Weekend homestay in Huilloq

First day impressions (3/2/07):

So here I am in Huilloq, a small rural community in the district of Ollantaytambo, where my adventures in Peru began. As soon as our group got here our academic director pretty much just dropped each of us off with a different family and left. So far I have understood about 10 words total of what my host mom, Basilia, has been saying to me. One of my first attempts at Qechua was when I tried to ask her, “Are you cooking?” (“Wayk’ushankichu?”) but accidentally asked her if she was crying instead (“Wakashankichu?”). She laughed at me. Basilia has five children: Mikías, 3; Jeremías, 5; Rosalío, 11; Emilia, 14; and Elías, who seems about my age. The boys are all learning Spanish in school, and the two older ones speak it fluently (the other two are still too young to really know the difference, and speak to me in Spanish and Qechua interchangeably). The one daughter speaks a little bit more Spanish than her mother does, but not by much. The 11-year-old son, Rosalío, has been translating for me most of the time. Right now he’s standing next to me and just gazing out at the mountains. He’s been standing there for at least 10 minutes; it occurred to me that I’ve never seen my 13-year-old brother sit or stand still for that long, except when he’s watching TV. It is indescribably peaceful here; no sounds of the modern world polluting the air.

I will be sleeping on the second floor of a little hut, the bottom floor of which is home to a bunch of free-roaming guinea pigs which dart under the bed whenever someone approaches them. There is a ladder leading up to the loft, and next to my bed is a giant pile of potatoes and another pile of dry maize for the chickens. I helped Basilia peel potatoes for lunch. One of the first things she asked me (well, one of the only things she asked me that I understood) was how many children I have. She also said she wanted to learn English, so I taught her the names of some things—although most of the articles of clothing she pointed to were pretty much untranslatable because they don’t exist outside of the Andes, as far as I know. It was announced that Jeremías can sing songs, and I was asked if I would like to hear one. It was pretty adorable. For lunch, I was given a chair to eat off of like a table while the rest of the family just ate off the dirt floor. First I was served a bowl of toasted choqllo (corn), then a bowl of boiled potatoes (I mean like 6 good-sized potatoes—I only ate one), then a bowl of really good potato soup. They offered me a peach, but I had to turn it down because I was afraid I’d get sick from it. They have different standards of hygiene here, to say the least; the most noticeable of which is that they don’t consider the ground dirty. The entire area surrounding the house is also grazing land for livestock (pigs, chickens, cows, and a donkey), so the entire ground is covered in manure. They all wear sandals made out of recycled rubber and their feet are leathery and black. I saw one of the kids accidentally drop a peach in a pile of manure, then pick it up and eat it. Yet they all seem very healthy.

More highlights (3/4/07):

My host family turned out to be incredible. I really became attached to Rosalío and kind of wanted to take him home with me. He’s really a brilliant little kid; the whole time he translated for me, explained things to me about how things are done in the village, and showed me around. After lunch on the first day he took me on a walk on the outskirts of the village, and then we both sat down on a little mud hut for animals and looked out at the mountains for a good 20 minutes without speaking. Rosalío is wise beyond his years, and everything about him gives the impression of his being a miniature man: his facial expressions, the way he stands, and the sheperd hat he always wears.

After that walk, we met up with some of Raquel’s host brothers and sisters and took another walk halfway up one of the mountains. The kids pretty much just ran up the side of the mountain while Raquel and I took our time, clinging to the side. Then we went down and played soccer with some more kids and some other girls in our group. The kids weren’t bad players and had the advantage of being accustomed to the altitude, whereas I was pretty much pooped within 10 minutes. After that I went home and took my contacts out after washing my hands in the river that runs right by my house. There was a group of about 5 kids watching me “take my eyes out”, and they thought it was just about the coolest thing they had ever seen. Rosalío wanted to know how much the lenses had cost. At dinner that night, Basilia asked me through Rosalío how much it had cost to come to Peru. I told them 500 dollars, which is less than it had actually cost. The family misunderstood and thought I had said $150, but still acted as if this was an unimaginable sum of money. Basilia then told me that she has a sister that wants to come to the United States, and asked me if I could take her with me. I think there’s a very good chance she was serious.

