2010!

Happy 2010! So it’s been a pretty interesting week or two here in Ancash, starting with new years. I’ve never been such a big new years partier, so I figured I would just hang out with my host family and do what they do. What they do is stay up until midnight, drink hot chocolate and eat paneton, wish each other “feliz año nuevo” and go to bed. Things were going fine until 10, when I got sleepy and my host dad put on a terrible, dubbed martial arts movie. But I powered through that and at 1130 the snacks were served and we put on Rambo, which was a good change of pace. So I made it until twelve, which I think is the latest I have been up since training ended 6 weeks ago. We went outside and it was a beautiful night with a full moon that illuminated the snow covered mountain peaks—really gorgeous. There were some fireworks and my host mom burned a doll made of old clothes—it’s supposed to bring luck for the New Year, and everyone likes burning things. Then I walked over to the town plaza (up the street) where there were some beers being passed around a circle and really loud whyno music (you should check it out—it’s not good http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04JpzkDbIq8). All in all it was a nice tranquil way to pass the New Year. And New Year’s Day my Peace Corps friends Pete and Kaitlin, who live within walking distance, and I went on a long hike to celebrate amongst ourselves. It was absolutely beautiful, and it proved our theory that where we live, if we start walking in any direction, we’re bound to wind up encountering a stunning landscape. So that was a good start to 2010.
Then this week has been a week of what else but potatoes. My host family harvested their biggest field of potatoes all week long. At this point we’re about ½ to 2/3 done and by my calculations it’s already been over 3000 pounds sent to market. I was invited to come help and for the first time I was actually allowed to do a little work (usually when I go out to the fields I am told “this work is hard, you should sit here in the shade). The whole extended family came out (about 12 people per day) and the jobs are either digging up the potatoes with a pick or sorting them by size. At first I just sorted them, but eventually against everyone’s advice, I grabbed an unoccupied pick. No one believes that I’ve done physical labor before, and unfortunately it has been awhile—my calluses are gone and I have what my old manager at the farm would refer to as “wuss hands”, so within an hour I had a few blisters and I was encouraged to go sit in the shade. But I pushed on for long enough to salvage some dignity and I think that at the end of the day I was more of a help than a hindrance (I hope).
So we harvested a lot of potatoes and then my dad asked if I wanted to accompany him to the market to sell them on Saturday night. I have always been fascinated by markets so I jumped at the chance. So at 11 pm on Saturday night we crowded into the back of a truck with a few tons of fresh produce (potatoes, beans, hot peppers, herbs, corn etc) and about 10 other people and drove two hours down the hill to a city called Carhuaz, where they have this huge market Saturdays and Wednesdays (I also went Tuesday night for the Wednesday market at 1 am in a small station wagon of a cab with 13 people in it. At least I think it was 13—I couldn’t fully turn my head to count…). The market is awesome, a combination of wholesalers and retailers, selling everything from fresh produce grown locally, to tropical fruit brought in from the coast, to fresh meat, to dry goods and clothes. We arrived at about 2:30, set out our 15 sacks of potatoes and slept on the sidewalk until a buyer walked up at 3:30 and asked my host dad how much. We had sold everything by 4, at which point we sat/slept with some other vendors from Yanamito until 6, when we did our grocery shopping for the week. I was amazed by the huge variety of goods, as well as the hustle and bustle of the market, accompanied by throngs of people, many of them women in brightly colored traditional clothes. I’m excited to go back on a full nights sleep and wander around for a few hours.
So yea those were all cool things. The other two notable things were I was coerced into tasting tokush, which is some kind of fermented porridge which tastes OK because it’s loaded with sugar, but was honestly the foulest smelling thing I have ever eaten. That was not so fun—the smell is kind of still haunting me. I also saw a feature on Peruvian TV about a Peruvian midget who dances to Michael Jackson songs in the Times Square subway station and is known as “the mini Michael Jackson”. So if anyone passes him by, give him a dollar for me…
And that’s life. My summer school teaching starts on Monday and the kids seem excited, which is great. And in two weeks we have intensive Quechua language training, which will be cool if I can learn enough to communicate with the older folks who don’t speak much Spanish or follow a conversation. Wish me luck and I hope everyone had a great new year’s.