Courtyard Interviews and Trucha Farms

We left for Huilloc Thursday morning, in a little rain storm, the first rain we´ve seen since we´ve been here. Kennedy said rain in July here is like snow in July in the U.S., very bizarre. We drove up in the back of Miguel´s yellow Nissan, about a 45 minute ride, with two Austrian tourists; the new volunteers at the museum, Bill and Michelle, a couple from Boston; and Kennedy. We met our host, Gabriel, and walked through his store to the courtyard behind his house, and stashed our things in a room there with three beds. The rest of the group went down to the school where we filmed on the first day for a weaving demonstration, of which we´ve seen and filmed plenty by now, and we went up to a construction site to interview the workers.

We got there as they were eating lunch, and Albizu led a good conversation with them about tourism, their work as porters, the changes in the town, their lives, why they drank Sprite now instead of chicha during lunch breaks, all this - about seven guys, laying around in a circle, with mud covering their feet from the work. They said they every single person in the town works in tourism, and the first tourists only came about fifteen years ago. We watched them building a house for a new couple with mud and stone bricks that they got from a huge pile outside of town, fashioned for this purpose. A really good scene.

We had some lunch, then walked around with a list that Kennedy and Miguel had given us of people to talk to - we found a few, usually in a courtyard weaving, and Albizu asked them about the collective and the management of tourism in the town. We got really lucky and came across the mayor of OTT district, in town to visit the construction of a new textile market for tourists. He put on a poncho being sold by a lady, grabbed a couple kids and talked about the benefits of tourism for the town, and how these people were living in poverty but the travel agencies hogged all the money from tourism, at their expense - very good interview.

We spent the afternoon watching and translating footage to find out what we had, and where to go from there. We had dinner with our family, cooked over a fire stove, but with combustion gas available - eggs and rice and french fries - we´ve had french fries with almost every meal here. No shortage of potatoes. We watched a video of an unattractive Peruvian lady singing at lots of ruins on their tv, and then the kids watched Son of the Mask.

We got a good interview after dinner with Gabriel about the history of the town, his role as a shaman, which Miguel said was an exagerration, and how tourism has been great for the development of the town. He talked about past NGOs working here in the 80´s and the impact they had - the chimneys in the kitchens, the eucalyptus trees for construction, which we found out were actually very bad for the soil, soaked up all the water. He said farming was great when he was growing up, and now it´s a lot worse. We then tried to sleep under lots of wool blankets in the freezing cold on unforgiving beds, with some wooden slats and a hole cut into it for a toilet out back. Good times.

The next morning we went to the escuela to watch a group of tourists get the weaving spiel. Kennedy and Miguel came with them, and another Peruvian lady as their guide - they wore panchos and Macchu Piccu floppy hats and owned the part, very good. We got a good scene of Gabriel´s daughter preparing to go in the courtyard and in the store, gathering her weavings and dolls and purses into a large manta, or textile, to carry on her back, and meet some girls to walk down to the school. We also finally interviewed Miguel about the town, tourism, the collective, management, all this - he´s a star also. A great set up, with tourists browsing the huge display of mantas in the background, at the school that he helped to build.

We followed them all back to Huilloc to a real kid´s school and watched the Independence Day march with a bunch of kids in the courtyard, goosestepping to some drums in ponchos and little red and white Peruvian flags and chanting Viva Peru!

They left after that, and we wandered around doing more courtyard interviews with people. We found out that most of the town are Evangelistas or Mormons because of missionaries in the area, and that this is good bc they don´t drink and follow strict rules, which is better for tourism. We also heard about an organization that covers most of the surrounding towns called Rondas Campesinos, basically a community court that punishes people for crimes, then hands them over to the police. If you steal a bull, you have to return three bulls and get a healthy beating. There was a big problem with thefts, and now, there´s almost none.

Last night we sat with Gabriel as he made chicha for his son´s 18th birthday over a fire and talked about how changing from a barter system to money affected the town, and made everyone recover their old Inka identities for tourism. We even discovered that a lot of people had resisted modernizing their homes, at least on the outside, bc the tourists like traditional stone and straw homes better.

This morning we went with Gabriel to his trucha, or trout, farm, just off the main road. He has about ten little ponds, each with about fifty trout swimming around. We had a few of them for dinner the night before, served whole. He also has an impressive greenhouse with lots of fruit trees and plants. All of this is his, he says - we found out he is by far the richest man there, bc he married a rich woman from another village. We kind of wished we´d stayed with some of the Mormons. He was good to us, but the town and the surrounding areas have about 2,000 people, and most of them are living hand to mouth - he has more than plenty.

Miguel picked us up this morning and we drove up to Patacancha, another village that the museum works with, recovering the tradition of natural dyes and weaving. It was another thirty minute drive up the mountain, even colder - but it is the center of all the other towns in the area, including Huilloc. All the major meetings are held there, and they have the best school with the best teachers. There are several other villages higher up. The women in the weaving school gathered when they saw Miguel´s yellow truck, and they set up in a courtyard by the river for the show. We interviewed a couple of them, while an alpaca, like a llama but with more expensive wool, roamed around headbutting things. We talked with them for about an hour and got back in the truck to OTT, picking up people along the way, including a group of about 10 or 12 schoolgirls that Miguel kept pulling away from, making them run to catch up. Tonight we´re going to rest, and tomorrow we´re going on horseback to Antipunco, the ´hitching post of the sun´.