Hearing the phrase “if it doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger” is never a good sign. It usually means that someone is trying to spin something in your favor, trying to sympathize with your plight and commiserate with you in your misery. It also doesn’t usually make you feel a whole lot better.
But, so it was last Tuesday afternoon as I was walking home from the supermarket, flea bomb in hand, that my friend Bridget told me just that: Well, I guess if it won’t kill us it will at least make us stronger. She was, of course, speaking of that piece of the campo that we’d brought home with us, the fleas.
Last Friday morning I woke up and, in the course of showering and getting dressed, began noticing some bites on my legs. I didn’t think much of it at the time—sleeping in the Shebang has brought much worse than a few spider-looking bites on my legs. They itched a bit, but again, I’d had much worse. Bridget also had some bites, and was convinced she had fleas. (At this point I still thought she was crazy, and made sure to let her know each and every time she told me about them. I even laughed at the idea, which, looking back was a terrible idea and ended up being a lesson in Karma.) I was, on Saturday morning, still of the opinion that my bites were simply errant spider bites, just a holdover from the campo. Merely a visitor who wanted to see Cusco from the vantage of my leg and got hungry along the way.
Every day, though, I woke up with a few new bites that were beginning to itch worse than any bites—mosquito or spider—that I’d had in the past. They were also pretty big, maybe ½ centimeter in diameter which, although it may not seem like a lot, begins to look like it when there are 20 of them covering your leg. When I spoke to Mom on Sunday night I mentioned the bites to her and she told me I should talk to my host mom, to see if she had any ideas about the bites. With new ones appearing daily I was beginning to come around to Bridget’s flea theory—albeit begrudgingly.
Monday morning dawned with five new bites, which had now migrated now from my right leg to my left, and up to my stomach. At breakfast I showed my host mom a few of them and asked her what she thought they were.
“Oh, you’ve got pulgas,” she said.
Now, I have taken seven years of Spanish; I could explain the usages of the subjunctive tense, the difference between por and para and idioms with the verb tener. The word pulgas, however, was one with which I was not familiar. So, when my mom told me I had them, I just assumed it was Peruvian Spanish for generic bug bite. (Pulga is not a word one comes across in the thematic vocabulary of Spanish textbooks in the US—which theme would that fall under, “vermin that infest your bedroom”? That has never been a chapter heading, but maybe I’m just using the wrong books.)
When I got to school that day I told Bridget not to worry, that it was okay, that I just had pulgas!
“Julie, pulgas are fleas.”
Well, there it was: karma, come to bite me in the ass. Oh Jesus, I thought. I’d had a dog for 13 years and not once did the thought of fleas even cross my mind. Now, five days in the campo and my body was an all-you-can-eat buffet that happened to be popular with a good portion of the fleas in Corporaque. It took me a few minutes of arguing, but after having everyone else assure me that pulgas were indeed fleas, my period of denial was over and I’d moved into the next phase of my grieving: acceptance.
“Alright, well what the hell are we going to do about our fleas, then,” I asked Bridget, although only half-heatedly, because I really didn’t care to know the answer.
“Well Irma (=director of the program), told me that we need to spray down everything in our rooms with flea spray. Then we need to do it again, with some kind of spray that is even more powerful than the first. We need to do it in the morning, because we can’t go into our rooms for 8 hours after we spray,” she told me.
We walked home, half laughing and half incredulous at our situation: we were here, living in Peru, with fleas. Was that a joke?
Today, no, it was most certainly not a joke. Tomorrow, even still would be a little too soon for it to be a joke. By Wednesday, though, the fact that we had fleas might be hilarious. (So I hope you’re enjoying this post—it’s meant to be funny, as it is now Thursday night and the fleas are hopefully dead and I don’t think I’ve gotten any new bites.)
On Tuesday morning both Bridget and I got up at 6:15, and instead of meeting our friend Jaime to go running like we usually do, took everything out of our room and sprayed it down with the flea spray we’d gotten. (It takes a surprisingly long time to spray three heavy wool blankets with Raid! Flea Killer) Then we both packed up every single item of clothing that we’d brought with us and took it to the Laundromat. Fleas be damned, they were going to die whether they liked it or not.
