So we haven’t been the best at updates so far but all that is set to change, I promise! Here is a quick roundup of life so far...
As Janek predicted, arriving back in Cusco did take the sting out of leaving home; there is something uplifting about blazing sunshine, blue sky and breathtaking mountains. Not least when your feet are planted on said mountains, alleviating all fears held moments earlier on the plane that you were seconds away from plummeting to your death between their peaks. I should clarify that at no point were we about to die (I know this because the air hostess told me so when I took a rare break from staring at the inside of my hat to survey the flight situation); the imminent danger was in reality just a little something I concocted in my head to make the flight more ‘exciting’. And to give me an excuse to crush every bone in Janek’s hand.
So, feet safely on terra firma, we were welcomed by Yuri, his wonderful mother and Dianita. Our first day now seems a long time ago and is a little hazy. I believe cups of maté were drunk to help with the altitude (that’s tea made from the leaves of the cocoa plant, also used to make cocaine: sounds very rock n roll, in reality is soggy leaves and hot water), greetings were exchanged with the staff that were here when we last were, and dinner plans were made. These dinner plans were later broken as Jan and I managed to sleep for a solid 17 hours or so, and we awoke to a Sunday consisting of a Halloween party held by Cusco’s most important gay man, pounding electro music, misjudged fancy dress costumes and many a drag queen.
After this slightly hedonistic beginning, our first week was spent settling into our new lives. Jan spent every afternoon in school, and every morning trying to get his head around the volunteer system which was being run by another guy before we got here, and I took on the task of Yanapay’s marketing and image promotion. My job has been made much easier thanks to the help of Maia, a particularly dedicated volunteer who has been here for 2 months; she’s helped me get to grips with the systems that were in place before I was here, and also happens to be a technological whizz kid. Anyway, Janek promises an entry very soon that will explain a lot more about what exactly we are up to out here, so watch this space for more information.
We’ve quickly slipped into the pattern of our day to day life here. Cusco is a beautiful city in a breathtaking location, and it’s pretty easy to get every home comfort we could want (including Heinz ketchup and Twinings tea, although no Ribena for me so far). Around the main plaza you could almost imagine that you’re in a European city, everything is so convenient and geared towards tourists. It’s easy to forget the reality that Cusco is a messed up place; you quickly become desensitized to seeing pissed up men lurching up streets and peeing (most of the time not even against a wall), children working through the night on the streets sniffing from bottles of glue, old women doing manual labour jobs I’m pretty sure I couldn’t do. I suppose you can argue that this is the ‘real’ Cusco and in many senses it is. If you leave the main square the colonial white washed buildings metamorphose into mud walled structures often shared by several families, which look like when the next rain comes they’ll just slide down the mountain. But weirdly this reality exists alongside the clubs and travel companies that depend on the tourists that are here to see Machu Picchu. Cusco is a melting pot consisting of the most dysfunctional elements, and we are somewhere in the middle of all of it.
Between working in school with kids that so blatantly come from Cusco’s ‘darker side’ and going out with volunteers for slap up meals or crazy nights out, our lives are slightly schizophrenic at the moment (a little like the weather here), and trying to write something to get this across has forced me to think about it perhaps more than I otherwise would. It’d be easy to write something that dwelt on the negative stuff we see here every day, but then a lot of what we see happens at home too, it’s just more concentrated here. And in all honesty, for all the depressing statics concerning kids, women, animals, corruption, crime, drugs, I still think (like I did when we first landed here), that Cusco is an uplifting place. Yesterday we took the kids from the school to a local park. I could relay every detail of their dirty clothes, the fact that many parents of kids as young as 5 didn’t bother to come and pick them up, that many of them didn’t have water with them despite the blazing sun, or that as well as the kids in the park there were also an awful lot of men hanging out there getting drunk. Yet that stuff isn’t what stuck out for me. My day was dominated by a bunch of kids being kids and having a whole lot of fun, myself being included in that bunch. Yesterday really sums up for me what our experience here has been so far; I reckon that these pictures can probably convey this better than I can...
Hasta pronto chicos,
Besos y abrazos
xx