I was surprised by how good the food was. Even though potatoes and choqllo are somehow incorporated into every meal, we never ate the same meal twice. These people are not poor from a nutritional standpoint; their diet is limited to things that grow in and around the village, but there is never a lack of food. The first night we had a soup made from ground maize with potatoes, the next morning I had a plate of fried potatoes (french fries!) with a fried egg, the next lunch was quinoa soup (a grain, kind of like wheat, they have a lot of here) with potatoes, carrots and alpaca meat, and for dinner, a guinea pig, which they cooked on a stick next to the fire. Once the guinea pig had been taken off the stick and served to me with rice and green beans, I actually wasn’t too repulsed and thought it was quite good. The one thing I was slightly uncomfortable with was the fact that they served it to me in the same room where the other guinea pigs live. I thought that was a little inconsiderate. But back to food: one thing they all like to do is put toasted choqllo in their tea and kind of sip out the kernels and chew on them one at a time. It's pretty delicious. For breakfast on the last morning they gave me a delicious hot, sweet drink made from ground habas (large fava beans). Mmmm. I could not have been happier.

The next day my whole group walked down the mountain a little to a central location where all the weavers gather to do their work (they’re all officially registered in a kind of collective), and got to watch them all at work. The women in the village all wear traditional clothing on a daily basis, and make their own skirts, shawls, and ponchos for the men in the family. Not all the yarns they use are natural though, and one might think it a little ironic that the “traditional” color of Huilloq is neon orange. Emilia, my host sister, taught me to spin yarn from wool, which for the record, is really hard, but which all the women do as they’re walking. Later in the day I took a walk with Emilia, some other young weavers, Jenny, and Rachel and we sat down in a scenic spot, helped roll synthetic yarn into balls, and then, upon the suggestion of one woman who spoke Spanish, started a game of “telephone” in Qechua. As you might imagine, this game is a lot more interesting when not everyone in the group is proficient in the language, and all the original messages ended up as something completely different then what they’d started as. The first few messages that the Qechua women started all took the format of "(Insert Qechua woman's name) is going to live with (insert Qechua man's name)." There were lots of giggles. We tried playing the game in English and then in Spanish, and the game was equally ridiculous in each because there was no language everyone in the group spoke fluently. The funniest one started as “A Jenny le gusta la música” (“Jenny likes music”) and ended up as “Hay un bebé en el hospital” (“There’s a baby in the hospital”). I felt equally lost later on when Emilia tried to teach me to weave a bracelet. Somehow as many times as she showed me how to do it I just could not figure out what was going on. It seemed just about as magical to me as “taking my eyes out” had seemed to the little kids. Emilia kept asking me “Now do you understand?” and I just kept shaking my head.

I met Basilia’s husband, Pablo, on the second day, because the first day he had been out working in the city. I think he works for a tourism agency. He’s incredibly friendly and speaks good Spanish. All day he kept asking me what I wanted to learn in Qechua, and whenever he told me a work in Qechua I would tell him the word in English. He also asked me a lot of questions about the United States, including who the president is now. When I told him it was George Bush, he said, “Still? He has been elected four times, right?” I explained that two different George Bushes had been president, but that I, like him, could not understand how the second one had been reelected. Then he told me about how a “campesino” (farmer) had almost become the president of Peru (Ollanta Humala is a socialist with a military background who's campaign was funded by Hugo Chavez, and who my academic director said she feared would have turned the country back to a military dictatorship had he been elected). But he’s going to enter again in the next race, Pablo assured me.

The next morning before I left, I announced that I wanted to take a picture of the whole family. As soon as I said this everyone ran to put on their traditional clothing (the women wear it all the time, but the men usually don’t wear ponchos while they’re working). Afterwards I showed them all the pictures I had taken of them over the course of the weekend, and they laughed at every one of them. I promised them I would make them copies of the pictures and bring them to them sometime before I leave Peru.