Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Chapter 16: El Shaman Y El Doctor

Urubamba, Sunday, August 21, 2011  The day began with a fascinating visit to the surface salt mines of the Urubamba area and then the site of the Inca experimental farm. But first I want to tell you about the Shaman, and the doctor who respects his kind.

The day after the ProPeru staff transported us from Cusco to Urubamba, the Shaman blessed us in a ceremony that began at dusk and continued into the chilly night as the stars began appearing overhead. It ended with fire. We sat in a semicircle while he spread before him the materials he would burn. We introduced ourselves. Our words were translated by ProPeru staff into Spanish for the interpreter who would then translate them into Quechua, although at times the Shaman seemed to be using Spanish phrases as well as Quechua. We folded  coca leaves and placed them in our mouths, sucking on them as he invoked the spirts of the surrounding mountains and Mother Earth, asking the mountains to accept us as we traveled there, and to welcome us back if we should return. He glanced around as if speaking to each ¨apu¨ that dwelt with each mountain. He prayed that we be kept safe in Lima and in our own country. And he asked Mother Earth as well to welcome us back on our return. He completed the ceremoney with a Christian benediction.

A fire was lit from small twigs. In it he placed alpaca meat, rice, garbanzos and a variety of other ingredients. He sprinkled wine and beer on the fire. Then he removed some ingredients, tailoring the fire to our nature.

The interpreter explaned that some ingredients might cause harm, so the Shaman removed them and would afterward throw them in the river.

This Shaman is 62 years old and has been a Shaman for 30 years. He is known throughout Peru and has conducted ceremonies at Machu Picchu. He also is a farmer.

The interpreterexplained that doctors call him and pay him when there are things they cannot figure out with patients. One technique he uses is to rub a guinea pig agaist the body of the patient, then break its neck and look inside the animal to see what is wrong with it. Whatever is wrong with the patient would appear in the guinea pig.

Two days later our group, which includes two physicians, a pharamcist, a nurse and aspiring medical professionals sat in the same room at ProPeru´s Urubamba officer to receive a presentation from Dr. Victor Alfredo Del Carpio Yanez, the director of Minsa, one of the health authorities in Peru. That´s him on the right, below. On the far left is Lynn Morrison, our group leader; her husband, Chuck, a physician; and Kate of the ProPeru staff, who served as translator.



Dr. Victor has 6 years of field experience, 10 years of standard experience, and 4 years experience as Minsa director. During his stint in the jungle, he became aware that people who went to the hospital for snake bites died, while those who were served by shamans had a better survival rate. He went to the shamans to find out why.

What he learned was that the shamans were administering an herb that slowed down the heart rate to 12 beats a minute, slowing down the distribution of the poison through the body. They also had a mushroom that would be rubbed over the wound. When Dr. Victor sent the mushroom to a laboratory for study, he learned it had properties similar to penicillin. He had never seen anything like this, but when he conducted a search of world health practices, he learned that the same idea of slowing the heart rate was practiced in Australia. (I wish I could be more precise. There was a lot being lost in translation, but our medical staff was fascinated, nonetheless.)

There was another surprise in store. Some children who did not respond to medical treatment were bathed in intestines. Dr. Victor´s research turned up the same practice in Russia. The reason this worked: apparently this reintroduced a good balance of bacteria into the gut of the child.

How about childbirth? His research suggests that the idea the woman should be lying on her back during labor was introduced by a French doctor, and the idea took hold. Regardless of whether that story is accurate or not, what Dr. Victor found was that in none of Peru´s 74 ethnic groups (and 14 language groups!)  did the mother go through labor on her back. Around the world, some women squat, some recline at an angle, some crouch and lean forward against an object, and some even stand.

Each ethnic group in Peru has its own medical history that has evolved over thousands of years, and what they have learned has frequently proven useful for Peruvian doctors who have studied standard Western medicine.

At the same time, there have been significant strides in reducing infant mortality and the deaths of mothers during childbirth.

All Peruvians have health care, but 80% have supplementary insurance. Peru has the most complete national vaccination program in all of South America, Dr. Victor said.