And here we are, a combined 165 soles worth of laundry later, 3 cans of flea/mite death spray, and 27 soles worth of cortisone cream later, it seems that we are flea free. It is a nice feeling not to wake up in the middle of the night tearing at your legs and arms because they itch so much. And, I suppose because the fleas did not kill us, they perhaps made us stronger. Or at least they made our fingers stronger, from all the itching.
And now, to bed. (which is, thankfully, sans fleas.)
Friday, March 20, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
My friend Bridget woke me up on Tuesday morning with a song, sung to the tune of “Going to the Chapel,” that went like this:
“Going to the campo, and we’re,
Gonna pick papas,
Going to the campo, and we’re,
Gonna pick papas.”
(Papas = potatoes)
We were staying in a beautiful hotel in Arequipa, a city west of Cusco that was built at the base of three volcanoes, and, as the song would suggest, we were headed off to the capmo (=rural town) to complete our rural home stay portion of the trip. For most of us it would be our first experience with agricultural life and life outside the realm of instant communication to which we’d become accustomed. In short, we were headed for a place where, as my friend Marley put it, “if something on the scale of September 11th happened again, there is a good chance we wouldn’t know about it.”
But first we had a day in Arequipa. Many of the buildings there are made from bricks made from white volcanic ash, hence the city’s nickname: “the White City.” We didn’t get to see much of it, as we arrived on Monday night around 8:00 and left the next afternoon at 1:30, but from the little we explored, it is beautiful and almost feels colonial with its gothic buildings and big churches. There is a main plaza, called the Plaza de Armas like in Cusco, and, because much of Peru caters to tourists, lots of quaint streets with overpriced restaurants and shops selling baby alpaca scarves and sweaters. We ate dinner at a restaurant on the second floor of a patio overlooking the square, which lights up at night and looks more like a movie set than an ancient plaza. (Much like the Plaza de Armas in Cusco, the fact that it is so manicured as to appear fake doesn’t take away from its beauty.)
After a five hour bus ride on Tuesday afternoon, which was made longer by the fact that it is the rainy season and long stretches of road are made into Swiss cheese by the downpours, we arrived in Chivay, a small town which serves as a tourist hub for Colca Canyon. Colca is the second biggest canyon in the world, measuring 3400 meters in depth. The town itself is very nice and quaint—the center of town is probably about five or six square blocks—with restaurants, hotels and tourist shops offering bus tours of the canyon starting at $70 US. The fifteen of us, by now glad to be anywhere but on a bus, got off the bus and went into a restaurant where we were going to be greeted by our host families. We sat down for a lavish buffet meal, and our families walked in soon after. I suppose they wanted to impress us, but most of the women (probably 13 of 15) were wearing traditional outfits, which, as you can see from the picture below, are not the easiest things to get into. (That picture is of me and my friends Bridget and Mary, the two other girls that were staying in town with me.) As soon as the families walked in I began to get extremely nervous: yes, I was going to be living in the same town Mary and Bridget, but would I see them in the next six days? Was I going to taken to the field everyday, to harvest potatoes and plant quinoa? Where would I sleep? Probably on a hard dirt floor along with spiders and snakes and whatever else lived in the campo, was of course the answer I rushed to first. These ridiculous hypothetical situations only got worse as the eight of us (me, my two friends, and the five members of our respective host families that came to greet us) piled into the station wagon and began the 25-minute drive up the hill to the town of Corporaque, where we would be staying. They weren’t helped by the fact that, midway through the drive, the car died and the driver (who, it turned out, was Bridget’s host dad and an extremely nice and capable driver) had to jump out, put a bit more gas in the tank, and continue on the way. By the time I got out of the car and said goodbye to them I was convinced that the next five days would stretch into five years, and that I would come back to Cusco with malaria and yellow fever, having done enough back breaking labor to harvest all the potatoes in Peru. I met the rest of my family—along with my “mom” Muriel, and my eight year old “brother” Alex who had come to meet me in Chivay there were two other boys, Denilson (Chabu) and Christian, who were 11 and 13. My “father” Miguel was 39, and drove a combi in addition to working in the fields—and quickly went to bed. It turns out that, instead of sleeping on the floor with the “snakes” (of which there are none in Corporaque), I actually had my own room which was very big and nicely furnished with a bed, desk, dresser, bookcase and TV. It was also decorated with lots of scientific drawings because I took Christian’s room, and his favorite subjects are math and science.
