We went to Machu-Picchu today! We ate breakfast and set off. We walked up a beautiful jungle path filled with creepy and eerie sensations but they decided to be silent when we were there. We peeked around an overgrown archway made of palm leaves and realized why we were here. There in front of us was the most mystical thing we had ever seen (well of course that was because the air was filled with mist.) I looked up to see towering walls of power with every stone placed in its one perfect position.

Our group walked for a while then came to what was my favorite place, I called it The Echoing Chamber. We all scrabbled in the small space and attentively listened as our guide starting talking, “this is a room for music, when the wind blows from the west the music will play by blowing through the rocks” and he showed us a demonstration. We walk out of “The Temple of the Wind” and everything happened so fast after that. All of a sudden our guide left and then we had lunch and before I knew it we were walking down from Machu Picchu as we finished our miraculous journey.


By Sinclaire


Layers of mountains beyond Machu Pichu

I can’t take my eyes off the women. They are so stunning in their wool skirts and their top hats that sit high up on their heads. I pretend to be active while I stare at them. One woman in particular is wearing a white top hat and the sun is coming through the window and shining only on her. Her white hat is glowing above her rich dark skin. She has no idea how beautiful I find her right now.

The women are gathered for Talleres which is a handi-craft collective. Peru’s Challenge organized the Talleres three years ago to give the women a means to earn money. They are given wool or material and they produce the crafts to sell. A portion of the money goes to the individual and a portion goes to the community.

The Talleres has not met for a few months following the school break and the women are like giddy girls. Understanding this, Iris (the famous social worker) has the women play a game before coming inside. We form two lines out on the grass and when she says “GO!” we hurriedly pass a ball of wool between our legs. The person in the back runs to the front and continues to pass the ball. Some women run, some walk, some stroll. We are squealing and falling, and mostly we are laughing. We are laughing so hard. It is so wonderful to laugh with the women who often appear so serious.

So proud of my girls- they are like little mountain goats bounding to the top of the passes first. I nearly didn’t’ do this trek because I thought they wouldn’t do very well with their questionable digestive health over the past month, and with a bunch of strapping 20 year olds in the group. I can’t imagine missing this. Aside from being with the kids at Puma Marca, this is the best experience of our trip. The beauty is beyond description because it is so different from anything I have seen. It reminds me of Alaska combined with what I imagine Scotland to look like, combined with someone’s superb imagination of the most beautiful place on earth. The girls and I are the first ones down this valley and we can’t help but run and leap in this verdant beauty. We are surrounded by high peaks, mist, pools of water, and a green, spongy, mat plant that completely covers the ground. We feel like we are the only people and it is the beginning of the world. It seems like a dinosaur could walk into the scene and we wouldn’t be surprised. We have trouble waiting for the rest of the group because we can’t stop walking and being filled by the raw beauty.

This is the land of the Incas. The land of the proud Quechua people, distinct from the Spanish. This landscape looks exactly as it did during the time of the Incas in the 1500’s, and then again exactly as it did with the first people. It is such a natural combination of people living with the environment. The llamas and alpacas are the same animals that have been here 6-7,000 years (domesticated from the vicunas and guanacos). The inconspicuous homes are made of the same rocks and Andes grass that is covering the hills. There are no roads here, only trails that lead up and over the high misty passes and down through the valleys. As we hike the trails we are suddenly joined by several young kids, or a mother and baby, or a lone man with a horse in tow. They are dressed in colorful hand-woven alpaca clothing that looks like their finest attire. Our guide explains that this is what they wear daily. It is like artwork and I devour its beauty as I pass in my drab head-to-toe REI hiking attire.

The people are curious, or passing by, or seeing what we might offer them. They are very humble, never imposing. On our second night after climbing our third and highest pass at over 15,000 feet, five women suddenly appear at our campsite and spread their beautiful hand-woven blankets near our tents. They display large bottles of Cusquena beer beside hand woven socks and alpaca hats. I really want a beer, but I hold off because I need to respect the altitude and instead buy a pair of socks. As dark approaches they pack up and head back to their homes that are hidden somewhere in the hills.

Sinclaire shows off her talents after being accepted to the the Peruvian Women's Pro Basketball Team.

All night bus ride

Returning to Cusco feels like coming home. We took an all night bus ride that started off fine- the seats tilted far back, the driver was reasonable, the kids fell asleep, and I had my cozy sleeping bag to snuggle. At 1:30 AM I was jostled awake and felt like we were hurling downhill. In the front of the bus there was an LCD screen and instead of broadcasting the time and temperature it was a blinking Kilometros Maximos, Kilometros Maximos! I was instantly wide awake and madly checked the seat belts of my kids. My broken seat belt which had previously seemed inconvenient, suddenly seemed like a death sentence. I pulled my seat belt out as far as it would go and tied it in a large knot around the arm rest. Damned if I was going to be thrown from a crashing bus, instead I would be the one they couldn’t extricate. I slept only fitfully the rest of the night and thought a lot about death (traveling has a way of doing that to you). When we got off the bus in Cusco I realized that we had a different driver (a young speed junky). As a mother this is the hardest part of traveling. My kids are so dependent on me and in turn sometimes I am dependent on careless people.




