Highlights from Peru: The Sacred Valley

A month-old alpaca on the left and 3-week-old llama on the right. They might look cute and fuzzy in this photo, but the multiple tender, juicy alpaca steaks I ate were definitely one of the highlights of my trip.

The ruins of the old Incan fortress and temple at Ollantaytambo.

Although various, wide-ranging theories exist, the exact meaning of these six stones, which are the centerpiece of the Ollantaytambo ruins, is still unknown.

Rainbow!

The Urubamba River, which runs through the entire Sacred Valley all the way to Macchu Pichu.

This is an archeological site known as Moray. It served as an agricultural research and investigation station for the Incans. They would plant different crops on different terraces, and then able to control the altitude, shade, and water (through their highly advanced irrigation systems), could conclude the optimum conditions and locations to plant all the different crops they had domesticated.

Not only had the Incans mastered terraced agriculture, they also were brilliant enough to include stairs in their terrace designs. After my nearly two years of agricultural work in El Salvador, what amazes me most is that the Incan people were easily more technologically-advanced farmers 600 years ago than the average Salvadoran farmer is today.

These are photos from a location known as Salinas, which has been in operation since the time of the Incas. They channeled the water of a spring, which emerges with salinity levels nearly equal to the Dead Sea (37%-40%), into thousands of individual pools, where after allowing for 3 months of evaporation, they are left with pounds of easily harvested salt. Today, much like hundreds of years ago during the Incan era, the nearby community then trades the harvested salt for the corn, quinoa, or potatoes produced in other areas.

These are the ruins of Pisac, located above a curve in the Urubamba river near the beginning of the Sacred Valley. Much like Macchu Pichu or Ollantaytambo (pictures above), the ruins include agricultural areas, fortressed military areas, and religious areas.

Changing Political Views

The following is an article written for and posted on a friend of mine's blog, The Shortest Road. Check it out here or there.

During my college years, my admiration, real recognition, of what the United States represented, was, and stood for, was immature. During the ’08 Presidential Election, calls by liberals claiming they would de-camp to Canada, Europe, or some other liberal bastion if Sarah Palin ever became Vice-President were common. I heard these and—maybe out of a youthful romanticism, or maybe just unchecked excitement and loyalty to Obama’s campaign, for whatever reason—I agreed. However, since then, my stance towards the importance, the gift, of being born in America, and growing up American, has developed, and I will never feel that way again.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m still a liberal voter. You can punch my ballot for Obama in November right now, and for that matter, any other Democrat who can get themselves on the ticket. But, since graduating from college and moving to El Salvador, where I have been working as a Sustainable Agriculture Volunteer with Peace Corps for almost two years, my love, respect, and admiration for America— and not just the NFL, NBA, and July 4^th, but everything else it represents as well—has grown exponentially. Many will think of America’s reputation as affected by its habit of becoming involved in cultural, political, trade, and real wars abroad in all sorts of ways that, quite frankly, do not make the United States many friends. This reputation I regret—from the Iraq War, to tacit support of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, to an unwillingness to agree to the Kyoto Protocol or any other global climate agreement, to its bloodily muddy history supporting right-wing governments in Latin America—but is not what I refer to. The focus put on basic education, women’s rights, environmental awareness, and sexual education, which are such taken-for-granted parts of the American experience they are easily forgotten, is what I am talking about.

In El Salvador, I am currently living in a very rural community of about 350 people. Only one woman in the entire community currently has any form of professional employment. 5 have high school degrees. There are currently 5 girls 15 years old or younger that are pregnant. In 3 of those cases, the father is over 30. In not one of those cases, did the now-pregnant girl stay in school past 4^th grade. The water system is laden with parasites and diseases. I just got back from my Peace Corps-required annual trip to the doctor—I have three different types of parasites myself. But my body has already fully grown and developed and I have free access to medicine and doctors whenever I’d like. Because of water contamination, lack of nutritional food, and a host of other reasons, the local health promoter estimates 45% of children suffer from malnutrition, stunting not just their physical height and weight, but their brain development as well, limiting their potential for life before they’ve even had their 2^nd birthday. Condom use is unheard of, and birth control use by women is thought of by men as something that only leads to women’s infidelity. Family planning is rare. Any factual knowledge of STDs is almost non-existent. There is no trash collection—it is buried or burned in the best of cases, but 95% is just thrown in the creek, ravine, or wherever else seems convenient. This wasn’t an issue 20 years ago when everything was made from locally-sourced, native materials. Then plastics arrived. Now it’s a problem.

