Cooperativas

We´ve started working at the museum and meeting folks in the town. Things are going very quickly, and our film is coming together well. We´ve got a reallly good story here and some great people to profile. Kennedy, the woman that runs the museum, is great and is connecting us with lots of good people. She´s 26, from Seattle, and originally came here as a high school student. Lakeside HS in Seattle, Bill Gates alma mater, sends kids to programs all over the world, and each summer, they send about 12 kids down to work at the museum. They´re here now, and they´re leaving in a week, which is a good thing - I had my fill of highschoolers the last few months. But Kennedy came back a lot, and in May was hired to run it - she´s here til next May.

But the museum is really run by a guy named Joaquin, an American who was born and raised in OTT, his family runs a hotel here, the first one in town. His mother´s name is Wendy Weeks, she´s very famous here and her artwork is all around town. Their hotel is the Albergue, and is literally right on the train platform. I read a book called The White Rock which Kennedy recommended before we came about this part of Peru, one guy's story of exploring around the towns and ruins and explaining things, written in ´01 - but Joaquin and his family are in it, the author stayed with them and got to know them well. He´s connected with everyone, is very much into our doc, he´s about 28, he ran for mayor and has lots of gripes and thoughts about the way the town and tourism money is managed.

Yesterday we went up to a textile cooperative run by the museum that they built with and for ladies from a village above the town called Huilloc - it´s a ridiculously idyllic setting, three little huts made of stones and straw by a river in a huge valley. The ladies came down from the town, decked out in their colorful red Inca ´costumes´, many with babies on their backs wrapped in their clothes, lots of safety pins on their black wide brimmed hats for securing things to take back - and we and the high schoolers formed a big line to move rocks from a quarry to finish a wall surrounding it so animals wouldn´t come in. Lots of passing rocks. All day. But beautiful footage and interviews.

When we were done, Joaquin and Miguel, who speaks Quechua, gathered all the women into a semicircle, curling around a rock wall with the village in the background, and they just straight up weaved some textiles. We interviewed the president of the cooperative about the group, how they formed, how they combatted and tried to manage the influx of tourists wanting to see their town and their ways, how thankful they were to the museum for training them in the techniques for weaving and natural dyes, how the town had totally changed in the last ten years after not really changing for centuries. We interviewed one other lady, who was more charismatic and insisted on speaking, which is always good, about the work and the town. Each town has their own colors and patterns, and each person kind of communicates who they are with their ponchos that they weave. There´s a stark difference bw this and the ones made for tourism - authenticity comes in here. But it was a great day, way beyond our expectations.

This part of Peru, and most of the rest of the mountains, are pretty much socialist. Each town has a cooperativa, run by the men mostly, and the farms are owned and operated collectively. The family I´m living with, the dad, Eduardo, and his son, Sebastian, work on the farm everyday, growing potatoes and maize and managing cattle and llamas, along with most of the other men in San Isidro - ten families total. The family received a microloan a few years ago, part of a regional plan to help families convert their homes in tourist hostels - they´re called hospedajes - but the ones built outside of the main two streets never see any action really. Most of the families lost money, including mine.

In ´75 there was a change, a non-violent revolution, where the military govt stripped the hacienda owners of their land and gave it all to the people. Tomorrow, we´re going to a village called Huaran, formerly a huge estate, to meet the leaders of the cooperativa there and talk about that transition and how things are going now. The lady who runs the Hearts Cafe in OTT, an old British Mrs. Paddington kind of lady named Sonia, who by coincidence stays at the same house as Maya, but lives full time in the village - she´s delivering donated educational items and baby clothes to a nursery school there. We´re also meeting another Sonia, a lady who has a textile market outside the village and is an expert on weaving and ponchos, who will explain all the intricacies of meaning. And Sonia´s neighbor in Huaran, Justina, who lives in a stable and just had twins. Sonia feels that the men who run the cooperativa can´t be trusted with medicine and resources - they just sell them. Even the materials at the school have to be signed off on by the teacher or the parents would sell them.

So that´s a lot. We´ve got a large picture of the impact of tourism here, the state of the valley and how outsiders are changing it and how local officials are managing it. Everyone we´ve met is enthusiastic about helping us portray it. Rafael just connected us with an assistant, an anthropologist who speaks fluent Quechua, Engish and Spanish, who´s going to come up and help us out.

We got in touch with the School for International Training, the school I did a Tibetan Studies program with - their rural tourism expert is available for interviews and advice in Arequipa, about ten hours south by bus. We´ve got a good opportunity here. I think the title will be Inkaland. This is a beautiful place, the footage can never not be gorgeous, Inca ruins and terracing everywhere, everybody trying to picture what it was like back then. It gets about 1 million tourists a year - everyone that goes to Macchu Piccu, one of the most popular destinations in the world, increasing rapidly every year, esp now that´s it´s a 7 wonder - huge celebrations here when that happened, a very big campaign, billboards and posters everywhere telling people to vote - everyone is funneled through here and stops in for a few hours to walk around. Huge tour buses, trains, taxis, thru the main square and one narrow cobblestone street. Desperate street sellers, parading in Inca costumes, some will make a months income with one sell, most go home every week with nothing. Lots of cooperativas and farmers. The town has 3,000 people. It´s unrecognizable to people who were here five years ago, and it changes faster and faster. So we´re kind of preservationists.