The Office of Provisional Normalization

On Monday morning, a jovial, well-rested Peruvian border agent brought his children to work with him, read them our names, showed them our passports, gave us our entry stamps and wished us a good journey. From that point, the day was a blur of towns and transport, too many people crammed into a series of white station wagons, the windows open, the roads dusty, the mountains, rivers, high desert plains and planted fields rushing by.

We went through hilly, twisted-street towns, past adobe huts painted with political slogans, along wide, business-lined boulevards crammed with cars, trucks and moto-rickshaws. In some rural stretches there were so many rickshaws, palm trees and rice fields that I wondered if this was in fact Peru and not Southeast Asia somewhere.

Then we found ourselves stranded in a hot, metal-roofed adobe shed in Bagua Grande, waiting for a colectivo that was promised but nowhere to be found. The young woman on duty in the shed put her feet up against the door frame and watched her telenovela. The five of us—the same five who had waited for the hostel to open in La Balsa—avoided saying out loud that we seemed to be in for a re-run.

But a driver did eventually come. By 9:00 that evening, after a long, slow ride up into the mountains, we arrived at last in Chachapoyas. In two long days, we’d covered 189 miles as the crow flies.

Our first morning here, still exhausted and disoriented, I saw a sign that said something like The Office of Provisional Normalization. “I should probably stop by,” I thought. “Some provisional normalization sounds like just what I need.”

Except for the gleaming white cathedral, the buildings that lined the plaza all looked identical to me at that point—two-story, white colonial buildings with wooden doors, red-tiled roofs and wooden balconies under the second story windows. The streets too seemed impossible to tell apart—there were no street signs, not even placards at the street corners. (Later we learned to look for the address plates over individual doors, which also give the name of the family that lives there.) Everything was dusty, and the sun was hot and so bright I kept reaching for my sunglasses before realizing I already had them on.

Everything we needed to do involved learning new words and navigating new systems, and that morning it all felt overwhelming. We worried that if we plugged in the computer, the 220-volt current would fry it. Finding a laundry service and dropping off our dirty clothes seemed an almost insurmountable task. Every word of Spanish abandoned me, and I felt like we were staggering around, confused, bumbling and blatantly out of place in our gringa-ness.

It didn’t help that when we met the director of the school the night before, he didn’t seem quite sure who we were. He appeared surprised to learn we hoped to arrange home stays, and he kept alluding to some difficulties the school had been experiencing. It would open, he told us, five days later than scheduled.

The delay has turned out to be a good thing, though. Now, five days after our arrival, we are well settled into big, thick-walled, wood-floored rooms that open onto a courtyard full of flowers and small trees. We look out over tile roofs to the mountains to the west and south, and at night the sky is full of stars and the courtyard full of fireflies. Our landlady, Andrea, has a warm smile, honest eyes and a lot of patience. When we were moving in, she indicated she’d like me to come downstairs and sign a piece of paper summarizing our agreement. I understood what she said, but could not get a reply together for the life of me. She just laughed and gave me a big hug, as if to say, “Oh, you poor thing! You’re in way over your head, aren’t you?”

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We’re getting there though. Staying in one place and catching up on sleep has helped enormously. The streets have started to take on individual identities, and we’re quickly building our web of local landmarks—the school, the market, the vegetarian restaurant, the café with the decent internet connection, the shop with the really good lemon pie.

And our fellow teachers have taken us in hand. One of the first nights, Gregory, the academic director, sent word he wanted to meet us. He was a bit in his cups when we arrived, but kindly and welcoming. He explained the splatters of blood on his shirt with an involved story about a chicken that got caught in a closing door and subsequently needed comforting.

“Where is that chicken?” he asked Fidel, the director of the school and the owner of the pub we were in.

“In the toilet,” said Fidel. I had to hope he meant the bathroom, and in fact, a little later on, Rie discovered there was a live chicken perched on a red bucket in there. Before long, Fidel brought it out to the bar and they all gave it a cuddle.

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Then he made us Pisco sours, and Gregory and Tom, another teacher, insisted we carry them to the roof of their lodgings a few doors down. It was a great place, with a view over the rooftops to the cathedral on the square. In the other direction, you could see the lights of the houses climbing up the hill to the west. Gregory pointed out the South African flag he flew from one corner of the roof, the internet router that hung from a telephone pole inside a plastic bucket to protect it from the rain, the few stalks of corn he has sprouted in a pile of clay apparently intended for repairing the house.

