Today we did a bunch more stuff for orientation. We talked about social norms and behavior, host families, and other pertinent but not necessarily interesting information. We found out who our host families are! Finally! I have a four-person family with two girls (Donaldo said that they’re about thirteen years old). I figured that they were pretty young because they listed dancing and reading as their hobbies. To my dismay no one else from the group lives in my neighborhood so I won’t have a buddy to walk to school with, but evidently I only live two blocks away from school. I guess I can handle being alone for two blocks! We live pretty far outside of the town center actually, which I was surprised by. However, I don’t think I would want the constant nighttime noise of discotecas etc.. when I’m trying to sleep or get work done.
We had an assignment to go to a market, find as many varieties of a certain edible as we could, find out how they prepare it and where it’s grown, then return and report back. That wasn’t a very good sentence. But anyway, my group was assigned potatoes and we were to go to a market in a town nearby called Yucay. Donaldo told us that it was like a twenty minute walk. He didn’t tell us which direction to go in, didn’t tell us when to get back…. Oh man. So we set off, in what turned out to be the wrong direction, had to take a mototaxi (which is essentially the front half of a motorcycle and a rickshaw added on back) for what would have been more like a 40 minute walk to Yucay. Once we got there it turned out that there actually was no market to attend. We decided that since we were there we might as well stay and went from tiny shop to tiny shop collecting potato varieties.
The title of the post is about something Sonia mentioned in our orientation today. She was talking about drugs and how they are absolutely not allowed on SIT etc.. but then she began to expand on an Amazonian psychotropic called Ayahuasca that she does not personally consider a drug, nor do many Peruvians. Ayahuasca is a vine that many people in the Amazon start taking from infancy. The way she described it made sacred plants, like Coca in the Andes and Ayahuasca in the Amazon, make a lot of sense. Psychotropic drugs like Ayahuasca make you very alert and give you precision- what you would need on a daily basis if you need to hunt and fish in the Amazon. In contrast, Coca gives you endurance and resistance to the effects of altitude- both things that an Andean farmer would need and value. I’d never had that sort of explanation given to me about drugs before, coming from the sort of community from which they originate.
For lunch we had a delicious Pollada a la Braza, which was like a big chicken bbq with wonderful corn! (which they call choclo. Also the word for pig is chancho.) The little girls here gave us a tiny party in which we played freeze tag in the dark, which they called Agua y Concreta. After dinner most everyone turned in early since we have to wake up at 4:30 to go to Machu Picchu tomorrow.
So, a couple things about Peru. One: They do not have waste disposal systems capable of dealing with paper so you can never put paper in the toilet! Two: It is gorgeous! It is like the Andes spring out of nowhere. I’ve never seen mountains that go up at such a steep incline immediately from the ground before. Three: Everyone is amazingly friendly and kind. Four: It rains fairly often, but the more appropriate term would be sprinkle. Five: They call anyone who is Asian Chinese. There is a Korean girl on my program and several people have explained to her that it’s not meant to offend, it’s just what they do. Six: In many ways Peru is very conservative. It’s considered very American to walk around without a jacket cause it gets cold all the time! Most people are Catholic and likely homophobic. However, at the same time it is often times all that they are familiar with. They don’t mean to offend.
Well, off to Machu Picchu tomorrow!
xo Claire
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