Wednesday morning dawned bright with no clouds in the sky—a rare feat in Peru in the rainy season. I went into the kitchen to have breakfast, and was told that we would be going to the chakra (=fields) today, to harvest albergas (=peas). In the light of day everything looked nicer and more manageable. My house, which was actually more of a compound as it was built in a rectangle around a dirt courtyard, was very big, and my family extremely welcoming and kind. I was excited to go out to the fields and do some manual labor, adopting that Protestant attitude of hard work doing some good for the body and soul. (I’ve learned it well from you, Mom.) Six of us—Muriel and Miguel, Christian and Chabu, a “tio” (=uncle) and I—left the house at 8:00 in Miguel’s combi, and got to the chakra at 8:30. We immediately started picking peas, which is a pretty mindless task and not too hard on anything minus the back or the knees, as those only grew about two feet high. For the first few hours I was really enjoying myself: we had brought a radio, I was doing a bit of thinking about random things, and I was really enjoying the feeling of collecting beans and seeing my progress as I tossed them into the plastic bag. But then, around 11:00—at 2 ½ hours that was longer than I’ve ever spent continuously in a garden doing anything—I began to tire of the work. I asked Muriel how long we would be spending there, as I actually did have a meeting with the academic director of the program to discuss my independent study project at 2:00 in town. I thought she said that they usually only spend 3 hours at a time in the chakra, but when noon rolled around and she brought out a picnic lunch, I assumed that I’d misheard her. After lunch, when they all started back into the field to continue picking peas, I asked her when she thought we’d be done, as I didn’t want to miss my meeting and I wanted to get out of that godforsaken place.
“We’ll go when it starts raining,” she said. Well that’s great, I thought. It rains at least twice a day every day here! Well, wouldn’t you know it, Wednesday, March 4th, 2009, it didn’t rain. Around 2:30 I gave up on my meeting, just around the time I started talking to myself. (What am I doing here? I hate picking peas! Why am I even in Peru? Whose idea was this? This is ridiculous!) Hindsight being what it is, I can now say that it was not bad at all; in fact manual labor is good for the body and soul, and thinking about it now I am glad that I got to spend the whole day there, seeing what it is like to have to do that kind of work all day. It certainly gave me a renewed appreciation for people who do that all the time. In my journal that night I wrote:
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to learn from all this, but I can definitively say that there are two things I have learned:
1) I am SO glad that I go to Columbia and will never have to do this for my life, and will always have the choice of doing something else
2) I will probably never own or maintain my own farm.”
I probably should have written: 3) It turns out that I actually am a city girl after all.
The next four days flew by, and instead of going to the fields to pick peas I took a lot of walks in the canyon with Mary and Bridget, and spent a lot of time with the three brothers with whom I lived. We herded sheep (I am getting good at it, if I do say so myself), picked corn and apples, played soccer, and they so kindly showed me around the town and let me tag along with them with whatever they did. I got along best with Chabu, probably because I spent the most time with him. He likes to cook, and I taught him how to play slap jack and war with a deck of cards. His favorite subject is Communication Skills, but he wants to go to University to be an engineer and work in a mine. He is very good at soccer (he likes taking penalty kicks), and he climbs trees like a monkey. He has good aim with a slingshot, which came in helpful when we were herding the petulant sheep down to the pasture. He is also very funny, and tried really hard to teach me some phrases in Quechua because he knew that I was trying to learn it. (Llula = Liar. That was all I retained.) The other brothers, were also extremely nice and welcoming, and all of them asked lots of questions about life in the US, and especially about how much things cost there. I felt as welcome in their house as I think someone would feel in my own house, which is the absolute highest compliment I can give to the Torres-Bernal family.
