June 14-19: Natural dyes class
Our main goal at the orphanage was to start teaching some of the older kids (ages 12-15) skills they can use to make money after the leave the orphanage at age 18. This week, we brought in a weaving expert from one of the nearbye villages to teach the kids (and be default, us) how to make natural dyes for wool using plants, minerals and insects. We made yellow, green, purple, gold, and red. It was really fascinating to see what the people have learned to make naturally. Due to the deaths in Iquitos, there was a strike and lots of protests in the streets this week. People overall are extremely unhappy with the Garcia government. Maura and I had the opprotunity to visit the Huancayo courthouse with a lawyer we met at a barbeque and it was extremely interesting to see how a different judicial system functions. We took one walk out into the country, came across some people harvesting potatoes, and sat for a while with them and ate fresh roasted potatoes. Its incredible how such poor people are still so generous. We also went to a little village famous for its gourd-carvers and learned how they make the gourds.
June 20-24: Trip to the Jungle
Along with three of my friends, and then our tri-generational guide trio of Abuelo (grandfather), Lucho (father) and Rayme (son), we took a bus ride about 4 hours north to La Merced. From La Merced, we took a car for an hour, a moto for another hour, a cable car across the river, and then hiked about an hour up into the high jungle. It was absolutely beautiful... looked like it was straight out of Jurassic Park. We stayed at a ranch their family owns in a two story, no-wall wooden structure, sleeping in mosquito nets. Every day we were there, we took hikes around the jungle. Lucho is an expert on the plants and animals, and we found coffee beans, chocolate beans, avocado, bananas, and lots of other things to eat. We saw an amazing selection of birds and butterflies. Abuelo cooked for us every breakfast and dinner, and the food was really amazing. Whenever we got too hot and sweaty, we would just stop at one of the waterfalls and take a little shower before continuing on.
A couple more memorable experiences...
The second day we were there, we hiked down a steep bit of mountain that was very muddy but had lots of small trees and vines. Lucho, Rayme and my friends Maura and Kusi walked down very gracefully. However, my other friend Frank and I could not keep out footing and ended up sliding down most of the mountain on our butts. We would just swing/hang from vine to tree to vine, pullling our quite a bit of it as we went. It was incredibly fun and my pants were irreversably muddied. Lucho claimed that the two of us needed to be careful not to contribute so much to deforestation.
On the third day, we walked along the river, stopping to climb up the different little waterfalls. Everything was going well until Lucho got bored with the trails he always goes on and decided to explore a bit. We ended up having to repel down a series of twenty foot rock cliffs with nothing but a rope to hold onto. COnsidering my fear of heights, I was absolutely terrified. However, things were fine until Rayme forgot the machete at the top of one of the cliffs and decided to free climb to go get it. He started an avalanche on himself and one of the rocks cracked a gash in his head. We all, predictably, started to freak out, but we still had like three more cliffs to climb down. We tied a pair of pants on Rayme´s head to stop the bleeding, then rushed down all the cliffs and hiked about 2 hours down the river. Rayme went to the clinic, got some stitches and was fine, but it was quite the scary experience. Medical accidents become a little more frightening when you´re six hours from a hospital.
Overall, the jungle experience was absolutely incredible. It was one of the most beautiful places I´ve ever been, the hiking was incredible, and it was great to meet all the local people.
June 26-29: Visit to Ayacucho
For the weekend, Maura, Kusi and I went to visit Frank in Ayacucho. We took night buses too and from Ayacucho on Friday and Sunday nights (a good way to save time and to save money on hostels). The road from Huancayo to Ayacucho is mostly dirt and very bumpy, but it was easy enough to sleep both ways. Ayacucho is a really cool city. It´s smaller than Huancayo, more colonial and more pedestrian. It was also the home of the terrorist group the Shining Path, so until recently no tourists could go there. Therefore, the city has less American/European influences than most cities in Peru, which was fun to see.
The first day in Ayacucho we went to a soccer game (which was absolutely insane but very fun) and went shopping for llama blankets. The second day we went shopping at a market which used to be a jail but now serves as an artesian market. Every vendor has a cell. In the afternoon, we watched the America vs Brazil soccer game in the street with about 30 Peruvian men. It was fun, even though everyone except for us was rooting for Brazil.
June 30-July 5: Back to Huancayo
We had class again with the kids at the orphanage this week. Since Maura and Kusi left on Wednesday, we had a little party with the kids. It was adorable- they were all so excited and appreciative. We decorated our classroom with streamers and balloons, ate cake and ice cream, handed out photo albums and had dancing competitions. The party reminded me of a middle school dance. There was another strike this week in protest of three new transportation laws, and no cars or buses were on the roads and most of the roads were blocked off with large stones. The general discontent with the government is pretty incredible.
