weddings on numerous occasions but this one seemed more important because we traveled to be here for them. It was a blast too!

I took Julie up to the project and nearly killed her because of the altitude but she loved it and was impressed by the spectacular vistas. The road is nothing short of terrifying, and the rains are well underway producing a mass of chuckholes over the whole 350 kilometers of nasty highway and back roads. The trip from Arequipa in this time of year takes a good 11 hours over the worst roads in the world, one could argue. Julie commented that she used to think that Yauri, at four hours from Arequipa was remote but it is more of a suburb when compared with Huanacopampa. Life there is pretty much as it has gone on for centuries. They even still dress in traditional, home-spun clothing, live in the mud houses without electricity and cook over dung just like their great great great grandparents...

As part of our work with the communities we had foolishly offered to help with a couple of dire health cases, and one of more note was a little girl named Nayda who, at one and a half years old, still only weighs six pounds. Her mother's name is Lorenza, and we agreed to bring her to Arequipa to see what could be done to help her. It became clear on the way that the baby has Down's syndrome and many other problems as well. We stopped frequently for Lorenza, and bought Pampers and food in Yauri. We also took care of her and had a companion for her while in Arequipa since Lorenza does not speak any Spanish.

The doctors in the hospital determined right off that her problems were huge and that she would not get better without a serious time commitment and that she would have to stay months and undergo at least five surgeries. The hospital offered to take care of her stay and most of the costs.

When we put the baby in the hospital the guide, Juanita took Lorenza out for dinner, Lorenza cried and could not wait to go back and check the baby out. When she got back there, she completely unwrapped her and reviewed each and every finger and toenail and looked over every inch. The campesinos have been made hysterical by rumors that when one goes into the hospital, they take your blood. It does not stop there but they believe that they also take out your liver, heart and kidneys.

Anyway about day three of her stay, Lorenza began to tell Juanita that she needed to go home because she did not know who was feeding her children and it was likely that her husband, Santos had already dumped her over for her sister who lives in the same house. They did get Nayda up to about nine pounds before leaving for home, but without any of the necessary surgeries. She also appears to be blind. I think that she is not long for this life.

Anyway, when Lorenza got home she told everyone that she received bad treatment from the folks in the hospital and that they did not feed her and that we did not feed her on the way to Arequipa even though we had a huge lunch with her in Yauri. She commented that she did not know how to use a fork and we had someone cut her food for her. It disappointed me but I guess she could not go home and tell everyone that she thought her husband was cheating on her so she came home, or whatever was the root cause of her coming home. I was pretty mad!

We came back to Arequipa in time to participate in Teresa and Marti's wedding. We had a great time and they involved us in everything including manicures and Julie got her hair done, ala Peruana. It was great with a big side swoop. I loved it. They had an afternoon wedding, unusual here but it was great and got us out of there by 10:30 having begun at the salon at 8am. We got to dance and enjoy the whole Latino atmosphere that we have come to love. It was really fun.

On our way down from the project, we got a call from our daughter telling us that our beloved boxer, Bailey suffered an accident in the kennel and hanged himself. That set us up to talk with the girls who had stayed with friends. It was pretty terrible.

Because of pending projects, I had to come right back to Peru and celebrate my fifty second birthday in here. The deal is that no one knows how to have a party like a Peruvian and the office staff took me out to lunch while friends invited me to dinner and to have cake with them. I did not suffer on that end. I truly get treated like one of the family here. On this trip to Peru, I have made the trip to the project twice in ten days and have contracted another in a long string of parasites, hence the nightmare comment. Nothing new, just too much road time and familiarity with porcelain and other versions of the same, yet another bout with Atahualpa’s revenge…

Aerolineas…The Cattle Car Company

2006-11-20T05:30:00.000-08:00

I am still pondering my laundry list of reasons to defame and heap calumny on Aerolineas Argentinas’ head. Yet, this trip may suffice. I recall my saying that one could be worse off than to be stranded in BA…I may have been hasty. On my way home via Arequipa I had to fly Salta—Buenos Aires—Santiago (on LAN Chile)—Lima—Arequipa and the flight to BA got side tracked for two hours to Mar de la Plata airport because of a storm over BA. Now, no other planes passed the hours with us so it did make me wonder if we had a pilot—in—training issue or a real problem. During that whole time, the airline agents never made a single announcement as to times, conditions or reasons for the detour. We, the passengers individually or in small groups had to seek out the agents and ask for their opinion as to why all of this was going on. Anyway, the deviation in plan got me into Buenos Aires too late to make my flight to Santiago.

I am thinking, this is no problem, having called my secretary and being told that there was no trouble finding airplane passages to get where I needed to go. I would get someone to find me a hotel and have a nice steak, be a little out of time in Arequipa but in the end, everything would be handled, a classic case of over confidence. Upon landing, my secretary called and told me that our travel agent said that we should talk to the airline to get them to help because they sometimes have rooms and BA was booked tight. O wonderful!

