Giving thanks in the cloud forest

I'm just down to sea level from about 9,000 feet after spending Thanksgiving in Bosque de Cuyes in Ayabaca, Piura, a cloud forest and national protected area in northern Peru with fellow Peace Corps Volunteers Angela, Patrick and Aaron. I baked a mango and apple pie on a charcoal fire for the feast and hiked for hours everyday. It was gorgeous. I also learned that could totally bake a mango pie. I thought mango would be too soupy by itself, but it was not at all. And my mom's pie crust recipe cooks up great on charcoal in a Dutch oven.

We took a hike on Thanksgiving morning out to a quiet spot in the cloud forest and just sat for a bit and meditated. I listened to the quiet and the birds and felt like I was swimming in the green and the fog. Everything grows on top of everything else, trees, moss, orchids, vines, insects, mold, mushrooms, ferns, and epiphytes (a new life form to me). The clouds are like animals. They come and go through the mountains as they please. I stood on a peak, watched them move in and out, and they all made me feel breathtakingly small. It was very easy to remember how much I have to be thankful for there.

The last day I went out with a group of bird biologists and my friend Aaron's youth group and they taught me the names of the birds that I had been seeing in the forest. There were hummingbirds called Quinde Jaspeado and a kind of turkey that lives in that little patch of forest called Pava de Monte. The kids LOVED tramping around in the forest and telling me about all of the different species.

My favorite bald woman

This adorable child is Devlyn. It's beautiful and kind of mind boggling that life goes on without you while you're off drinking coconut milk and zooming around South America in mototaxis.

Can't wait to meet her.

Unfortunately Managed Economies or Why I Can't Get a Ride

The motorcycle taxi is a beautiful Peruvian phenomenon. Here in Bajo Piura, the coastal northern lowlands of Peru, the mototaxi is the transportation option. It goes everywhere. It carries everything. It carries everyone. I have seen an entire women's volleyball team board a mototaxi, a space that your average North American might assume fits two people comfortably. I have seen a mototaxi with its passenger-seat removed carrying TWO full-grown hog-tied horses. I have seen a woman in late labor lumber into a mototaxi and speed off like lightning into the rice fields and down the bumpy dirt path from Rinconada to the nearest hospital. I love mototaxis. I’m bringing one back to the US and driving it around Brooklyn.

The only place the mototaxi seems absent in my Peruvian life is on the paved highway between Rinconada and Llícuar on Wednesday mornings at around 8:20 when I need to go teach elementary health classes there. Mototaxis speed up and down this highway all the time, but for some reason on Wednesday mornings it's like trying to get a cab in Red Hook, Brooklyn at 3AM on a weeknight. Admittedly, it's only a long half an hour walk from my front door to the front door of the elementary school in Llícuar but, on Wednesday mornings in that wormhole of transportation, I'm usually running late and lugging posters, markers, graded papers, 5 kilos of dry beans, 300 balloons, 50 empty plastic bottles, and any number of oddities that are really my means of communicating with my students. Most Wednesday mornings I find myself wandering the main street in Rinconada begging all of the drivers to take me to Llícuar while sweating on and squishing and wrinkling absolutely everything that I'm carrying. I tell drivers, “I will pay. I will pay extra! Please! Don’t make the gringa cry. ” Not exactly in those words.

Sadly, no one goes to Llícuar from Rinconada on Wednesday mornings, therefore none of the 10 mototaxis waiting for a fare can take me. I curse as fiercely as possible with my New York City mind during every refusal while with my Peruvian mind and physical body I smile and say, “Ahh yea, por supuesto.” Of course you cannot take me to Llícuar because you need to sit here and read the paper and wait another hour to make S/4.00. New York City says, “I'm paying. I just want to go 5 minutes down the road. What the hell? I’m teaching your f@#%ing kids!” The worst thing that you can do in Peru is appear ungrateful or proud and I feel both with some frequency, especially during these interactions. New York City me says, “S*#t!”

