7/19

This week was kind of downtime - we learned to open and work the museum store yesterday, where they sell handmade textiles and food products and books and things. A bunch of tourists come in and browse, kind of uncomfortably, and wander out. Sold a couple textiles.

Last night the kids from Seattle had a farewell party at the museum - I took Sebastian. Also, yesterday during lunch we played frisbee in the farm fields across from our house - some former students had left the bee, and they had used it as a plate. We also played one on one soccer on the concrete field. A good day with him. He´s a little slow, also extremely under-educated, but still, a bit thick - but always smiling, a really good kid. There´s two kids that hang out at the museum, Patricia and Luis, about ten, who after a day mastered our cell phones and were manipulating the picture functions, and filled our cards with photos of tourists. I don´t see Sebastian rolling with that too well. He´s very small for his age, he looks like he´s ten. He´s been working w his dad Eduardo on the farm since he was 9, so five years - he´s a pro, I watched him with the pigs and chickens, working the handplow, climbing up and down the rock wall to and from our house, which takes agility - he´s got the farm thing down. So who needs to know geography and stuff?

My madre runs a school for Quechua women in their 40s and 50s to learn Spanish. So the dining room is also a school, with posters and vocab on the wall, and their names written on the board. One bizarre thing - in the courtyard, outside the dining room, where the ducks are, they have a calendar nailed to the stone crumbling wall, 2007, of a bare breasted blond woman with a perm, clearly taken in 1982, carrying a golf bag, w the crotch torn out. Sebastian reinforced it with some nails yesterday, pointing and giggling the whole time. Disturbing. Their storage room has old calendars, also with nude women.

Last night at dinner, to avoid the awkward broken Spanish conversation, I brought in my Ipod and speakers and played dj for Sebastian. He liked The Ramones. Me Gusta! He was also incapable of pronouncing 'ipod'. He managed Rolling Stones after awhile. 'Rrroo...rrrooo....llling... that´s right!' He can´t do the v sound either. But Quechua´s worse than German for harsh gutteral noises - he's got different habits.

Today we went to Calca for the textile market - we were going to go early with David but he never showed, so we got there at noon, and it was over. So we walked around the town looking for stuff to fix the museum computer, which malfunctioned on our first day and has resisted all attempts to revive it.

We also went to Urubamba, where we found more electronics, bought speakers for the movie theater. It´s actually a nice town, much more than the one street we saw when we crashed there during the strike. There´s a beautiful plaza with an old church that they´re restoring and trees brought in from the Canary Islands by the Spanish.

We´re showing The Big Lebowski at the museum Saturday night for 10 soles - the exchange is 3.2 soles to the dollar. They have a nice film screen and projector there. We made posters and put them all around town today - checked the Spanish with folks in the internet store, it checked out, then tonight we were told that most of it was grammatically awful.

Tomorrow we´re going to the village of Chinchera to interview a lady who´s run a textile cooperative there for years, and she speaks English thank God. Their organization is the model for the museum´s cooperative.

We also got in touch with a leader of the town of Cachiqata - his dad´s the real leader, and is the oldest porter on the Inca Trail. The son´s name is Klever. My first born son´s name. He´s starting a collective, or community reserve, there to control ecotourism´s encroachment - they´ll build one hotel, have one tour service, a few restaurants, all owned collectively by the town. They´re basically trying their hardest to ensure that no outside company will profit from their town´s culture or resources or take over their land. That´s unfortunately what´s happened to almost every other town in Peru that has any kind of indigenous 'authentic' culture or old ruins to see - industry finds legal loopholes to expropriate the land and they usually convince the state and local governments to sell. So the citizens are kind of bullrushed, and the towns, like this town, become totally reliant on tourism, and a lot of people kind of become caricatures of themselves to make money. A bit soul killing, and that´s definitely everyday life here. So what he´s doing is very admirable and a nice model for towns to follow, if it works. Lots of people to meet and interview - we just need more everyday life scenes.

Food´s great, no stomach problems, weather´s good, people are friendly, internet´s slow - all´s well.