Chapter 23: The stoves of Little Afghanistan

CCotowincho, Agosto 26-- The tall, boxy stetson the Quechua woman wore couldn´t hide the fact that this grandmother was not even five feet tall. The lines on her mocha-colored face disclosed her years. She stepped out of the clinic into the bright noon-day sun and her small eyes glanced in my direction. I was close enough to the doorway that she extended her hand. I wasn´t one of the clinicians who had waited on her, but she extended her hand nonetheless. She was grateful.

Inside the clinic there was an oblong rectangular poster, a 360-degree view of the Urubamba valley as seen from CCotowincho, which is called ¨Afghanistan¨by the locals for its rugged, stark landscape. To one side you can still see the scar where a landslide deposited a pile of rubble along this border of Urubamba. The poster, which showed the soaring mountains that ring this valley included a slogan: "Una comunidad de viviendas productivas." (A community of productive housing.) The aspiration is noteworthy. Many of the homes in CCotowincho are as humble as the sod houses of  pioneers of the American prairie. A ditch beside one home where we installed a stove  served as the latrine. Much of the earth is chalk-like. These people are the poorest of the poor. And yet the slogan on that poster may be spot-on."Everyone who lives here is coming from a worse place," observes Joe Lerman, an aspiring doctor and one of the local staff at the ProPeru office in Urubamba. This is a community whose homes and lives are literally rising from rubble. The dirt these people walk on has become the stuff of new lives and buildings that stand as evidence of a stubbornly indomitable spirit.

  If the slogan is not yet the reality, it represents the aspiration of these people who live in the service area of Urubamba and have their own ¨president.¨ (In Peru, outlying areas have presidents; cities have mayors.)

We had visited CCotowincho earlier in the week as a preparatory visit for installing stoves. The president had met us and asked whether we might set up a clinic for a handful of residents who needed attention. ProPeru had expected our clinic to run for a couple hours while part of our contingent installed stoves. But when the clinic opened, the handful grew and the clinic ran into the afternoon. One man had experienced problems urinating for two years (due to an enlarged prostate), so he drank less fluids, dehydrating himself. A woman laid her son on a gurney and told the clinicians he wasn´t well. Patty, a doctor from South King County, collected a urine sample, smelled it, and realized the child was dehydrated. Apparently the mother had been taking herbs that slowed her lactation--or perhaps the effect was passed to the son through her breast milk. A mother with three teeth missing sat on a bench and nursed her baby, who kept her eyes locked cautiously on me while I played peek with her. She reached up to touch her mother´s cheek, and the mother recoiled; did she have another tooth problem? People came in with back and knee pains, probably caused from years of packing heavy loads. There was a case of bronchitis and another of epilepsy with possible brain damage from falling. Another individual had gall stones.

While this was going on, I and Avaleena Bhati worked on a stove that for the time being was outside a house. The family´s plan was to expand the house, eventually enclosing the stove. Avaleena was born in Pakistan and came to the United States as an infant. She lives in Seattle and hopes to go to the University of Washington to study to become a physician´s assistant. her boyfriend is studying to be a physician, and they plan to marry in December. Supervising and guiding us was Christina, a volunteer, who returns to the states on Monday. We slathered on the sun block and got to work, eventually running out of barro--mud--that serves as the glue for the stove parts. A neighbor came to the rescue by mixing up some more, and Jaime Olave, director of the stove project, shown below, put on the finishing touches with a trowel.

This is how the finished stove looked. The chimney will be extended when the new room is added around it.

Installing cleaner-burning cookstoves isn't just a matter of showing up with some ceramic tiles and a wheelbarrow of mud. It is a socio-political endeavor at which Jaime excels. The first day we visited CCotowincho involved Jaime checking in on a housewife to see how she was using the stove and whether it was working for her, then knocking on some doors to see whether residents were using their stoves successfully. The photo below shows what one of them looked like. Note that instead of sitting on a burner the pots sit in a well, where they trap more of the heat, which means water boils faster. The pots sit on iron re-bar, which is easily replaced. Jaime has made several modifications to the original stove design making it easier for the homeoner to maintain and repair. The concept is that, if ProPeru ceased to exist today, the stoves could still be maintained affordably.

