¡Mañana me voy a Chijnaya!

This is my last night in Cusco! I'm actually quite sad to be leaving, as I enjoy the company of my host family very much and I was starting to get into the rythmn of how things go here.

Last night Anselmo returned from their property in Acomayo and had brought in tow a giant boom box. Before dinner, during dinner, and after dinner while we were talking about all sorts of things (he's a very down-to-earth guy and great to talk to) he was blasting huaynos...the música típica of the sierra. Now this music is great for the first few songs. There's guitar, violin, accordion, men with great voices, a danceable rythmn, and interesting lyrics. But after about five they start feeling...grating. They all seem to have the same melody and they all have the same dramatic flourishes and then when the women sing...it's over. For some reason a woman singing huayno just makes it worse, I'm not entirely sure why. Anyway, so that was fun. Thinking about it more, though, if one is able to really plunge into the spirit of huayno--dancing, singing along, etc.--then they're not all that bad.

Today I met up with Renato and one of his friends and we made a slapdash lunch that turned out decently. We walked up to the Supermarket Mega (which I learned is one of the few really big companies from Cusco), pondered over pasta, then walked back, trying to avoid getting hit by cars while walking around construction sites. Anyway, Renato and I had some great conversations, ranging from 80s music to different accents, both in Spanish and English.

Later I helped three twelve year olds (one is the grandson of Rosa and Anselmo) with their English homework. This consisted of me summarizing news articles and then "presenting" them, on camera, as reporters who were going to give us the daily news. They then read the (slightly altered) summaries for the camera as their mothers looked on making suggestions about pretty much everything. It was actually a lot of fun.

Tomorrow I leave pretty early in the morning for Pucara, a town near Chijnaya, where I will meet up with David Cajo, the project coordinator, and then proceed on to Chijnaya.

So until I surface from the netherworld of Internet,

un beso y abrazo,
Leah

Ahh, I love kids soo much! Rosa's son, Edgar, and his wife, Mayra, came to visit today with their two little daughters, Adrianita y Ana Lucita, who are 2.5 years old and 9 months. Ana Lucia honestly has the biggest cheeks ever...except for her sister's when she was the same age! they almost engulf her little mouth! Very kissable. They are too cute not to pay attention to. Anyway, I always loved visiting with Edgar and Mayra because they're young and love to chat about anything and everything. For example, today after a program about Anacondas appeared on the television I told a story about one of the boys at camp catching a snake, which set off a bunch of little stories from Edgar about encounters with snakes in the country (there's a superstition en el campo that if a snake crosses the road in front of you someone will die...this usually leads to the gruesome death of the snake...) and then memories of trying to shoot birds with a sling shot. Once he shot down a parrot, was swooped at by its flock, escaped with the injured parrot (which had a broken beak), cut its flight feathers, and brought it to a man known for curing animals...the man said the parrot couldn't be helped, but that he would by the parrot from Edgar. Edgar returned the next day only to discover that his parrot had been made into a soup!

So that was my day. Now I'm going to see if Rosa wants to play card, and if not we'll be watching a telenovela!

Me ha llegado

Well, I have successfully arrived in Cusco and am currently staying with my host family from my time studying abroad here two years ago. Rosa, la madre, has been incredibly wonderful. She made me a mate de coca as soon as I stepped in the house, gave me food, and piled about five blankets onto my bed to ensure that I will be extra warm at night so that my cough doesn't get worse. Her husband, Anselmo, is at their property outside Cusco preparing the fields and planting corn and habas...he'll be back on Friday, luckily, so I'll be able to see him.

Luckily the altitude hasn't hit me too hard yet...and I intend to keep it that way by drinking copious amounts of mate de coca.

We were visited around lunch time by one of the host mothers of a girl in my SIT program, Mairead, (unfortunately I can't remember the name of the woman). She, Rosa, and I chatted for about two hours covering topics ranging from food prices to how much they loved hosting us gringas (they always cry when we leave and love all the beautiful memories of us) to how the young mothers these days simply can't do anything on their own. This last topic proved to be the most interesting. I had known that Rosa had lived alone in the campo when she was raising her first two sons, but I got more details this time. Not only did she have to take care of all the household chores (cooking, cleaning, repairing broken things, etc.) as well as take care of her young children (no doubt rambunctious), she also had to manage fields (she had to hire men to help her) and sit at her little tienda selling vegetables and other wares as a source of income while her husband was away (and he was away most of the time as he was part of the police force and was posted all around the country). Now, her stepdaughter occasionally has a nanny and often relies on both Rosa and her own mother to help her with her two daughters (I think she has a part time job)--so it's easy to see how these older women think the younger ones are quite incapable!

The landscape is just as stunning as I remembered, Cusco just as full of tourists, and the sun burning just as strong...it felt at first like I had never left, but then I would think about how yesterday I was in Vermont among the changing foliage and then I just feel as though I'm in some strange time warp.

Time to go watch a talk show with Rosa!