The top three health issues are malnutrition, infant deaths and childbirth deaths of mothers. But there are also chronic breathing problems due to poor cooking practices, and severe body ailments that arise from the packing of large loads on the back. The toughest health challenges are in the high, remote mountain areas.

There is so much more to share, but I must apologize again for the slow computer speed. It has taken me more than 90 minutes to write this small amount.

I hope to soon share with you soon the experience of installing our first cookstove and hawking clean water filters in the marcado of Urubamba. However, getting to a fast internet site can be difficult due to our training, work and travel demands. There is so much here to see and share.

Love,

Roberto


Friday, August 19, 2011

Chapter 15: Sex, drugs and toreadors

LIMA--Reflect on this image for a moment. Yes, it´s an advertisement for altitude sickness pills.As you work through the image, you realize some poor chap is spoiling his Kodak moment in the presence of one of the World´s 7 Wonders. But there´s more going on here than that. There´s a sexual message here.

Sexual Dimorphism. OK, boys are different from girls in more ways than their working parts. Apes are bigger than the members of their harems, and men are bigger than women. But spider guys are smaller, dangerously so, when the passion ends. And how about those fish I was reading about¿ (And how about that funny question mark, while we´re at it¿) The species in question have males about the size of a skin tab and they attach themselves to the females, who may have a regular harem of these tiny romeos.
 
Dimorphism extends to habits, too. Why do men spit? (I just found the regular question mark on this nutty keyboard.) For that matter, why do they scratch, and burp, and do that fourth thing that I don´t want to mention here. Women don´t do that, do they?

And did you notice? It´s not the woman who is hurling in the advertisement for altitude sickness pills. It´s the guy. While the guy in the center is staring off into space like he doesn´t want to know, the woman on his left looks revolted. Like that never happened to her. What? Women don´t throw up from altitude sickness? Or are we just coddling them? Why couldn´t all four of those people be barfing? How chauvanistic.

Stopping traffic. Pretty girls have been known to cause car wrecks. But in Cusco, they try to prevent them. To wit: You hear a lot of tweeting along busy cobblestone streets, even with traffic lights.

The toreadors: 
          Cusco pedestrians
          Can safely be said
          To fall in two classes--
          The quick and the dead.
Check out this intersection at the traffic circle around Plazoleta Limacpampa: In this photo mamacito is teaching chico to look both ways and then run like hell across the cross-walk. Hell, they ought to call those white lines cross-hairs. Cars don´t slow down for nobody. Watching an intersection is like watching a Viennese waltz -- people swirling around each other like a morphing pinball game. But they seem to have the system down.

There´s a lot more to share, but I´m hampered by the lack of a photo editing program and computers that have to stop and catch their breath due to the altitude. Here´s a few short cultural notes:

Cusco:   You fly over whatI  call ¨mesa de montanas¨ Soon out of Lima you are flying over a plateau characterized by waves of mountain ranges that serves to isolate the people in the mountains from the coastal areas. Counting the Amazon lowlands, Peru is really three countries.
Local time:  My cell phone automatically resets itself, even though I can´t get my messages.
White water:  So far, so good. It´s when it turns yellow that you know you need to pay attention.
The shower at my hotel: It comes in three temperatures, chilled, tepid and scalding.
Cocaine: If you haven´t thought about this, I´m worried about you. Yes, I´ve already had some. They gave it to me when I got to the hotel. Very small amounts, though. They put the leaves in the tea. Gives it a strange leafy flavor. Supposed to help with altitude. They even have coca candy: Damn, why did it turn out upside down?

This side of the label shows it´s all legal and everyting. Does that mean I can bring some home to share? Yeah, right.  
The label uses the word, Keshua, instead of Quechua. Interesting.


Corn nuts:  They don´t put out salsa and chips at Trujillo´s restaurant. They put out toasted maize kernels. They are quite tasty. I asked what they were and when I found out remembered those bags of roasted, salty hominy we could get from dispensers in junior high school.
Pulse:  For me, at rest, at sea levels, it´s 51. In Cusco, it´s 68-76. I took it after a meal and during a nap.
Inca presence:  You see it in the natives, but it´s also underfoot. Shops are built atop pieces of Inca wall.
The reason I believe it´s an Inca wall is that there appears to be no mortar and some stones are irregular in shape.