The Uros floating islands, Lake Titicaca

Lake Titicaca, Amantani Island

Coming here is like going back in time a hundred years. No streets, no cars, no big stores, no hotels, water at a trickle from the faucet if you are lucky, and electricity from a car battery.

We have been traveling by boat for 3 hours and are greeted at the dock by our home-stay family. They are dressed in their finest which for the women is red woolen skirts, white blouses and black embroidered shawls, and for the men, black pants and ponchos. As we walk up the narrow cobbled path to one of the top houses we realize this is the attire for all Amantanis, not just those greeting the handful of tourists.

The home is better than I had imagined. The bedrooms are on the second floor and are clean, colorful, and pretty. The house is built around a garden that has a profusion of 5 foot pink hollyhocks and the red stalks of quinoa growing side by side. There are several mud brick buildings that surround the garden. One of them is a cozy kitchen that has a large table with benches. At one end of the room is a rounded clay cook “stove” with a hole for a small fire beneath. The fire is kept burning with eucalyptus leaves and small twigs. We sat while our host mom (Teadora) and her teenage daughter prepared a lunch of sopa (soup), followed by fried cheese (that was squeaky against your teeth) and papas (potatoes). One of the papas was a small fingerling that was waxy, sweet and delicious.

After lunch Sinclaire and I were enjoying the tranquility and beauty when suddenly there was the strangest noise in the room. We heard it twice and couldn’t comprehend what it was. We looked at each other and then at Teadora who smiled and then reluctantly reached into her blouse and pulled out a cell phone. She looked at it and then handed it to her teenage daughter. She gave us a resigned look while her teenage daughter broadly smiled. Suddenly Amantani Island was part of the modern age.

Peru by day, Grass Valley Charter School by night. For the past four nights I have been dreaming about home and school. I am beginning to feel the first bit of homesickness dawning on me. I’ll imagine what time it is back in California, and what everyone is doing at the moment. Dad, golfing. Grandma, playing cello. Friends, school. Everything is so new here it is sometimes a bit overwhelming. Although we Scype my dad it almost makes me miss him more. The tug of seeing his face, but him not actually being here is a little bit crazy.

by Elena


Tug

Tug, tug, tug

My heart is being pulled
In different directions
Pulling, pushing
Moving, morphing
Hurting, healing
Connected by
So many
Delicate threads
Some of them
Are going to break
But others
Will only
Get stronger
Binding us
Gravitating together
When apart,

Tug, tug, tug.

House Visits
by Elena

I had my first house visit about a week after my family and I arrived in Peru. We had just been getting settled in with the Puma Marca school and the community, when our whiteboard schedule announced a house visit for the following Wednesday. We had been told that house visits were a way to become familiar with the community and families. Our van arrived at the school and we set out to find the family we would be visiting that afternoon, two grandparents whose lives had been changed by their kids. Their children were grown and were living in Cusco, but often came up to Puma Marca to take anything their parents had. They would take clothing, money, furniture, and even food. It’s hard to imagine they could take so forcefully from their own parents, not even caring that they were starving or dying, selfishly caring about only their own problems. The grandparents lives are so different from anything I have ever imagined that it is a little overwhelming. We brought the family some food and clothing and made sure there was someone who would cook for them. We walked up toward the streets, back to our clean house, back to a different place. We can go home and pretend we have never seen anything like this, or we can do our best to help these people. This is why we came here, even if we can only do something as small as giving them a bag full of food.



















Buying food for the home visit

Tears trickle as every kid comes and says goodbye and we will never see them again. I don’t understand, a month couldn’t have gone by. It’s impossible, I am already their family and they are mine. We will never separate, we will always be together, but I feel only half full. It is like I don’t have my sister with me. Or, my long lost brother is finally here with me, and then we break-up! I realize that the kids feel like us and they think why would we come help them? But my feeling is why wouldn’t we help them? They line up and start hugging us one by one, and tears trickle.
By Sinclaire