I mentioned the situation to a driver friend and he kindly, if a little exasperatedly, explained that the morning cluster of mototaxis is actually a line they see but that I do not. The line is managed by the Association of Mototaxi Drivers and the guys suffer major social isolation and are penalized by a fine if they hop the line or take me to Llícuar and try to keep their place in line. The morning "rush," if you can call it that, moves in the opposite direction to the nearby market town of La Union and in the 20 minute trip there a driver can earn S/4.50 (S/1.50 a head with three passengers). Llícuar on the other hand, is only a 5 minute mototaxi ride in the opposite direction. It should cost S/0.50 but, the driver loses his place in line if he leaves to take me to Llícuar and only earns .50 while maybe, possibly, on a long shot, losing S/4.00. On the other hand, if there are about 7 mototaxis waiting around at the stop to make the trip for S/1.50 a head with three passengers each that would mean that for the last guy in line to get make the trip 21 passengers need to appear at the stop and frankly my dear that's just not going to happen in Rinconada at the height of any kind of Wednesday morning "rush."

I’ll even pay S/1! Sometimes that gets the juices going and I get a ride, but only about 40% of the time, the times when the guys on the board of the Mototaxi Association are not around. Basically, I need to find a man willing to gamble if I want to get a ride to Llícuar.

It occurred to me that this is a quintessential example of the problem with managing economies. The Association makes it their job to manage the equity of the distribution of work so that people don’t go snatching all the fares, running over small children and lose chickens in the process… like in New York City. The kink in the plan is that it’s hard to predict where people are going to want to go and when they're going to want to go there. Or more generally, it's hard to know what people are going to want to buy or sell and who they’re going to want to sell it to. So, if you make a bunch of rules about who can sell what, when, and to whom, it can seem like it makes stuff fairer and generally better for everyone. It certainly can ease social strife from disgruntled mototaxi drivers and their wives who had their jobs and S/4.50 swiped by quick whippersnapper drivers. But, and it’s a really big but, everybody can end up losing perfectly good money if the rules go against the interests of the consumer. In other words, if I can't get a freaking ride they must lose money. I mean rules can be good. For example, “Do not buy mercenary services” is an excellent rule in my book but, I’m talking about a ride to Llícuar and that in my humble opinion, is perfectly good money.

Everyone told me that Peace Corps would turn me into a Republican. I was really hoping that they were wrong. Democrats have much better hair and generally much hipper outfits.

Vanity note: Please overlook the fact that I'm about 25 pounds above my normal weight in the photo. This is a photo from when I first arrived in Rinconada and well, leaving for Peace Corps was very hard.

Velaciones

Velaciones, is All Saint's Day, the day after Halloween. It's cause for celebration in many Latin American nations, maybe all of them, and Peru is no exception. In Mexico it's called Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead but here it's called velaciones, which means something like "candle-ings." It's my new favorite Peruvian tradition. I went with my friend Dora and her family to the cemetery in Sechura where her loved ones are buried. Everyone was there, literally the entire town went to Sechura. Rinconada must have been a ghost town save for the few dad's who stayed behind to guard the livestock from rustlers. When we arrived at the cement burial vault that houses the various niches where families bury their loved ones I thought for the 100th time how much the structure looks like a giant honeycomb, each cement niche houses a casket. We built a tent of bed sheets, rice sacks, and algaroba wood sticks around it and ourselves to protect us from the cold wind off the Pacific. The cemetery was transformed into a field of glowing tents. Inside each tent entire families gathered on woven reed mats called petates with blankets, coffee, and sandwiches. Everyone from 2 week old infants to 85 year old grandmothers huddled around the burials, put half a dozen or so candles in each niche, and designated the kids' to change them before they burned out to keep constant light for those who had passed on. Then the stories stared. I head about Crazy Tío Santos who apparently had the best racy jokes ever and while everyone was rolling on the ground remembering I had to laugh trying to imagine what that joke about the donkey cart could possibly mean and why it was funny. They talked about their grandmother and explained all of the ingredients in her best dishes to me. It seems like it would be morbid to camp in a cemetery and talk about dead folks all night but it was a fabulous party. Vendors came a set up outside the cemetery and all the young people were wandering between the booths. There was even a dance in the high school across the street. We just hung out and had a blast. I wish that we did Velaciones in the US. I think that I'm going to try to start the tradition when I go back. I bet my grandma would be into it and in my family everyone follows her orders.



During the daytime celebration of Velaciones children take little plastic bags from house to house and get angleitos or sweets from families that have lost a child in childbirth, infancy, or early childhood. Most families here have suffered that loss so the kids come back with quite a stash of sweets and take them to the cemetery with them at night.


My dad sent me these funny blinking jack-o-lantern earrings for Halloween and they were a big hit with the kids.