The picture below, taken August 29, shows a "four-burner" stove Jaime Olave built for a local "restaurant."  There is a bedroom door right beside the kitchen. Until this stove was installed, with its chimney, smoke was continually filling this kitchen and escaping into the bedroom. for several hours each day. Note: Smoke in a room reflects the light from a camera flash. There is NO smoke reflection in this kitchen.

 The next day, August 30, we were back in town, installing a stove in this room, which served as the kitchen and bedroom for a home complex. The object in front of the door is the metal mold around which we situated the bricks and ceramic plates used to construct the stove.

 Opposite this small building, a new one was arising, using adobe bricks built from the same type of "barro"  we used to create the stove.

Our stove-building team included several Global Outreach staffers from Seattle, including Amanda Gary, a biology student, and a couple of rug rats who wanted to watch the gringos. I introduced myself to them and they disappeared around a corner, giggling and calling my name. Then they got into the act, imitating the adults by grabbing handfuls of mud and passing it off for me to bring into the other crew members who were slapping it over bricks and tiles to build the new stove. Curbing their enthusiasm proved to be a real quality control challenge until Amanda slowed them down by teaching them some verses of "Row Your Boat." Here she is, leading the chorus:

 I would like to add that a few days earlier, our ProPeru team had visited this home as part of a   a COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) survey. Surveys can be tricky when the man of the house is illiterate. The little girl pictured above assisted. It's not clear which adult woman she was describing, but our preliminary indications were that on a scale of 40, that individual  showed a score of 35. Questions dealt with phlegm, coughing, tightness of chest, limits on home activities, sleep patterns, energy levels, etc. The high score comes as no surprise when there's no chimney and the kitchen is also the bedroom. I'd like to add something here here in closing, but I'm not sure what else there is to say.
Love,
Robert

Chapter 22: The Inca salt mine and agricultural research station

Maras,  August 21. The high plains above Urubamba are primarily farmlands that incongruously look out over glaciated, dry mountains. It's strange, thinking of farmers growing crops at 11,000 feet in a land so arid that the mountains which frame the vista are crested with ice but barren of snow. It's Sunday, and we are heading for Maras, a Quechuan community where, in the coming days, we will flouride the teeth of school children,  teach them to wash hands, and install water filters in their classrooms in what, at first appearance, looks like a futile attempt to interdict the cycle of parasites that feed on them. But today the health issues don't hold our attention. We are driving to the canyon where the children of the sun used that sun to evaporate water from a briny mountain stream in order to collect the water-borne salt. 500 years after the fall of the Inca empire, their descendants still gather salt in an estimated 6,000 evaporation ponds, raking the crystals into mounds and then bagging the salt for distribution.. From the road above, it looks like an industrial Superfund cleanup site, a bleak landscape of yellow brackish pools and ground poisoned with chemicals.

 Within those pools, laborers toil under an unrelenting sun.

 Salt-laden streams are channeled toward the ponds, encrusting the surrounding landscape.

 The view is almost surreal:

 A barefoot worker rakes the salt crystals into piles to further drain and dry.

 Pyramids of salt will be gathered and bagged.

 At a shed on one side of the canyon,the bagged salt awaits distribution.

A few miles from here, there are natural depressions, 500-foot deep sink holes caused by leaching of calcium-rich soils. Research that turned up seeds has contributed to the theory that the Incas studied the impact of the natural microclimates in these depressions to learn about growing crops.

 Note those  rocks set into the sides of the terraces. That is an Inca stairway, without bannister. They are not easy to descend.

 They are easier to climb , but it's still 500 feet back up to the top.

 Next time: Installing stoves.