A few days later, they took us off on a strenuous but wonderful hike, delivering bits of teacher-to-teacher advice and local knowledge along the way. (“Only eat the cebiche in the market on Wednesdays—that’s when the fresh fish comes in.”) Next up is the trek to Huancas, which Gregory keeps recommending, though in his South African accent it comes out more like “Wankers.”

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We met more of the teachers at a staff meeting last night, including the two kind souls who will teach us Spanish, and this morning we went by the school to pick up our books. The secretary’s desk and the bookcases that normally lined the walls were all pushed into the middle of the room and the computer screen had a cloth draped over it to protect it from the dust. A radio was playing and a painter was rolling blue paint on the walls. In the midst of all this, the secretary was registering two little girls for school, that is, until Fidel sent her out for glue to repair the teacher’s manuals he wanted to give Rie and me. The CD for my audio-based class is missing, but I’ve been assured it will be in hand by Monday.

A little later, in the copy shop/laundry service where I went to pick up our clothes, I found, next to piles of pantyhose and unidentifiable pieces of hardware, something I’ve been looking for for days:  a notebook! With that and a pen in hand, I’m as ready as I can possibly be to start classes on Monday.

Every day has some kind of mistake in it—Rie asked our landlady’s granddaughter where her birthday was, and I apologetically told a woman we met that unfortunately she didn’t speak Spanish very well. And every day there’s some kind of technological breakdown, whether it’s the electric shower head sending out sparks or the power going out entirely. But bit by bit we are becoming provisionally normalized, even coming close to feeling at home.

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Hiking the Izhcayluma Loop

Now that we've had time to catch our breath a bit, Rie has written some reflections on one of the wonderful hikes we took in Vilcabamba last week.

Setting out into a light rain one morning in Vilcabamba, Kath and I were well prepared for our hike. We had a map and directions from the hosteleria, plenty of water and lunch. Off to a good start, we followed a well-defined trail along a creek. All too soon however, things got fuzzy. We couldn't find any blazes, and then we couldn't even find the trail. Were we on a trail, a cowpath, or neither? With no way to be sure, we traipsed back and forth across the creek several times, climbed up and down the bank, all to no avail. Finally we headed up a steep hill into a llama/cow pasture hoping for a view of the road or path. No luck. So, on we trekked, through pastures, over fences, through fences, up and down. We fondly reminisced about our parents - - Mom, with whom we walked through many a cow pasture during visits to the family farm, and Dad who led the way on many adventurous hikes when we were kids. We also ran through our Spanish vocabulary. Did we have the words to say, “sorry, we are lost”, or, “can you show us the way to the road?”.

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The good news is that, at last, we found the road and headed off in the right direction. Following an old dirt road, we passed small farms and homesteads, a woman milking a cow, some young children playing. We paused for lunch at a school named in honor of a local farmer who had never been to school himself.

By this time the rain had let up and the skies were clearing. On up the road we continued. The views were increasingly impressive the more we climbed, but the real treat was yet to come. Crossing a paved road, our directions read “climb a small ledge to reach the trail”. Well, to us the ledge was not so small. So, we scouted around and found an alternate way to the path, and then on up to the ridgeline.

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We hiked through grassy fields with scattered agaves, small shrubs and trees. Soon we reached a wonderful old stone wall full of treasures - - agaves large and small, cactus, several species of ferns and lichen, wildflowers and a perfect lime-green begonia with a red edge and red flowers. Gorgeous!

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Up and up we climbed along the ridgeline and were rewarded with a most spectacular vista. Kath and I plopped ourselves down in the middle of the trail to try and absorb the view. Words cannot possibly do it justice. We were looking out over miles and miles of steep peaks and deep valleys, all lush and green with sunlight and shadows playing over all. There was no-one else to be seen, just some swallows and butterflies and some very sure-footed cows.

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After some time we reluctantly gathered ourselves and headed back down the ridgeline, past the agaves, past the old stone wall, past the grazing cows to the road and on down to the hosteleria for a well-earned dinner of vegetable soup and homemade bread.

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Cuenca at Christmas, Lounging in the Valley of Longevity

We’ve been waking up the last few mornings to a braying donkey who—from the sounds of things—suffers from both asthma and hairballs. The roosters are crowing, the dogs are barking, and birds new to us are chirping and calling. We’re in Vilcabamba, Ecuador, up in the Andes for a few days of hiking and hammocks before we set out overland for our teaching gig in Peru. Once the morning mist clears, the hosteria’s open air dining room looks down on the green valley and the little town and out onto high peaks on all sides. All this and good coffee too.