Normally, in California we applaud our soccer players as they go off the field. Here in Peru, it’s a little different. Last weekend my family and I went to a pro soccer game (at a cost of $2.20). When we arrived, we found seats and waited for the game to start. The stands filled quickly with die-hard fans. The game started... and if I had to describe it, these would be the four words: dramatic, aggressive, painful, and exciting. The fans get really into it. The halftime score was still 0 to 0 and everyone was just warming up. Cusco was in control of the ball most of the time, until the other team got so close to scoring a goal that a defender tried to kick the ball out and ended up scoring a goal on his own team. That got the crowd going. They screamed and booed at their own player. But, the game must go on, and so it did. Just when the crowd was giving up on Cusco, they scored a goal! We all jumped up and screamed, while some other fans shot off fireworks. The clock had moments to spare, when the game ends. Cusco gets ready to walk off , when the crowd starts throwing stuff at them. Water bottles, paper, trash, soda, hats, you name it. Apparently in Peru, f your team doesn’t win you are in danger of getting hit by flying trash.

by Elena

I remember the day Emily fell to the ground while playing tag in P.E. I didn’t know her yet, since we had just met the first grade class. She had slid while running and now had a long, bloody cut on her knee. She began crying, and before I knew it she was in my arms. I rocked her gently back and forth until we bandaged her knee, yet she still clung to me. The kids of Puma Marca aren’t used to being touched or hugged very much, so this was a new experience for both of us. I held this stranger close to me and waited until her sobs had subsided completely. She was still curled in my arms, so I took off my coat to keep her warm and started to sing every children’s lullaby I knew. After my third time of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" she had relaxed and curved her little body so that she was leaning into me, her tears were long gone. We stayed there for awhile, listening to rain fall. Everything in the kids daily lives they have to work for, nothing comes easy. Yet, if I can give her a moment of being a kid, I would hold her and sing until I lost my voice. Eventually, we both stirred and I helped her outside to finish her P.E. class. The day finished with my head still back at the school with Emily. We were halfway home when I realized I hadn’t learned her name yet.

by Elena

The fun part about today is cooking lessons, and after that Spanish, and after that Salsa lessons! Here I am writing and thinking about today with steam and yummy smells coming from the kitchen and our cooking teacher trying to understand what we are saying, and us trying to understand what she is saying. I cant wait to eat what she has made- it is DELICIOUS! Pip, Lauren, Nico and Memo are joining us and going to eat our yummy food. It sounds like we’re having steak and beans (frijoles) and some kind of soup and carrot cake for dessert, but I am not positive because I don’t speak Spanish very well. Later we are going to do Spanish for 2 hours (surprisingly it is quite fun), and then Salsa lessons. This is the first time doing Salsa lessons so I don’t know quite what it is going to be like. It’s at a club so we will get dressed up, but not too much so we can dance!

by Sinclaire

(this is our sauve dance teacher...)

This weekend has been awesome with nothing to do except explore and shop. On Saturday we decided we should go to the Plaza and shop so we took the bus and it was horrible! There is only two real seats lined up so my mom and Elena got to sit beside each other. I sat on the bench and sooner or later the bus got full and when I say full, I mean full! I was squished between two teenagers (at least they were girls!), but one of them had a fluffy hood so I had to keep spitting out fluff. The other looked like she wasn’t very happy so it was not a very happy ride. But finally we got there and I bought some fun souvenirs.

By Sinclaire

After working at the school on painting the new cucina we walked to a neighboring village called Quiahuata. It was the first time we had been to this village, but we knew many kids as they walk to Puma Marca for school. Quiahuata has only 400 residents but they have a new beautiful community center that they just finished building (it looks rather out of place in such a poor community). We were invited to the village to join in an Easter celebration (which meant no one knew what would happen).


Iris (pronounced Eris) is a social worker for Peru’s Challenge and she was there. She is not one to be messed with (she reminds me of Simon Says, only substitute Iris for Simon). One of the first stories we were told after arriving in Cusco was of a landside that blocked her cambi (small bus) while traveling on the road leading to Quihuata. Iris jumped out of the cambi and yelled
S. O. S. at the top of her lungs (which is extremely loud) and several kids immediately came running with shovels to aid her. She is a force in the community.



The women began arriving at the community center, each with a bag of vegetables wrapped in blankets that they carry on their backs. They sat in groups and chatted, and peeled their papas (potatoes), and chatted, and peeled their abas (beans), and chatted, and diced. The children were too idle so Iris sent them to gather eucalyptus leaves for the fire that would heat the enormous caldrons for soup.




The volunteers (consisting of me, the kids and Genny from Canada) were sent inside to eat some choclo (enormous kernels of corn on the cob). It was very satisfying because it was so cold outside and the choclo was fresh and warm. After eating, we were told (by Iris) that we were going to help wash the 12 children that Iris had chosen to play Jesus's disciples. We figured it would be the usual procedure- give the children a little squirt of soap in their palms, hold the towel for them to dry, give them some cream for chapped faces, and voila!, clean, happy children.