I´m tired of fooling with this computer. That´s all you get today.

Hasta luego

And Amor,

Roberto



Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Chapter 14.1: Intermission

Two things:

First: I will be in Peru Aug. 18-September 3. For those of you who are following the diaries, they can be found on this blog at http://incadiaries.blogspot.com/.

Because I'm not sure what Internet services and computers will be like, it's my intent to update the blog, then draw from that to send the e-mails. For those of you looking forward to the dispatches, you will have two possible ways to stay updated—I hope.


One issue I'm wondering about is the ability to upload photos from my camera. Without photos I think the narrative suffers.

Second: There's a very impressive video about the cook stove project in Peru.

It's not long, and it tells the tale well. You can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neZZvvnL8Lg&NR=1&feature=fvwp

Love,

Robert
..

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Chapter 14: The Mount Adams Experience










Dedication: To Betty, my deceased wife of 31 years and a New Jersey transplant who taught me to appreciate the Northwest’s outdoors. Her blue backpack followed me closely up Mount Adams.


 
The point of climbing Mount Adams was to experience the sensations of high altitude similar to Cuzco, Peru, where I will be heading in barely a week. After two climbs on Mount Rainier, with the second obtaining an altitude of 8,700 feet, reaching Adams’ 12,300-foot summit seemed within reach. But Adams was nothing like Rainier. Rainier was cold. Adams was unexpectedly hot. What had promised to be a challenging climb for me became an impossible one, due to miscalculations and equipment failure. 

Bigger than Rainier

Adams is a big mountain – bigger than Rainier, though not as high. Situated 31 miles east of Mount St. Helens, it covers 250 square miles, with its eastern slope part of the Yakima nation. Its volume is 85 cubic miles, second only to Mount Shasta in the category of Cascade stratovolcanoes. According to Wikipedia, its main cone was built when Adams was covered by a glacier in the last ice age. When lava came in contact with the ice, it shattered. Constant heat and caustic gasses has broken down much of its rock into clays, iron oxides, quartz and sulfur-rich compounds. There is so much sulfur on the mountain that there was interest in mining it during the 20th Century. Separate vents generated cone-building eruptions. There is a false summit on the south side, reaching 11,500 feet. The highest point is a small lava cone 800 feet higher.

Like Rainier, Adams is largely covered by snow, and you are literally “walking on water” when you ascend. Unlike Rainier, Adams is close to the Columbia River, whose microclimate yielded plenty of sunshine and warmer air.

There are some great views, like this one of Mount St. Helens:

 
Exhaustion and dehydration
I dressed for Rainier, wearing ski pants while my companions, Roger and Ron, wore cutoffs. In the interest of carrying less I left behind my safari pants, thinking they wouldn’t be warm enough once we were on snow, and therefore guaranteeing I would sweat—especially at moments like the one below, where the climb was pretty steep and the likelihood of sliding backward was real. The top edge of this particular bank, where the snow becomes increasingly vertical is called a "lip," and there was one like this beaconing us at the false summit. (I found out later that Roger had deliberately led us up this path to prepare us for the much scarier one at the false summit.)


We started at 5,600 feet and camped the first night at 8,600 feet, planning to find a fresh water source at elevation. We didn’t. Dripping with sweat, having exhausted my two liters of water, I found myself dehydrated and very tired. Roger was tired also: When I asked him to pull one of two water bottles out of my pack, he handed me the empty one. It was clearly time to camp, and we stopped 400 feet short of our initial goal, an area called the “lunch counter.”

Rock Island Lines



 
The lunch counter is characterized by several lava rock outcrops. They are stretches of rock islands in a sea of white and are populated with “stone igloos.” The lava can be smooth or jagged, with small flat sandy places where tents may be situated. Over the years individuals—probably hikers—have stacked lava stones into circular walls to protect tents from the elements. After setting up the tent, Roger acknowledged this likely would be his last climb of Adams. He had made 10 ascents of Adams, the last one seven years ago, when he was 60. We used his camp stove to melt some water for the morning. I ate a sandwich, and had a hot drink. Roger suggested waiting until morning to melt more drinking water.