Our time in Ecuador was meant to be a holiday, and Cuenca at Christmas was pure festival—the crowded streets and markets, the brass bands, the smell of horse pee on cobblestones in the sun. Amplified Christmas music blared from speakers, an older woman in a sweater, bowler, and embroidered skirt tended to a little boy in a Santa costume, and a girl clutching a fuzzy stuffed llama crossed a plaza full of flower stands. There were firecrackers and church bells and vendors with wheelbarrows full of red cherries; there was the smell of diesel fumes and fresh piña. There were tile roofs with crucifixes on the ridgelines; there were red geraniums on the ironwork balconies.

And there were parades. The main one, on Christmas Eve, honored El Niño Viajero, a local icon of the Christ Child that a priest took to the Holy Land back in the 1960s. We didn’t actually see the Traveling Child in the procession, but we saw plenty of kids dressed as angels and toreadors and shepherds and kings.

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Aside from the odd Eeyore costume or NYPD hat, almost everything was handmade—the costumes, the floats, the offerings of chickens and roasted guinea pigs and fruit and candy and Coca Cola, all festooned with ribbons. And though the spirit was festive, there was also an undercurrent of solemn devotion, especially on the faces of those carrying their own baby Jesus dolls in homemade cradles or on embroidered satin pillows.

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We watched the parade for hours, then had lunch and went off to buy our bus tickets for Boxing Day, when we would set out for Vilcabamba. When we successfully found our way to the intercity bus terminal and made our purchase, we felt a small thrill of accomplishment. And we enjoyed knowing we were, like those around us, out doing errands on this busy Christmas Eve.

Fortunately, we didn’t bring our goat.

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Though it takes effort to make ourselves understood with our still-primitive Spanish, people have been kind. The driver on the local bus laughed when I accidentally paid twice as much as I should have, but then he made sure we got our change. A fellow passenger waved us along at the terminal until we found the right ticket window. A woman at midnight mass hugged us and said, “Feliz Navidad, senoras,” a gesture that hugely touched me.

We went to mass in a small, simple chapel across a side street from the cathedral. A brass band played outside, and inside the altar was hung with floor-to-ceiling draperies in shiny gold overlaid with pink gauze and white lace, all set off with dangling blue Christmas lights. A small band of horns and keyboard played lively music, and we drew some curious looks as we stood along the side. Only a small part of the packed house took communion—it turned out they were waiting for the main attraction at the end of mass. All were attentive when a man in a wool poncho climbed a ladder behind the altar and took a green-gowned baby Jesus down from the top of a tiered structure piled with flowers and strung with lights.

It turned out to be the Traveling Child, a semi-circle of gold rays behind his head. Everyone pressed forward so the man in the poncho could touch the top of their heads with the base of the statue. Outside the chapel, a tall, elaborate, multicolored framework was set up, ready, we figured, to parade the icon around the plaza in the middle of the night. But we were too tired to stay up and find out.

On Christmas Day, the festivities continued, and the streets and plazas were full.
  

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In the afternoon, we walked along Rio Tomebamba, a clear, rapid-filled river that rushes through town.

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The Inca ruins at Pumapungo were closed for the holiday, but we looked through the fence.

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 Then we climbed back up the hill and through the old city with its hookah bars and church domes.

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On Boxing Day, we took one bus through the high Andean towns to Loja and then another to Vilcabamba. The bus rides were a bonanza of sensory input: some kind of Spanish industrial music over the P.A., a dubbed American shoot-em-up movie on the TV, vista after vista of Andean valleys. It took me a while to realize that the mist that surrounded us on the peaks was really clouds and that we were actually inside the clouds.

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The day after we arrived in Vilcabamba, we took a 12-kilometer hike that started out on a dirt road along a mountainside. Walking to the trailhead, we saw men with machetes cutting bananas by the side of the road and a kid riding a skateboard on a dirt side street. The trail crossed steep slopes where donkeys and cows grazed, looked down on tiny plantings of corn, sugarcane and bananas, then led us down to the river and up again past a monastery with a walled garden and a side business in medicinal honey.

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Yesterday we had a lazy day, but one thing we did do was look up the vocabulary we may need on what promises to be a somewhat rugged trip into Peru in a few days. Muddy roads? Landslide? Impassable? It will be an adventure, for sure. (KK)