Ideas and Practices: March 2022

I soak in

The stillness of the mountain

And its life

Never dull

As the colors of the lliklla and poncho

Match the February flowers

And the birds that peck at them.

“Allinllanmi,” people respond when greeted

With a smile and a joke.

Indeed, what would cause one not to be well

In this Andean paradise?

With its grazing llamas

Its prolific papa

Rivers flowing majestically down the mountainside

Front yard pharmacies

Terraces that the Incas discovered long ago would defeat erosion

Adobe houses rich in their modesty.

Am I in the shire?

A people who shine in their humility

Whose language enchants

And warms hearts with its fraternal sweetness

Who avoid the complexity and anxiety of urban “modernity”

In favor of the ancient complexity of style and symbol

embedded in their textiles.

What could possibly disturb the peace of this allyu, of this llaqta?

Only the state, the police, the church, the forces of so-called “progress.”

And the community responds when it needs to.

But kunan p'unchay, all is well

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lliklla - colorful woven blanket that women from this region wear around their shoulders. It serves multiple uses, including carrying children as well as items.

Allinllanmi - "I am well"

papa - potato

allyu - family

llaqta - town

kunan p'unchay - today

Since the beginning of February, we have been staying in the enchanting town of Ollantaytambo, nestled in the Sacred Valley just outside of Machu Picchu. We are volunteering at a beautiful boutique bed and breakfast with stunning views all around us. Compared to the rest of our trip, in which we were roughing it pretty hard, this is a much more relaxing and comfortable experience. We work thirty hours per week, mostly doing reception and working in the garden, in exchange for a room at the hotel, breakfast, and a small allowance for lunch. Our colleagues are all super laid back and sweet, the job is chill, and there are a ton of hikes within a really short distance. Here are just a few pictures of the town and area:

I wrote the above poem while we were staying in Patacancha, a traditional Quechua-speaking town of about 200 families about a 40 minute van ride from Ollantaytambo up to the mountains. One of our colleagues was nice enough to set us up with a family there, with whom we spent two nights. It was an amazing weekend, to say the least.

We knew from the minute we stepped into the colectivo (minivan) to Patacancha that this would be a unique experience. The vast majority of the passengers were wearing the traditional dress of the area, and everyone was speaking Quechua. Everyone (besides us) knew each other and was laughing and joking for most of the way. It felt more like a happy hour than a bus ride, minus the alcohol. Everyone in Patacancha speaks Quechua; some speak Spanish, but many, especially the older folks, do not. I had been dabbling a little bit in learning Quechua, and so was pumped to try out a few phrases. After studying up with my little phrase book for an hour in the colectivo, I mustered up the courage to ask the driver "How much?" in Quechua when it was time to pay. To my great pleasure and surprise, he actually understood. The problem was that I didn't understand his response, because I could only count to three in Quechua at that point. But we figured it out eventually.

Since everyone in the town knows each other, the driver was able to connect us with two girls standing around the drop-off point, who were waiting for us but too shy to say anything. We followed them up a muddy hill—more like a cliff, to be honest—before one of them peeled off and the other, who was one of the daughters of the family we were staying with, took us to her house.

The girls who met us at the bus stop

I think my favorite part of the whole weekend was when we first arrived. The mother of the family was peacefully sitting on the floor and weaving. She was warm and welcoming and pointed us to the tea that was on the table, but didn't go out of her way to entertain us. There was no TV or music; she was just peacefully weaving while we drank our tea—we had a variety of choices, all freshly picked leaves from around the area. Once in a while she would ask us a question, after which we'd sip our tea in peaceful silence. There was none of the normal anxiety of hosting, which I appreciated so much.

The tea selection from the garden, way better than lipton

The other reason I enjoyed this moment was because I was able to practice some Quechua. Basic phrases, of course—"I want to learn Quechua; we're from the United States," etc.—but she humored me enough to make me feel like I had actually learned something. Throughout the rest of the weekend, I was able to pick out words here and there, and once in a while a whole phrase, and it felt awesome. (Since then Mere and I have hired a teacher—Spanish for her, Quechua for me—to make use of our down time here, because we have quite a bit of it.)

The whole weekend ended up being yet another experience of unplugging, unwinding, and unlearning a bit of the anxiety-ridden way of being that we're accustomed to back home. There wasn't much instant gratification to look for, so what more could we do other than just BE? Of course we didn't just sit around the whole time: the father of the family took us out to plant about 30 trees, literally on the side of a mountain. (Unfortunately the electricity wasn't working the night before, so our phone had died and I don't have pictures of that.) He showed us around the farms, taught us some things about adobe houses, and let us guide his horses down the mountain to a new place to graze. We also got to watch the mother and her daughters weave, and helped them weave a bracelet for each of us. For dinner we went down to the fishery in town and bought some trout, then cooked it up in the dark because the electricity went out just for an hour right around dinner time. It was storming pretty hard, and that is a common phenomenon. At night, we slept with (literally) eight or nine blankets. They didn't have heat, and it was COLD up in the mountains. One woman we met told us they're used to it and it didn't feel cold to her, which was astounding to me.