The family owns a store, in addition to Miguel’s work as a taxi driver and to owning cultivated land and sheep, which allows them a relatively high level of prosperity compared to their neighbors. The store sells canned goods, meat, bread and basic household necessities, and on Sunday night I asked them what they thought I should buy from the store as a souvenir from their house. Instead of giving me a suggestion, Miguel went into his room and came back with a beer mug that he’d won in a salsa dancing competition. “Take this, and write ‘souvenir from the Torres-Bernal Family, Corporaque, Peru.’” Then he signed it, and I wrote the names of everyone else in the family. I was so touched by the gesture, and it was difficult to show him how much I appreciated it by the awkward hug that ensued. I am looking at the mug now, as I write this, thinking of what they are doing now (probably sleeping), and what they will be doing for the next week while I’m in Cusco, the next two months while I’m in Peru, and the next twenty years while I’m in the US. They will probably be doing the same thing they’ve been doing for their whole lives (maybe Chabu or Christian or Alex will go to University), and the same thing that their parents did. Leaving on Monday morning was sadder than I thought it would be; I really do miss them very much, but it’s hard to think about them in a real way, because their lives are so foreign to my own. It almost doesn’t feel real: did that week really happen? Well the answer for me is yes, and for them it is that it will probably happen exactly like that a thousand times over.
Now I am back in Cusco, living once again with instant communication, access to the US whenever I want, with all of the amenities that accompany living in a city. It certainly feels nice to be back but for now it feels a bit strange, I am sure because the experience is so fresh. The pressure of good fortune is weighing heavy on my shoulders and, even though it’s not guilt that I feel it is like something has shifted. I am guessing that the feeling will fade with time, but hoping and trying to make sure that it doesn’t. It’s a renewed appreciation for showers and bookstores, for rooms without the smell of animals and varied food choices. Mostly, though, it’s just a renewed appreciation for my place in the world, and for exactly what makes my life different from 90% of it: that I have the choice to live however I want, be it in a field in Peru or a house in Montclair. I will probably choose the latter, but it’s nice to know that I’ve got options.
And now, to bed.
“Going to the campo, and we’re,
Gonna pick papas,
Going to the campo, and we’re,
Gonna pick papas.”
(Papas = potatoes)
We were staying in a beautiful hotel in Arequipa, a city west of Cusco that was built at the base of three volcanoes, and, as the song would suggest, we were headed off to the capmo (=rural town) to complete our rural home stay portion of the trip. For most of us it would be our first experience with agricultural life and life outside the realm of instant communication to which we’d become accustomed. In short, we were headed for a place where, as my friend Marley put it, “if something on the scale of September 11th happened again, there is a good chance we wouldn’t know about it.”
But first we had a day in Arequipa. Many of the buildings there are made from bricks made from white volcanic ash, hence the city’s nickname: “the White City.” We didn’t get to see much of it, as we arrived on Monday night around 8:00 and left the next afternoon at 1:30, but from the little we explored, it is beautiful and almost feels colonial with its gothic buildings and big churches. There is a main plaza, called the Plaza de Armas like in Cusco, and, because much of Peru caters to tourists, lots of quaint streets with overpriced restaurants and shops selling baby alpaca scarves and sweaters. We ate dinner at a restaurant on the second floor of a patio overlooking the square, which lights up at night and looks more like a movie set than an ancient plaza. (Much like the Plaza de Armas in Cusco, the fact that it is so manicured as to appear fake doesn’t take away from its beauty.)