Love,

Robert

Chapter 21: The Apu of Picchu and other observations

Although I did wax poetic about it a couple chapters ago, I have an admission to make: Machu Picchu wasn’t the thrill I had anticipated. I mean, the Incas had it down well. Great stone masons! Effective administrators! Wonderful architects! Gotta love those guys. But hundreds of years before Macchu Picchu the Mayans had constructed Chichen Itza, which I had the good fortune to visit  in 2010. Those Mayans were amazing. Have you ever noticed how light streaming through the gaps in venetian blinds bends and casts shadows with jagged patterns on a wall?  For example this photo from my college days:  (I hope the photos come through. Theoretically, they're attached, but the Internet can be funny at times.)

The blinds work like a lens that bends the light. The Mayans created the same effect with a the levels of a square pyramid which they situated to catch the sun’s rays on the solstices so that light undulated down the side of a staircase creating a snake-like movement to signal that it was time to plant or harvest, or whatever.

Machu Picchu is wonderful, but the Mayans help keep these things in perspective. They could have taught the Incas a thing or two. But people still  go oooh and aaahhhh at Machu Picchu—my colleagues, for example:

Some visitors hold their hands close to this sacred rock to feel its “energy”:

Others meditate:

Some of us just hike up that long trail you can see on the hillside below to visit the sun gate, where we get spectacular views of the site. (This was a 1,000-foot ascent and took almost an hour.

When I got to the top I was able to look right across at Huayna Picchu, that tall mount that serves as a backdrop for the ancient city. For a video on what it’s like up there, please go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF8kXFQrNpY From those perspectives, it’s not hard to see why the Incas thought the mountains were spirits, or Apus. The cliffs are amazingly sheer in places, leaving the mountains standing like sentries to guard the passes to the Inca strongholds. Anything coming off those slopes does so with a lot of spirit.

By the way, here’s what the Inca trail looks like near the sun gate. Try running up that hill in sandles, or whatever they wore. The podiatrists must have been well paid.

The llamas take it all this pretty stoically. They’ve been watching outsiders show up for hundreds of years, and they can appear pretty blasé—these two for example.

Here’s another pair watching me take their photo after getting off the bus:

And yet…There are some interesting things to discover at Machu Picchu. For example, here’s the Inca’s own personal privy. Bet you didn’t know he had his own, did you?

And you remember those magazines you used to read as a kid that had photos with images hidden in them that you had to discover? Check out this rock arrangement – I don’t know if this is supposed to be the Easter Bunny or the Playboy Bunny, but either way he/she  looks a little grumpy to me.)

You may notice that these rock walls for the buildings in this photo aren’t as fancy schmancy as the fine stone work in this wall behind Jill Wakefield, the chancellor at Seattle Central Community College.

Apparently the quality of the stone work had a lot to do with how important the particular stone formation was. There was a lot of quality that went into the one below, for example, because it was designed to catch the sun’s rays coming up the valley on the solstice.

Oh, here’s probably my favorite shot: I wonder – is that a golf course?

Wish I could share more about this place

Love,

Robert

chapter 20–Homecoming: Contraband, counterfeits, indigestion Insomnia, paralysis, exhaustion and a mighty wind.

OK, so the e-mailed versions of the chapters aren't numbered sequentially , and the next installments of the diary are going to present things out of chronological order. And I suppose you want a refund? Well, life is messy, and travel can be confusing, so just sit back and enjoy the story, most of which is true, although some may be a little exaggerated. When I'm trying to stay current while shifting from one unpronounceable village name  to another without a road map, the computer at the hostel  is glacially slow, the Internet is unresponsive, I'm getting ready to fly between continents , and my colleagues are scattering to the winds, sometimes hoping for news on time and spelled right is just beyond realistic expectation. So anyway, I'm home and I'll try to fill in the gaps as best I can. The Diaries Continue!

