Shereef’s Kiva Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Peru’

Sometimes the thin, sensory stitch that distinguishes reality from hallucination begins to come loose. Yesterday I found myself in a situation so unreal that I began to doubt the feasibility of the world around me.

EDPYME Alternativa has created a new loan product destined specifically for clients who will become Kiva borrowers. Loans of $300 or less at a special interest rate are now offered to rural entrepreneurs. Getting to them generally involves a unique combination of collective vans, collective taxis, mototaxis and walking aimlessly through fields.

Yesterday, Manuel and I took many collective taxis — a random car that allows anyone who needs a ride to hop in with their cargo. We drove for twenty minutes on unpaved dirt road through beautiful knee high corn fields, palm and locust trees spotting the hazy windless horizon. By sheer luck we found the borrower we needed to interview, Aurelio Sandoval, walking through a field looking to catch a ride.

The interview only lasted a few minutes and we waited on the side of the ‘road’ for more potential riders to come by. At this point reality begins to fray at the edges.

A copper skinned woman in a teal dress talks to the driver for a moment and leaves her bags on the floor behind the driver’s seat. She walks away and I decide to sit in the car and read the Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It takes a few minutes for me to realize that the chirping sounds I hear are not coming from the tropically bucolic fields surrounding me – but rather from right beside me.

The woman had left a young turkey in a woven plastic bag in the car. And it almost escaped. I went back to reading my book grinning at the situation and out of the corner of my eye I saw not one, but two adolescent turkeys looking up at me with their heads poking out of their unconventional quarters.

Reality frays a little further.

Almost immediately after my realization that there are two turkeys in the car, the driver gives up on waiting for more passengers and tells Aurelio and Manuel that we are going back towards town. Soon after leaving we find another passenger walking. He is holding a live hen, with beautiful orange and gold plumage might I add, by the ankles. He sits in the seat behind the turkey sacks and we set off down the road again.

At some point another gentleman squeezes into the front seat next to Aurelio and we come across the bronze skinned woman again. She squeezes in next to me and for good measure has another sack with a nearly full grown turkey. A decision is made to place all bags of live poultry in the back of this 1997 Toyota station wagon.

The tally so far: 3 passengers in the front, 4 in the back, 3 turkeys and a hen. The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is the only thing tying me to reality according to the logic that to escape into a fiction novel one must be escaping from something non-fictional.

And then we picked up another passenger. He sat with the driver in the driver’s seat. The mystery of who was steering, shifting gears and working the pedals has yet to be solved. In disbelief, I closed my book realizing that fiction had been overwhelmed by the implausibility of non-fiction.

Total chaos loomed threateningly in the collective taxi that carried 8 passengers, 3 turkeys and a hen.

The turkeys and hen could revolt against their confinement at any moment. The car would careen into corn fields as dust entered the open windows obscuring all vision. The driver’s already precarious control over the car’s directional instruments would be lost. Feathers would fly and people would shriek. A tire would blow and the hen would escape out the open window.

And then people started to get out. We had returned to the town and needed to catch our next collective van to see another borrower. Manuel slept through the entire ride and the only proof I have that any of this actually happened are these pictures.

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10.24.09 – 8 passengers, 3 turkeys and a hen

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After nearly six weeks in the flat and material city of Chiclayo I could not wait to get to the mountains of Arequipa. My pre-Foromic excitement spilled over into hasty decision making as I gazed longingly at the 19,000+ ft active volcano, Mistí, that towers above ‘the White City.” It was almost too easy: my hostal had a private guide, a young fun Swiss couple wanted to hike the next day, and I thought to myself ‘why not?’

If only I had thought to actually answer that question. I had been at sea level just the previous evening and 36 laid-back hours later I set off with my companions and a full pack of gear (tent, pad and all). Hiking in the Andes does not compare to the Rockies. There are no switchbacks, no markers and no explicit (or even marked) trail.

Instead one finds the directional efficiency of steep uphill gradients quickly elevating a path of suggestions known exclusively to the guide (Hugo) and assumed by the rest. We weaved through golden fields of tall grass, this being the arid dry season, and wild brush with explosively bright orange and yellow flowers all around us. At every rest the scent of chamomile and a hundred other unidentifiable herbs overwhelmed me.

The fields yielded to the gnarled volcanic rock that always seemed to be on the edge of the vertical horizon. But upon arrival, another crag rose right up to the next vertical horizon. And eventually the rock succumbed to the vast gray sand dunes of ash that one literally must trudge up to set up camp.

We pitched our tents a thousand meters below the cone with a tremendous view of the landscape below — valleys, gorges and more mountain chains in every direction. Every once in a while we heard explosions, but Mistí has been asleep for about 400 years. It turns out that the sound of bundled dynamite exploding in the mines some 100 kilometers away has an unobstructed acoustic path straight up the slopes of the volcano.

And then came the altitude sickness. I could not stand without shaking or walk without stumbling. I vomited. I even lost the strength to eat soup. Along the climb up I used coca lozenges (oh so tasty) to mitigate the effects and Hugo gave me some coca leaf to chew – all of which resulted in my heart thundering to the point that I could not sleep.

So I stayed on my back, but somehow remained happy and alert all the while. Hugo and I shared a tent and had the most interesting conversation about the evolution of culture, adaptation versus advancement regarding the integration or annihilation of knowledge, and the nature of a shrinking world that made the concept of ‘private’ knowledge a form of philosophical arrogance. Somehow, altitude sickness dulled my body while sharpening my mind.

At 2 am, Hugo and my Swiss friends left for the summit. I decided to keep trying to sleep, especially as my motor skills continued to evade me. I woke up around 7:30 and felt fantastic, but when they returned at 8:30 there was not enough time for me to ‘conquer’ the peak. I took it as a lesson that the journey’s importance supersedes that of the destination - and destination’s finality is nothing more than a stubbornly persistent illusion. Joyfully, I embraced the walk, hike, hop, slide down to our 4×4.

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10.10.09 - destination’s finality

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The last couple of days have been interesting in a deeply personal way. You see, I can only explain them in terms of a thousand little electric shocks - some literal and some figurative.

Lets begin with the literal. In many parts of the world hot showers are the result of some jerry-rigged faucets and electric heating coils. Generally safe and reasonably priced, why would anyone have reason to fear what lurks behind those crimson-tiled walls? Just flip on the current and turn on the water.

I was starting to believe that I had scraped my elbow or knuckle without noticing. Sometimes when water would touch those parts of my skin I felt a sting. Then it dawned on me one day when I felt a zp in the middle of my forearm that was held above my head - the water closest to the shower head is slightly electrified, and slightly electrifying me on a daily basis. This might explain my healthier than normal skin and conditioner-commercial shiny hair.

On to the figurative. I woke up the other morning as a result of what I can only describe as a thousand little electric shocks spreading through my stomach lining. Now, issues surrounding regularity and digestion in general are to be expected when living, eating and drinking in South America. But clutching oneself in fetal position while being slightly blinded by the pain - that’s new to me.

My eat-once-a-day diet from the last week includes rice, acidophilus and the playfully named ‘diarex.’ I tried eating a piece of chicken today, god help us all.

The nice thing about having traveled and wrestled with both infrastructural inconveniences and disruptions in bodily function is that my current set of circumstances is more hilarious to me than anything. But unfortunately for those who irritate me, I am more prone to ’speak my mind’ at questionable volume when I am in a state of necessary starvation and partial electrocution.

And yes, keeping with the theme of this adventure most of my room is painted ‘Kiva green.’

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09.18.09 - a thousand little shocks

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