After a five hour bus ride on Tuesday afternoon, which was made longer by the fact that it is the rainy season and long stretches of road are made into Swiss cheese by the downpours, we arrived in Chivay, a small town which serves as a tourist hub for Colca Canyon. Colca is the second biggest canyon in the world, measuring 3400 meters in depth. The town itself is very nice and quaint—the center of town is probably about five or six square blocks—with restaurants, hotels and tourist shops offering bus tours of the canyon starting at $70 US. The fifteen of us, by now glad to be anywhere but on a bus, got off the bus and went into a restaurant where we were going to be greeted by our host families. We sat down for a lavish buffet meal, and our families walked in soon after. I suppose they wanted to impress us, but most of the women (probably 13 of 15) were wearing traditional outfits, which, as you can see from the picture below, are not the easiest things to get into. (That picture is of me and my friends Bridget and Mary, the two other girls that were staying in town with me.) As soon as the families walked in I began to get extremely nervous: yes, I was going to be living in the same town Mary and Bridget, but would I see them in the next six days? Was I going to taken to the field everyday, to harvest potatoes and plant quinoa? Where would I sleep? Probably on a hard dirt floor along with spiders and snakes and whatever else lived in the campo, was of course the answer I rushed to first. These ridiculous hypothetical situations only got worse as the eight of us (me, my two friends, and the five members of our respective host families that came to greet us) piled into the station wagon and began the 25-minute drive up the hill to the town of Corporaque, where we would be staying. They weren’t helped by the fact that, midway through the drive, the car died and the driver (who, it turned out, was Bridget’s host dad and an extremely nice and capable driver) had to jump out, put a bit more gas in the tank, and continue on the way. By the time I got out of the car and said goodbye to them I was convinced that the next five days would stretch into five years, and that I would come back to Cusco with malaria and yellow fever, having done enough back breaking labor to harvest all the potatoes in Peru. I met the rest of my family—along with my “mom” Muriel, and my eight year old “brother” Alex who had come to meet me in Chivay there were two other boys, Denilson (Chabu) and Christian, who were 11 and 13. My “father” Miguel was 39, and drove a combi in addition to working in the fields—and quickly went to bed. It turns out that, instead of sleeping on the floor with the “snakes” (of which there are none in Corporaque), I actually had my own room which was very big and nicely furnished with a bed, desk, dresser, bookcase and TV. It was also decorated with lots of scientific drawings because I took Christian’s room, and his favorite subjects are math and science.
Wednesday morning dawned bright with no clouds in the sky—a rare feat in Peru in the rainy season. I went into the kitchen to have breakfast, and was told that we would be going to the chakra (=fields) today, to harvest albergas (=peas). In the light of day everything looked nicer and more manageable. My house, which was actually more of a compound as it was built in a rectangle around a dirt courtyard, was very big, and my family extremely welcoming and kind. I was excited to go out to the fields and do some manual labor, adopting that Protestant attitude of hard work doing some good for the body and soul. (I’ve learned it well from you, Mom.) Six of us—Muriel and Miguel, Christian and Chabu, a “tio” (=uncle) and I—left the house at 8:00 in Miguel’s combi, and got to the chakra at 8:30. We immediately started picking peas, which is a pretty mindless task and not too hard on anything minus the back or the knees, as those only grew about two feet high. For the first few hours I was really enjoying myself: we had brought a radio, I was doing a bit of thinking about random things, and I was really enjoying the feeling of collecting beans and seeing my progress as I tossed them into the plastic bag. But then, around 11:00—at 2 ½ hours that was longer than I’ve ever spent continuously in a garden doing anything—I began to tire of the work. I asked Muriel how long we would be spending there, as I actually did have a meeting with the academic director of the program to discuss my independent study project at 2:00 in town. I thought she said that they usually only spend 3 hours at a time in the chakra, but when noon rolled around and she brought out a picnic lunch, I assumed that I’d misheard her. After lunch, when they all started back into the field to continue picking peas, I asked her when she thought we’d be done, as I didn’t want to miss my meeting and I wanted to get out of that godforsaken place.
