I first met Ursula last Tuesday when we were staying in Urubamba. She came to give us each an oral exam that would place us in our respective Spanish classes, and my first words to her were, “antes del examen querría decir, lo siento,” which, (very) roughly translated means, “before this exam I would just like to say, I’m sorry.” She only laughed and assured me that it would be easy and that I would be fine. It turned out to be true: I didn’t get struck by lightening or eaten by an alpaca during the ten minute exam, and I left feeling like maybe I could actually speak some permutation of the Spanish that fluent speakers could understand. I’m sure I wouldn’t have felt that way without Ursula’s interjected bits of laughter when I tried to make jokes, which were frequent because I wanted to do all I could to detract the attention from my Spanish. She and her friend (also a Spanish teacher for our group) left after giving us exams, and all of us who came back from our tests saying something to the effect of, “wow she was so nice, I really hope she’s my teacher!”
The next day, though, was our trip to Machu Picchu, so the 15 of us quickly forgot all about the kindness of Ursula and Viviana, turning our minds instead to the massive Incan ruins and to our impending meeting with our homestay families and to our return to Cusco.
Monday, we remembered again. Ursula, as it turned out, was teaching my Spanish class and was ever patient with our misconjugations and incorrect pronunciation. Like all good language teachers I know—and, after taking seven years of Spanish and befriending a French teacher it’s more than a few—she was both kind and understanding, pushing us to speak correctly and slowly, and only very subtly registering her confusion as she tried to decode what we said.
Two days ago I was coming home from the internet café in my neighborhood, carrying my computer which had almost no battery life left in it. I went into my room, where I had been charging my computer for the past week, to plug it in but much to my chagrin the green light didn’t go on and it didn’t register a charge. “Okay,” I thought, “maybe it’s the outlet. But, after trying the charger in each of the 4 outlets in my room and in the dining room, I began to think that it was maybe my charger. I was on the phone with Dad, and, as is typical for me, I got incredibly frustrated and began swearing and let the problem take over. (I have very little patience when things don’t work like they should, but it’s something I need to work on because there is absolutely no use in living like everything is the most important thing.) The next morning when I got to school I again tried my charger in the outlets there, thinking that maybe some spirit had vexed my house in the night, rendering all the outlets useless.
I was beginning to consider my options for getting a new one—as it was I had about 32 minutes of life left before the computer would be dead as a doornail. There is one Apple store in Peru—they’re not so popular here, and I was about to find out why—and it’s in Lima. I walked into class and asked Ursula if she wouldn’t mind helping me call the store after class, to see if they could send me one and how much it would cost. “Por supeuesto, of course” she answered, as if it wasn’t even a question that needed asking. At 12:00, with cell phone and notebook in hand, so she could write down what the person at the story was saying, she came with me into the courtyard an made the call. Turns out that the reason people don’t like Apple products here is because they are exceedingly expensive (not much different than in the U.S.); for a new charger it was going to cost 689 soles, about $225, and more than most people here make in a month.
Ursula had a different idea. She hung up the phone and said that she had a friend that worked at a computer store and would I like to go there and see if he could fix it, or if he knew someone who could? “Ahh, muchas gracias sí, si es ok.” After spending 3 hours listening to me battle the imperfect and preterit tenses, Ursula was willing to walk with me to computer store to help me work out my relatively miniscule problem. As it turned out, she was not only willing to walk with me there, but also to stand there with me and translate while I tried to groped for words like “outlet,” “blue spark” and “voltage.” The man took the charger and told me to come back at 7:30.
As we walked out of the store, around 1:15, she asked me what I was going to do until 2:30 when I had to be back at school. “I’m not sure, maybe eat a little lunch,” and I asked her if she knew of anyplace to get a salteña, which is very similar to an empanada. She began to give me directions to the best salteñeria in the city, but after a minute decided that she would just take me there herself. We walked up two steps into a small restaurant. I knew she was right about it being the best in the city, because it was filled and I was only one of two gringos. I could also taste that she was right about 10 minutes later, when there was a piping hot pastry sitting in front of me. It was delicious, and certainly the best empanada I’ve ever had. The dough was just a bit sweet, which worked in perfect tandem with it’s savory richness. The filling is a juicy mixture of chicken, onion, ground beef, raisins and a hard boiled egg. When you sprinkle some lime juice on top and some slightly tangy and spicy salsa, the mix of flavors is like a sensory definition of synergy. The coarsely textured and disparate flavor bursts out of the not quite flakey but not quite chewy dough, and makes you feel so lucky to have been shown this secret place that you have the urge to write an ode in the style of Yeats to whoever you brought you there. (Alas, a blog post and journal entry will have to do.)
Ursula kindly sat with me and talked a bit about her self—what she is studying at university (literature), where else she had lived in Peru (Arequipa) and a bit about Peruvian politics (former President Alejandro Toledo, was not actually very popular, even though he was the first indigenous president). She also obliged me by allowing me to show my thanks by paying the 80 cents for her salteña. As we were leaving she leaned to me and gave me her cell phone number, telling me to please call her if I needed anymore help of if there was anything else she could do. I said that I was sure it would be fine, and tried once again to break the language barrier to tell her how much I appreciated her kindness. I think what came out was, “ahh thank you so much for your helpfulness today.” Certainly not as eloquent as if I’d been speaking English, but I hope she could hear my gratitude in my tone of voice, and see it in the way I was standing up a bit straighter, feeling so much better.
She went back to her apartment to study, nearly 2 hours after ending class, and I left to walk around and explore Cusco, listening to George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.” It fit my jaunty and upbeat mood perfectly, and it is the right song for a hot day in Cusco when you’ve just realized that you’re not alone in a foreign city and that karma really does transcend the language barrier, if words don’t always. I hope I will return Ursula’s favor in kind to someone, but more than that I hope that Ursula gets the favor returned to her, 10-fold or 100-fold or more. She certainly deserves it.

(A side note: I picked up my now functioning computer charger from the store at 7:30 last night.)

And now, to bed.