Numb All Over...Again!

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!