Lima, Andahuaylas, Chiara, and Chaccrampa

Well this is my first ever blog post! I am completely new to it but thought it would be the best way to let people back home know what I am up to, where I am staying, and what it is like. I am currently writing to you from the town of Andahuaylas, where I am living, but have been to three other places in Peru before now. My trip started in Lima where I stayed with my wonderful hosts the Perez family. I had never been to Lima and didn't quite know what to expect. I had heard it dubbed the "theft capital of the world" and one of the worst cities for crime in South America. I also heard it has a thriving restaurant scene and is up-and-coming. I found both of these assertions to be fairly true. We went all over the city by taxi in the two short days I was there and the driver always seemed to talk about a crime he had witnessed or a new restaurant. I'm not sure if that was just what I picked up on because it was what I had read beforehand or not but the two topics seemed to define Lima. While driving throughout the city I got a sense of how polarized it is. The brand new theater hall, which rivals any you would see in LA or New York with its changing light scheme and immaculate design, is directly across from Nueva Esperanza, one of Lima's poorest neighborhoods. I thought this proximity between rich and poor could be one of the main factors in the city's high crime rate. For lunch the day before I left we went to a traditional Peruvian restaurant in the Barranca district. Barranca is the artist hub of Lima and all of its buildings have maintained their colonial architecture. I ate papa huancaina and ceviche, two classic Peruvian dishes.
The next day I flew out to Andahuaylas. I flew over the Andes nearly the entire time and the views were great. An hour later I landed on the single runway at the Andahuaylas airport. Immediately after getting off the plane I could tell that this environment was different from Lima. It seemed like some cheesy tourist trap, with Andean women in their bright clothes and alpacas right next to the runway. But it wasn't and I was the only white person for some distance. If you mention Andahuaylas to most people who have visited Peru they will have no idea where or what it is. It's not because it is extremely small (it has about 50,000 people) but because it is far away from the tourist hubs of Cusco, Iquitos, and Arequipa and its population is almost all locals. All of the Peru guidebooks I looked at didn't even mention Andahuaylas or put it on the map and I started to wonder if this was all a big joke. The airport is about 10 miles out of town up the mountainside. When I got into the city there was the county "fair" set up which happens every Sunday. Andahuaylas is the agricultural hub of a large part of the sierra and many of the stalls at the fair had hand tools and grain for sale. It is also the closest town to the valley where the last remaining faction of the Shining Path, a terrorist organization which fought the government in the 80s, is operating. The Shining Path now mostly does drug-related business but Andahuaylas is their exporting hub for processed cocaine from the edge of the jungle. Because of this there is always a large number of police and military throughout the city. The people in the town are generally shorter and darker-skinned than in Lima because of the larger indigenous prevalence. The short factor didn't serve me well the first few days as I slammed my head against every possible doorframe and stairwell.
My host family's home and the office where I am working are next to each other and just up the hill from the Plaza de Armas and downtown Andahuaylas. It has been fun getting to know the family over the past few weeks. The dad's name is Francisco and he is a pastor and construction worker. The mom's name is Katerina and she works at the house as a tutor for disabled kids. They have two children, Daniel and Sara, who are 14 and 12 respectively. The house is a big, old, half-remodeled, modge podge of a modern dining room and living room with a very old kitchen and antiquated bedrooms.
After I got settled for a day I was introduced to the staff of Paz y Esperanza, the Christian human rights organization that I am working for. It's a team of 14, excluding me, and not one of them speaks English. This is good though because it is forcing my Spanish to improve. I am working in their communications office and have been assigned to maintain their blogs, write excerpts for the local newspapers about PyE projects, document the problems they are facing with photos and video, and document the projects they are running to help solve these problems.
My first assignment was to take pictures and video of the work PyE is doing in two extremely rural communities, Chiara and Chaccrampa. The project they are running there is called Bilingual and Intercultural Education. I accompanied some of the staff in bringing new Quechua calendars to the schools in these communities. The main problem these schools are facing is a disconnect between the education and the environment in which the kids live. At home they all speak Quechua but the teachers in the schools speak Spanish. The government mandated curriculum doesn't address the depth and differences in how these rural children have been taught since they were born. That is what PyE is changing. The new calendars are based around the Incan agricultural calendar, something the kids lives have been oriented around for centuries. What they learn to do and what activities they take part in are all determined by the Andean time of the year. It was amazing to see their reactions when we brought the new calendars. The previously boredom-ridden faces instantly lit up as they started reading the calendars in their own language and relating to the pictures in each season. This gave me a lot of hope for Christian organizations. The effectiveness of this project seemed irrefutable to me, someone who is usually quite critical. Paz y Esperanza's depth and respect for the local culture is something I've rarely seen in American Christian circles.
Despite my spirits being lifted by PyE's work, traveling in these parts was no fun at all. It took us 6 hours to go 60 miles in a 2wd van on a 6wd road. It was also impossible to sleep because of the constant side-to-side and up-and-down. We stayed one night in the only "hotel" in Chaccrampa which consisted of a mattress on the floor of a room that I had to hunch down in to walk around. The meals were also all local and quite harsh on my Western stomach. I ate a cheese that was harder than diamonds and a lot of maize. I am still feeling the effects of these. I will hopefully update this with a post soon but for now I'm signing off. There are pictures at the bottom here of various things I talked about. Once I can use a computer and not my iPad on Monday I will caption them. I hope everyone reading this is doing well!