My Peruvian Family

These are some pictures from our Thanksgiving dinner that we celebrated at the ProPeru Office. It was a huge event, with every student (there are eight of us) and her entire family, usually including some extended family too. They cooked a turkey, we had mashed potatoes, and then a whole bunch of dishes that were some blend of Peruvian and American - usually including potatoes and rice. It was very delicious, and really good because I was pretty sad to miss the normal celebrations of Thanksgiving in the U.S. It made the day into something new and exciting, and now I treasure the experience of celebrating Thanksgiving in Peru. It made for a weird blend of emotions: Heightened gratitude for the things we enjoy in the U.S. which the rest of the world does not have; a strong sense of unworthiness for being born into that privilege when soooo many other are not; and homesickness. We have SO much to be thankful for. 

And I pray that you all had an absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving, full of blessings and relaxing and football and food!

The Kiarita! She is my Peruvian niece, turns 9 months old today, and is quite the bundle of energy. She spends every morning at our house while her Mom works, and for that entire time is doted upon like no other. She is going to be one spoiled child! But oh, is she cute. (Her name is actually Kiara... they just add diminutives onto everything.)

Sleeping Kiara...
This is my Spanish class - Emily, our professor Karina, me, and Allie. A very small class, but we spent so much time with our professor that we got to know her very well. And thanks to her patient and persistent guidance, we have grown leaps and bounds in our language capabilities.My host Dad, Atilio; and Lauren. Lauren is another international student that works out to be my niece, because she is living with Atilio and Nora's (my host parents) son and daughter-in-law.
I finally got them in one place, feeling dressed up enough for a picture. Left to right, Paula (in the corner) is my host sister who doesn't live at home anymore; she's Lauren's Mom. Then is Tatiana, my host sister who does live at home and runs a dentists office out of our house. She's really cool - she dotes on her nieces like I've never seen, and is a blast to hang out with. She loves volleyball (and is very good at it), so we play together on the weekends sometimes. Then is Carmen, also my niece. Next is Nora, my host Mom - I couldn't have asked for a better temporary mother. She is a sweetheart, and an incredible cook. Then me, then Atilio - my host Dad. He is absolutely hilarious, claims to speak about six languages but really only knows one, spends hours talking to me to improve my spanish, and knows how to say "I want drink beer" and "you are my queen" in english. lol We have fun. :)

All in all, God has blessed me tremendously with this Peruvian family to take me in when I'm so far from my own family. They send you all their greetings quite frequently, and want to know all about you. I wish, sometimes, that all the people I know in all the different little 'worlds' of my life, like Peru, Grand Junction, Fort Collins, and fire could all mix somehow so that I could be with them all at once. But that's asking a lot I guess.

I hope that this holiday season, you are all enjoying spending time with your own families, and counting the many  blessings that you have in them. I can't wait to see you all in a little over a week. God bless!

p.s. I realized halfway through the night that my camera was on the wrong setting, which is why most of them are rather blurry. Sorry if you got a headache or something while looking at them! Hopefully I'll have more clear ones later. 

You're gonna get sick of Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu Itself

And... MORE Machu Picchu

First glimpse of Machu Picchu

They make their ruins in the same shape as the land

More Machu Picchu

Here're some Inca stairs... very steep.

My friend Jackie going through an Inca-style tunnel

A pretty Inca wall with grass growing out of it... random, I know. 

Not Machu Picchu yet! But a nice little teaser nonetheless.

Doesn't capture it. :)
More ruins... these ones were apparently haunted, but even though we spent the night there, I never saw a ghost. 

Machu Picchu - Part 1

Hello Hello!

I officially have 12 days left in this country. That is exciting and extremely saddening at the same time. I start listening to Christmas music on Thanksgiving - and not a day sooner, because I have a feeling it will make me far more eager to come home than I already am, and don´t want to do that to myself any sooner than is necessary. (Good luck figuring that one out.)

But in the meantime, I´m overcoming daily the lingering fear of public speaking in Spanish, because Peruvian professors almost never assign a paper without making us give a speech at the same time. But the end of the schoolwork is near... hooray!! And with it, the end of all the adventures I´ve had here in Peru... Bittersweet transitions, as always.

Last weekend, as most of you know by now, I got to hike Machu Picchu. I´ve wanted to see it for a long time now, and it turned out to be worth every minute. Actually, I think my favorite part was the three day hike it took to get to it - making for a four day trip in all. I hiked through some of the most beautiful mountainous country I have ever seen - and most of it was almost a tropical rainforest. I think the highest point we reached was about 7,000 feet above sea level (I think?), and that was the only time we broke treeline - a dramatic switch from almost a tropical jungle to windswept highlands. It was weird.

The mountains around us were very deceiving - around noon the clouds would come in and completely cut off the tops. Often we would go to sleep underneath clouds and surrounded by what looked like soft rolling hills, only to wake up in the morning and see that the clouds had cleared to reveal towering jagged snow-capped peaks. A lovely 5 a.m. surprise, I thought.

The hike itself wasn´t too challenging; the strange part was that it was made almost entirely out of stone stairways reconstructed from the days of the Incas. It was supposed to make the going easier, I think, but in the end it probably didn´t. The stairs were so big that it took a lot of effort to pull yourself up in some cases, which is weird because the Incas (and most of the indigenous people still living in the area) were extremely small due to malnutrition. The men often come no higher than my shoulder. However, they outdo us in strength by gigantic proportions, and while we carry all our own stuff, they carry all the stuff to feed us. Each meal was a huge event (of course), and the many porters would carry tents, utensiles, tables, chairs, stoves, and enough food for the entire four days up the mountains faster than we did. The record time one Peruvian had done that four day trail in was four and a half hours. They´re superhuman, basically. 

Early in the morning on the fourth day, when we were supposed to hit Machu Picchu at 8:00 a.m., things got interesting for me. We had been going straight down the steepest mountain stairwell I had ever seen (actually, the only mountain stairwell I had ever seen) for three hours that day and the majority of the day before that, so I´ll pull in the excuse that my ankles were tired - or something like that. Coming around one of the corners, I tripped, and turned my ankle rather badly. My ankles are shamefully unreliable and twist all the time anyways, but this one was worse than the others right from the get-go. May I just say now that God is pretty cool, because he decided to send a Swiss couple on this hike with us, who turned out to be very handy. The woman was a doctor who rapelled out of helicopters to do emergency medical work in the Swiss Alps, and her husband was a mountain guide in the same area. Immediately she had my ankle temporarily splinted, wrapped, and slathered with some Swiss cream. She produced two pills which I immediately swallowed without questioning, and she gave me her walking sticks. (Side note - being from Switzerland, they thought chocolate was the answer to everything, and fed it to be by the kilo when I couldn´t eat the bread in the mornings for breakfast.) The Peruvians had no idea what to do; they offered me their sandals to relieve my ankle of the support it receives from my boots.

Then, although I thought I was hobbling along fairly effectively after that, her mountain guide husband decided I was not moving fast enough. Handing his pack to our guide, he said "I sink it vould be faster if I carried ze Nikki," and up I went! He put me on his shoulders like a little kid, handed his walking stick to his wife, and started running down the trail. The other people in the group had to work hard to keep up with him. People along the way frequently stopped to stare at the man who, after four days of hiking, could put another person on his shoulders and literally run to Machu Picchu. 

"Did you rent that?" Asked one breathless and weary woman as we trotted past.

Later, I'm sad to say, they put me in a stretcher, making my pride the only thing truly wounded. 

Although I was slightly embarrassed to be such an encumbrance to the poor man, the fact that he refused to let me walk made me feel better. That and I cannot complain about getting my first glimpse of Machu Picchu from the shoulders of a Swiss mountain guide, picturesquely surrounded by a herd of llamas that decided to accompany us for a little while. 

For the rest of the day, I wandered around the ruins, watched my friends climb the other mountain of ruins, Wayna Picchu, and then enjoyed a train ride back to Cusco.

Highly recommended adventure. Except don't sprain your ankle, because I can't guarantee that there will be any more Swiss angels in disguise hiking the trail anytime soon. 

Hope that every day is an adventure, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Machu Picchu: Day One

A very fat hummingbird obligingly sat still just long enough for a picture. 

Summit #1 - freezing cold, limited view, but you should have seen those clouds roll in.

Machu Picchu: Day One

Day one

A tomb in a cliff
Ruins along the way
Entrance to the Inka Trail
A herd of donkeys - granted, not the greatest view, but hey...

Earl

I have decided to dedicate an entire blog post to my shower. It is a novelty and a tragedy that never ceases to amaze me every morning as I try to gather up the courage to use it. 

After about a week, I decided to call it Earl, being the first name that popped into my head at the point of extreme frustration during the first week and a half of my visit here. I was in need of something to call it as I tried to coax water, hot or cold, out of it at five in the morning during their freezing cold rainy season.

My shower has a shower head about the size of my hand, extending from a metal pole on the side of the shower. Every morning, I turn on the cold water with the one handle provided, and water pours out in abundance. 

Then.

To attempt to turn on the hot water, you have to flip a switch next to the shower to turn on the electricity that supposedly heats the water. It send a steady electrical current through the lowest part of the shower head, so that the water will be heated as it passes through this current - all seconds before it hits you on the head. Here several problems occur. As soon as I flip the switch, the cascade of water coming from the shower head turns to a trickle, roughly the size of the diameter of a nickel. This is all the water that has ever come out of the shower after I flip the switch. IF this water is warm, which really does make my day, I still have some problems. Most of these, not surprisingly, are connected to the fact that I am standing in a puddle of water with an open electrical current running through it just before it hits my head. If I touch the shower head, I get thoroughly shocked. If I reach my hand up in the water within about a foot of the shower head, I get shocked. I often wonder when this invisible barrier that stops the rest of the water from being electrically charged will change or disappear, and I will be completely zapped! 

All in all, the process of taking a shower is very risky business, and each morning that I successfully survive it, I feel a great sense of personal accomplishment, and say a prayer of thanks that I am still alive. 

Extracurricular Expeditions

Mototaxi: small town transportation.

Urubamba festival weekend: indigenously dressed locals rest between dances.
Local sidewalk artist
A decent meal for a Cusquenan: anticucho. (Cow heart.) Sadly, it made us violently ill for the next three days. No more street food!
Our last project: teaching duck duck goose (which we translated to duck duck cow, because they don't know what geese are) to the school kids.

Holiday Weekend

This weekend has been pretty tranquil here in Cusco for me, because the many riots around the country have shut down the buses that were going to take us to Arequipa and the coast for our four day weekend. Instead, I got to spend the weekend with my immediate family and ALL my extended family from Arequipa - Latin American family life at it`s best.

 This weekend holds three important holidays for Peruvians: Halloween on Friday, Day of the Living on Saturday, and today is the Day of the Dead. Technically, the Day of the Living in for honoring the Saints - it revolves very much around the Catholic church. The Day of the Dead is about the lives of the people you have lost. The Peruvians visit cemeteries, pray for their lost ones a lot, and sit around in circles talking about their lives and their death, and the things that they loved and miss about their relatives. It´s kind of interesting because the second day is a sad one, and yet they still manage to turn it into a celebration. To them, everything is a festival! Food, music, dancing and lots of family. For the Day of the Living, one random tradition that they have is to buy cakes, called Wawa, with dolls in them, and take the dolls inside the cakes to a priest to have them baptized. They receive names, the people present for the baptism become the parents... it´s a big deal. And then they take it home and eat it. lol Very odd to me, but they were surprised that we didn´t do the same thing on the day after Halloween in the United States. Ah, cultural differences.

Church

I feel like it has been a long time since I have written!
So here I am. 
The time here is just flying by; a fact that is made more and more evident as December approaches. Only five weeks left. As Halloween, presidential elections, and Thanksgiving all approach and fly by, I am reminded of how amazing it really is that I am here. I couldn´t imagine, even in the three months before I left, that I would watch these days pass from Peru. Though I dreamed of it, there were at the time a few too many harsh realities in the way for me to really envision myself here, learning and seeing all that I have. How unexpected, miraculous, and just all together awe-inspiring is this God we serve!
About a month or so into my visit here, I had the privilege of finding and attending an Alliance church here in Cusco. It took forever, and I tried many wonderful churches before I actually found this one, but it was well worth it. For some reason, seeing the familiar Christian and Missionary Alliance symbol, and hearing in another language all the Bible verses, admonitions, praise songs, and encouragement that I am so accustomed to in the U.S. served as the perfect antecdote to getting rid of whatever homesickness had lingered until that second month. It was incredible. (Especially once I could understand what they were saying.)The first time I walked in, I came in late (deliberately, I admit - in Peru a church that is supposed to start at 10:00 actually starts at 10:30 at the earliest), and was expecting to slip into the back row as quietly as possible. But this was not to be. I came in during meet and greet, and caused the stir of a lifetime in that little church. I was greeted with the traditional kiss and hug by every single person between the door and the rows of chairs, with no exceptions. They would not (and still will not let me) sit by myself, especially in the back - no, I was led by the hand up to the very from row and give a seat next to the pastor´s wife. Aside from the fact that I was slightly taken aback and felt self-conscious by this demonstration, I was also blown away by their hospitality. Now, a month after that, they still show me similar hospitality each time I come through the door, an occurance that never fails to humble me.

And then today, I took communion with them.

I don´t know how long it´s been since I had that privilege, what with the irregularity of fire season before I even left for Peru. This communion was a huge blessing to me, just because I thought it was awesome how I could take communion with a body of believers here in Peru, in a different language, different culture... God´s love knows no cultural boundaries. It´s pretty cool. And to think that I am probably taking it at the same time that everyone back home is taking it, on the first Sunday of November, excites me!

I pray that this November will be a blessing to each and every one of you; that as the holidays approach you will be overwhelmed with everything God is doing in your lives. Thank you so much for your prayers and support, and drop me a line when you get the chance!