“We’ll go when it starts raining,” she said. Well that’s great, I thought. It rains at least twice a day every day here! Well, wouldn’t you know it, Wednesday, March 4th, 2009, it didn’t rain. Around 2:30 I gave up on my meeting, just around the time I started talking to myself. (What am I doing here? I hate picking peas! Why am I even in Peru? Whose idea was this? This is ridiculous!) Hindsight being what it is, I can now say that it was not bad at all; in fact manual labor is good for the body and soul, and thinking about it now I am glad that I got to spend the whole day there, seeing what it is like to have to do that kind of work all day. It certainly gave me a renewed appreciation for people who do that all the time. In my journal that night I wrote:
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to learn from all this, but I can definitively say that there are two things I have learned:
1) I am SO glad that I go to Columbia and will never have to do this for my life, and will always have the choice of doing something else
2) I will probably never own or maintain my own farm.”
I probably should have written: 3) It turns out that I actually am a city girl after all.
The next four days flew by, and instead of going to the fields to pick peas I took a lot of walks in the canyon with Mary and Bridget, and spent a lot of time with the three brothers with whom I lived. We herded sheep (I am getting good at it, if I do say so myself), picked corn and apples, played soccer, and they so kindly showed me around the town and let me tag along with them with whatever they did. I got along best with Chabu, probably because I spent the most time with him. He likes to cook, and I taught him how to play slap jack and war with a deck of cards. His favorite subject is Communication Skills, but he wants to go to University to be an engineer and work in a mine. He is very good at soccer (he likes taking penalty kicks), and he climbs trees like a monkey. He has good aim with a slingshot, which came in helpful when we were herding the petulant sheep down to the pasture. He is also very funny, and tried really hard to teach me some phrases in Quechua because he knew that I was trying to learn it. (Llula = Liar. That was all I retained.) The other brothers, were also extremely nice and welcoming, and all of them asked lots of questions about life in the US, and especially about how much things cost there. I felt as welcome in their house as I think someone would feel in my own house, which is the absolute highest compliment I can give to the Torres-Bernal family.
The family owns a store, in addition to Miguel’s work as a taxi driver and to owning cultivated land and sheep, which allows them a relatively high level of prosperity compared to their neighbors. The store sells canned goods, meat, bread and basic household necessities, and on Sunday night I asked them what they thought I should buy from the store as a souvenir from their house. Instead of giving me a suggestion, Miguel went into his room and came back with a beer mug that he’d won in a salsa dancing competition. “Take this, and write ‘souvenir from the Torres-Bernal Family, Corporaque, Peru.’” Then he signed it, and I wrote the names of everyone else in the family. I was so touched by the gesture, and it was difficult to show him how much I appreciated it by the awkward hug that ensued. I am looking at the mug now, as I write this, thinking of what they are doing now (probably sleeping), and what they will be doing for the next week while I’m in Cusco, the next two months while I’m in Peru, and the next twenty years while I’m in the US. They will probably be doing the same thing they’ve been doing for their whole lives (maybe Chabu or Christian or Alex will go to University), and the same thing that their parents did. Leaving on Monday morning was sadder than I thought it would be; I really do miss them very much, but it’s hard to think about them in a real way, because their lives are so foreign to my own. It almost doesn’t feel real: did that week really happen? Well the answer for me is yes, and for them it is that it will probably happen exactly like that a thousand times over.
Now I am back in Cusco, living once again with instant communication, access to the US whenever I want, with all of the amenities that accompany living in a city. It certainly feels nice to be back but for now it feels a bit strange, I am sure because the experience is so fresh. The pressure of good fortune is weighing heavy on my shoulders and, even though it’s not guilt that I feel it is like something has shifted. I am guessing that the feeling will fade with time, but hoping and trying to make sure that it doesn’t. It’s a renewed appreciation for showers and bookstores, for rooms without the smell of animals and varied food choices. Mostly, though, it’s just a renewed appreciation for my place in the world, and for exactly what makes my life different from 90% of it: that I have the choice to live however I want, be it in a field in Peru or a house in Montclair. I will probably choose the latter, but it’s nice to know that I’ve got options.
And now, to bed.
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