Night
At night, the Milky Way was clearly visible, as was the Drinking Gourd, which floated just above the summit. One of its stars blinked on and off, perhaps due to clouds by the mountain. A meteor disappeared over the horizon. The stars weren’t as bright as I had expected. To the west there was a dim glow, and farther south, lights from some town were visible beyond several rows of foothills. It was warm. I lay down atop the $180 mummy bag I had bought after nearly freezing on Rainier. Later I crawled into the bag. 

Morning
 Sometime during the wee hours, the air had become frigid and I needed gloves and a couple wraps to stay warm. But it still was much warmer than Rainier. This is how the false summit looked at daybreak. Those tiny dots are climbers.



 
Die another day
Roger started up his cook stove for oatmeal and to melt more water. Like last night there was a small flame coming out of a tiny opening in the stove. Strange…This morning that tiny flame grew, and suddenly the entire stove was engulfed. A seal had broken and our heat source for melting additional water was gone.


 
Yes, we’re surrounded by water. It’s everywhere. But with all the people who have climbed up Adams, I’m reminded of Tallulah Bankhead’s comment that she was “pure as the driven slush.” I’d like to boil my water if possible before drinking it. After a very light meal the night before, an exhausting workout that represented only half our ascent, virtually no breakfast prior to a 3,700-foot climb, only one liter of water to drink when two proved to be insufficient the day before, and a camp stove that self-destructed, I remembered a homily an Army major shared with us at Defense Information School 43 years ago: “Death is nature’s way of telling you it’s time to slow down.” That burning stove was an omen. Dozens  of hikers were heading for the summit Sunday, but I wasn’t going to be one of them.

Roger and Ron strapped on crampons and went ahead, deciding to settle for the false summit.













 
Due to the large number of climbers, they separated confidently, and Ron was back at camp by 2:30 p.m. Roger returned by 4 p.m. It took them several hours to reach the false summit and 10 minutes to glissade back down. The photo below tells you what Roger saw halfway down the long slide.


Lost
Having sat around all day roasting on the snow field and consuming most of my liquids, I was impatient to set out, and I plunge-stepped downhill, leaving Ron and Roger behind, and eventually hidden behind an undulation of  the snowbank. When I next saw them, they had glissaded into a deep ravine and I was on a slope above, negotiating a snow hazard – a slump that bordered the Rock Island Line of lava outcrop that offered a safer descent. I took the Rock Island Line, ‘cause its zig-zag path looked like a mighty good road. But that road led me to choosing between a rock or snow cliff descent. Roger and Ron were nowhere in sight. I hiked back uphill, basking in the thought that I would spend another night on the mountain with Roger’s tent all to myself, while he and Ron would have to share a one-man tent after consuming chili and onions the day before.

Found
But Ron was waiting uptrail – they had been following my tracks. We backtracked further to a flag I had ignored earlier because it directed me down a 70-degree slope. I had thought there would be a better route and was reluctant to descend the shady side of a slope where the snow likely was already freezing. However, waiting on a rock near the flag was a marmot, a symbolic St. Christopher, promising me safe passage.

Trust me
If the marmot wasn’t enough, there was always Roger, the undying optimist and messiah of snow hiking, telling me this was the way. Walking on this kind of water is fun for him, while I, like Peter, (“Oh ye, of little faith”) tend to sink quickly as soon as I step out of the boat.

Descending this bank was like walking down a ladder, facing outward, with our only handrail being our ice axes, which we jammed into the snowbank, while we slid or stamped our feet into the depressions left by the last courageous soul who preceded us down this precipitous route. Ron led, tried to cross a glissade path and plunged into the trough, making an immediate and very impressive ice axe arrest that stopped him cold. And then, what-the-hell, he continued the plunge, gliding to the bottom while Roger and I crab-walked down.

Fame
The only other event of note before we reached our car and campsite at 8 p.m. was running into a troupe of boy scouts who had made it all the way to the summit (grrrrrrrrr), and who asked if I was the Robert that had gotten lost and for whom Roger and Ron had been yelling. That’s 30 minutes of fame I could have done without.

The next chapter should be coming to you from Cuzco. We’ll see.

Love,

Robert

P.S. Here are some additional photos you may enjoy: