Piracy

2-16-11

I think my mom forgot my request for smaller breakfasts because today was one of the largest yet! I don’t know how they do it. Today was the last day of Quechua! Thank god…although tomorrow we are going to the town of Ccorcca (or Qorqa) to interview Quechua speakers as our final exam. That seems super extreme to me, considering the fact that we’ve taken this exam for so little time. As for the varied spelling, that goes for just about everything. Quechua is not really a written language, therefore there is far too much flexibility in spelling. The double C version is the Spanish adaptation and the Q spelling is the Quechua. The same goes for Cusco/Qosqo and Cuy/Qowi. As for Cuzco with a Z…I have no idea. They split up our group of 25 into three smaller classes for Quechua and apparently the three different teachers teach us very different things. For example, we all learned this song called Taq’llaquy and evidently every single class learned a different tune for the very same words. What?

As it was a Wednesday, about six of us took a combi into the center to go eat lunch together. We witnessed a bit strike in front of a government building on the Avenida del Sol, and then a resulting parading demonstration that wound its way around the Plaza de Armas. We weren’t quite sure what they were protesting, but they kept shouting “Provincia de Espinar.” That, coupled with the fact that some wore miners hats, leads me to believe that they represented a miners’ union in Espinar? We decided that we missed American food, so we went to an Irish Pub called Paddy’s in the Plaza to eat some burgers. Every single person who came in the doors was obviously foreign! Oh well, we were among them. Good thing lunch is three hours long because we always need that much time! The combi took a really long time, then the restaurant too. Last time we also found it difficult to find a taxi willing to drive to Magisterio. What a pain.

The American ethnomusicologist who accompanied us to Calca, Holly Wissler, gave our lecture today about her three-year stay with the Q’ero people, one of the remaining traditional Andean peoples. She made a documentary about her studies and her Doctoral Thesis, which she showed. I find it hard to focus in the afternoons, especially when it is rainy and grey outside. That, in addition to sitting still to a three-hour lecture in another language does not always make me the most attentive listener. I asked her why Q’ero, as well as other indigenous women, sing entirely from their throats instead of using their diaphragm, but she couldn’t really answer. It strikes me as strange that they sing so eerily high-pitched, but it must just be traditional to sing that way.

At dinner I asked my host sister Farina about a few of the nicknames within the family. The younger Victor, the godson of Farina and Edward, is often called El Negrito. He isn’t particularly darker than the rest of the family, so I didn’t understand. In addition, they call Iris La Chinita… maybe she looks slightly Asian? In Quechua I thought about it and considered that El Negrito might just come from Quechua, in which “yanachay,” meaning “mi negrito” is a way to say “enamorado.” That’s just me guessing though.

After dinner a couple of us went to Allina’s to study for the exam tomorrow. I’m not sure I made progress, but I feel as if I have as good a grasp on Quechua as anyone else. I think I’ll do just fine tomorrow. Then I went home to watch a pirated movie from El Molino, only to discover that instead of my movie, they’d given me that Sylvester Stallone action movie (is it called the Invincibles? Not sure) in Spanish. Oh well, that’s what you get when you deal with piracy, I suppose.

Good night!

xo Claire