After getting into the airport, I sought out the Aerolineas’ oficina del Servicio al Cliente. Aside from being a misnomer, it is totally unmarked. I found the barely pubescent, goateed lad there who promptly and unhesitatingly told me, “No, che…voz no viajas con nosotros, conecta con LAN. No es nuestro problema. Lo siento.” He told me that he had been calling for an hour and that no hotels had rooms.

I knew that arguing with a virtual teenager at this point would waste time, and annoy the pig, as the saying goes so I beat feet to LAN to see if anyone there could save me. They made a valiant effort but in the end, the answer was the same, “No room at the inn.” I did discover that there is a baggage check in the airport and for 9pesos/piece/day one can check his luggage in total insecurity. I did that, went to Puerta Madero and had a marvelous steak and came back to the airport about 1:30AM for my 6AM flight to Santiago.

I found a less than comfortable polished, coarse-grained granite slab to stretch out on and slept/thrashed/twisted for a couple of hours and then checked in. The next day was wiped out when and late to work when I got to Arequipa. Aaaah ¡Aerolineas Argentinas, mi vida che!

NOT Snakes On The Plane!

2006-11-17T05:18:00.000-08:00

I am probably just dense, but I don’t get it. When you get on the planes operated by LAN Chile and related network, they get you all in there and then they decide to fuel the plane. They tell you, “Ladies and Sirs, we are about to be fueling the plane. You will please to remain in your seatings with your seatbelts unfastened until the fuelings are complete. While you are remaining in your seatings, you will please not to use the lavatories. You will to refrain from smoking and you will keep your electronical devices turned off.”

Now it just seems to me that the solution here is not to fuel the plane after everyone is on there. I think this comes of LAN safety execs watching a few too many Action Adventure movies. It would probably be good for them to have a look at their clientele. These are not Nicholas Cage or Tom Cruise clones we are talking about here. One only has to look at my Fester pix to figure out that I am not up to the antics of Mission Impossible 4.6 or wherever the _ _ _ _ he is in the series. I'm not sure what their plan is. Just like poker, with most things Latin, they like to keep plans very tight to their chest...You wouldn't want anyone to actually know what you have in mind ahead of the emergency, that is for certain.

Anyway, I am just thinking that on the outside chance that a spark from my five-year-old, beat-up iPod (I’ve never seen it spark but there are always firsts) triggers the blast of the fuel that turns a LAN jet into a ball of fire and shrapnel, I find it difficult to imagine the escape plan. They certainly have not made clear what they have in mind on any of the 101 Refueling courses in which I have participated. I am pretty sure that we are not going to dive headlong out of the plane en masse and do tuck-and-rolls to safety on the tarmac. The little old grandparents in the seat ahead of me, at the very least are going to keep me from running faster than a ball of exploding jet fuel, never mind my 15 extra kilos around my mid-section…I’m just guessing, mind you. I could be entirely wrong, I mean, though I have only seen the trailer but it looks pretttttty believable after all…??? So if snakes can get loose, maybe their plan will work…

Bureaucratic Shenanigans

2006-11-13T03:57:00.000-08:00

My work visa in Peru, called a “carné de extranjería,” runs out next Friday and there are hoops to jump through. Believe me; no flaming rings in a dog show/circus were ever more humiliatingly frustrating than third world red tape. The whole thing is a study in Latin American bureaucracy that makes even me stand gape-jawed and incredulous. There are aspects so disarming in their ability to allow you to believe that it will somehow differ from the expected, that you just simply cannot believe it. For example, the carné itself is a most professional looking piece of plastic with the photo and everything, just like a driver’s license from any state in the union. That one aspect can lead you to believe that the process that got you the piece of plastic in the first place was somehow similar to a comparable process in said state; but that would be oh, so wrong!

In order to renew the carné, which renewal amounts to a little sticker that goes on the back of the card, we were required to submit a letter, from outside of Peru, signed by my boss, saying that Mr. Rich has a contract with our company that has been extended for another year and would the department of immigration please grant an extension of the related carné, yada, yada, yada. My boss and I were in Arequipa at the same time, so I simple mindedly, thought, “I’ll get him to sign this here, get a copy of his passport and send this in with the necessary payment and pre-paid envelope to get it back to me in the US and save him a trip to the consulate. Duh…slam dunk!” I got him to sign it and once back home, arranged for it to arrive at the consulate with his return address, a note saying what we needed and I thought it all pretty neat. Wrong!!!!!!!!

I hate getting blind sided. The personnel in the consulate changed with the new president in Peru. I get this call back from the nice lady at the consulate informing me that the signature on the letter must be legalized in order for them to legalize the signature for Peru. What? If you are dizzy now, just wait. She told me that they needed me to notarize my bosses signature with a notary in New Mexico, (my boss lives in Denver) then run it up to Santa Fe to the state Attorney General’s office and get them to send a letter verifying that the signature notary’s signature was a legitimate one. I said, well, “John lives in Denver, I was trying to save him some time and I would see if he could go into the consulate and sign the letter in person.” This preempted her sending the whole mess back to me and starting from zero. John is really busy in Denver, a little prone to procrastinate and so I got that sinking feeling that I would not get it done in time.