I was surprised at one point in the afternoon when the father welcomed two people into the house who clearly weren't from the town. One was a twenty-two year old Norwegian guy who had traveled all the way to Peru to do a (presumably undergraduate) thesis on Spanish-language education in Quechua speaking communities, and the other one was his guide and translator, since he didn't speak enough Spanish to conduct the interviews alone. I confess I was immediately annoyed with their presence, mostly just because here we were in this idyllic town and I didn't want it to be disturbed by tourists. But, we were tourists too, of course, and if the family didn't open their doors to tourists like them, well, we wouldn't be there either.

But the interview, too—conducted with a 30-year old woman from the town who had agreed to do it—rubbed me the wrong way. From the moment the Norwegian student took out his shiny, white apple laptop and sat behind it typing, the atmosphere felt so sterile, impersonal, academic, Western-centric. The computer felt to me like a metaphorical barrier between him and the woman he was interviewing. If I were her, I would have felt like I were on display, being studied like some kind of object. At one point the translator/guide, who was from nearby Cusco but still obviously had his stereotypes about the indigenous people in the rural areas, said something like "Far away from here, close to France, there's a country called England," as if she would never have heard of England! I could tell by her response that she obviously had. It felt like they looked at her as a child. His questions, too, has assumptions behind them, and it caused quite a bit of confusion in the translation. Not to mention, my Spanish was decent enough by then to pick up on the fact that the translator misunderstood some of the questions the student was trying to ask, and also changed her answers slightly to fit his own preconceived notions and narrative. And to think, his work will get passed off as "research." Granted, he's an undergraduate student, but I wonder how much similarly problematic stuff gets passed off as legitimate research by people earning more advanced degrees. To cap it off, as a token of gratitude for the interview, he gave her a notebook that probably cost the equivalent of 75 cents—at least he let her choose the color, though :-/.

To be clear, I don't blame the kid; he was 22, and nice enough. I could easily see myself at that age having been caught up in some similarly grandiose idea. As usual, I blame the system and culture we're a part of. I blame the whole institution of the western university, which apparently thought in this case that it was a good idea to send someone tens of thousands of miles away from home to "study" how a people felt about Spanish- and Quechua-language education—neither of which he spoke—and write conclusions about it which will benefit...whom? Certainly not anyone from the town. All because he heard Quechua being spoken on the radio once and thought it sounded cool. Don't get me wrong: I think his research question was a good one. I just don't think he should be the one doing it, at least not as an undergraduate student. But once again, that's one of the many problematic things western- and white-supremacy does: gives white folks the privilege to travel the world and pursue whatever hare-brained idea sounds interesting to them, with no requirement to do anything that actually benefits the people whom they're "studying," or even to get to know them on any real level, for that matter.

As a white traveler myself, is this just the shadow of my own guilt and self-criticism coming out? I'm sure there's some of that, though I like to think I'm slightly more conscious. But regardless of my own personal motivations, I still think the point I'm making is valid.

The family was very welcoming, not just to those two. Their niece made an unexpected visit with her two year-old, and of course they received them joyfully. It made Mere and I sad and jealous that the unexpected visit, so taken for granted in most places we've been in Peru, is virtually non-existent in the U.S. Maybe you'll get an unexpected visit once in a blue moon back home, but in communities like these, people are ALWAYS visiting one another unexpectedly; people are ALWAYS together with other people. By comparison, it feels like folks back home—and again, the wealthier the community, the more this is the case—people are nearly always alone and isolated.

The father and I talked a lot about cultural differences, like the one I just mentioned above. He agreed with me that it was a shame how individualistic we can be in the U.S. He also shared lots of his beliefs and some stories with us. I learned that he has a big problem with some of the Christian pastors that do ministry in the area, because they have tried to prevent locals from doing traditional dances or weaving certain designs into their clothes, because it is supposedly from the devil. It's infuriating to me that in the 21st century you still have people coming to indigenous communities with that kind of narrow-minded, harmful mentality—intent on destroying cultural practices that go back hundreds and hundreds of years—but I guess things haven't changed as much as we'd like to think.

He also told us about a very interesting altercation with the police. Many rural, indigenous communities in Peru have a contentious relationship with the police, for similar reasons that minority communities in the U.S. do. At one point a group of arrogant officers came up the mountain to the town to "serve justice" regarding something that the community was in complete disagreement about (I'll spare the details). In an amazing display of self-defense, dozens of people from the community, men and women alike, surrounded the officers and physically forced them off of their land, telling them in the meantime that they never want to see them up there again. He told the story with pride. If their behavior sounds "aggressive" or rubs you the wrong way, I just wish you would have been with us while we stayed with the family, and seen how incredibly peaceful and warm they were. They just knew, as oppressed groups do, when it was time to get serious. Which is what I was alluding to at the end of the poem above.

Most of all, for me, our weekend in Patacancha was another opportunity to get to know people with a way of being that is much more embodied, centered, grounded, and free of anxiety than anything I've experienced in the U.S., and another opportunity to reflect on how we want to live our life back home. The only question is how to do it when everything in the culture surrounding us goes directly against a more tranquil lifestyle.

Here are some more pictures.

They immediately gave us a poncho and a lliklla.
We wondered why, but figured out that it was
most likely both a mix of wanting us to fit in with
the community, and to protect us from the cold.