More Ups Than Downs

     It´s hard to believe so much has happened in the past few months. We´ve let our blog updates get further and further apart and now here we are in December preparing for our second Christmas and New Year here. There has been so much happening we ´de like to share but to keep this entry at a reasonable length, we´ll stick with the highlights over the past several months.

Celebrating with Pisco Sours

     In July, we had a wonderful visit from Mom and Dad Liberatore. We were so thankful and happy to have them here and introduce them to Perú. They visited La Jalca and got to know our host family, hiked to Gocta waterfall and Kuelap and trekked in the jungle. It was a wonderful trip.

   In August, Brian and I traveled deep into the jungle to take part in the longest raft race in the world.  Over three days we paddled over 200 miles on the mighty Amazon River in a homemade balsa log raft held together with rope and wire. It was an epic adventure full of laughter, prolonged silences, sore muscles and wonder. Although we didn´t win the race, we more than finished,  paddling an extra  seven miles past the finish line in a blinding rainstorm. Overall, quite a jungle adventure to remember.

Our raft

Team: Piranha Bait

Day 2 on the Amazon

     

     When we returned to Chacha we had great news waiting for us. Both my grant for the forming of a conservation area and Brian´s grant for a cocinas mejoradas project came through and we´ve been working hard to get both projects rolling ever since.  

Our planned conservation area

Our families new cocina mejorada 

                         

Mausoleum sculpture in Recoleta Cemetary

     In November we headed to Lima for our mid-service conference and celebrated one year in Amazonas with a trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina. We spent two wonderful weeks exploring this vibrant, latin city, having coffee at many of the historical cafes, watching tango in the park, drinking our share of mate tea and Malbec and eating enough steak to get us through another year in Perú.
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Coffee break in San Telmo

Buenos Aires

   

Homemade dinner at  Lucianas 

     We don´t have as many pictures as we´d like to from our trip due to one unfortunate incident. Upon returning to Lima we experienced our first and hopefully last robbery.  We were both fine but a little shaken up. Someone smashed the window of the taxi we were in while we were on our way back from the airport and was able to snatch my backpack from the floor before we knew what was happening. It was a brief but scary encounter. We had our packs safely in the trunk but the thief made away with my camera and consequently most of our Argentina  photos. We spent the next several hours being shuffled from police station to police station and from one incompetent police officer to the next until someone finally helped us file a report. Thank goodness for insurance. The whole experience served as a reminder of the desperation and poverty that exists here.  Unfortunately, in Lima this kind of smash and grab happens quite often especially before the holidays.

The lovely ladies of Amazonas

     On a happier note, we arrived back to Amazonas in time to welcome the second group of volunteers to our region and enjoy some of the last beautiful days of sunshine here before we head in to the rainy season.

    

      To all of our family and friends we wish you peace, love and a very Merry Christmas. In the coming year we wish you all the best in making your dreams, pursuing them and hopefully living them.  

Travel Galore

It has been a busy couple months of travel and we´re glad to be back. Starting in April, Brian and I spent our first couple weeks apart since arriving in Peru. He traveled to Trujillo and I went to Chiclayo. We both presented our community diagnostics to our Peace Corps directors and are now ready to present our work projects to our community for the next 21 months.

Environmental Volunteers with our community partners in Chiclayo.

Over Easter we met up for a welcome vacation to the surf town of Mancora and with fellow volunteers rented a house with an incredible view overlooking the ocean. We relaxed on the beach, ate delicious food and played in the waves. We celebrated Brian´s birthday and he is now the proud owner of a traditional Jalquino wool poncho made by our host mother.

Our host Mom, Petronila, weaving Brian´s poncho.

Our view of the ocean in Mancora

We returned to site for a few days and were no sooner off again on another round of travel. This time Brian headed to Chiclayo and me to Ancash for an alternative energy conference and then on to Lima for Peace Corps meetings.  To get to Lima from Amazonas is about a 36 hour journey by bus crossing the Andes to the coast before heading south. Luckily we only have to go there once a year.  Even in Peace Corps terms we´re off the grid. Despite the isolation, we wouldn´t trade where we live for anything. There aren´t many places you get mountains, cloud forests and jungle within walking distance of your front door. 

Hiking the Cordillera Blanca in Ancash

We returned to La Jalca at an exciting time.  June is the month of our Fiesta Patronal celebrating San Juan or St. John, the patron saint of La Jalca. Everyone seems to be preparing. Traditional dances, music, food and crafts will all be presented during a 10 day festival. Brian was invited to perform some American music for the community during the celebrations. It will be a hoot to have The Beatles right alongside some traditional charango and flute music. 

Planting Alisos with the students in their garden.

Tour of the tree nursery with the high school students

Our native fruit tree project at the high school

We´ve been invited to the jungle for a few days by a cultural organization to teach students how to play baseball and have a barbeque. I love my job! And in July we´re going to have our first visitors to Peru from the States. Brian´s parents are coming and we can´t wait to have them. Love to all our family and friends and we miss you.