As we approached the little seated line-up of children with our wash basin it became clear this was something different. The first kid who was just a little boy of maybe 4 let his rainboots drop to the ground. It was going to be feet. He hid his head in the towel that was draped over his head (disciple style). Sinclaire and I who were the soap dispensers tried to encourage him to hold out his palm an get some soap to wash his feet. He sat there completely paralyzed as his feet barely touched the water. Sinclaire was so brave when she realized that it was up to her or nothing would happen. I elevated the bucket under his tiny, filthy feet and Sinclaire washed them.


I have never washed anyone’s feet before. Today I washed about 28 of the dirtiest feet I have ever seen in my life. Feet covered in ground-in dirt, callouses, warts and cracked skin.


The amazing thing that happened for me was seeing the fear and intimidation on the kids faces turn to pleasure and laughter as their feet were being touched, cleaned, massaged and even tickled. It was such a remarkable connection- I realized these kids have never been touched this way before and I got past my fear. I was really touching these kids, and I felt very humble before them. They have so little and today we gave them a little bit of dignity and pleasure. I looked in their eyes as I touched their feet and they looked back at me and smiled.

Restless Nights

The nights here are anything but quiet. It’s the dogs mostly, but also the car horns that are used to warn or cajole. They usually taper off at about midnight. The dogs however, are vocal all night. For the most part there is noisy harmony, but occasionally it is raucous chaos that shoots adrenaline through my body as I listen for the inevitable high pitched whimper as one or more dogs gets attacked.

The dogs are in fairly good shape as dogs go in developing countries. Most of them have collars which means they are owned, but not fed. There seems to be a genuine love for the dogs, but the love stops at a collar and a place to come home to. They are like wild street kids running in odd packs. Down the street there is a group of little fuzzy dogs that hang with an enormous scruffy dog. Size and type don’t seem to dictate the gangs- it must be smell.

The main street that leads all the way to Cusco is two blocks below us. It is a busy 4-lane road (which translates to an amorphic 6 to 8 land road). There are occasional intersections with red lights to allow cross traffic to enter the busy road. These red lights also mean Go-Dog-Go. And they do. Either the dogs in Peru are born smart or the dumb ones don’t last long. I am constantly cringing as we drive all too rapidly down narrow streets with dogs every 30 or 40 feet. But they seem to dodge our every attempt to eliminate them. I don’t believe the drivers really want to hit the dogs but they certainly can’t be bothered with trying to avoid them.

Amiga, they call out and I remember seeing how they live and I’m heartbroken. They walk to school away from their houses made out of dirt, their days filled with work in the fields. They leave their hard lives and walk to school with their heads up ready to start a new life. They call with all their hearts asking for help. They call to come play, but most of all for friendship. They don’t care if you’re dirty, they don’t care if you’re beautiful, they look straight into your heart and accept you for who you are.

They walk home to maybe their alcoholic mother and sick farther, but still their heads are high. I realize this is a helping hand for them not so much an opportunity for us, and I turn around and run in their direction.

By Sinclaire

Gole! They scream and it starts all over again. Run, trip, goal, win, and lose. I walk to the field and they shout, "Sincliare, come play soccer!" (but in Spanish of course). So I run into the pattern of goals and tripping and cheating.

We really are in Peru! We survived our first two weeks with a few cases of giardia and salmonella but we seem to be on the mend.

The boring background...

We live in a volunteer house in the neighborhood of Larapa which is about 15 minutes by taxi from Cusco. We live with one other volunteer who is a lovely woman from Canada.




We have been extremely busy with our volunteer work with Peru's Challenge and it has been amazing. Peru's Challenge is a non-profit organization that works with local communities on education and improvements. They have been working in the poor, agricultural community of Puma Marca for 5 years and have had a remarkable impact. When they started working with the community, there were only a handful of students attending a very small school. Now there are over 100 lively kids that attend a beautiful community built school. They also started a successful women's handy-craft collective and helped sponsor many children to attend high school in Cusco.

















Five days a week we take a small van up to the school which is about 20 minutes from our house. There are about 100 of the cutest kids you have ever seen that attend the school. Two days a week we go to the school to work in the garden or do construction work- we are building a new room for the school kitchen and a new classroom. The kids get a snack and a hot meal at school, which for some, is all the food they get in the day.
























Three days a week we go to the school to teach art, computers, English, hygiene, and physical education (all in Spanish- which is quite challenging since none of us speak the language!). We are taking Spanish lessons and are learning at a rapid pace, but being proficient at ordering lunch and teaching a class are very different things. We spend a lot of time preparing for these lessons, but no amount of preparation can control what happens when 33 Spanish speaking kids realize that your Spanish is limited to a few sentences written down from spanishdict.com. In a word, chaos. But fun chaos.





Sinclaire and Elena are in charge of hygiene which involves encouraging the kids to wash their hands and face with soap, dry with the towel, put on face cream and get a snack.