After Maura and Kusi left, a new girl named Sam from Pittsburgh arrived to help with classes. In the afternoons, we took a couple of expedititions out to different towns in the valley (Huancayo is in the center of the Mantaro Valley in the Andes Mountains, and the valley is full of really cool villages and beautiful hikes). On Saturday (July 4th), we tried to be American by going to the giant mall and eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and ice cream. On Sunday, we shopped at the Huancayo market (the longest in all of Peru) and had a delicious trout barbeque in the afternoon.
July 6- July 10: Rural homestay and weaving class
This week, I went with an English guy named Matt to a town called 3 de diciembre (about 1 hour south of Huancayo) to live for a week with a rural family. It was a really incredible experience. The family was a husband, a wife, their 23 year-old daughter (trainging to become a nurse) and their 19 year-old son (at school to become a mining engineer). They live on a farm where they grow all of their own food and raise animals. To earn money to pay for their kids´education, the husband works construction in the city and the wife runs the farm and takes the crops to the market.
We spent the weeking just helping around the farm and house. I cooked, cleaned, de-kernaled dried corn to sell in the market, chopped alfalfa, fed the pigs, mixed cement and much more. Everything we ate for the whole week was all natural and grown on their farm. They grow 4 kinds of potatoes, corn, spinach, 20 kinds of herbs, wheat, and much more. The only problem with this situation was that we ate an almost exclusively starch diet (potatoes 3x daily) and that our host mom forced us to eat until absolute exhaustion at every meal. We both felt our pants tightening a bit by the end of the week, and could not make it through the day without napping after lunch. However, for one of our lunches, we visited a trout pond where we paid $2 each for a man to pull out our trout, kill them, clean them, and fry them- one of the most delicious things I´ve ever eaten.
The lifestyle there was incredible. We worked hard all day, went to sleep with the sun and woke up at dawn. The landscape around the farm is incredibly beautiful, and the local people were all so friendly that we couldn´t go on a walk without having to stop to talk at least a few times. We learned about the rural Peruvian Santiago festival, and were twice dressed up by our family in traditional Santiago costumes to use as props for photographs (they had the two of us take one series of photos with the family cow). I was so lucky to have the opportunity to meet such wonderful people.
July 11: Huayatapallana hike
Huancayo is surrounded by mountains, almost all of which are brown and gently rounded. However, there is one mountain that is much taller and covered by snow- Huayatapallana. You can see the mountain from anywhere in the valley, and I´ve wanted to hike up to it since I got here. Instead of spending money on a guide, two Australians, Jared and Felicia, and I decided to try the hike ourselves.
We woke up at about 5, went to the market for some fruit, bread and cheese to bring along for lunch, and then took a taxi up to the last town up the road towards the mountain. From there, we hiked up the road for about 2 hours. After 2 hours, we met a Peruvian woman who told us it would be another 5 hours by road and offered to lead us on a short cut. After walking with her for about an hour, we arrived at her familiy´s cow and llama grazing area. They live out in the middle of a beautiful, freezing, windswept mountain range in these little grass huts that are about 15 feet in circumference and 5 feet high. They offered us some milk (actually disgusting milk curds, but it was still very generous) and crackers. Then, they offered to have their 12 year-old daughter lead us up the mountain. Wearing nothing but black sandles with no socks, a t-shirt with a blanket safety pinned over, pants and a hat (we eventually gave her some of our clothes to wear), she started running up the mountain much faster than any of us could keep up (we were at about 13,000 feet and not breathing so well). She kept having to adjust her time estimate and was in constant amazement at how slow we were. Finally, we arrived at the lake at the base of the mountain, which was gorgeous, and ate some lunch before an easy hike back down.
July 12: Pachamanca
Today, we had an enormous Peruvian feast called a Pachamanca. They cook a Pachamanca by digging a giant hole in the ground, lining it with extremely hot rocks, and then filling the hole with potatoes, lamb, pork, beans, tamales, and guinea pig. Then, they cover the food with banana leaves and a tarp and it cooks. It was incredibly delicious and it was definitely one of the biggest meals I´ve ever eaten in one sitting. The guinea pig was delicious, but the lamb was my favorite.
July 13-14: Last days in Huancayo (kind of)
On the 13th, our last day at the orphanage, we went into the orphanage with all the ingredients for the cake the kids wanted to make us and watched them bake. They were all much more knowledgable than we were. After, we took a little trip out to the Ocapa Monestary in one of the nearby towns. In the evening, we went back to the orphanage and had a little going away party. We ate the cake, gave the kids all of our leftover supplies as prizes, and danced. At the end, all the girls sang us a song and a couple of the kids gave going away speeches. It was all very touching, and it was sad to leave. They are all such great kids with a pretty hard life ahead of them.
Today, I´ve just been trying to get everything in line before I leave. Tomorrow morning, I take a bus to Lima and then spend the night in Lima. Thursday I fly to Cusco, and Friday I begin the Inca trail. By Monday I´ll be in Machu Picchu, and I leave for Buenos Aires on the 22nd.
Sorry this is so long and I hope that everyone is well. I will try to update this more regularaly when I am in Argentina and have better internet access. Please send emails with updates on how you´re all doing.
Love, Melanie
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