At this point, it's probably appropriate to break into song, and what better tune than Dusty Springfield's Windmills of your mind from The Thomas Crown Affair? What I would suggest, however, is that for "mind" you substitute "gut", because at the time I was leaving, the windmills of my tummy were churning "Like a carouselle that's turning, running rings around the Moon.” But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Here are the lyrics, if you’re interested. Use your imagination when applying this to my upper and lower G.I. tract:

Round, like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel.
Never ending or beginning,
On an ever spinning wheel
Like a snowball down a mountain
Or a carnaval balloon
Like a carousell that's turning
Running rings around the moon

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it's face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

etc…

As
Cool, clear…
I would lay odds that most Americans haven't got the faintest idea of the incredible wealth we enjoy by simply turning on a tap and bathing our throats in sweet water chilled to 55 degrees by flowing through pristine pipes situated in the cool earth. It is a miracle we partake of every day. And just as the "power to tax is the power to destroy," the simple reality of even slightly impeding access to cool, clean water takes its toll, day by day. Just a few sips too few of tepid water on a regular basis, and your mouth can begin feeling like the bottom of a slightly dried out paste pot. Which is how my mouth felt the final Friday night in Peru after a food orgy that I should have avoided. We had experienced two weeks of safe food and drink, prepared each day by two lovely ladies at Pro Peru, Luz and Villma, shown below.

On our final day these two ladies prepared a meal of noodles and cheese and stuffed peppers that couldn’t be beat. We should have stopped there, but someone suggested we go to an avant garde restaurant just off the Plaza de Armas in Urubamba. It was a literal hole-in-the-wall without a ceiling. We piled in under the stars, it was chilly, and the chef began delivering exotic and greasy tapas in great profusion. Through the remainder of That night I awoke periodically to sip water . the following morning I had a déjà vu experience of what I had felt one day 43 years earlier on the ocean swells just outside Westport, Washington when  it occurred to me to wonder whether that hot stuffy-room feeling was an indicator that I was going to be sick.

Well, yes. Dr. Chuck observed that all that greasy food might have had an impact. On a few occasions that Friday I became reacquainted with some of that food, most of which didn’t make it to the lower G.I. Tract. Oh, yeah, there was a little diarrhea, but nothing to write home about (Like you’d want me to.) All I’ll say is that although there were occasionally a few hints of a possible  volcanic lahar, usually the great events were limited to mighty wind storms.

Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of it's own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream.

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it's face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Well, having got off to a great start, I rode in a silent (except for the slow, careful, soulful belches) daze  from Urubamba to Cuzco where some members of our party were kind enough to let me nap on their hotel bed between opportunities to re-examine Friday night’s  meal.
Being all out of Peruvian soles, I had the good fortune of having my taxi fare to the airport covered by Jasvir ….. our group pharmacist about whom there will be more to tell in upcoming chapters. Nice lady. She led me stupefied by the hand through the Cuzco airport, commiserated about the glacially slow check-in process, brought me a cool bottle of water and sympathized while I slowly ambled over to a plastic tote, knelt before it reverently and tried o conjure up one more specimen while succeeding only in freeing up another zephyr of stale air from someplace above my duodenum. The lady at the boarding gate didn’t even turn her head. Cerberus, the three-headed hound that guards the gate to  hades, had clearly succeeded in blocking all passage of sustenance to the labyrinthine maze known as my small intestine, and in its merciless jaws was choking from my prior night’s meal its final dying breaths.. Jasvir, the pharmacy wizard, conjured two magic pink tablets which tamed the great vapors while I silently acquired a new respect for the power of prayer—to the Pepto Bismol deity.

While I’ve tried to make light of my distress, Jasvir deserves some special respect here. She was handling her own duress. Earlier this day she had come to an unsettling discovery—Someone had plucked from her wallet several $100 bills in U.S. currency and substituted counterfeits similar to the one shown here – complete with a Spanish phrase that roughly translated as “Ticket Luck Alasitas”—whatever that means. At this writing, we’re still trying to figure out how the switcheroo could have taken place, and why someone would create currency that was so obviously fraudulent. To her credit, Jasvir graciously resigned herself to the situation: “It’s only money,” she said, softly.

From Cuzco to Lima we shared a flight that could have been uneventful, but had its own excitement. As I was leaving the plane, I noticed a surprising numbness in my arm. My fingers would’t close around the zippers on the pockets of the vest I wore to carry my travel paraphernalia. As I rotated my arm, my hand flopped back and forth. I couldn’t raise it or make a fist. It was at least a half hour before I began to recover movement. I could pinch my fingers and feel the slight pain, but I couldn’t move them. Rather inconvenient. Over time I decided that my head-down in-flight sleep position, my airline pillow, and the weight of the collar of my utility vest must have pinched a nerve in my neck, putting the arm to sleep. Either that or something as innocuous as a stroke.

Caught in the Act!

The final thrill of the return home was finding out I was a smuggler. Waiting to board my Lima-Miami flight, I was approached by a young woman who told me there was something in my luggage that was not allowed. Drugs? Explosives? WHAT?!?!?!?!  After leading me on a labyrinthine stroll into the bowels of the Lima airport and a reviewing my passport, she explained that I was illegally removing from Peru a rock, of all things. More specifically, a fossil of an ammonite, a prehistoric mollusk that the Andes lifted 11,000 feet off the ocean floor several million years ago, discarding it on a table in a tourist trap at an Inca salt mine our group visited on our second afternoon in Urubamba. An ammonite is basically a flattened snail shell. I had always wanted to have one of those, and here was my chance to buy one for only 70 soles —$25 American. Seemed like a good price at the time, and when we got off the train to the jumping-off point to Machu Picchu, we were shuttled through a veritable casbah of trinket sellers with tables covered with fossil ammonites. I’m left wondering how many of these the government confiscates on each out-going flight, and whether they discount them afterward back to the souvenir shops as a sort of business stimulus. I think this is Peru’s twist on Keynsian economic theory, that every dollar spent in an economy gets respent three times. I always wondered how that worked.
But that’s not the worst thing that happened on my return. The real problem will be sorting through and editing 1,426 photos and more than an hour of videos. Ugh.
I hope you are all well. Love,

Chapter 19: Telegram

Sept. 4, 2011—Home. Stop.Tired. Stop. Much to share. Stop. Later. Stop.

Besos Y Abrasos. Stop

Roberto. Stop

Chapter 18: "At Machu Picchu"

August 28, 2011—Someone told me
It's all happening Machu Picchu
I do believe it,
I do believe it's true

Mmmmm. Mmmmm. Whoooa. Mmmmm.

It's a long exhausting journey
All along the Inca trail,
A twisting grueling trek
To Machu Picchu

But you can take the mountain bus,
And forget about the porters,
And your lungs will be so grateful
If you do.
If you do.

Something tells me
It's all happening Machu Picchu
I do believe it
I do believe it’s true

Mmmmm. Mmmmm. Whoooa. Mmmmm.

The natives have a friendly smile,
The Grosbeaks sing so sweet,
But the stones are squeezed so tightly that they're dumb.
The coca tea is helpful for that headaches that you get,
And I prefer it over Cuzco rum...

Mmmmm.

Spanish priests were missionaries.
Llamas replaced dromedaries.
Way up here they'd grow the grain
In garden spots with perfect drainage

Terraces are on the level.
Ground those stones to get that bevel.
Inca Bridge’s a scary treat,
‘Cause you can plunge 2,000 feet.


Mists from Rio Urubamba
Make me want to dance the samba.
Geeze it's hard to breathe up here,
But at least the air is clear.

Scholars made investigations.
Governments did restorations.
Persónas de la Inca raza,
Over there! El Condor Pasa!

What a gas! You gotta come and see
Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu

Max Planking Machu Picchu, Agosto 28, 2011

Chapter 17: Clinic Day—Los Niños

CQAcllaraccay, August 25 -- Today, instead of taking the lead, our ProPeru team was backup.The medical staff of Centro de Salud Maras was heading for an elementary school to fluoride the teeth of young children, teach them to wash their hands, check their stools for parasites, take blood pressure from adults, and see what else blew in the door. (Answer: An eye infection, a herniated disk and a few other odds and ends)

The vehicles picked up the ProPeru team at Hostal de Maizel about 9 a.m. for the 45-minute drive to the mountain village of 50-60 families beyond the salt ponds we had visited on Sunday. This is an area of extreme poverty.  I rode shotgun next to Fortunato, our driver, who spoke very little English, but was most accommodating in practicing Spanish, and very useful in providing some Quechua phrases we could use to talk to people when we arrived: Ari = yes; manen = no; emaynaya kashianke = how are you; and aillimi (I-Yee-Mee) -- well done! That´s about all you need with the kids.

When we arrived in the village square, many adults and children had gathered and were receiving instructions from community leaders. While this was going on, some of us shot photos and made movies. I shared images with the children, who crowded around, pointed at themselves and their friends in the videos and stills and giggled.

Our base of operations became an elementary school play area. We pulled tables out of classrooms to create the location where children would have their teeth painted with fluoride. The person below who is performing this service is Jill Wakefield, chancellor of Seattle Central Community College.

Unlike last year, when they simply spit the solution out, this time they got to rinse their mouths. Our water source was a large water container -- the type used for office water coolers. It was quite heavy, and there was no dispenser, so I was designated the one to wrestle the container into position to pour the water into little plastic rinse cups. My helper was a gentleman named Hector. ¨Usted y you somos equipo Hector,¨ I joked. (You and I are team Hector.) He liked that. The kids would come over for the rinse and Hector would instruct them to spit. We rested the water jug on a table taken from a classroom. To keep the wind from blowing it away, we put a rock inside a plastic grocery bag I had brought to Peru, and used that for our waste basket.

Part way through, a clinician set up a hand-washing demonstration to show kids the importance of having clean hands and how to do it.

As time passed, we ran out of cups. Andrea Insley, head of the Global Outreach program at Seattle Central Community College said they could just spit without water as they did last year. But many of the kids ran to a water faucet for water. I was assured by Hector that it was ¨agua pura,¨ but afterward it was explained to me that he probably didn´t understand what I was asking. No matter. These kids were already exposed to that water. In a little over a week we would be returning to provide water filters for each classroom at the school.

The teeth were serviced, the hand-washing lesson was over. Time for the stool samples. Kids were provided little cups to put some poop in and a clinician examined smears under a microscope for parasites. Virtually all the kids had them (from the water, naturally). They were sent to the pharmacy table to swallow tablets with anti-parasite medication. Running the table was Jasvir,38,  a Sikh who takes time off from work for this kind of service. A while back she fought with her personnel department and won the right to go to Haiti to help in the earthquake disaster, organizing the drugs which had been rushed to the scene so swiftly that there was no order to them. On her breaks she practices some pretty impressive yoga--as do other young women on our team.

While I lugged the water container toward the inside clinic, Jill  was teaching the children the Hokey Pokey. They loved it. I tried to join in. Not a smart idea at 10,000 feet while holding an office water jug. Later I tried something more tame -- playing the harmonica in the play area. Children crowded around to see this strange instrument and hear the unusual music played by the big pale hombre with the week-old, scraggly beard. Some wanted to play it. (Not possible. I have an illness, I explained.) When we return in two weeks I hope to have the Col. Boogie March ( think Bridge on the River Kwai) down well enough to form a couple of marching lines. I think they would love that. But there´s a lot of in-and-out breathing on that piece, and it my be  bit much at altitude.

I wasn´t the only one having fun. Alveena Bhati (Afghanistan-born and living in Seattle) and Linda Nguyen introduced the girls to the fine art of jump rope while the boys competed at spinning old-fashioned tops.

I wish I had written down the slogan painted along the edge of the school´s balcony. It´s hidden away some placed in one of my videos and a little inaccessible at this time. But  here is a rough translation: ¨The next generation is our hope.¨

Besos y abrosos...

Roberto