I love El Salvador and always will. The people, culture, and the welcoming, sharing personality are impossible to complain about. In fact, I just agreed to an extension of my Peace Corps service; I’ll now be spending 7 more months than I had previously committed to in El Salvador. This country is a special, special place. But, in the United States, drop-out rates of 10% in a high school are considered troubling numbers. Women are graduating college at a higher rate than males, and though their pay still lags behind, their pursuit of complete equality is light-years ahead of where it is in almost the entire world. Climate change may be refuted by some, but environmental awareness and education is nearly universal, and ideas such as raising mileage requirements for cars or taxing plastic bags at grocery stores are no longer considered “extreme, liberty-infringing, liberal ideas.” Sex education, abstinence-based or not, is unavoidable, and all young men and women are relatively well-informed of their results of their decisions, even if inadvisable decisions are still made.

So I love El Salvador, but at the same time, I can’t wait to be home. And not just to see my family and enjoy my first proper Thanksgiving in three years. Nowhere is perfect, but after my time in El Salvador with Peace Corps, I’ve learned the United States is much closer to perfect than I ever could have previously imagined as a more naïve, younger me fretted about the results of an election. There are other highly developed countries that offer an equally comfortable life, but after seeing first-hand how most of the world lives, the small issues I disagree with in the States no longer represent reasons to move abroad. Realizing how small these issues really are just inspires me to continue living in the States, treasuring the luck I’ve had to have been born a citizen, and work to make the changes that years earlier would have just hastened a move to Canada. No matter who wins the Presidential Elections coming up in November—Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, or Barack Obama—the USA is a place I’ll always proudly call home.

A Few Going-Away Shots

Entering my last few days as a Volunteer in my current community, San Luis, I've been spending almost all of my time visiting the families, people, and counterparts who I've worked most closely with during the last 20 months.

Many of these people have become very close friends who I will very much miss and will always remember. They've all graciously opened up their families, homes (especially their kitchens), lives, and cultures to me.

Above is the team of park rangers that patrol the nearby natural protected area where I have spent a lot of my time hiking, building latrines and camping areas, and translating for foreign visitors.

From young kids who come to my house just eat the mangoes falling from my trees, to the fathers and sons who play soccer with me on the community soccer team, to the wives and grandmothers who seems to always have food ready in their kitchens for whenever I may arrive, I'll never forget my time in San Luis.

Changes Are A-Coming

Over the last few months, Peace Corps in El Salvador (along with the Peace Corps programs in Honduras and Guatemala) have been forced to adjust to some big changes prescribed by Peace Corps Headquarters in Washington. No one in the Peace Corps community—from staff members to Volunteers to the very communities where Volunteers work—could escape dealing with these sudden changes, including me. As a result, in less than two weeks, I will be moving from the far west of the country—the tiny, 300-person strong, rural community of San Luis, the place I have called home for the last 20 months—to the far east—San Francisco Gotera, a, at least relatively, bustling town of about 10,000. San Francisco Gotera (or just “Gotera”, as it is universally known in El Salvador) is the small, infamously hot (the first thing literally every Salvadoran tells me when I inform them I’m moving there: “Do you know how hot it is in Gotera?”) town that doubles as the capital of the northeastern, ruggedly mountainous department of Morazán. Morazán was the epicenter of the guerrilla forces and the most intense fighting during the Salvadoran Civil War, leaving it very poor with completely devastated economies, communities, and families. Once in Gotera, I will be adjusting to a new role within Peace Corps as well, shifting from working as a Sustainable Agriculture Volunteer to serving as a Regional Leader, more or less supervising and overseeing all of the other Volunteers in Eastern El Salvador.

These last two weeks in my site promise to be some of my most hectic, as I have daily schedules crammed with various despedidas (going-away parties), individual good-byes, loose ends on projects, and various Peace Corps paperwork. There are festive activities—a despedida in the nearby naturally-protected area with all the park rangers and staff, playing in my last soccer game with San Luis’s team, and another despedida dinner party with all the members of San Luis’s ADESCO (Asociación Desarrollo Comunal: a locally elected group of leaders, all from San Luis, which acts as it’s representation and leadership). And there will be the more emotional—saying goodbye to the host family where I lived for my first two months and ate all my meals during my entire time here and my other neighbors and close friends. Also, the time-consuming—visiting all the families involved in my tilapia project, reviewing what they’ll need to do when harvesting their first fully-grown fish just 2 or 3 weeks after my leaving, and completing the various final reports and summaries required by Peace Corps. All of that, on top of trying to find a place to live once I get to Gotera, figuring out how I am going to get all my stuff moved clear across the country to my new home, and preparing for a 3-week trip to Peru, and it’ll certainly be a busy next two weeks.

However, to help me get through the emotional and busy days and nights to come, I do have that trip to Peru to look forward to. I will be traveling with my Mom for the first ten days then traveling on my own for about 10 more days, before heading back to El Salvador in early May to attend training for my new Regional Leader position. In Peru, I’m excited to be heading to Machu Pichu, other various ruins in the high mountains of surrounding Sacred Valley, Cuzco, Arequipa, Lake Titicaca, Lima, and probably at least a few other places while traveling on my own. I’ll surely be posting pictures to the blog upon my return.

Part of what I am looking forward to about moving to Gotera is that I will be transitioning from very rural Salvadoran life to life in a small city. I will have running water (all the time!), electricity (all the time!), cell phone reception and internet service (all the time!), and potentially even air conditioning in my bed room (a key feature in one of the houses I’m looking at moving into). While I have loved every moment of living in San Luis, and a huge part of why I joined Peace Corps was to live a bit “off the map,” without electricity and water and in a place where a cell phone signal or internet service was rare, after over a year and a half…well, I think I’ll certainly enjoy that first shower in Gotera. I feel like after leaving a place where bucket-bathing and spotty electricity are not just the norm, but a given, I’m going to feel, relatively, like I’m mine as well be back in America, enjoying the comforts of the completely developed world! And more than internet or running water, I’m also looking forward to being able to go workout at a gym or play pick-up basketball every afternoon in a nearby park, something that just wasn’t feasible in San Luis, it being over an hour from the closest small town equal in size to Gotera. And while I have fulfilled one of my desires for joining Peace Corps—living a bit “off the map”—another of my goals was getting to see and experience as much of El Salvador and Central America as possible. While I have passed through Gotera once or twice by car, and I have traveled a bit in Eastern El Salvador, it is a side of the country I do not know close to as well as the West. And now that I very well know my way around the rest of the country, I’m extremely excited to learn my way around Eastern El Salvador—especially the different traditional foods eaten and Spanish slang there.

The next biggest change to my life after returning from Peru will be the day-to-day work I am involved with. In San Luis, I have no one to report to and to supervise, and am basically on my on in my own community, free to do as I like, starting and stopping any sort of project I like, whenever I like. Additionally, the focus of most of my largest efforts is agricultural and the majority of my time is spent with rural, Salvadoran farmers. In Gotera I’ll be taking over a new position as Regional Leader—a newish position in El Salvador’s Peace Corps program, which can be loosely defined as supervisor, manager, and support for all the Volunteers in one’s region. I’ll be visiting the communities of all the Volunteers in Eastern El Salvador (to check up on their personal status, the status of the projects, and help them solve or deal with any issues within their community, etc.), organizing regional Volunteer retreats, meetings, and get-togethers, supporting Peace Corps in their setting up of a new regional office to be located in Gotera, and organizing regional youth leadership camps. Instead of dealing with rural Salvadorans on a daily basis, it is much more likely I spend my days planning and discussing with Peace Corps staff in San Salvador, local organization and institutions run by professional Salvadorans, and other Volunteers. Instead of not deciding on my day’s schedule until after waking up, eating breakfast, then reading for an hour or two in my hammock, I will probably have to start keeping a day planner or some sort of calendar to schedule the, at least slightly, more rigid, planned-out life I’ll be living.

So, with all these changes, travels, and transitions ahead of me in the next month or two, I couldn’t be more excited, and will do my best to keep all of ya’ll as updated as possible via the blog.

Also, just last, boring a technical note: For all of you that were planning on sending me something via snail mail, I’d hold off for now. While I will certainly have an address where I can receive mail in Gotera, I still do not know exactly what it will be, and if something has not already been sent, it won’t be arriving at my current address in time for me to get it before leaving. Thanks!

The Past Month in El Salvador

Along with 6 or 7 other Peace Corps Volunteers in Western El Salvador, I helped organize a weekend-long youth leadership retreat for teenage girls from each of our communities. Each of us brought 4 or 5 girls between the ages of 13 and 18 to three days of discussions and trainings on sexual education, family and career planning, leadership, and self-confidence—all issues that teenage girls are otherwise never exposed to in rural Salvadoran communities. After months of planning, the camp went of without a hitch this past weekend, and was judged a complete success by all who participated.

Above, me and the four girls from my community, San Luis, who came with me to the camp. Below, another Peace Corps Volunteer helping lead a jewelry-making session.

Above, a group photo at the hotel where we ran and organized the entire camp. We took the girls to a hotel high in the mountains, farther from home than they had ever been, and all thoroughly enjoyed getting to see a new part of the country and staying in a nice hotel (in addition to any benefits that came from the actual training sessions, it was also the first time any of the girls had actually take a shower). Below, a few shots from the diploma ceremony with ended the weekend.

From December to March, my community is completely consumed by the sugar cane harvest. Surrounded by thousands of acres of sugar cane and located very close to a sugar mill, the sugar cane harvest is responsible for all employment in the area for these 3 or 4 months.

Harvesting sugar cane is never easy work, but it is made much easier by burning the sugar fields before harvesting them. Burning sugar cane has many negative environmental consequences, and while parts of El Salvador are currently passing legislation outlawing this burning, for now, the only regulation in the San Luis area is that the burning must be done at night. Burning the sugar cane eliminates all the leafy outer-growth of the plant (while the actual cane, which is filled with what will later be processed into sugar, doesn’t burn because of its inner humidity and hard exterior), making the cutting much less taxing, the work at least a little bit cooler, as a breeze can then penetrate the sugar cane, and eliminates the small cuts that plague workers from the sharp edges of the sugar cane leaves.

When fields of sugar cane are burned, all the animal life inside the patch of sugar cane come running out, making for great hunting opportunities for anyone willing to spend a few hours late at night waiting for said animals. While the rabbits are tasty, you’ll also have all types of rats, mice, frogs, opossums, and raccoons come shooting out of the cane. With a few friends of mine, we even found a turtle a few months ago—although, quite sadly, the turtle did not beat the hare and win this race. Unable to out-sprint the flames, we found him quite bar-b-que’d and my friends went ahead and made a soup out of him.

A few nights ago I went with a few friends to help burn their patch of sugar cane and watch as they waited, with slingshots loaded and ready, for all sorts of fleeing animal-life. Being one of the last times I’d be burning sugar cane with them, I decided to snap a few pictures and even take a video.

The Past Month in El Salvador

A few weeks ago I finally decided it had just been too long, and I couldn’t waste any more time getting around to learning how to milk a cow or goat. Besides the fact that it is somewhat essential to my dream of eventually retiring out to a little farm, I figured, if nothing else, it would make for a good story and be a skill I could put on my résumé and use in all those graduate school applications I’ll be filling out post-Peace Corps…

This is my best friend in San Luis, a big jolly guy named Mario, but known to just about everyone but his momma as Pipa. I often go raccoon and opossum hunting with him at night and fishing with him on the weekends. I was invited by a few Ministry of Agriculture counterparts of mine to see a field of experimental new corn seeds they had developed for this coming year and invited him along with me.

A few weeks ago, El Salvador held mayoral and congressional elections all over the country. To avoid any issues or claims of political tampering, Peace Corps informed all of us we weren’t allowed to leave our communities starting a day before the elections until a full day after. To escape the boredom of this lockdown, I decided to make a trip to a nearby swimming hole.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one who had that idea…I was quickly joined by a mysterious Salvadoran man I had never before seen who quickly stripped down to his Speedo and goggles, looked around for about 5 minutes, and without getting even a single toe wet, quickly fled the scene. Note: it is completely possible he was a little bit freaked out by a gringo trying to surreptitiously snap photos of him in a Speedo and that led to his quick departure.

When I got my camera, the box claimed it was waterproof, but out of sheer disbelief and fear, I had always been scared to actually test the claims of being waterproof. However, I decided I had to finally test it…here is my proof, it really is waterproof!