Sunday, October 9, 1988
Big Doings at Poetry Fest, National Poetry Week Festival, CPITS, SF chronicle
WOMEN'S POETRY: Curator Joyce Jenkins of Poetry Flash, San Franciso poet Edith Jenkins and other women poets discuss the theme, "Stealing the Language."
NATIVE AMERICAN POETRY: Mary TallMountain, Dennis Jennings, Lorenzo Baga, Janice Gould and Ramone Wilson offer poetry from early American history to "the present cacophonic and multitudinous society."
ASIAN AMERICAN POETRY: Marilyn Chin hosts a program with poets Genny Lim, Richard Oyama, Jeff Tagami and Nellie Wong.
CELEBRATION OF THE WORD: Maya Angelou and Janice Mirikitani - two of the most rousing and moving poets - will be joined by Guy Johnson in an evening of poetry readings.
LITERARY SAN FRANCISCO: A review of San Francisco's literary history will be launched by Jack Mueller and Kevin Starr.
BLACK AMERICAN POETRY: A great afternoon of readings hosted by Guy Johnson, featuring Opal Palmer Adisa, Lucille Clifton, Yusef Komunyakaa and Reginald Lockett.
HISPANIC POETRY: Latino, Chicano and Central and South American poets will appear under the direction of Martivon Galindo in a program including the work of Francisco X. Alarcon, Carlotta Caulfield, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Victoria Mirinda and Piri Thomas.
POETRY OF THE SACRED: A program ranging from ancient Indian perceptions to modern celebrations of the holy will include Hindu temple dances by Uday Shankar Sengupta and readings by James Broughton, Andrei Codrescu, Mary TallMountain, Jerome Rothenberg and William Ruddy.
POETRY IN FILM: National Poetry Association chairman Herman Berlandt will lecture on synergistic art with illustrations from 12 poetry film festivals.
POETRY IN DRAMA: Patrick Finley, Kush, the Noh Oratorio Society, Titch Jones, Verona Seiter, Paul Finocchiaro and Larry Maraviglia will perform poetry from dramatic works.
LANGUAGE WRITING: New trends in poetry will be explored by language writers Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Michael Amnasan and others.
POETRY AND HEALING: Santa Clara State Hospital Poetry Therapy director Joy Shieman will host a seminar with Dr. Jack Leedy and psychotherapist Sylvia Lange.
PRISON POETRY : San Quentin Poetry Workshop director Floyd Salas introduces works by inmates, guards and outsiders from many poets including Judith Tannenbaum, Shawn Murphy and Raymond Thompson.
POETRY FOR PLANETARY SURVIVAL: Mary Rudge features Miriam Patchen, music by Will Sand Young and Jesse Beagle, Haiku poets of Northern California, Julia Vinograd, Jack Hirschman, Native American drumming and poetry - all in celebration of the environment.
CALIFORNIA POETS IN THE SCHOOLS: John Oliver Simon and Tobey Kaplan present poetry written by students and teachers.
APPRECIATION OF THE TRANSLATOR: An afternoon of understanding how translation shapes poetry, with Etel Adnan, Geoffrey Cook, Michael Davidson, Barbara Paschke and Paul Vangelisti.
EROTIC POETRY: Mary Mackey hosts readings by Alta, Ivan Arguelles, Jane Hirschfield, Lynn Lonadier, Viola Weinberg and Jeremy Larner.
THE LIBERATED MUSE: Gay and lesbian liberation is the focus in this program of poetry, with readings by Neeli Cherkovski, Judy Grahn, Susan Griffin and Harold Norse.
THE BUSINESS OF POETRY: Jan Butterfield of Lapis Press and Joyce Jenkins of Poetry Flash present ways to expand the poetry audience and break into the media.
POETRY IN WORK AND PLAY: Longshore poetry, trucker ballads, sea chanteys, union songs and cowboy poetry will be read by poets Bobby Erikson, John Devore, Billy Fouts, Gino Sky, Jesse Smith and Piano Jack under the direction of Buzzy Vick.
POETRY IN POP MUSIC: Jesse Beagle, David Brian, Mathew Robertson, Chuck Brodsky and Beth Margolin appear with Ted Czuk to explore the historical development of poetry in music from troubadours of the Middle Ages to to contemporary songwriters.and many more.
All this plus creative writing workshops, round-robin readings, open readings, marathon readings, poetic dance performances, book tables, poetry video theater and visual poetry exhibits. Tickets for any part or whole are cheap (call 762-BASS), thanks to grants from the California Arts Council and the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund.
Friday, October 7, 1988
PHOTO ALBUM
PHOTO ALBUM
1. By the same white car
where my grandparents stood
sternly facing the camera,
was that me in my mother's arms
or someone else, milk eyes squinting
as she drools, her fat starfish hands
clutching a red and green tropical sea.
My mother's skirt, an island in paradise
and later, the jungle print will become
a pillow for my grandmother's couch
where I will wait years for my mother
to reclaim that skirt, and me.
All this fuss for a photograph.
who'd have thought those faded photos
marked the end of an era?
At the age of two,
that isn't me looking in.
I'm looking out of the photo
at a woman, older than my mother
who is still holding me in the picture.
She says she knows me but I know better.
I am cross without my nap
so I squint and sing and coo
to the sun in a blue sky.
Now she makes some other writing marks
but I swing my arm across the paper
and the table and the wall
filling the world with rainbow color
putting an end to all this writing.
2. That can't be me at 13
about to start high school.
That's someone else who looks like me,
who feels very grown up and eager to begin.
I'm looking out at myself, looking in.
She looks different, she isn't smiling, like me.
Are we related?
Her eyes glow red from the flash of the camera
making her look like an albino rabbit
while my eyes are brown.
My mother's skirt, a pillow on the couch
is now threadbare.
My red dress is embroidered with small mirrors
reflects a cloudy sky, like a pond,
a mirror full of algae.
I awake at night full of fear
I can't hear what she's saying.
a namelessness in the dark, like a sudden flash
that bleached the color form her hair, from her eyes
turning them from brown to red
like the rabbit who said yes.
All the times she turned them down,
every single one of my children.
10/7/1988 rev.4
1. By the same white car
where my grandparents stood
sternly facing the camera,
was that me in my mother's arms
or someone else, milk eyes squinting
as she drools, her fat starfish hands
clutching a red and green tropical sea.
My mother's skirt, an island in paradise
and later, the jungle print will become
a pillow for my grandmother's couch
where I will wait years for my mother
to reclaim that skirt, and me.
All this fuss for a photograph.
who'd have thought those faded photos
marked the end of an era?
At the age of two,
that isn't me looking in.
I'm looking out of the photo
at a woman, older than my mother
who is still holding me in the picture.
She says she knows me but I know better.
I am cross without my nap
so I squint and sing and coo
to the sun in a blue sky.
Now she makes some other writing marks
but I swing my arm across the paper
and the table and the wall
filling the world with rainbow color
putting an end to all this writing.
2. That can't be me at 13
about to start high school.
That's someone else who looks like me,
who feels very grown up and eager to begin.
I'm looking out at myself, looking in.
She looks different, she isn't smiling, like me.
Are we related?
Her eyes glow red from the flash of the camera
making her look like an albino rabbit
while my eyes are brown.
My mother's skirt, a pillow on the couch
is now threadbare.
My red dress is embroidered with small mirrors
reflects a cloudy sky, like a pond,
a mirror full of algae.
I awake at night full of fear
I can't hear what she's saying.
a namelessness in the dark, like a sudden flash
that bleached the color form her hair, from her eyes
turning them from brown to red
like the rabbit who said yes.
All the times she turned them down,
every single one of my children.
10/7/1988 rev.4
Thursday, October 6, 1988
10 6/88 journal
This morning the phone wakes me, Fotomat saying the small albums I had ordered are in. Then she calls me back, says it's the wrong size. I didn't order either size album and I don't like 7 AM phone calls telling me to buy something. If anyone calls me at 7 AM it'd better be for a good reason.
I can barely remember my dreams except that John looked a little like Bob as if bits and pieces of Bob had rubbed off and attached themselves to John's face. Most notable was the patches of beard and hair – as if John were a prisoner behind the mask of Bob's face—someone whom I haven't seen in over 10 years. Perhaps all that talk about abortion brought Bob back into the picture.
Not so much the first one, God. But I remember the day it happened so well. I just come off the pill, tired of being continually nauseous. One afternoon, we weren't careful. I knew then it was too late, the moment frozen in my mind.
It reminds me of the story of the fifth-grader, when asked when he was born, he said, My mom and dad went on a picnic, and she got pregnant. It was in Germany. The teacher and I manage to keep a straight face but, as she said, the times they are changing. Quoting Dylan and our own lost youth.
10 6/88
Wednesday, October 5, 1988
Phone calls to the dead
Today I was asked by the San Francisco Bay Guardian to be a screener, a first reader for the Northern California poetry contest. My penance for having won it in the past. The woman who called, Jane Sullivan, was not related to the Jane Sullivans in my family. She said I've never received any calls from another Jane Sullivan. I said our Jane was long dead, so it would be hard for you to receive her calls. I always thought it would be an ingenious invention if someone would developed a telephone to call the dead. AT&T would make a killing. Only one dollar a minute, evenings and weekends free. Call home.
Saturday, October 1, 1988
I Won $50 for Horseflesh at National Poetry Week
I won $50, second place for my poem, Horseflesh, poems on everyday experience.
Horseflesh was a dream fragment. John and I were in Mulegé, Baja. I was going out to the bathroom and I
met someone outside in the moonlight. It was unnerving. Another
guest at Nachito's.
I'm not sure if I was awake or asleep when the Horseflesh poem came to me. Whether it was dreamed before I woke up to go to the bathroom, and I added this skull image, or whether I was still in the dream state, as I stumbled off to the bathroom.
And I don't remember if it was happening and I wrote it down when I returned, or if I wrote it afterwards. What I do remember was the brilliant stars above. The broken bed, the sandy sheets, the abject poverty, all contributed to the imagery. And there were many more fragments which I wasn't able to retrieve.
10/1988
DATE?
HORSEFLESH
I'm not sure if I was awake or asleep when the Horseflesh poem came to me. Whether it was dreamed before I woke up to go to the bathroom, and I added this skull image, or whether I was still in the dream state, as I stumbled off to the bathroom.
And I don't remember if it was happening and I wrote it down when I returned, or if I wrote it afterwards. What I do remember was the brilliant stars above. The broken bed, the sandy sheets, the abject poverty, all contributed to the imagery. And there were many more fragments which I wasn't able to retrieve.
10/1988
DATE?
HORSEFLESH
Friday, September 30, 1988
Chicuchas Wasi, the Children's Home of Cusco (notes for an article)
FIRST DRAFT NOTES Most of my Chicuchas Wasi files won't even open, and the ones that do open are in far worse shape than this one. And this one's in bad shape. Will I ever be able to resurrect this? Alas, the dot matrix hard copy version I finally found is basically what you see here, not a finished article.
Peru’s capital city, Lima, founded in 1537, was once
considered the Paris of the New World. But even the new Paris foundered quickly.
Patron of Peru, born in 586AD, Santa Rosa de Lima, the new world’s first and
only saint, housed, fed and nursed the poor, teaching them to read and write.
By 1823, when the Gran Liberator Simón Bolívar arrived, he was appalled by the
filth and poverty. Cuzco has always been the naval of the world, the capital
of the Inca empire.
In the center of the world, carrying on the tradition of
Santa Rosa de Lima, is a modern 20th century healer, nurse Rae Pieraccini. When Pieraccini, a Sonoma County resident and Kaiser nurse at Santa Rosa (named after Rosa de Lima, incidentally), went to Peru with a Sierra Club expedition in 1985, little did she know she’d move to Cuzco and found a home for poverty-stricken children of the street, Chicuchas Wasi, which in Quechua,
the Inca language, means Children’s Home.
NOTES Pieraccini said when she arrived in Cuzco, she had a sensation of
being here before and vowed to come back to live. Se didn’t even know Spanish.
She was put to work as a nurse soon after when the tourist train to Machu
Picchu was bombed in 1986. After the bombing, tourism dropped off because of
war and terrorism but the children are insistent. Pieraccini came to Cuzco with a nurse
friend whose brother was an archaeologist at Stanford. Pieraccini had the feeling of
deja vu, of having been here before.
Rae Pieraccini has 3 grown sons in Santa Rosa, 21,
23, 26. In 86 it was rough. Her youngest son was in Cusco when the train was
bombed. She was the only bilingual nurse. She said that she tried not to work in medicine…but Rae at Kaiser was into alternative healing practice. Psychic healing, stress
reduction (Kaiser administrator Michael Peterson was supportive of her efforts.)
Rae: I don’t know anything about US policies. This is
a project of the heart..so we can get to know eachother as people. When you
finally have all the things you need, then what? You come here where they have
nothing. The only luxury we have is a black and white TV. I have a VCR wish out. I’m writing a lot, mostly out of need. Perhaps for a nursing journal.
Rae works in the countryside with a Peruvian
nurse, Enriquetta, and house manager, Phil Voysey, an Aussie.. Phil & I are on max burn-out level
24, hours a day. (
see PD article july 19, and TV interview on Chamnnel 6?
Rae returns home to Sonoma County every 6 months to keep the flow (cash) going)
How people can help. Send money, says Rae. Chicuchas Wasi needs to become self-sufficient. to buy land in the country and to raise vegetables, there's always a shortage of greens in the Andes. She wants to take the kids back to the country. But there's no electricity, she talks about the dangers of using a kerosine stove. No hot water, etc.
This is an outreach perogram, She has to contend with officials. credibility Ifactor.. story of sold kids... She has the way paved with the ministry of Health. She has an administarative role, something she doesn’t like to do…but it needs to be done. Chicuchas Wasi is in her name. She married a Peruvian.. Americans can’t own land (doesn’t want this mentioned… )
Chicuchas Wasi's legal foundation is in Santa Rosa, because the money is in California. She says Chicuchas Wasi isn’t my house. it’s the kid’s house. She sees herself in the role of country nurse who's duties include birth to autopsy to dentistry (not in that order). She’s tryiing to incorporate both local healing, herbal and modern medicine practices.
We hiked three hours and 1,0000 meters up to vaccine kids and teach birth control. Cuzco at 11,100 ft. is base camp.
KINTERPLAST—group of surgeons plastic, at Stanford. She’s liasion. She says there are lots of burns, cleft palates, and told a story about a baby in the campo with a cleft palate. The parents wanted to leave it out, exposed to the elements, to die. Many superstitions.
But things are improving, there are several groups working together to serve the community better.
Sociology syndrome. There are kids living in the street everywhere. The poverty is appaling. It’s time to take another look at how the children of the world are suffering. We’re chasing the wrong rainbow.. The time is now.
CHILDHOPE in Guatemala City gave Rae a foundation grant.
She tells a story about one of her first charges, Ronald, now 15, twho ook everything we had. He’s now on his own working in a bakery painting faces on tarts. He earns 1,500 intis a month ($7.50 us) 500 intis go for a room. ($7 buys a good meal for 2 in Cuzco—barely). He lives on this a whole month?
He was their first street kid. She said, old habits die hard. Stealing and lying are a big problem. He still lives on the outside. His brother Lucho, we’re having better luck with him.
We’re trying to get little girls off the streets and into the home. The problem is 99% have parents so we legally can’t do much for them. For the first few months I was out there every night pounding the pavement. They won’t talk to Phil bevcause he’s a man. There’s a lot of abuse…mothers won’t let them come here because they won’t be earning money.
Foreigners have come here in the past to “adopt” kids and have turned around and sold them.
The story of Eva, the 8 year old selling her body to tourists on the streets of Cuzco. pix
People here are blind. It takes a foreigner here to see what the needs are, and what can be done for these kids. The question is, there’s so much to do, where do you start?
Her mail’s being lifted? She said that she can’t trust officials. >she describes herself as a woman in transition. Trial by fire.
See article in the Christian Science Moniter on street kids. june 30, 87.
Phil Voysey’s been in Peru since January. He received a phone call at 4 am from Rae asking for help. Phil worked in Zimbabwe for two years teaching English & African history. He's had a lot of experience with the 3rd world. He first came to Peru in 1985. He said that he wanted to work in Latin America. And he intended to go to Chile, but never mde it.
Though Rae doesn’t want to talk about the political structure, she said that Peru is one hell of a political hot spot for a middle class single gringa with 3 kids.
She takes a more holistic approach—medicine. quote on wall— in spanish— your children are not your children. They are *sons and daughters of life—-Kalil Gibran
Her own children having fled the nest, she’s now raising Quechua chiildren.
I can’t figure out the politics. Like Pol Potismos, Viet Kong terrorists—nobody seems to be for the Sendero Luminoso. Carlos, our Limeño friend, a member of the miiddle class, feels a Sendero takeover is inevitible. He hopes they’ll have learned something and mellowed in the process.
Chichua means pregnant. Chicuchas means children. Wasi means house.
Ronald who’s 15 looks about 10, from malnutrition, she said that he grew 4” in 4 months after she took him in.. .
Rae now has his brother Luis who came to Chicuchas Wasi —because I was walking the street looking for Ronald & they told me he was living with a gringa. Need translation of story...
Gillermo’s story, In the hospital, my mother died, my papa died .
Santusa’s story. She says they suffered a lot in the country taking care of the sheep in the rain? and she likes it better in the city. She likes it in Chicuchas Wasi because she wouldn’t have anywhere else to go if she left. She’d like to be an empleada (a domestic) when she grows up and work in somebody’s house. She’d like to work & put Rosita her little sister through high school.
John, who was translating their stories said, One thing that strikes me is that these kids have limited aspirations. Carpenter, maid. All my chicano kids in Oakland want to be doctors, lawyers, models. Or is it that a carpenter or maid is as high or unreachable or semi-realistic a goal as these :professional glamor positions are for most of my students?
Chicuchas Wasi was founded for puroses offering practical assistance, a future with hope to the abandoned street children of Cuzco. We were striving to create a home environment, where together we can become strong in body, mind, and spirit. Daily existence here is a struggle—even for the educated.
An economic crisis exists in Peru—so the children are forgotten. The government has no financial ability to help them. They simply exist by whatever means they can find, they are alone, afraid, hungry, sick, and without hope for more; or they die.
We are trying through love, affection, imnproved diet, health and education *to give them hope and a productive future.
Goals: to establish several permanent homes.
Self care education. Kids in local schools, apprenticeship with artisans. I’m looking for a mechanic apprentice to work 1 to 1 with the kids. We need community volunteers as well as US health care providers.
I’m here alone with the kids for days at a time. Kids have humble goals, but not too humble. A carpenter, a maid, I teach them basic living skills, washing and cooking. It’s a lonely profession. You have no one to share the hard times with—especially street kids—Ronald, I had to send him back to the streets because he exausted me.
Rae would like to see the home staffed with members from the local community. Creating a sense of extended family where children can reestablish their capacity to trust, and reenter their culture with a future that will include a job, self-respect and dignity.
Rae lives in a modest 3 storey complex of adobe with a tiny courtyard the size of a hallway where the laundry chores are shared by all the children. The bright red plastic tubs are nearly as big as the kids. The kerosine stove is also outside.
Kerosine stoves account for nearly all the burns that Interplast tries reconstructive surgery on. Rae says we theoretically could expand Chicuchas Wasi.
Chicuchas Wasi currently has 6 kids; 4 brothers & sisters). We can put 4 more boys (8 total) at 2 to a bed, and 4 more girls. We have the space but not the resources. This includes care providers and money.
There’s also the problem of neighbors complaining about the noise the kids make while playing.
What Rae really wants to do is to relocate in the country and build a large hacienda where kids can raise their own vegetables to sell.—to become self supporting. She needs large cash outlay of several thousand dollars. $12,000 to buy a truck, $7,000 for land and another $3,000 for building supplies for starters.
We're outgrowing our house. Rae would like to see graduates from the home return to participate in its continued existance. As a registered nurse, and help in the community…. outreach
The kids always say, “are you going to hit me? There’s so much alcoholism here. They are always speaking Quechua when they don’t want me to understand. They tell us, you and Phil speak English when you don’t want us to understand. I need to learn Quechua. No one speaks Spanish in the campo.
I was in the park, when I first arrived here—- I lifted my hand from my backpack for a moment and it was stolen right out from under my hand. I didn’t have a place to live, I didn’t have a job and everything I owned was stolen. I had enough change to get a cup of coffee and a friend saved me. He took me up to th English Language school and got me a job.
Rae is care provider for six kids; 4 boys and 2 girls. All are without family. One child has Spina Biida or Spinal TB, they’ve had parasites, worms, typhoid—many street kids come to lunch to eat their main midday meal—usually their only meal.
Rae needs more space & help. She says we have a policy not to take in kids on a permanent basis under the age of five years. The economy here is crazy. The price of food has more than doubled in six weeks. The majority of the street kids are boys.
All I want to do right now is administartive stuff— I’d like to start a cottage industry. Make cookies to sell to the gringos. All the kids are way behind ifor their age— physically, emotionally & educationally. I must be crazy to do this (to raise kids) for a second time. I look at all those kids soaking it up In Cuzco, there are similar projects.
The orphanage run by nuns and Jhurch-related orphanages tend to take in babies but they don’t deal with Iindependent street kids. There’s a woman from France who also takes in street kids but she doesn’t offer them the kind of support Rae offers her charglings. Giving them a place to sleep and food isn’t enough—like Oliver Twist in the poorhouse in England—-
Rae said, I went home to get rested and I worked like hell to raise money. We had two interviews. The crowd she wants to reach are the west county folks. She says the 8 to 5’ers don’t respond. It’s the alternative lifestyle people who will help this project. Who knows what’s going to happen here politically? The Peruvians don’t understand our motives. Gringos robbed them of their children years ago and sold them into slavery and prostitution.
Her nurse companion Enriquetta Ccapatinta has been instrumental in helping Rae get through the legal work. ON her bookshelf, City of Joy, 501 Spanish verbs. Pediatrics, Carlos Casteneda, candles, crystals, shells and herbs. A poster on the wall. Love is the power that heals. A calendar of street people of the world. Stuffed bears and rabbits. Large butcherpaper notes of Quechua suffixes and tenses plaster the walls. Mi casa wasi y, tu casa wasiki, casa wasi.
There are no stipends she can offer house manager Phil Voysey. Phil’s had to pay for everything out of his own pocket. When Rae came to CA to raise money, someone donated $100 so he could take a vacation. When we get the oven working, we’ll sell cookies and wear our twe shirts that say Chicuchas Wasi and sell them to the gringos on the plaza.
Her dream is to open a *tienda, a store and export Peruvian goods. Rae was raised in Sausalito, the daughter of a fisherman, I was his crew & deck hand. We were berthed down where Spinnaker's is now. Her father went into boat tours and they moved the business over to SF’s Pier 43.
I was the oldest of two daughters. I did all the PR and contacted the hotels. For ten years. II passed out literature, sold tickets, etc… this survival skill was to later help her with Chicuchas Wasi.
She was married at 18 to someone who lived around the corner, had three sons by the time she was 24. She moved to Hawaii, sold real estate in Oahu and Kauaii.
She returned to San Rafael, had the ticky tacky house, station wagon and dog—the whole middle class scene. And I woke up one day when I caught my children out in the back yard taking the temperature of the pool with a thermometer to see who had the warmest pool in the neighborhood. I said, something’s wrong here.
We took a ride up to Sonoma (74) and bought six acres south of the town on Watmaugh And built a home for ourselves. We went back to the land. We were very domestic. We had a farm, joined 4H, raised pigs. I had a truck, with pigs in back, kids in front—pigs have a tendency to escape. I wound up chasing pigs with a tennis racquet.
We had goats, made cheese, home canned, etc. The kids were involved. Like with coming here, I lived by that inner force that's always led me. IMy dream as a kid was to be a nun and to work on the hospital ship, Hope.
Rae did become a nurse. Took courses at Napa Community college for 5 years.. She worked at Queen of the Valley hospital, Yontville Veteran’s Home, Sonoma Valley Hospital, before coming to Kaiser Permanente for six years.
She officially quit last year. She did ICU intensive care nursing at San Rafael for two years—before she burned out. Working at Santa Rosa Kaiser, in general medicine, five days a week from 8 to 5, was great. She taught stress reduction classes, and worked in OB/GYN.
She said, I wish I had more pediatrics training. What I like most is country nursing. I was involved in psychic healing long before I became a nurse. When I worked as a student nurse, I’d use psychbic healing and the moniters would go down. ‘I use touch, channeling energy fields.
See PD ARTICLE Fall 85 Rae visited Cuzco, the magnetic center of the earth. where she found the place & its indigenous Quechua people so compelliing that she knew :she had to go back whether or not she could make a living.
10 year resident of Sonoma co. critical care nurse at Kaiser Pernanente. her 3 sons live in sonoma, their father is in Stockton. (Sausalito story…3 mos. later, she took leave of absence from her job to spend a year in Cuzco and be a volunteer nurse, to learn Spanish, to make connections with the Quechua culture.
During her year in Cuzco she became acquainted with the street kids. seven year olds with families so impoverished, they live solely on potatoes. She blames the problem on declining economy and high birth rate. This forces the kids on the street to work, beg, steal at an early age. Soon, they’ve moved onto the streets.
After months of fundraising, Rae bought the apt 3 blocks from the town’s main plaza and invited the street children in. Her project has attracted the attention of foreign Peruvians in Cuzco.
Contingents of interested Sonoma County people are fundraising on the home front. Rae says Peruvian participation is crucial if this projets is going to survive. Rae wants project to be acceptable to the Quechuas and then she’ll turn it over to them when it’s established.
In June, Rae drummed up donations of time, clothing, and medical supplies. Cuzco is an Inca museum filled with peasants. Those coming from primitive mountain villages find the adobe houses, electricity, and cobbled streets, very urban. Lack of high rises, poorly equipped hospitals and a severe absence of services for the poor…
get back to PD article
see PD article july 19, and TV interview on Chamnnel 6?
Rae returns home to Sonoma County every 6 months to keep the flow (cash) going)
How people can help. Send money, says Rae. Chicuchas Wasi needs to become self-sufficient. to buy land in the country and to raise vegetables, there's always a shortage of greens in the Andes. She wants to take the kids back to the country. But there's no electricity, she talks about the dangers of using a kerosine stove. No hot water, etc.
This is an outreach perogram, She has to contend with officials. credibility Ifactor.. story of sold kids... She has the way paved with the ministry of Health. She has an administarative role, something she doesn’t like to do…but it needs to be done. Chicuchas Wasi is in her name. She married a Peruvian.. Americans can’t own land (doesn’t want this mentioned… )
Chicuchas Wasi's legal foundation is in Santa Rosa, because the money is in California. She says Chicuchas Wasi isn’t my house. it’s the kid’s house. She sees herself in the role of country nurse who's duties include birth to autopsy to dentistry (not in that order). She’s tryiing to incorporate both local healing, herbal and modern medicine practices.
We hiked three hours and 1,0000 meters up to vaccine kids and teach birth control. Cuzco at 11,100 ft. is base camp.
KINTERPLAST—group of surgeons plastic, at Stanford. She’s liasion. She says there are lots of burns, cleft palates, and told a story about a baby in the campo with a cleft palate. The parents wanted to leave it out, exposed to the elements, to die. Many superstitions.
But things are improving, there are several groups working together to serve the community better.
Sociology syndrome. There are kids living in the street everywhere. The poverty is appaling. It’s time to take another look at how the children of the world are suffering. We’re chasing the wrong rainbow.. The time is now.
CHILDHOPE in Guatemala City gave Rae a foundation grant.
She tells a story about one of her first charges, Ronald, now 15, twho ook everything we had. He’s now on his own working in a bakery painting faces on tarts. He earns 1,500 intis a month ($7.50 us) 500 intis go for a room. ($7 buys a good meal for 2 in Cuzco—barely). He lives on this a whole month?
He was their first street kid. She said, old habits die hard. Stealing and lying are a big problem. He still lives on the outside. His brother Lucho, we’re having better luck with him.
We’re trying to get little girls off the streets and into the home. The problem is 99% have parents so we legally can’t do much for them. For the first few months I was out there every night pounding the pavement. They won’t talk to Phil bevcause he’s a man. There’s a lot of abuse…mothers won’t let them come here because they won’t be earning money.
Foreigners have come here in the past to “adopt” kids and have turned around and sold them.
The story of Eva, the 8 year old selling her body to tourists on the streets of Cuzco. pix
People here are blind. It takes a foreigner here to see what the needs are, and what can be done for these kids. The question is, there’s so much to do, where do you start?
Her mail’s being lifted? She said that she can’t trust officials. >she describes herself as a woman in transition. Trial by fire.
See article in the Christian Science Moniter on street kids. june 30, 87.
Phil Voysey’s been in Peru since January. He received a phone call at 4 am from Rae asking for help. Phil worked in Zimbabwe for two years teaching English & African history. He's had a lot of experience with the 3rd world. He first came to Peru in 1985. He said that he wanted to work in Latin America. And he intended to go to Chile, but never mde it.
Though Rae doesn’t want to talk about the political structure, she said that Peru is one hell of a political hot spot for a middle class single gringa with 3 kids.
She takes a more holistic approach—medicine. quote on wall— in spanish— your children are not your children. They are *sons and daughters of life—-Kalil Gibran
Her own children having fled the nest, she’s now raising Quechua chiildren.
I can’t figure out the politics. Like Pol Potismos, Viet Kong terrorists—nobody seems to be for the Sendero Luminoso. Carlos, our Limeño friend, a member of the miiddle class, feels a Sendero takeover is inevitible. He hopes they’ll have learned something and mellowed in the process.
Chichua means pregnant. Chicuchas means children. Wasi means house.
Ronald who’s 15 looks about 10, from malnutrition, she said that he grew 4” in 4 months after she took him in.. .
Rae now has his brother Luis who came to Chicuchas Wasi —because I was walking the street looking for Ronald & they told me he was living with a gringa. Need translation of story...
Gillermo’s story, In the hospital, my mother died, my papa died .
Santusa’s story. She says they suffered a lot in the country taking care of the sheep in the rain? and she likes it better in the city. She likes it in Chicuchas Wasi because she wouldn’t have anywhere else to go if she left. She’d like to be an empleada (a domestic) when she grows up and work in somebody’s house. She’d like to work & put Rosita her little sister through high school.
John, who was translating their stories said, One thing that strikes me is that these kids have limited aspirations. Carpenter, maid. All my chicano kids in Oakland want to be doctors, lawyers, models. Or is it that a carpenter or maid is as high or unreachable or semi-realistic a goal as these :professional glamor positions are for most of my students?
Chicuchas Wasi was founded for puroses offering practical assistance, a future with hope to the abandoned street children of Cuzco. We were striving to create a home environment, where together we can become strong in body, mind, and spirit. Daily existence here is a struggle—even for the educated.
An economic crisis exists in Peru—so the children are forgotten. The government has no financial ability to help them. They simply exist by whatever means they can find, they are alone, afraid, hungry, sick, and without hope for more; or they die.
We are trying through love, affection, imnproved diet, health and education *to give them hope and a productive future.
Goals: to establish several permanent homes.
Self care education. Kids in local schools, apprenticeship with artisans. I’m looking for a mechanic apprentice to work 1 to 1 with the kids. We need community volunteers as well as US health care providers.
I’m here alone with the kids for days at a time. Kids have humble goals, but not too humble. A carpenter, a maid, I teach them basic living skills, washing and cooking. It’s a lonely profession. You have no one to share the hard times with—especially street kids—Ronald, I had to send him back to the streets because he exausted me.
Rae would like to see the home staffed with members from the local community. Creating a sense of extended family where children can reestablish their capacity to trust, and reenter their culture with a future that will include a job, self-respect and dignity.
Rae lives in a modest 3 storey complex of adobe with a tiny courtyard the size of a hallway where the laundry chores are shared by all the children. The bright red plastic tubs are nearly as big as the kids. The kerosine stove is also outside.
Kerosine stoves account for nearly all the burns that Interplast tries reconstructive surgery on. Rae says we theoretically could expand Chicuchas Wasi.
Chicuchas Wasi currently has 6 kids; 4 brothers & sisters). We can put 4 more boys (8 total) at 2 to a bed, and 4 more girls. We have the space but not the resources. This includes care providers and money.
There’s also the problem of neighbors complaining about the noise the kids make while playing.
What Rae really wants to do is to relocate in the country and build a large hacienda where kids can raise their own vegetables to sell.—to become self supporting. She needs large cash outlay of several thousand dollars. $12,000 to buy a truck, $7,000 for land and another $3,000 for building supplies for starters.
We're outgrowing our house. Rae would like to see graduates from the home return to participate in its continued existance. As a registered nurse, and help in the community…. outreach
The kids always say, “are you going to hit me? There’s so much alcoholism here. They are always speaking Quechua when they don’t want me to understand. They tell us, you and Phil speak English when you don’t want us to understand. I need to learn Quechua. No one speaks Spanish in the campo.
I was in the park, when I first arrived here—- I lifted my hand from my backpack for a moment and it was stolen right out from under my hand. I didn’t have a place to live, I didn’t have a job and everything I owned was stolen. I had enough change to get a cup of coffee and a friend saved me. He took me up to th English Language school and got me a job.
Rae is care provider for six kids; 4 boys and 2 girls. All are without family. One child has Spina Biida or Spinal TB, they’ve had parasites, worms, typhoid—many street kids come to lunch to eat their main midday meal—usually their only meal.
Rae needs more space & help. She says we have a policy not to take in kids on a permanent basis under the age of five years. The economy here is crazy. The price of food has more than doubled in six weeks. The majority of the street kids are boys.
All I want to do right now is administartive stuff— I’d like to start a cottage industry. Make cookies to sell to the gringos. All the kids are way behind ifor their age— physically, emotionally & educationally. I must be crazy to do this (to raise kids) for a second time. I look at all those kids soaking it up In Cuzco, there are similar projects.
The orphanage run by nuns and Jhurch-related orphanages tend to take in babies but they don’t deal with Iindependent street kids. There’s a woman from France who also takes in street kids but she doesn’t offer them the kind of support Rae offers her charglings. Giving them a place to sleep and food isn’t enough—like Oliver Twist in the poorhouse in England—-
Rae said, I went home to get rested and I worked like hell to raise money. We had two interviews. The crowd she wants to reach are the west county folks. She says the 8 to 5’ers don’t respond. It’s the alternative lifestyle people who will help this project. Who knows what’s going to happen here politically? The Peruvians don’t understand our motives. Gringos robbed them of their children years ago and sold them into slavery and prostitution.
Her nurse companion Enriquetta Ccapatinta has been instrumental in helping Rae get through the legal work. ON her bookshelf, City of Joy, 501 Spanish verbs. Pediatrics, Carlos Casteneda, candles, crystals, shells and herbs. A poster on the wall. Love is the power that heals. A calendar of street people of the world. Stuffed bears and rabbits. Large butcherpaper notes of Quechua suffixes and tenses plaster the walls. Mi casa wasi y, tu casa wasiki, casa wasi.
There are no stipends she can offer house manager Phil Voysey. Phil’s had to pay for everything out of his own pocket. When Rae came to CA to raise money, someone donated $100 so he could take a vacation. When we get the oven working, we’ll sell cookies and wear our twe shirts that say Chicuchas Wasi and sell them to the gringos on the plaza.
Her dream is to open a *tienda, a store and export Peruvian goods. Rae was raised in Sausalito, the daughter of a fisherman, I was his crew & deck hand. We were berthed down where Spinnaker's is now. Her father went into boat tours and they moved the business over to SF’s Pier 43.
I was the oldest of two daughters. I did all the PR and contacted the hotels. For ten years. II passed out literature, sold tickets, etc… this survival skill was to later help her with Chicuchas Wasi.
She was married at 18 to someone who lived around the corner, had three sons by the time she was 24. She moved to Hawaii, sold real estate in Oahu and Kauaii.
She returned to San Rafael, had the ticky tacky house, station wagon and dog—the whole middle class scene. And I woke up one day when I caught my children out in the back yard taking the temperature of the pool with a thermometer to see who had the warmest pool in the neighborhood. I said, something’s wrong here.
We took a ride up to Sonoma (74) and bought six acres south of the town on Watmaugh And built a home for ourselves. We went back to the land. We were very domestic. We had a farm, joined 4H, raised pigs. I had a truck, with pigs in back, kids in front—pigs have a tendency to escape. I wound up chasing pigs with a tennis racquet.
We had goats, made cheese, home canned, etc. The kids were involved. Like with coming here, I lived by that inner force that's always led me. IMy dream as a kid was to be a nun and to work on the hospital ship, Hope.
Rae did become a nurse. Took courses at Napa Community college for 5 years.. She worked at Queen of the Valley hospital, Yontville Veteran’s Home, Sonoma Valley Hospital, before coming to Kaiser Permanente for six years.
She officially quit last year. She did ICU intensive care nursing at San Rafael for two years—before she burned out. Working at Santa Rosa Kaiser, in general medicine, five days a week from 8 to 5, was great. She taught stress reduction classes, and worked in OB/GYN.
She said, I wish I had more pediatrics training. What I like most is country nursing. I was involved in psychic healing long before I became a nurse. When I worked as a student nurse, I’d use psychbic healing and the moniters would go down. ‘I use touch, channeling energy fields.
See PD ARTICLE Fall 85 Rae visited Cuzco, the magnetic center of the earth. where she found the place & its indigenous Quechua people so compelliing that she knew :she had to go back whether or not she could make a living.
10 year resident of Sonoma co. critical care nurse at Kaiser Pernanente. her 3 sons live in sonoma, their father is in Stockton. (Sausalito story…3 mos. later, she took leave of absence from her job to spend a year in Cuzco and be a volunteer nurse, to learn Spanish, to make connections with the Quechua culture.
During her year in Cuzco she became acquainted with the street kids. seven year olds with families so impoverished, they live solely on potatoes. She blames the problem on declining economy and high birth rate. This forces the kids on the street to work, beg, steal at an early age. Soon, they’ve moved onto the streets.
After months of fundraising, Rae bought the apt 3 blocks from the town’s main plaza and invited the street children in. Her project has attracted the attention of foreign Peruvians in Cuzco.
Contingents of interested Sonoma County people are fundraising on the home front. Rae says Peruvian participation is crucial if this projets is going to survive. Rae wants project to be acceptable to the Quechuas and then she’ll turn it over to them when it’s established.
In June, Rae drummed up donations of time, clothing, and medical supplies. Cuzco is an Inca museum filled with peasants. Those coming from primitive mountain villages find the adobe houses, electricity, and cobbled streets, very urban. Lack of high rises, poorly equipped hospitals and a severe absence of services for the poor…
get back to PD article
Chicuchas Wasi Rae Pieraccini, President,
Casilla 636, Correo Central, Cuzco, Peru,
SA tel 22772 Domicillo: Alabado 525
FAX 51-84-236140
Sra. Rae Pieraccini tele. 22-77-20 c/o La Positiva, Cuzco Peru
Capp Street Foundation flow thru— went belly up. Chicuchas Wasi needs another flow thru. List of foundations sent to Steve Burdick to FAX to Rae. or PO box 2031 Sonoma CA 95476 CA Prez. Steve Burdick, 1860 Sobre Vista Ct., Sonoma w. 765-9125, h. 938-0267 Kaiser ortho Dr.Jon Lopez H. 579-9065 W. 571-4123 9 Carol Stewart 539-4563, 538-2468 leaving for Peru in Oct? Leann Geiger 578-2606, 19, wants to work with Rae. Read about Chicuchas Wasi in PD. See also, Betty Woods—back from Nicaragua. Still at Kaiser? She may come down to help Rae later….
Thursday, September 1, 1988
Are the French Really Rude? On the Gringo Trail
ARE THE FRENCH REALLY RUDE?
Just back from spending the summer in South America, for me,
one of the first indulgences of coming home (besides marveling at flush
toilets, potable tap water and raw fruits and vegetables), is to read the Sunday
paper.
One title in This World section caught my eye. “Are the
French Really Rude?” Foreign LA Times correspondent Stanley Meisler writes,
“after five years in France, and American still has a puzzling time figuring
out the French. Are they really rude?
I read that article with particular interest because I was
going through the same dilemma after spending two months on the Gringo Trail
with them. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, all those places we budget
travelers have been beating a path to, made popular in the “60’s, is the Gringo
Trail. Tropical beaches and ancient ruins are de riguer. Club Med is out.
One meets people from all over the world vagabonding on the
Gringo Trail but these days the bulk of travelers are comprised of young
Europeans. The trouble with the Gringo Trail is that the travelers tend to
bring to bring a portmanteau of their country’s obnoxious habits with them.
Friction develops.
Fellow tourists from other countries tend to get annoyed
with each other. Being forced to ride 14 hours in the Pullman car or a first
class bus with a group tour of rude Frenchmen is worse than water torture for
some travelers. I suppose a tour of North Americans or Germans would be equally
obnoxious— but one sees fewer North Americans on the road.
These reports
are not isolated instances of psychopathic travelers who have it in for the
French. For example, the journalist from Boston’s very first sentence to us was
to commiserate how rude the French were.
It seems one Frenchman didn’t like the way she moved his
suitcase in the overhead luggage rack above her seat to make room for hers. He
jumped up frothing and shoved her suitcase back screaming if he wanted his
suitcase moved, he would have done it himself.
Days later she’s still pissed off. The problem with the
Gringo Trail, is that you keep running into each other in various ruins and
cafes all over South America. Vendettas and quickie marriages are common.
There are times when I prefer a second class carriage with
its chickens, pigs and robbers to traveling with the French. When the train
stopped to wait for an oncoming train to pass, pity the poor traveler, unable
to face a second class pissior, who jumped off the parked train to take a quick
pee and lost his eyeglasses to a light-fingered Peruvian admirer in the
process. He was pissed off. P.O’d. is a more polite abbreviated term.
Any tree in a public park is well guttered with piss. A seal
rookery smells better than the local plaza. One rarely sees a Frenchman
traveling second class. I didn’t always have this racist attitude toward an
entire segment of fellow travelers. Being on the road with them too long did
it.
When I first came face to face with blatantly rude French
travelers was in Guatemala. It’s true they won’t give you the time of day. In
Latin America, every one graciously and politely greets each other. A greeting
is met with coldness by the French. Being in a restaurant with them can be embarrassing
for fellow Gringos. If they wanted to eat at Maxim’s why on earth did they come
here?
I though my normally liberal traveling companion’s bristling
tirade against the very sight of the French was a bit of an overreaction— he’s
logged many more miles than I have, with ten more years on the Gringo Trail than
I— I figured that they just pushed his buttons and the incident was merely one
of travelers crossing each other’s paths wrong.
That was until one Frenchman decided my bus window needed
closing with my hand still in it. I wasn’t upset that he knowingly slammed it
on my hand. He didn’t have the courtesy to ask to close it. As it turned out, I
was carsick— about to lose my cookies as they say— because he smoked a cigar
and I needed air. A minor brawl erupted. What thoughts go through their heads
that they prefer to do violence to fellow travelers than to speak anything abut
French?
Or the time one Frenchman took to shouting and laughing into
the wee hours in the open air bathroom adjacent to our room in a minus three
star hotel in the Galapagos. Minus star hotels generally don’t have glass in
the windows or curtains for starters. I asked him to be quiet in the lengua de
pais, Spanish, which he ignored. I tried both the formal usted and the familiar
tu forms. I even tried French. No luck.
It’s amazing how much English they do understand when it’s
delivered at top lung and peppered with stout anglo-saxon phrases. “Fuck” a
guaranteed attention grabber will usually trick them into speaking English with
you. Then they really hate you.
Next morning, he claimed innocence saying he didn’t
understand Spanish because he was French— as if that in itself was an excuse—
and proceeded to deliver insults like a schoolyard bully.
Lack of sleep does wonders for my Irish temper. He erred in
his judgment as to how much abuse I would take. Spineless, I’m not. Hell hath
no fury like a woman scorned. When he flicked his hand like a glove at my face
like a man about to challenge another to a duel, he got one.
I avoid physical conflict, being on the short side of small.
There was a time when I despaired that I would never reach five feet. That was
like breaking the sound barrier. When I was in 8th grade, the school bully, a
well developed “girl” named Tayde who outweighed me by100 pounds, and was a
foot taller, had me cornered and tormented me one time too many.
I went in swinging expecting to be killed on the spot but I
didn’t care any more. About the only place I could make contact was with her
boobs. We always speculated they were fake balloons. Well, they weren’t and
they didn’t pop. To my surprise, she laughed, and later became my friend.
I went for the Frenchman’s throat. I didn’t care that I was
creating an international scandal. I was out for blood. My companion separated
us and everyone thought he had pushed the Frenchman and jumped on him! Male
chauvinism. He didn’t become my friend.
I am reminded of the curious fact that the French installed
in their public buildings the placard, “no spitting and no Bretons allowed
here.” They have little love for the Celt yet they call themselves Gallic—
which is a Celt of course! The French, or the Franks of Charlemagne as they
were called, took what is now called France from the Celts in the first place.
It took the Bretons, last of the European Celts to rescind
the law concerning spitting and Celts. Llamas and Latin American men spit like
crazy. A disgusting habit. At least llama spit is mostly hay.
The natives get jaded fast from all this hobnobbing with
world travelers and demand money for everything from posing for photos to
tourists loitering in public squares and churches. Gone are the National
Geographic salad days of photographing the natives going about their business
in quaint settings with llamas gamboling about.
Kids are the worst. Dame plata, dame sucre. Gimme money,
gimme candy. And if you don’t give willingly to the cause, there are other
methods. They’ll come up and hug you, their tiny starfish hands thoroughly
frisking each pocket and wrist before you can say como te llamas.
They grow up to be razor artists who slash your daypacks and
pants pockets so everything falls out. There’s a funny story of a razor artist
so skilled that one unfortunate traveler’s pants fell off as he was walking
down the street. Some are that skilled. It gives new meaning to the word embarrassed.
In South America, one has to register name, age, nationality
and passport number at every tourist site and public transport. Each ticket
taker demands this information and woe to the traveler who resists. I assume
this precaution is in case there’s a coup so they’ll be able to identify the
bodies after. This does not make me feel any more secure.
Half the time, we weren’t about to list our passport numbers
namely because our passports were safely stashed inside a secret pocket in my
traveling companion’s pants which meant exposing himself in public just to get
the number and so we made up new ones on the spot.
Getting arrested for publicly unzipping and rummaging in
one’s pants in a foreign country didn’t appeal to us when there were so many other
more interesting things we could get arrested for— like false passport numbers.
Ticket takers are almost as irrational as the French when crossed.
My traveling companion, at 46, took a perverse delight in
noting he was usually the oldest person on the road. About the only time he was
upstaged was at Lake Titicaca by a 60-year-old New Zealand grandmother who
decided it was time to travel the world. So she left husband and kids to fend
for themselves for a year. At 12,600 feet, she did better than we did in the
thin air.
He said, admiringly, “I hope I’m in that good of shape at 60.”
My traveling companion and I were an anomaly. North Americans, Californians—
over twenty-three traveling with backpacks. Not many from our neck of the woods
travel in strife-torn Central and South America these days. The declining
dollar, the unofficial coin of the realm is keeping us home, but not the
Europeans who are able to travel at bargain prices. The median age of all the
world’s people is twenty-three.
The cliché that the French are rude as you’ve heard seems to
be true in Latin America. It’s become one of the topics of conversation in
coffee houses along the Gringo Trail. Latin Americans are complaining. Even
other Europeans. I’m not about to write off the entire French population. I
love French cooking. My aunt spent two years in Paris getting her Grand Diplome
at the Cordon Bleu School of Cooking. I can’t imagine the world without the
visions of Renoir, Cezanne or Debussy.
I also remember reading how the impressionist artists were
barred from the Salon of Painting because they did something different than
what was accepted as culture. According to my aunt the French come from a
stiff, unbending world, blamed in part on their rigorous school system which
focuses on rote learning rather than creativity.
“Shhhh! You Americans and French always at each other's
throats! France is a middling power, arrogant and with an inferiority complex,”
said a Limeño friend. It’s a pity so many take the national prejudices with
them.
I’m sure I will meet many lovely French people traveling. I
prefer the individual travelers to groups who may as well never have left their
native soil to begin with. Nationalism belongs at home.
I read that the French president Mitterand is one of the few
foreign leaders who stands up to the US and refuses to bow to its power and
influence. They have banned “American” words like hamburger and computer from
the French language, fearing the corruption of their language. Our language is
enriched by the addition of French. I can’t see North Americans boycotting
words like envelope, romance and intellectual because they’re French words.
I can imagine all the hate mail I’ll receive in French
envelopes on this one. (Oops, French envelopes means something else again.
Rubbers, galoshes).
One Peruvian
said France is too unyielding. It’s unable to bend. That is why it is no longer
a superpower. As Americans— let me digress. Calling ourselves Americans is
considered an imperialist attitude. And rightly so. It was pointed out to me
that North America also contained two other countries, Canada and Mexico. We
are all North Americans. English, Spanish and French.
Central and South Americans don’t call themselves Latin
Americans. They call themselves Americans! And they are also Americans. I’m
sure Kennedy addressing the people, “my fellow Americans…” had no idea he was
addressing two continents. Simón Bolívar’s dream was to unite South America and
call it the United States of South America. How different things might have
been if he’d succeeded.
As US citizens, we are often called on the carpet for our embarrassing
policies on Central America. We travel as ambassadors of the American people
who don’t necessarily support or agree with the political policies of our
nation.
Reagan is a very dirty word. Reagan may shoot down passenger
planes mistaking them for military planes in the Iranian Gulf but at least he
doesn’t go around blowing up Greenpeace ships protesting nuclear testing in the
South Pacific like the French did in Tahiti. That’s a very small consolation
prize.
I take it back. The man’s senile and crazy. Referring to the
destruction of Polynesia, Jacques Cousteau said, “small material things mask
the vital problems in the destruction of a culture. He was referring to his own
countrymen. Nationalist attitudes should stay at home with all the extra
baggage you don’t need (like the outboard motor) while traveling in a foreign country.
Stanley Meiser cites a stifling school system and foolish
posturing on the world stage as an excuse for their behavior. He writes, “all
studies show that outsiders look on the French as the coldest and least
welcoming people of Europe. They have no tolerance or time for spontaneity or
weakness.”
One begins to wonder why a group of people who steadfastly
refuse to learn the barest minimum of a foreign language would even want to
travel. Simple words like excuse me, con permisso, or thank you, gracias would
make all the difference in the world—well, not world but in the Americas at
least. ”When in Rome, do as the Romans do” obviously hasn’t yet been translated
into French.
The sad part is, aside from pissing everyone off, they miss so
much of the culture. Americans both the Latin and Northern of the species— are
gregarious and open. A Bolivian writer said, “Nowhere else in the world do
people treat you like the French if you do not speak their language.”
Note Bene: I transcribed these journal entries in 1988 - 1990, hence the variable dates. (I'm moving them all to 1988, journal entry date, not transcription/revision date). We were in South America during the summer of 1988. I was trying to publish these stories, or at least find a home for them. I've a vague recollection of the Machu Picchu piece being published in The Paper.
I was readying several of these Peru pieces pieces for an anthology, House on Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad. I also wrote Bill Truesdale, the editor for New RIvers Press, St. Paul, MN, a rather zany letter about my travels across the USSR. He took the letter, and not the stories.
After an incredible journey through South America, John Oliver Simon broke up with me, left me for a young blonde former student of his, and it took me nearly a decade to recover from the horror of it all. Going to the USSR in 1989 was my salvation—and still John was trying to reel me back in. Or maybe he was doing the AA thing, in his case, the SA 12-step thing, atoning for his wrongdoings. By that point, I wouldn't even give him the time of day. Ironically, we managed to heal the gap nearly 35 years later. So it's fitting that these pieces finally get to see daylight, after languishing in darkness for so long. —Maureen Hurley 2/26/2014
I've very few photos transcribed over to the electronic medium, another project. Here are three small albums.
Machu Picchu
Peru
Galapagos
Tuesday, August 30, 1988
Lima, portrait of a city
“When you no longer see any trees you will be in Peru.”
—Simón Bolîvar's boat pilot, 1823
From the air, the outskirts of Lima, even the multitudes of red and white Peruvian flags fluttering over the pueblos jovenes, the shanty settlements don’t hide the smoldering heaps of garbage lining the dry banks of the Rímac River. In Quechua, the Inca tongue, Rímac means talking, or singing river.
If the river could speak, it would not have much to commend during the 400 turbulent years of European settlement. Twelve degrees south of the equator, Lima, the capital of Peru, is situated on the great coastal desert, the driest in the world, where precious rain is measured in millimeters a year.
South America’s Gran Liberator, Simón Bolîvar described it in letters as “the land was almost impossible to believe. Along the coast it was not only dead— for dead implied having once lived— it was unlacing, desolate, without trees, grass, or even cactus. The air was chilled; a cold ocean current prevented the fall of rain, and transformed a thousand miles of coastline into an utter wasteland.”
Though the explorer Pizarro is credited with the founding of Lima in 1535, there are huacas, adobe pyramids that predate our current calendar (Año Domini) by 1000 years.
For 400 years Spain generously suckled riches from Peru’s golden breasts until there was nothing left. I imagine most of that melted gold still slumbers in the tombs of numbered Swiss vaults.
Some Peruvians claim the Incas, with subtle revenge in mind, suggested the site to Pizarro, because, unlike the rest of the coast, it was so gloomy and cold five months of the year. Perhaps the Inca’s best revenge is that Pizarro's mummified body is on permanent public display.
Because of the Arctic Humboldt current, Lima is blanketed with heavy fog, the garuá, which lets in little sun from June to October. In 1823, Liberator of Colombia, Simón Bolîvar described Lima— once considered the Paris of South America, “Lima had a down at the heel look. The avenues were filled with filth and the water which ran down the gutters in the centers of the streets was dammed with a concentration of litter.” Not much has changed.
—Simón Bolîvar's boat pilot, 1823
From the air, the outskirts of Lima, even the multitudes of red and white Peruvian flags fluttering over the pueblos jovenes, the shanty settlements don’t hide the smoldering heaps of garbage lining the dry banks of the Rímac River. In Quechua, the Inca tongue, Rímac means talking, or singing river.
If the river could speak, it would not have much to commend during the 400 turbulent years of European settlement. Twelve degrees south of the equator, Lima, the capital of Peru, is situated on the great coastal desert, the driest in the world, where precious rain is measured in millimeters a year.
South America’s Gran Liberator, Simón Bolîvar described it in letters as “the land was almost impossible to believe. Along the coast it was not only dead— for dead implied having once lived— it was unlacing, desolate, without trees, grass, or even cactus. The air was chilled; a cold ocean current prevented the fall of rain, and transformed a thousand miles of coastline into an utter wasteland.”
Though the explorer Pizarro is credited with the founding of Lima in 1535, there are huacas, adobe pyramids that predate our current calendar (Año Domini) by 1000 years.
For 400 years Spain generously suckled riches from Peru’s golden breasts until there was nothing left. I imagine most of that melted gold still slumbers in the tombs of numbered Swiss vaults.
Some Peruvians claim the Incas, with subtle revenge in mind, suggested the site to Pizarro, because, unlike the rest of the coast, it was so gloomy and cold five months of the year. Perhaps the Inca’s best revenge is that Pizarro's mummified body is on permanent public display.
Because of the Arctic Humboldt current, Lima is blanketed with heavy fog, the garuá, which lets in little sun from June to October. In 1823, Liberator of Colombia, Simón Bolîvar described Lima— once considered the Paris of South America, “Lima had a down at the heel look. The avenues were filled with filth and the water which ran down the gutters in the centers of the streets was dammed with a concentration of litter.” Not much has changed.
Sunday, August 21, 1988
Letter to Luis Kong, from the Necropolis, Paracas, poem
(RETURNING FROM PARACAS)
In Paracas where it has never rained in living memory, literally nothing grows. You told me there was nothing here in this place of your birth. I didn't understand what you meant. This place I've waited a lifetime to visit.
The garúa or coastal fog, rolls back each morning to reveal distant purple mountains, the Andean foothills, contrasting with the eroded bright ochre and red coastline of sedimentary rock turning back into dust once again.
Dust with its airiness is the wrong word to use. I want to say mud or earth to imply something of the weight and adhesion of this "dust." What is left is heavier than dust.
From countless jailed lips, the word Paracas has escaped—an eager storm of Inca doves bursting into sky, or slender serpentine syllables seeking shelter, and like pigeons, the sound returns home to its toothy origin only to find the speaker gone; a skeletal utterance, the word itself meaning dust storm.
Heavy with silica, the drifting sand dunes march in crescent-hooved formation over hills and plateaus, swallowing cities of the living and the dead. Above the buried necropolis, fossilized shells raised above the surface of the matrix, escape from stone prisons.
Sun, wind and time erodes this place. Fragments of quartz, venial intrusion once separated two layers of mudrock; thick milk glass shards strewn across the surface; the parent rock long since scattered by the four winds.
I crumble silica crystals between my fingers as if it were made of sugar or fake windows of a Hollywood stage set. Lit by morning sun, translucent alabaster "fish" swim in the sky.
Strange, unbroken ridges fall at the angle of declination to the coastal plateau. Rusted metamorphic pebbles erratically eroded by alluvial action, not water, glaze the slopes like chocolate "fleas" on a cake.
I wander between large shell mounds, each separated by species, clams, purple scallops and snails; worn pawns in a gigantic game of chess. The Paracas Indians were the first to fall to the Incas, who in turn, fell to the Spaniards. And so on. From flamingo carcasses, crazy pink feathers tumble across the desert.
Saturday, August 20, 1988
Peru Journal, Santa Rosa de Amantani, Lake Titicaca
8/20? no date: At the weaving co-op I tied friendship bracelets on to the slender wrists of the gaggle of young girls that clustered around us. The old woman dressed me in a vest and traditional hat. The hat, nearly flat with flowers embroidered on it, was an extraordinary affair.
Too bad the vest was uneven, I might have bought it, but we already bought so many things yesterday I didn’t want to load up on more things that I really didn’t want. They greeted us like old friends after yesterday‘s purchases. The women taking interest in who buys what since this is a co-op.
Being on this island is like stepping back in time. No cars, no roads, just cobbled paths.
Sunset, a desert lake the size of an inland sea, but at 12,000 feet from sea level. With the setting sun comes the chill of being at 12,000 feet. The lake is an aqua gray, with its skin fluxed into patterns by the complex winds. I keep looking for seals, it looks so much like the ocean.
We spent the day hiking up to the ruins at the top of the paps, twin volcanos of Pachamama, which has both a pyramid and round amphitheater, and then we hike over to the crest of the next volcano, Pachatata with a square temple. Both have niches and little cuy houses under the hearths. Interesting little locked doors. There are shallow tunnels beneath these doors reinforced with hinges and padlocks. Wonder what is stored in them?
There is evidence of earlier fires. The multitudes of stone arches, like portals to other worlds, are dressed with dried flowers. Apparently we’ve just missed an important ceremony.
But for the most part, the Incas have abandoned the top of this island, especially Pachatata. The terraces below us yield bright gardens of maize, and wheat stubble. Harvest festival? At Pachamama, stone cutters still divide the stones with crowbars and hammers looking for a clear stone to hew. We learn the volcanic rocks don’t make good corners.
In the pueblo of Santa Rosa, close to the lake, life is lived in the same fashion it has been for thousands of years. Tiny misshapen two-story dark houses, often windowless, tiny beds. Generations have lived here.
It is said the sun god, the Inti was born on an island not far from here. The Incas claimed this place as their ancestral home. Either that, or an older culture was settled here and the Incas took over, or this place is the birth place of the builders of Machu Picchu.
Being on this island is like stepping back in time. No cars, no roads, just cobbled paths.
Sunset, a desert lake the size of an inland sea, but at 12,000 feet from sea level. With the setting sun comes the chill of being at 12,000 feet. The lake is an aqua gray, with its skin fluxed into patterns by the complex winds. I keep looking for seals, it looks so much like the ocean.
Last night a surprise rain played on the galvanized roof. The adobes all sport new roofs, new economy comes to the island via the tourists. The separate kitchen still have the thatch reed roofs. Five girls dressed in full skirts of red and green, rush to the kitchen of the house where we are staying.
Children playing fútbol, soccer in an empty field. A baby is crying, the mother exclaims in Quechua. A woman in a full red skirt and black mantilla borrows something from her neighbor. She hurries to the kitchen with a white bucket and the cuy, the guinea pigs whistle an alarm call, and scuttle to safety into their stone abodes beneath the hearth. Dinner cooks in earthenware pots, full round ollas, blackened from dung and charcoal fires.
We spent the day hiking up to the ruins at the top of the paps, twin volcanos of Pachamama, which has both a pyramid and round amphitheater, and then we hike over to the crest of the next volcano, Pachatata with a square temple. Both have niches and little cuy houses under the hearths. Interesting little locked doors. There are shallow tunnels beneath these doors reinforced with hinges and padlocks. Wonder what is stored in them?
There is evidence of earlier fires. The multitudes of stone arches, like portals to other worlds, are dressed with dried flowers. Apparently we’ve just missed an important ceremony.
But for the most part, the Incas have abandoned the top of this island, especially Pachatata. The terraces below us yield bright gardens of maize, and wheat stubble. Harvest festival? At Pachamama, stone cutters still divide the stones with crowbars and hammers looking for a clear stone to hew. We learn the volcanic rocks don’t make good corners.
In the pueblo of Santa Rosa, close to the lake, life is lived in the same fashion it has been for thousands of years. Tiny misshapen two-story dark houses, often windowless, tiny beds. Generations have lived here.
It is said the sun god, the Inti was born on an island not far from here. The Incas claimed this place as their ancestral home. Either that, or an older culture was settled here and the Incas took over, or this place is the birth place of the builders of Machu Picchu.
Much of this was used in my article for The Paper.
Note bene: There was a round altar on one of the volcanoes, and on the other there was a square altar, and enclosure on Amantani. I asked one of the women and she said, as she padded both my breasts, PachaMama, y PachaTata! I was blessed in this way.
Tara Edna Miller from Colorado who lives part time on Taquile, and imports weaving, said, Yes, Amantani has two high points with ceremonial sites. Taquile has more than one ceremonial enclosure, but Mulcina is the high point and makes a triad with PatchaTata on Amantani and Auki Karu on the Capachica peninsula.
Tara Edna Miller from Colorado who lives part time on Taquile, and imports weaving, said, Yes, Amantani has two high points with ceremonial sites. Taquile has more than one ceremonial enclosure, but Mulcina is the high point and makes a triad with PatchaTata on Amantani and Auki Karu on the Capachica peninsula.
Friday, August 19, 1988
PUNO/AREQUIPA Festival of Santa Rosa de Lima 8/23/88
The Puno train station along with the Arequipa train station is amongst the worst in Peru for thievery. Thieves especially favor the evening and early morning trains….but there aren’t many other scheduled trains to pickpocket, so it makes the thieves all the more dangerous and desperate.
As a successful thief deterrent, I’ve found the best result is to play “bopper car” with my backpack. If anyone comes too close to me, sidling up to slash my pockets, they get bashed by my swinging pack. This makes for a silly walk ambulating with a sideways drunken twisting motion—Monty Python style. The ladrinos keep clear of me—I'm an unpredictable gringa.
8/19 Today is one of the few days I actually know what day it is. I've had no sense of time. South of the equator, my internal clock and equilibrium are so thoroughly sprung by the extreme northern winter sun, I can't seem to find firm footing. At night I can't even get my bearings by the stars. Familiar constellations are canted too far to the north. The Southern Cross is my guide. Only the moon and the sun remain constant.
This is the year of Año Marina. The Year of Mary parade. Today, they bring Máría out from the church, they air her out at twilight. She's beautiful, this gilded lace Mary of Chiapi—she rides on an extraordinary throne flotilla of flowers— marigolds and roses and carnations. She's paraded clockwise around the Plaza de Armas at sunset amid much fanfare and drums. The air and light are translucent. Crepuscular. Máría arrives back from where she started at the steps of the Catedral de Arequipa. her luck and grace dispersed, her journey done.
Young boys march in battle formation hoisting banners of Santa Rosa with California written on them. It gives me a start to see Santa Rosa de Lima with California embroidered on the banners. We are so far from home from our Santa Rosa, California—Alta California norte. What is the likelihood of those two names appearing on a single flag in South America? Apparently we do not own the name. And who in Northern California even knows that Santa Rosa is named after the first New World woman saint?
I've a sudden pang for natal ground. Homesickness. A strange coincidence. We ask, Why California? It's a district in Arequipa, the taxi man tells me. A plausible reason ordinary and mundane after all. A cardinal dressed in red stands at the front gate of the church to welcome Máría home. Dignitaries mount the steps looking grimly important. Respite during a time of war. Sendero Luminoso are on the move. The country is at unrest. But for a moment, the clocks have stopped to honor Máría, Pachamama in Catholic dress.
Perú journal, Amantani (a lot of this was used in an article)
The Puno train station along with Arequipa, is considered to be the most dangerous train station in Peru. For thievery, especially in the evening and early morning hours. I found the best result is to play bumper cars with my backpack. Anyone that comes to near to me gets bashed by my backpack, with a quick twist of my body. It makes for a an interesting kind of walk, twisting and turning like that. Monty Pythonesque.
The boat to Puno was excruciatingly slow and all the tourists are on top of the curved roof so it rolls from side ato side as well threatening to capsize. One can see the huge snowcapped Cordillera Real of Bolivia from Taquile. The islands of the sun and the moon visible from the Bolivian border, are small dots on the horizon. It is said that the first Inca was born there, it is also the birthplace of the sun.
*. *. *
On the island, our host asked us if we are ready to eat. He use the term papaer instead of comer which gave us a clue as to what to expect by way of cuisine. Wise papas, potatoes for lunch, and more potatoes for dinner with rice. One should bring cook technology to these islands.
Villem takes us to the boat on a different path, the low road. People genuinely greet you with warm here. They tend to greet both of us individually, not as a couple, so there’s always a double buenos dias with an echo. Like the women of Yucatán these women here genuinely smile upon us, not like the hostility that greets us most places we go.
Señor Bernardo C., our host, says there are nearly 4000 people on the island between the two villages. I suppose it is possible. I would say it’s probably closer to 1500 each. Certainly there were more sheep than people on this island.
Diminutive merino sheep clogging the pads as their shepherdess is guide them to forage among the upper terraces. There is a commute rush-hour of sheep. One can’t help but touch the tiny babies as they trot by on delicate legs. The rams with their curled double horns that stick out like devil horns, are the size of a springer spaniels. The sheep must be genetically similar to the first sheep brought by the Spanish, being isolated for so long.
No more alpaca on this island, there is barely enough for the sheep to eat. They remind me of the Navajo sheep with their double horns, but the sheep are very docile. The short furry pigs intermingle and blend in with the sheep. I wonder if they know they’re a separate species? Evidence in the form of a litter suggest that they do know that they are indeed pigs, not sheep.
We were reduced to adding bleach to our coffee, which we had brought, luckily. The local maté, muña seems to be a type of pennyroyal. Villem brought us a handful at each meal and soon our table was covered with bushes. Not much in the way of plant life survives the appetites of merino sheep.
John found a sheep in the kitchen this morning when he went to check on the progress of our hot water. After finding black hairs in my mug I resorted to using bleach in my coffee, but a sheep in the kitchen was too much.
I keep thinking of the cultural connections between unrelated cultures. The hanging gardens of the Irish, the fir bolg who carried bags of soil, the Irish word sounding like Guatemala. All the terraces here are on 45° angle slopes. Though the pueblo of Santa Rosa de Amantani was founded 20 years ago, the Indians still live a similar lifestyle untouched by the coming of white man or Christianity. There is no electricity, no hot water. No windmills.They gather their water from the ditches—it’s a communal system. There was also no litter, none of the usual toilet paper and plastics of Perú
The modern touches include wooden boats with engines and a chainsaw. One could hear it from various parts of the island during our outings. We imagined it to be a communal chainsaw. One boy with a ghetto blaster playing Quechua music took us aback.
At the school John gave a little discurso, a speech to the fourth grade class on his school in California. We estimate that the number of kindergarten through sixth graders to be about 210 kids. There is also Colegio for 7th to 12th graders as well. Most kids probably don’t continue schooling after the sixth grade.
The teachers are from Puno and the kids attend school from Monday through Thursday, a four day school week. Imagine the teachers are quick to head back to Punahou for their three-day holiday. The school seems to be open year-round. There is no summer vacation on the equator apparently. The teachers use a lot of rote teaching methods. The children sing us a song in Quechua and we imagined it to be an anthem of sorts. They then sing a list of all the countries in south and central America. Goosebumps rays on my arms when they say Guatemala. One hears the sound Ari a lot in Quechua speech. Ari means yes, but in Aymara, it means peak. In Irish it means God.
John found a sheep in the kitchen this morning when he went to check on the progress of our hot water. After finding black hairs in my mug I resorted to using bleach in my coffee, but a sheep in the kitchen was too much.
I keep thinking of the cultural connections between unrelated cultures. The hanging gardens of the Irish, the fir bolg who carried bags of soil, the Irish word sounding like Guatemala. All the terraces here are on 45° angle slopes. Though the pueblo of Santa Rosa de Amantani was founded 20 years ago, the Indians still live a similar lifestyle untouched by the coming of white man or Christianity. There is no electricity, no hot water. No windmills.They gather their water from the ditches—it’s a communal system. There was also no litter, none of the usual toilet paper and plastics of Perú
The modern touches include wooden boats with engines and a chainsaw. One could hear it from various parts of the island during our outings. We imagined it to be a communal chainsaw. One boy with a ghetto blaster playing Quechua music took us aback.
At the school John gave a little discurso, a speech to the fourth grade class on his school in California. We estimate that the number of kindergarten through sixth graders to be about 210 kids. There is also Colegio for 7th to 12th graders as well. Most kids probably don’t continue schooling after the sixth grade.
The teachers are from Puno and the kids attend school from Monday through Thursday, a four day school week. Imagine the teachers are quick to head back to Punahou for their three-day holiday. The school seems to be open year-round. There is no summer vacation on the equator apparently. The teachers use a lot of rote teaching methods. The children sing us a song in Quechua and we imagined it to be an anthem of sorts. They then sing a list of all the countries in south and central America. Goosebumps rays on my arms when they say Guatemala. One hears the sound Ari a lot in Quechua speech. Ari means yes, but in Aymara, it means peak. In Irish it means God.
Villem takes us to the boat on a different path, the low road. People genuinely greet you with warm here. They tend to greet both of us individually, not as a couple, so there’s always a double buenos dias with an echo. Like the women of Yucatán these women here genuinely smile upon us, not like the hostility that greets us most places we go.
Señor Bernardo C., our host, says there are nearly 4000 people on the island between the two villages. I suppose it is possible. I would say it’s probably closer to 1500 each. Certainly there were more sheep than people on this island.
Diminutive merino sheep clogging the pads as their shepherdess is guide them to forage among the upper terraces. There is a commute rush-hour of sheep. One can’t help but touch the tiny babies as they trot by on delicate legs. The rams with their curled double horns that stick out like devil horns, are the size of a springer spaniels. The sheep must be genetically similar to the first sheep brought by the Spanish, being isolated for so long.
No more alpaca on this island, there is barely enough for the sheep to eat. They remind me of the Navajo sheep with their double horns, but the sheep are very docile. The short furry pigs intermingle and blend in with the sheep. I wonder if they know they’re a separate species? Evidence in the form of a litter suggest that they do know that they are indeed pigs, not sheep.
Wednesday, August 17, 1988
Amantani, Lake Titicaca, Peru (article)
AMANTANI, LAKE TITICACA, PERU 8/17/88
In the heart of the Peruvian Andes, Lake Titicaca, a deep
blue inland sea intersticed with umber and sienna, reflects the sky and desert
hills surrounding Puno with a vengeance. Horizons shimmer with lapis lazuli luminescence—the
refractive quality of light on the altiplano so different at this great height.
An Indian in our boat plays a thin, atonal melody over and over with
his quena flute, a bamboo
penny whistle. "No, he corrects me, "it’s a piruru.—carved
from a condor’s wing feather shaft My perception begins to waver as he repeats the simple notes
over and over. Or maybe it’s the thin air above 12,500 feet that’s affecting
me.
A channel wends along a wall of reeds; miles and miles of
reeds; serpentine hissing, like pines in a high wind. Small mats of vegetation,
algae and lakeweed carpets undulate, and constellations of bubbles escape from
the shallow floor.
 |
| Uros fisherman |
As we approach the land of the Uros nation—floating reed
islands—giant Andean coots honk and scuttle among fallen tortoras. Ripples
divide an Andean gull’s reflection into four parts, a broken mirror, the four corners of the
earth. “Reeds tied together in a
clump mark the edges of the channel,” says the old boatman in halting Spanish,
as he polled the reed boat with slow measured movements. Tortoras—everything, even the floating islands are made from
the tall reed. We debark onto a bowed wooden plank. The islands make a
rollicking motion beneath our feet, like walking on a huge waterbed.
An Uros fisherman, perhaps the village idiot, repeatedly
shakes our hands, pats our shoulders and peels a reed for me to eat. He strips
off the outer bark and hands it to me, “Para comer,” he says, with a decayed smile, “Eat.” And stares. I hesitate,
hoping that the reed has filtered the raw sewage pouring from the open gutters of
Puno—a desperate town if ever there was one. It tastes mallowy, of dank, white
underbelly, like the insides of the river elder stem.
A tethered pig roots and squeals when I approach. Uros is a
landless nation. Soon, the pig will root his way through the island and drown! Grubby children sell replicas of reed
boats. The women hawk crudely embroidered wall hangings. We buy nothing and
feel saddened by the children begging, it’s much worse here than in Cuzco.
At least in Cuzco, home to more than 3,000 street children,
there are more tourists to beg and steal from. We escape to the boat, it
becomes a refuge from this poverty and bleakest of lives. We have no words in Aymara
to say hello, goodbye or sorrow, for that matter.
I watch the young ones play at the water’s edge; they are
like children anywhere. A rotting reed boat with someone’s bundled manta inside, plastic litter, a charcoal brazier—pathetic
remnants of a way of life that’s no longer viable. Soon, they will be all gone.
The Uros language is all but lost. Most Uros islanders have
intermarried with the Aymara Indians. Anthropologists speculate that like the Pomos
of Northern California, where I'm from, the Uros are among the oldest native peoples
in South America. Persecuted by the Incas and by the Colla Aymaras for
centuries on end, they took to hiding in the reeds. This way of life among the
reeds became their culture—like that of the Marsh Arabs of Iraq.
We bear
witness to the last breath of a dying nation that so vividly captured the 1950s
imagination of my youth. The Lake Titicaca of my dreams held vast ornate cities
and large floating islands—not these small barren straw bale outposts of civilization,
if you could call it that More
like subsistence survival. Where were
the big-breasted women in grass skirts posing in reed boats I'd seen in back
issues of National Geographic?
 |
| Santa Rosa de Amanti, the place where the falcon rests, Google maps. |
We head for the island of Amantani because the boat happened
to be going there to drop off the mail and supplies, our original destination was the more
populous island of Taquile but there was no scheduled boat. It’s a grueling
four-hour boat ride to Amantani and onto yet another culture. This is the seat
of the Quechua Incas, the Inca conquerors who built the fabled stone cities
we'd made pilgrimage to: Machu Picchu, P’isac, and Sajacmarca.
Lake Titicaca is a desert lake the size of an inland sea
situated more than two miles above sea level. I keep looking for seals and test
the air for the familiar salt tang. It smells more of the earth, dank cellars or moldy grain.
The barefoot men of Amantani wear thick black wool pants,
white billowy shirts and vests, knitted hats with long tassels and earflaps. There is such rivalry between
the island people of Amantani and Taquile, they won’t even intermarry. I
imagine a Quechua version of Romeo and Juliet set in the weaving and textile
capital of the Andes. The indio says “Amantani
es mejor. Hay muchas ruinas” He tells
us the island of Taquile has none...
But later I find out that the island of Taquile, the more
popular tourist destination, too, has many ruins. I am saddened by the
boatman’s zealous misinformation. When will I ever have the opportunity to come
here again to bear witness to this place?
These ancient cultures we seek are
swiftly dying from the vicissitudes of tourism. We too are part of the problem,
but our varied and sullen art helps us document what we see. I am traveling to
the underbelly of the world with my boyfriend, poet and translator, John Oliver
Simon—we are on a quest in search of the poets of South America.. This is a side
trip. Kavafy's Journey, not the destination.
Small trout and gorgeous large, gold-headed fish swim among
the aquatic plants. I sense the movement of something large under the
water—what loch monster lives in these depths? The suche, the world’s largest freshwater fish, lives here along with sweet water mackerel, or
the pejerrey. Are they truly mackerel?
or are we having a cross cultural linguistic conundrum? How did ocean-going
fish get into this lake two miles above sea level? If they're really mackerel,
an ancient lake, or perhaps even a sea, Titicaca must have risen up from the
sea floor with the Andes themselves. The trout were introduced.
“We use small nets, fishing only at night, we fish under a
full moon or at dawn—and still we catch nothing,” says a fisherman. “The
water’s too deep and cold here. There is better fishing there among the reeds.”
This highest navigable lake, as all the guidebooks proclaim, is the largest navigable
lake above 2,000 meters in the world. Higher than Lake Victoria. Bernardo
O'Higgins launched his dream of the Chilean Navy from here.
Vital statistics in feet or meters mean little to me. I have
to experience it though my senses. At nearly 12,600 ft. above sea level, Lake Titicaca, with its 36 islands, not
counting the artificial islands of the Uros, is 105 miles long. We’re in open
water, buffeted by offshore winds. An incongruous red lateen-rigged sailboat on
a long reach makes it seem like
we’re in Egypt instead of Peru.
The fisherman talks of the fierce winter storms that ravage this place and how huge
waves mercilessly pound the shore. We watch the steamship from Bolivia belch thick black ropes into the
painfully thin blue air. No place for
pollution to go in a fragile ecosystem perched at the ceiling of the sky.
The volcanic island of Amantani looms up, like terraced breasts.
We manage a rocky beach landing and crawl up from the rocks like antediluvian ancestral
ooze over terraces of bright green corn sprouting up like bamboo forests, and eucalyptus. We climb over tilled deep red earth and stone fences, panting from the
altitude. No roads, not even a path. No horses, no carts, no automobiles.
We gringos are assigned to a family for the night. The
island swallows us up like darkness. I spray our tortora reed bed and blankets with bug spray for fleas. They
are busily feeding on my ankles. We take refuge on the wicker bed. But the bed’s so
short, we have to sleep diagonally. The local maté, muña works a a flea deterrent.
The outhouse on the cliff, with its raised (Middle Eastern) foot-rests,
has a great view of the sunset across the lake. All the terraces are sloped at
a 45-degree angle. Though the village of Santa Rosa de Amantani was founded
only 20 years ago, the Quechua Incas still live a an ancient lifestyle
untouched by the coming of white or mestizo cultures.
Amantani’s whole, like the town of Otavalo in the Ecuadorian
highlands. No disease of dominant Euro-culture demanding conformity, has encroached.
The thread of craft and pride are unbroken.
No electricity, no hot water. Communal water from the ditches. No litter! No
usual toilet paper and the ubiquitous plastic, in pink and blue, that is so
much a part of Peru.
Children play fúbol in an empty
field. Rock arches everywhere. Magical doorways frame lake and sky at every
turn. Adobe, brown on brown. A baby cries, its mother exclaims over it in
Quechua. I gasp. It literally hurts to breathe up here.
Thursday, August 11, 1988
Machu Picchu: Hiking the Inca Trail (article, photos)
MACHU PICCHU 8/11/88
We hiked the fabled Inca Trail to Machu Picchu with a forest
fire hot on our heels. Every August, the campesinos set fire to their fields to
enrich the soil, to send smoke to
the clouds to make rain; every August the selva burns. Wildfires.
 |
| Macchu-Picchu with smoke from massive fires |
Peru has a policy of not putting out fires, not because they
believe in a natural burn system, but because they don't have high altitude fire
fighting planes, or chemicals to
combat the forest fires. It's an attitude, a way of life.
Peru is famous for its corrupt government officials. Those
in charge of the national monument either don't care, or can't enforce the
no-burn policy in the park. Officials also say there's no money to fight forest
fires. Canadian and French officials happened to be in Peru at the time of the
fire and they put pressure on the Peruvians to do something about it. This,
after 17 days of letting the fire burn up one watershed and down another.
 |
| Huailabamba shrouded in smoke
When cloud forest habitats are destroyed, they don't
regenerate. The Peruvian cloud
forests are rapidly disappearing due to increased colonization which follows
after the selva burns. The rare and exotic plants will eventually be replaced by ichu grass for livestock. Meanwhile, the erosion will be
tremendous.
|
The Andes are unbelievably steep. When the first rains come in September and October, torrents of muddy water will turn the Urubamba river into a conveyor belt of lost soil. Though many of the ancient Incan terraces are still used, sustenance farming at altitudes of 8,000 to 12,000 feet isn't easy. Also the rare plant and animal species are threatened by burning practices.
The surviving rare spectacled bears, pumas—already
threatened species lose their habitat. It's been dubbed an ecological disaster
by the Peruvian Civil Defense Committee whose job is to protect the Sanctuary.
The thing is, this catastrophe happens year after year. This
year's fire destroyed over 7,000 acres in 17 days and when we left Peru it was
still burning. Soon, there will be no more cloud forest left. Each ridge, each
valley supports different species—different and unique ecosystems. Every fire
destroys and endangers species already on the brink of extinction.
Unless national and international pressure is put on the
Department of Civil Defense, the burning will continue, even though it's
illegal to burn within the Sanctuary. They have laws to protect the Sanctuary.
They just don't see the need to
enforce them.
Of course, politically speaking, Peru is one hell of a hot
spot these days. The leftist-Maoist Sendero Luminoso, the conservative
APRA and other extremist political
factions are splitting the country apart. Inflation is rampant—1500% in two
months. There are food shortages. Black market powdered milk smuggled in from
Ecuador was selling well. Food prices have doubled in six weeks. Those in power
continue to gain wealth through these misfortunes. It's a matter of time before
civil war and a distinct possibility of a military takeover.
The other sad news is the fabled Inca Trail is utterly trashed.
The trail, a major tourist attraction is used primarily by Europeans. Since the
1986 bombing of the tourist train of Machu Picchu, few North Americans are
traveling in Peru. The Inca Trail is the filthiest trail I've ever hiked.
Toilet paper, plastic cans, Bluet gas canisters. All us first world folks are
responsible for this mess. The latrine of Peru.
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| Mo & Paco, the Alpaca at Machu Picchu © John Oliver Simon 1988 |
Me & Paco, the itchy alpaca, el major poeta de la ciodad perdida. What you can't see in the photo is that he's wagging his lips in ecstasy, I found the resident lawnmower's sweet spot.
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