Six months in Peru

February has arrived and along with it the torrential rains that mark Summer here. I think we were going on 27 straight days of rain when finally the sun came out for a few precious days. Along with the rain, our power and phone service has been intermittent as well as our ability to travel out of La Jalca as mudslides blocked most of the roads and the Utcubamba River overflowed its banks. People here are saying it’s the worst rain they’ve seen in years. They are also saying March is much worse! 

Losing a boot in the mud

On the bright side…our Environmental Club is awesome. We went to the museum in Leymebamba last week and because the electricity was out all over the region, we were the only visitors that day and got VIP treatment. We got to go inside a climate controlled room where archaeologists are doing research on 300 mummies unearthed from the Laguna de los Condors nearby. The mummies were buried with their possessions inside large statues carved into the cliff sides. It’s one of the most abundant, intact archaeological finds in this region so far which remains largely unexplored. Afterwards we visited a native tree reforestation area and a fish farm. So that was pretty cool for us and the students.  Another week we made popcorn and showed the Planet Earth Fresh Water movie with Spanish subtitles and the community authorities came and watched.  This week, the students wrote letters to kids in the States and it was so much fun. Translating their letters before sending off was illuminating. Every single student wrote about their dreams, what they want to be when they ‘grow up’: Doctor, policewoman, astronaut, lawyer, agro-industrial engineer, civil engineer. Now is their summer vacation but every one of them goes to their families chacra’s (farms) at the crack of dawn to work in the fields. They all said they didn’t like it because it was back breaking work but it was a way to help their parents, who are all subsistence farmers, and a motivator to study hard and do well in school. I hope they all get the chance to go to University after they finish high school.  One student wrote about how much she loves books. She said “Books are my life”. It’s a real challenge to find books in Spanish here and they are unbelievably expensive. There’s no library in this region, which has gotten me thinking about another future project…

Brian and I with some of the Environment Club in Leymebamba

Our plans over the next few weeks are to finish up our community diagnostics to present to our Directors and the community and to do some traveling over the Semana Santa holiday at the beginning of March. I’ve been collecting hundreds of seeds and saplings for the tree nursery and we’re planning a community seed gathering day for March. Hopefully we can really get the nursery up and running soon. Brian is doing his thing and charming, ahem, educating, the whole town into wanting to chlorinate their water. Poco a poco, or little by little, good things are ahead.

Thank you to everyone sending notes, emails and care packages our way. We can’t tell you how much we appreciate reading news from home and all the tasty treats. 

With our host family at Danny's 16th birthday party

Feliz Año Nuevo

It’s a new year and the beginning of mango season here. We’ve been spending our free time getting to know the hiking paths around La Jalca, visiting the spectacular ruins in the area and on Sundays we usually head to the weekend market in Yerbabuena. It’s a couple hour trek down the mountain out of the “eyebrow of the jungle”, the name for the cloud forest climate region where we live.  At the bottom, in the village of Ubilon, we hike along the Utcubamba River for another hour or so and arrive to the bustling market where we stock up on spices, meat, mangos and avocados and then hop on the truck for a butt numbing ride back up the mountain to La Jalca. We bought beef at the market for the first time and it was rather amusing. We picked the most crowded of the vendors in the row of meat stalls and pointed at the part of the skinned cow we wanted that we thought most resembled a filet. The petite señora slapped the carcass down on the wood stump, pulled out an axe and in a few bone crushing hacks we had about 3 lbs of meat from which we made a steak dinner and fantastic stew the next day. At the spice stall we found dried truffles for about $1 and they were a perfect accompaniment.

The amount of biodiversity here is incredible. On a hike with one of the community officials I asked about medicinal plants and within minutes she had plucked an armful of different leaves that are used for everything from soap to curing malaria. There is a lot of discussion at meetings we’ve attended to make this region a natural protected area in order to preserve the biodiversity, which is exciting for us to be a part of.

The holidays here were quite a different experience. It feels like we’ve stepped back in time. There were masses and processions through town and celebrations of the Saints with music, dancing and eating.  In the days leading up to Christmas, we attended our first celebration in the community complete with a candlelit procession to the 500 year old cemetery. The band played traditional folk music and men carried a beautifully decorated float of San Roce on their shoulders while women and children followed behind with lanterns. The stone church in the cemetery was filled with candles and calla lilies and we were unexpectedly welcomed by the priest at the mass and introduced to the congregation. Afterwards, a feast was held with more live music and dancing well into the night. 

For Christmas we found a small synthetic pine tree in the store, decorated it with some lights and played our Ella Fitzgerald Christmas songs playlist way too many times. Thanks to our wonderful family and friends in the states we had cards and gifts under our tree to open Christmas morning and a mini ‘Nacimiento’ or Koresh. It was a quiet holiday but we were happy to have each other to share it with.

Our year in review - a family tradition.

On New Years we visited Kuelap, an ancient, sprawling mountaintop ruin that rivals Machu Picchu in size. It was spectacular.