To his credit, he went in, a little late but I got the letter in the end. As a secondary element, my carné is obviously connected with my passport number. After I got the papers back, on Saturday more than a week ago, I started to look for my passport, not finding it in the two places I always leave it. I spent more than six hours on a passport-treasure hunt and could not turn it up after turning over most of the house. I did not sleep all night and could not recall for the life of me where I had it last. I prayed fervently for help in finding it but nothing came to me and it did not accidentally turn up.

What had I done with it? Gr-r-r-r-r! I arrived at the decision that it was lost or stolen and on Tuesday, I began the process of canceling my travels and putting together a new trip just to Argentina for some business there. I also began the process of declaring my passport lost and applying for a new one. I could never rid myself of the nagging sensation that it would turn up. It would obviously cause me problems with my carné for the change of passport number and the fact that a new roll of red tape would wrap the whole thing up.

There are groups who say that they can get you a passport in a day but that does not mean delivered to New Mexico in a day. It actually means three days if nothing goes wrong… Anyway, I sat down in the early morning on Tuesday to do this and began by printing out the pages I would need to fill out to get a new passport. While I was printing them out, my printer kindly informed me that I needed to put in a new cartridge, which I did. It then prints out a page that must be placed face down on the scanner to alighn the printer… When I lifted the scanner cover, there was my passport. It was positively surreal. I have no recollection still of scanning or copying my passport! If anyone believes in coincidence, I defy them to convince me that no divine intervention was involved and I am appropriately grateful.

Leaving off, the uplifting miracle story, and back to the miserable rules and regulations story, I took my papers to our lawyerette the morning I arrived in Peru (Thursday) to get her started getting my little carné sticker. Now, she had said that she could get this done in one day… Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha… I told her that I would be traveling to Argentina the next evening but would be available until 9pm, before the flight. She kind of blanched and asked, “Tomorrow?” and went into a phoning fury and asked her go-fer if it could be done in that short a time.

Ready to be astonished? He said that the legalized signature legalizing my bosses signature and the legalization from Peru’s own Denver consulate, with its official looking stickers, stamps and cover letter, would first have to be legalized by the department of the interior in order to then be sent to the department of immigration to ask for the sticker. This would take all day and because tomorrow is Friday and they are lazy on Fridays, it won’t get done until Monday! What a stunner! Well, I have kind of gotten used to it and you may think all you like that I am pulling your leg but, there is not joking with these guys; they don’t have senses of humor as far as anyone has ever been able to determine.

Luckily, the letter had been written in Spanish, because had it not, they would have to send out for a legal/official translation of it before beginning. That takes from a week to a month because; guess what…it has to be legalized!

As it works out, on the next Wednesday, I was to be heading back to Arequipa. Now, instead of killing time in the airport, I will have a driver pick me up at 1am, take me across town to leave my carné with the night watchman at the lawyer’s office, to get the sticker stuck on it, and then repeat the performance on my way out of the country on Friday to pick it up. So it goes in dealing with the bureaucracy of a third world country and not bribing.

My Grandbaby as the Pillsbury Dough Boy

2006-11-08T18:44:00.000-08:00

Ghoul Hair

2006-11-07T18:45:00.000-08:00

I got roped into going to see Phantom of the Opera. My family grieves over my lack of culture and taste in these things. Above all, my lack of regard for Musicals in general aside from West Side Story is a burr under a number of saddles. Lest you feel inclined to join in the pitying of Rich for his boorishness, let’s leave it that Musicals just are not truly my cup of tea. I happen to love the opera, ballet, classical concerts, music of virtually all sorts and have a great respect for the arts in general. Perhaps a certain snobbishness inspired by my dad’s love of the true art of opera has rendered me incapable of really appreciating even the Gilbert and Sullivan stuff. Always the Musical lout, I guess, I just prefer Verdi or Mozart.

Having said that, “Phantom” was still pretty cool. The sets were fantastic; music good enough; the voices were amazing, needless to say. In all I thought it not a scourge and a pox as I have other musicals I have been forced to endure in my life.

However, what really made it for me was Christine’s unmasking of the Phantom. The thing that made this so impressive for me, and I almost blurted it out in the performance is that, my hair would look exactly like his if I let it grow out. I did not know before this experience that along with his megalomaniacal obsession with music and a certain younger woman’s voice and some obvious burn scarring and so forth, the phantom has alopecia areata…Who would have thought it?

Book Reports II, Halloween Party and Puppy

2006-11-03T07:29:00.000-08:00

I am cobbling three things together to fit into one just to save time.

A welcome relief, I read Larry McMurtry’s, “Horseman, Pass By.” It is his novel about a family in Texas that inspired the Paul Newman movie, “Hud.” I enjoyed the book and remain impressed by McMurtry’s descriptive ability. I can almost forgive the Billy the Kid travesty, as the same teacher required both. I won’t go that far.

We had a great Halloween party at the church and I got to use my Peruvian made Fester get up and the girls Nun costumes. Julie dressed as a witch and did such an effective job that kids from her own young women’s group did not recognize her. It was stunning!

Still reeling from the loss of Abby, we began the quest to find another dog in hopes of simply surviving. We found a gorgeous brindle boxer. His name is Bailey and I am also going to post photos of Bailey. More will follow: